I arrived late and she was waiting downstairs for me, wearing another of those West African suits. She had a touch of makeup on and I saw that she’d taken some trouble to look good. But I was in the same clothes I’d worn all day, with two days’ growth of beard and a dull pain behind my eyes.
We had to eat at Mama’s place; there was nowhere else in town. So I led her through. The bar was full. From the haircuts and attitude I recognized the full contingent of soldiers, a group mixed in race and age. But there were also more of the other regulars than usual, the scattering of clerks and farmers and workers that were the motley population of the town. There was a table open in the courtyard, by chance the very same one I’d sat at with Laurence the first day, in the corner under the bougainvillaea. Mama came over to serve us and I ordered whisky.
‘Is that a good idea?’ Zanele said.
‘Hair of the dog. I couldn’t get by without anaesthetic. And there’s nowhere else to find it in this whole godforsaken place.’
She smiled. ‘It is kind of a strange spot. Not what I was expecting, I guess.’
‘What were you expecting?’
‘Well, Laurence didn’t say … in his letters … I had a different idea.’
I don’t know what her different idea was. But I could see that the place made her uneasy: she kept looking around distractedly. I didn’t want to be here myself, but I made an effort to shed my burden of bad grace. It wasn’t so unpleasant sitting opposite a pretty face, whisky in hand.
Things mellowed once I’d had a bit to drink. We talked about this and that – her background, how she’d landed up out here. She came from middle America somewhere, the daughter and granddaughter of black Americans. There was nothing African about her, really – not even her name. Zanele was a name she took on when she came out to the Sudan. Her real name, it turned out, was Linda.
‘Linda’s a nice name,’ I said.
But she shook her head. She wanted to leave it all behind, that middle-class childhood of half-privilege and displaced values. She thought she was African now, but she had the manner and confidence of another continent completely.
Still, there was something about her mission I admired. She was actually out here, slogging in the Sudanese desert, roughing it in the Drakensberg mountains. She told me about her life in Lesotho, and none of it made me envious. I was on to my third whisky, feeling good now, and I ordered another along with my food. It was easy to listen, while she talked about a library, a crèche, a literacy training programme, even a village bank – all of this started and run by the people of an impoverished community in the high mountains. With the help of overseas funding, which she’d helped to raise. It sounded Utopian – and of course it was: none of this had really come to pass yet, it was all in the pipeline. Meanwhile she and six other foreign volunteers were sleeping on mattresses on the floor, while the days passed in grubby work that ranged from inoculating cattle to digging irrigation ditches.
‘And you? What are you doing there?’
‘I’m a teacher. The only one in the village. I teach children of all different ages – six to sixteen.’
‘What do you teach them?’
‘Different subjects. Math, English. Some history.’
‘Can’t be too effective.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well, I mean. Different ages all together. Different levels. All those subjects.’
‘It’s not like the schools you probably went to,’ she said, a bit stiffly. ‘But it does have some effect. These are very poor people. Anything is better than nothing.’
‘Is it?’
‘Well, of course. Don’t you think so?’
‘It seems to me,’ I said, ‘that past a certain point, anything is exactly the same as nothing.’
She was watching me warily. ‘Have you ever done it?’
‘What? Gone to do volunteer work with a poor community somewhere? No. Maybe I don’t believe in it. Or maybe this place is it.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘This place isn’t it. What you’re doing here isn’t community work. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
She and Laurence were the same kind of person: blindly and naively believing in their own power to change things. It was simple, this belief, and the simplicity was strong and foolish. I could see how they might have been drawn to each other, up at the camp in Sudan – Laurence the young healer, earnest and passionate, she the lost seeker with her new name. And how South Africa, down at the bottom end of the continent, with its glorious future just beginning, might have seemed like a backdrop to their belief.
But that was only part of it, of course. Because I could also see how mismatched they were. Behind the brave aspirations, what did these two really have in common? Their relationship was just another idea – dry and sensible, like everything they did. And they had started to realize it too. Which is why she and I were sitting at this table now, while Laurence was a kilometre away, doing a shift of duty he didn’t need to do.
Talk turned inevitably to Laurence. She said, ‘I wanted to thank you for looking after him. He’s mentioned you in every single letter. It’s helped him a lot to have you here.’
