Patrick Flanery - Absolution

CHAIRPERSON: And how did your family react?

MR LOUW: To them I was a hero just because I survived but I said no, you must rather not call me a hero because I was the one who set off the first bomb that day. I was the one that opened that box. I should have been more careful with the package. Maybe I don’t know there was some clue on the box if I’d looked carefully that would have told me it was rigged. They trained us for that kind of thing but you get careless, you get a little lazy I guess maybe. My wife was good at first, she looked after me, and there was the pension, but then she couldn’t take it any longer. I could not blame her, if I’m being honest, because you know I simply was not a man any more and imagine what I looked like then, you see what I’m like now when the wounds have long healed. I could do nothing for her. And with the two kids it was too much for her to do on her own, so she went away and took the kids to live with her parents up north and I sold the house and moved back in with my own parents because I could not look after myself at the time then. I am getting better now and the government has looked after me somewhat, even the new one. I have to give them credit for that at least. My wife is remarried now and I don’t get to see my children so often because I can’t afford to visit and she can’t afford to send them to see me. It’s not the way it should be you see, and I blame that on the attack that day, not on her, I know it’s not her fault. What else can I do? I ask you, members of the committee, what else am I supposed to do? What are you going to do to help me?

CHAIRPERSON: Would you like to say anything, Mr Louw, to those who have accepted responsibility for the attack?

MR LOUW: What can I say? I guess it was war. But they were fighting us, and we were just defending ourselves. That’s all. And me I was just a clerk.

CHAIRPERSON: Quiet please. That really is the last warning. If there is another outburst I will have to clear the room.

Despite her initial insistence that she wouldn’t do so, Clare begins to let me see business correspondence with her agents and publishers. When I arrive now for further interviews, there is a file waiting for me on the coffee table in her study. We talk in the morning, eat lunch together, and then I’m allowed to examine the papers in another room, make notes, photograph them if I want, and ask her questions, although there’s still an edge of ice beneath the surface. She is reserved and distant and acts scornful about the project. Biography is the work of the second rate, she says. Biography is cannibalism and vampirism. I have not heard her say darling again, and suspect I won’t. It was an uncharacteristic moment of weakness.

A week later. Instead of correspondence, today she begins to show me manuscripts and typescripts with her own marginalia, allowing me again to take these to another room where I can work on them uninterrupted. I make notes, comparing variations between the printed editions of Landing and its early drafts, composed by hand in school exercise books. There is enough work here to keep me busy for months. What is essential is getting copies while I can, which means photographing every page Clare puts before me. I buy additional memory cards for the camera, a better tripod, and a small light. She looks on with amusement as I set up my studio and she even apologizes that she doesn’t have a photocopier or a scanner; it’s out of the question that I should be allowed to remove any papers from the house. ‘Too many hazards,’ she says, ‘you understand. I have lost precious things in the past. I cannot bear loss. But record all you want, all that might be relevant.’ I know that at any moment she may change her mind. It’s within her power to end the project and buy me out of my contract. Technically, my notes and transcripts don’t even belong to me, but to Clare and her publisher. I think twice about the camera and buy a portable scanner, duplicating my earlier photographs, and e-mail everything I copy to Greg, who agrees to keep the files safe. Everything must be compiled, copied, archived, backed up. In all likelihood, this is a chance no one else will have. Who can say what’s going to happen to the papers once she dies? Her son has already proven himself uncooperative, so I can only imagine the restrictions he’ll place on access to Clare’s papers after her death. The key is to get the book written and published before then.

She tells me that she hasn’t given anyone else this kind of access before. No one has seen the author in her workshop, ‘through the fluidities of her texts’, she says. I know that in many ways I’m just being used, even as I’m using her, never mind her performance of scorn for the project. There’s her reputation to consider — the biography can only enhance it, as well as my career. This could make me a full professor by the time I’m forty. There’s the money as well. She and I, we’re feeding off each other. It’s a relationship of mutual interest.

Beyond the money and my career, there’s the other thing as well. The subject I haven’t had the courage to raise. I allow my mind to indulge in fantasy, to imagine that I spent my adolescence living with Clare and her husband in Cape Town, the city that had always been home.

Most days we have lunch together in her study and I ask questions about the manuscripts, or about her life, trying to clarify key events and establish a detailed chronology. She has also given me access to her personal library, which numbers in the thousands of volumes on shelves throughout the house and has its own catalogue, maintained by Marie, who, I discover, is a trained archivist. When I happen across an unusual or unexpected title — Liddell Hart’s A Greater Than Napoleon: Scipio Africanus (1926), for instance — I ask Clare if she’s read it. Often, she can summarize it with a cryptic phrase (‘the deadly indirect approach’ in that case). Other times she admits the book was a gift or an impulse purchase and she’s never opened it. ‘Who has time to read everything?’ she says.

There are few photos around the house — only two of her children, one of each, though the photo of Laura is taken from childhood, and her son Mark is pictured more recently. Smug and prosperous, he is also dishevelled, and nothing at all like Laura except in his fair hair and complexion. It’s the first time I’ve seen a picture of Laura. I wouldn’t have recognized her, prim in pigtails and a school uniform, but of course it can’t be anyone else.

Leading from the room where I’m allowed to work into the main body of the house is a corridor painted the colour of unbleached bones, decorated only with a long textile hung across the span of one wall. Like the paintwork throughout the house the colours of the textile are muted: granite, flax, a wave of ochre. In the large L-shaped lounge that faces the garden there is a small art collection, mostly third-rate Dutch masters, but also paintings by Cecil Skotnes and Irma Stern, and an etching by Diane Victor that depicts the Voortrekker Monument as if in catastrophic ruins. There’s a black tin box with Clare’s father’s name stencilled on it sitting in a locked glass cabinet surrounded by what I take to be the family silver.

Food deliveries are made every few days. The mail arrives each morning. Sometimes a courier delivers boxes of books. The phone never rings. I’ve offered to take Clare on a drive for a change of scenery but she says she has already seen enough to last a lifetime. The outside world has become too much for her. The garden, the house, her own work will occupy her mind for the rest of her life. She’s retiring from