‘I haven’t helped him.’
‘Well, he thinks you have. Maybe you don’t know this, but Laurence doesn’t have friends. You’re the first friend he’s ever made. It’s important to him.’
‘Why doesn’t Laurence have friends?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe he’s too preoccupied. He is a touch wrapped up in himself. Of course, you know his background.’
‘Some of it. Not too much. I know about his parents being killed.’
‘His parents?’ She stared at me. ‘That’s not right.’
‘Weren’t his mother and father killed in an accident?’
She shook her head and looked at the table. ‘That’s an old story,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why he told you that. I thought he’d got over it.’
‘So what’s the truth?’
‘His parents aren’t dead. He’s an illegitimate child. His father wasn’t ever around. His mother raised him on her own. But she told him that story about his parents dying, and how she’d taken over – ’
‘That she was his sister.’
‘Right. That story.’
I felt somehow betrayed. ‘He told me a long saga about looking for their graves one day …’
‘Well, that part is true. He did go looking for them. That was when his sister – his mother – came out with it and told him the truth. It was a big thing for him. But it’s all history now. I don’t know why he lied to you.’
‘As dark secrets go,’ I said, ‘that’s pretty disappointing. It’s not the Middle Ages any more.’
She looked troubled; it gave her face an added depth. It was on the tip of my tongue to say something reckless, but at that moment Mama arrived with our food. I transferred my attention reluctantly. ‘Full house tonight,’ I said.
‘Everybody’s here,’ Mama said. She couldn’t seem to stop smiling, all her good fortune radiating from the gap between her front teeth. Her plump arms, as she set down our plates, gave off a jangling of bracelets that was like the sound of cash in a drawer.
‘All the soldiers have arrived?’
‘Even the boss. Colonel Moller. He came yesterday.’
‘Who?’ I said.
It was like a hot light growing in my head.
‘Colonel Moller. Ooh, such a nice man. That’s him there inside, by the bar. You want more ice with that drink?’
‘No, thanks.’ I’d started to sweat. It was too much, surely; too much of a coincidence. But I had to see for myself. I went to the bathroom to wash my hands. The figure that Mama had indicated was at the far end of the bar and it was only on the way back that I could stare into his face for two long seconds. Yes, it was him; not much different, despite the ten intervening years. He was a little slacker and older; he’d gained one rank and was in charge of a mixed group of soldiers – black and white together, some of them the enemy he’d been trying to kill. His life must feel very different to him, sent up here on this unlikely posting, but to me he was the same, unchanged. The narrow, fanatical features, the lean body generating a disproportionate power. He stared back at me with dead eyes, then looked away. He didn’t know who I was.
I found that I was trembling. Zanele looked curiously at me as I settled myself again. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Oh, nothing. I’m all right.’
But I wasn’t all right. My mind was knotted up with what it had seen. I sat and picked at my food, but I wasn’t in the room any more. I was following the brown back of a corporal through the dark, towards a lighted cell … and then stumbling away again, alone.
I shook my head to rid it of the memory. But though the room came back to me, with all its new chatter and activity, something was different now. Something in me, perhaps, but it found its way into the silence at our table.
Eventually I put my fork down. I said, ‘That man in there, by the bar. He was someone I worked under in the army.’
But she didn’t even look into the bar. She stared at me and said, ‘You were in the army?’
And I could see what this meant to her. The army, the bad old days: she was having dinner with an enemy.
I said defensively, ‘Laurence told me he was sorry he’d missed the army. He said he thought it was a formative experience.’
‘Laurence says silly things sometimes. He doesn’t know how the world works.’
‘But he’s got a point. A year of community service up here isn’t going to teach him much. He might’ve been better off in a shit-hole in the bush. Let him kill people, let people try to kill him. Then we’d see. He wouldn’t talk about country clinics and helping the human race any more.’
I was surprised at my own anger, the coldness and clearness of it – though I wasn’t sure who it was directed at. We were in a world without nuances now, in which all the subtle gradations of colour had turned into black and white.
She pushed her chair back from the table. ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Don’t talk like that.’
But I was unstoppable by now. ‘Why? Is that too real for you? Ideas are always better than reality, of course. But sooner or later the real world always wins. Laurence will find that out. So will you, when you go back to America and lose your African outfits and your fake name.’
‘Fuck you, mister.’
‘The feeling is mutual,’ I said, as she stood up and stalked out. I sat crunching an ice-cube, reflecting on how quickly it had all gone off the rails. My cold anger went on burning for a while. But it wasn’t her I was thinking about; it was Laurence. And I remember that his name, Laurence Waters, seemed suddenly like a combination of blandness and intrigue, banality and piety, that offended me.
It didn’t take long for me to calm down. And then I wasn’t so proud of myself any more. I got a tray from Mama, set our plates and glasses on it and climbed the stairs. But she wouldn’t answer when I knocked, though the silence behind the door was charged.
‘Please,’ I said. ‘I was totally out of line. I’m really sorry. I’m drunk. I had no right.’
‘Fuck off,’ she eventually told me.
‘I can’t. I can’t go back and tell Laurence I insulted you.’
‘I don’t care. I don’t care about you or Laurence. The two of you are obviously in love with each other, so why don’t both of you just fuck off.’
It was maybe the first time in years that I was speechless. Something of my amazement must have carried through the door, because in the ensuing silence I heard the bolt slide back.
It took me a moment to get myself together. I picked up the tray from the floor where I’d put it and went in. The room was in darkness, the only light from the courtyard outside. I remembered at a glance, from when I’d stayed here, the frugal furnishings: the narrow single bed, the table with two chairs, the sink in the corner. She was sitting at the table, by the window, looking curiously set and formal. I went over and put the tray down.
‘Well,’ I said at last.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Aren’t we two having a fine time.’
‘I’m very mixed up,’ she said. ‘Confused and angry. It’s all over, isn’t it – me and Laurence. If it ever really happened.’
I sat down opposite her. There didn’t seem to be anything to say. The whole evening was just a jumbled mess of emotions with no clear focus in the middle. The sound of voices and laughter carried up from outside. On the table was the photograph of her and Laurence in the desert, both smiling into the camera. I picked it up and tilted it towards the dim light coming in through the window.
‘You guys look happy here,’ I said.
‘That’s because we were working. He’s happy when he’s working. But I don’t make him happy.’
‘Does he make you happy?’
‘I don’t know. I guess not. I can’t remember.’
‘Why don’t you eat your food,’ I said, like a mother.
‘I’m not hungry. I’m fucked-up. I’m sorry.’
‘It’s all right. I’m sorry too. We’re all sorry.’
She was bitter, but all the fight had gone out of her. She was slumped and sad in the chair, like a windless sail. In the silence I could hear her breathing. Suddenly, on a fresh impulse, she said, ‘Let’s get out of here. It’s so … stuffy.’
‘But where will we go?’
‘I don’t know. There must be somewhere.’
‘Not really. We could take a drive.’
‘It seems kind of desperate.’
‘But we are.’
She gave a small, unhappy laugh. ‘What’s that place there,’ she said, ‘that big place on the hill?’
I’d been looking at it too, like a gothic galleon stranded by a flood.
‘That’s the Brigadier’s house.’
‘Who’s the Brigadier?’
‘The Brigadier is the ex-tinpot dictator of the ex-homeland. The capital of which is where we are.’
‘And where is he now, this Brigadier?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘that is the question. It depends who you listen to. Some people think he’s dead and gone. Other people say he’s around, running refugees and stolen goods and arms and stuff back and forth over the border. His retirement job, you could call it. These guys, the soldiers, are here to plug up the holes. Supposedly. But all of it’s just talk talk talk. Who knows what’s real?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Well, you can see what I’m like. Always ready to believe the worst. Keeps me prepared for all eventualities.’
‘Have you ever seen him?’
‘Oh, ja. In the old days he was always around. I saw him here once, as a matter of fact.’
‘Here?’
‘Well, down there. In the courtyard. I came here for a drink and there were all these security goons standing around. They only let me as far as the bar. The rest of it was closed off. I could see him through the door, eating with his wife. Little man. But I had a closer encounter than that.’
‘When was that?’
‘When he came to the hospital while I was on duty. He had chest pains, he said. The security guys were all over the place. I called Dr Ngema and she came to look after him. But in the meanwhile I listened to his heart through my stethoscope, so I can confirm that it does actually beat.’
She was fascinated. ‘How did he treat you?’
‘Polite but distant. I don’t think he noticed me much. He was worried about his chest pains.’
‘And what were they?’
‘Bad conscience? Gas? I don’t know. Dr Ngema took care of it and he went away.’
The memory of this event was suddenly strong again: the tiny shirtless man on the edge of the bed, holding his military cap in his hands. He was very stiff and upright, very neat.
‘Were you afraid?’
I had to think for a moment. ‘Yes, I suppose I was. I tend to be afraid of what can kill me, even if it’s not likely to happen.’
‘Incredible.’ She turned her serious, excited face to me, and I knew it before she spoke. It was as if all the turmoil of the evening had led to this single, clarifying idea. ‘Let’s go there.’
‘Where?’
‘To his house.’
‘He doesn’t live there any more. It’s empty.’
‘It doesn’t matter, I want to see. Let’s just take a look.’
‘All right,’ I said. I was glad to have found something to distract her. I wanted to make her happy.
So we drove towards the bright mansion on the hill. It was lit up every night, even though it was empty; some lackey or watchman throwing a switch. Keeping the old symbols shining.
There was only one road to the top. I imagine it had been made at the same time as the house was built; nobody else lived up here. The view was impressive. I’d been there only once or twice before, and that was soon after I’d arrived in the town. On the last occasion there’d been a very unpleasant incident. I’d parked and was sitting, looking out, when a policeman came and knocked on the window. I was forced to get out of the car. I had to lean on the bonnet while he searched me. Then another policeman arrived and they started to push me around. Not badly, but enough to get me scared. They were both young and full of impassive enmity. I remember that an image came to me of my wife reading an article on the third page of a city newspaper: Doctor vanishes in bantustan. And that would be that.
But then an officer appeared and everything cooled down. He was polite and professional with me. I shouldn’t come up the hill, he said; the Brigadier had many enemies and the police and army had been told to take no chances. There were other hills, he said, pointing out into the distance, from which to admire the view.
This would have been an innocuous ending to a potentially nasty story, except that there’d been a subsequent instalment. The first policeman, who’d shown such exemplary qualities of brutishness, was someone I’d never seen before and hoped never to see again; but six months later he was personally appointed by the Brigadier as chief of police in the town. It was indicative of something that he’d been promoted over the head of the kindly officer who’d saved me, and who turned out to be the man I would never see again.
I hadn’t been back, even though these days the hilltop wasn’t out of bounds any more. There were two other cars parked up here, discreet and dark – lovers, I supposed, come from who knows where for a bit of late-night fumbling – and I stopped a little way from them. The valley was a mesh of lights below us. From this height the town seemed ordinary; the same as any other country town at night. It would take a close scrutiny and a sharp brain to see that there were no moving headlamps and that most of the windows were dark.
‘Could we take a walk around it?’ The view didn’t interest her; she only had eyes for the house. But all you could see were high walls topped with barbed wire and a roof on the other side.
‘We can’t go in.’
‘I know, but let’s take a look from outside.’
The main entrance in front had a pair of steel doors on rollers. We pressed our eyes to the join, but there was only the thinnest slice of a view: grass and a pillar and steps. I thought I could see a sentry-box. We walked around the corner and down the side. And came to a stop.
‘Frank,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe it.’
I couldn’t believe it either. A small side gate, set into the wall. Ajar and open. Inside, barely visible, the gloomy spaces of a garden.
‘It doesn’t mean we have to go through,’ I said.
‘Who left it open?’
‘I don’t know. A worker, maybe. Or a security guard. With a gun.’
‘Oh, come on. We’re not going to steal anything.’
‘I don’t think this is a good idea,’ I said.
But she went in and after a minute I followed her. I found myself in a quiet cul-de-sac off the main route of the garden. There was no light here, but as I moved further in the dark screens of leaves composed themselves into hedges. There was a loose crunching of gravel and twigs under my feet, which sounded terrifyingly loud to me. I tried to tread carefully, holding my breath, but let out a little cry of alarm as I lurched against her in the blackness. She giggled and clutched at me, a warm embrace that slid immediately away.
‘What’re you so afraid of?’ she whispered.
‘We’re not supposed to be here.’
I followed as she moved away towards the wash of light higher up. The house came into view, big and gleaming and solid. We had entered into what must have been the bottom of the garden, and were moving towards a central avenue. A slate path led to a lawn with a sundial. Beyond it there was a gravel road, with flowerbeds and separate grottoes off on the other side, and I glimpsed what looked like a putting green.
The grounds were big, an acre or two, and elaborate. But as we moved closer to the light I could see that the gardens, although they were ragged and turning brown in places, were not completely neglected. The shapes in the topiary were blurred but still visible and the lawn wasn’t overly long. Somebody was keeping an eye. And maybe this wasn’t so absurd: some new politician with a new function would be posted here some time. I remembered the abandoned house near the river. This wasn’t the same. This was a different kind of desertion. People hadn’t left here completely; it was only history that had temporarily vacated its shell, until it could take up office once more in a different shape.
She’d stopped walking again. I caught up with her and started to speak, but she held up a hand to quieten me. And when I stopped I could hear it too.
It seemed incredible: voices in the garden. Two of them, speaking back and forth, in a murmur too low for individual words to be distinct. I strained my ears to hear what was being said. But instead two different sounds started up, which I recognized, but couldn’t believe. Not here, so late at night. But the sounds went on, and there was no doubt about them.
It was absurd. We were listening to a lawnmower – one of those outmoded manual mowers – and a pair of shears. The soft noise of this bizarre industry in the dark was like another language, as clear and incomprehensible as the two voices. It was hard to tell where exactly the activity was happening, but it seemed to be behind the wall of foliage next to us. The clack-clack of the shears was steady, but the mower was going up and down, up and down, and when it reached the end of its circuit we could hear the voice of the man pushing it, fixed perpetually on a note of complaint.
I touched Zanele’s arm and gestured. Although I wasn’t afraid any more and the situation was almost ridiculous, I wouldn’t want to show myself to the gardeners. To go any closer to the house would be to step into full view in the light, so we retreated down the alley on the other side. As we moved away, the urge grew in me to laugh. Our transgression was a childish one, not dangerous after all, but when I turned to her to speak I saw one of the statues in the garden, of which there were many, randomly arranged, break into calm motion and step sedately towards us. And in an instant all the danger in the world was alive and possible again.
We had both frozen, waiting. The statue came ambling into our path, until a strip of light from the house revealed the peaked cap and uniform of the security guard I’d imagined.
‘We didn’t mean to trespass,’ I said.
‘The gate was open,’ she said, ‘so we came to take a look.’
‘We came to look,’ I repeated. We were talking fast, overlapping each other, but our nervousness didn’t touch him. He was standing quite still, considering us. Then he rocked on his feet, out of shadow into the light and out again, but in that brief second I knew who he was.
The Brigadier wasn’t a brigadier. Until he staged his coup he was just an ordinary captain in the homeland defence force. Nobody had heard of him before. And it could only have been with the help of bigger, unseen friends that he had emerged from the shadows with such sudden support and power. After he had appointed himself chief minister he heaped numerous honours on his own shoulders, including his rank and a handful of medals.
He was wearing the rank and the medals now, although officially both the uniform and the army it belonged to didn’t exist any more. He made a soft clinking noise when he moved.
He said, ‘I opened the gate.’
I remembered the voice. Cool, flat, soft. It was far more distinctive than his face, which was small and ordinary. His voice was memorable. I had heard it coming out of the radio and television, always level and void of feeling, no matter what it was saying. You remembered the even, dead tone, though you might not hear the words.
What did he say, in those few brief years when he was playing god over his little artificial world? I couldn’t tell you one quote or original line. No, it was the usual rhetoric about self-determination and a bright future, scripted for him no doubt by his white masters elsewhere. Pretoria had put him in power when his predecessor started to get troublesome, even though he was far more venal and corrupt. And he knew what he had to do to stay in place.
But the timing was bad. If the political scene had stayed on track he might’ve been able to proclaim himself life-president and people’s hero for the next forty years. But not too long after he took over, the white government down in the real capital gave in and power started to change hands. And two or three years later he was out of a job. And a few years on from that, here he was, dressed up for his role in the middle of the night, preening around the empty set with two bit players in the background.
I said to Zanele, ‘Do you know who this is?’
She shook her head.
‘This is the Brigadier.’
‘This?’
‘Yes.’
We both stared at him. The conversation we’d just had wouldn’t have been conceivable a few years ago. We’d spoken contemptuously about him, as if he wasn’t there. And now we were looking at him in the interested way you might look at an object. But he was unperturbed. He stood, rocking on his heels, no expression on that tiny, stolid face. His eyes glinted whitely in the gloom.
But now she changed. Since I’d started describing him to her, much earlier in the evening, I’d been aware that her fascination contained an element that was disturbingly close to arousal. Now you could see it happen. It was as if she’d been introduced to a celebrity. Something in her warmed and opened to him; she looked at him differently; she actually moved closer.
‘We wanted to see your house,’ she said.
‘You want to see my house?’
‘Yes.’
‘Come.’
He started walking back the way we’d come, giving off that clink of metal. She looked quickly at me, almost guiltily, then followed. I hung back for a moment, and only caught up where they’d stopped next to the two men working in the garden.
The men looked as strange as they’d sounded. They were both dressed in brown military overalls that were too big for them. One man was white, a few years older than me, with thinning ginger hair and a swollen, florid face I recognized from newspaper photographs; he was one of the ‘advisers’ that the white government had assigned to the homeland cabinet, back in the days of the first deposed chief minister. He’d come a long way, through a military coup and the annulment of all his labour, to end up pushing a lawnmower at midnight. The other man was young and black and fresh-faced; I didn’t know him. They were both staring at us in bemusement, while the Brigadier spoke to them in a low voice. He told them to move on to the next area of the garden; he was just going up to the house and would be back in a moment. Then he set off again, dragging us behind him, up the long central avenue and the broad back steps to the slate stoep. Through French doors there was a glimpse of a dark room, emptied of furniture.
The house was large, ostentatiously designed, but otherwise there was nothing remarkable about it. In a big city it would’ve been merely one of many sumptuous, tasteless houses. What made it striking here was its lonely setting on the top of a brown hill, with a green moat of garden around it. But now that we were standing here, up close, I wondered what we were looking at.
‘Did they take everything away?’ Zanele said.
He nodded sadly. ‘Everything. They came with three trucks.’
‘Where did they take it?’
He shrugged. ‘To Pretoria. They said they wanted to look after it. But by now where is it all?’ He nodded meaningfully. ‘Gone. Gone.’
We could see him now in the light. And though he was clean-shaven and gave off a hint of perfume from somewhere, there was a dissolution in his face. A crassness, an undoing of the muscles from deep inside. His eyelids hung heavily down.
But she didn’t notice. Though she didn’t touch him it was as though she’d put a hand on his arm. And I saw that I was wrong to think that his power had been taken from him. He was still a dangerous man, as dangerous as anybody who will do anything he wants to you in a locked room somewhere, and he gave off his power like the metallic smell of sex.
Leaning to him, she said, ‘Can we, could we, go in?’
‘They took the keys. They changed the locks. They threw me out of my own house.’
‘How did you open the garden gate?’
‘That key I kept.’ He smiled slowly. ‘There is always one lock they forget to change.’
‘Why are you looking after the garden?’
‘Who else will do it? I ask you: who else? These people? They can take, but they can’t give anything. So I come sometimes, once a week, twice a week, just to make everything okay.’
‘It must be difficult for you. Lots of memories.’
‘Ja,’ he said. ‘I remember everything. Everything.’
‘Do you mind if we take a look around?’
He went ahead of her, like an official leading a guided tour. But there was nothing to see. Just one empty room after another, visible only through heavy glass and shrubbery. They went around the side, stopping to peer in every few steps. He pronounced the function of each room – ‘reception hall’, ‘pantry’, ‘study’ – like a fact loaded with great historical significance. But he was outside the history now, looking in at it through a thin but impervious barrier.
When we had gone around to the front of the house, where the pillars and the sentry-box were, he paused at the top of the steps. From here there was a view of the town. ‘If it was daytime,’ he said, ‘you could see my statue now.’ He meant the one down there, at the crossroads. She came and stood next to him, staring down into the dark.
I didn’t exist for them. Since our little walk had begun, he hadn’t once looked at me. She was his sympathetic ear. And I felt for her a rising revulsion that was not unconnected with desire.
But it was true that the strangeness of the scene was powerful, inclining all attention towards the small, lost figure at its centre. The emptiness of the house seemed somehow to emanate from him. He gave off a melancholy, injured air, as if he’d been dispossessed of his birthright, instead of what he’d taken by force. And in this moment it was hard, even for me, to see him as truly dangerous. He was like a child dressed up for some imaginary role.
The front door was heavy; now he went and tried the handle as if he thought that this time, just once, it would open for him again. I was glad we couldn’t go in. It would have been too much to follow this tiny monster through the entrails of his old domain. He stood like a shadow across the bright scene of the garden, in which the two figures were still moving, pruning and mowing. Beyond the wall the dead frieze of lights marked the town.
She heard the note in my voice. She shifted her weight uneasily and said, ‘Well.’
But he had heard it too. For the first time he looked directly at me. From behind the ivory glint of his eyeballs I could feel his disdain. He said, ‘Do you not like my house?’
‘What do you come here for?’
‘To look.’
‘To look at what? This is past for you.’
The silence deepened and grew. She said again, ‘Well.’
But he moved closer to me. ‘What have they done with this place? Nothing. They throw me out, they take my furniture. Three trucks came. Three.’ He held up three fingers. The number seemed important to him.
‘It didn’t belong to you.’
He ignored me. ‘Then they leave it. They do nothing. If I don’t take care of the garden, what will happen? It will die. Who will cut the grass? Who will give it water? If I don’t guard everything, one day some rubbish will break in and live in these rooms. These beautiful rooms.’
She said anxiously, ‘It must be hard for you.’
‘It is hard. Very hard. One day to be living here. Next day living in a tent. One day everything is possible. Next day nothing is possible any more. Terrible. Terrible.’ He turned his head heavily back to me. ‘So tell me, Doctor, if you were me, would you not want to come back?’
Doctor: the word dropped coldly into me, like a stone: he knew.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what it’s like to be you.’
He smiled slowly again, baring his big, white teeth. ‘I will tell you. People, small people, nothing people, they think I am the past. But I am not the past. My time is coming still.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘I am very happy for you. But now we have to go. It’s very late. Linda. I mean, Zanele.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Well. Thank you. It was nice to meet you.’
He took her hand and bowed over it, still wearing that big smile, like another worthless medal. I was already halfway down the steps.
She caught up with me as I was passing the two gardeners. They had moved on to a new section and were back in their rhythmic cycle of cutting and complaint. Their faces looked up in consternation as we went by; then the noise of clacking blades started up behind us again.
‘Slow down,’ she said. ‘What’s the hurry?’
I slowed. We walked in silence the whole way back – to the gate, then up the side of the house. We had to go past the other cars before we got to ours: a black one and a white one parked next to each other, like some crassly obvious symbol of unity. I’d thought they belonged to romantic lovers – arbitrary people visiting the hilltop – but now I knew their cargo was more sinister. I laughed aloud.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘It isn’t funny, actually.’
‘What isn’t funny?’
How could I explain? It all came down again to simple, unreal ideas. Earlier in the evening she had seen me as a villain because I’d told her I’d been in the army. And now this awful little man was some kind of icon to her, just because he’d been in charge. Never mind the homeland, the violence, the greed; never mind the dirty politics and meaningless titles. It was the clear moral universe that Laurence inhabited, in which no power was ever truly false.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
We coasted down the hill in silence, both staring in front of us, with the lights of the town rising. Then we were back among the deserted streets, the crumbling buildings. As I stopped outside Mama’s place, I had a moment of dry-mouthed uncertainty: was the silence empty with failure, or heavy with possibility? But as I turned towards her I knew. She was turning towards me too. Our mouths locked hotly. And even then-before the climb up the stairs, the room with the hard little bed – all the echoes from the evening were with us, so that more than two people were grappling together there in the dark.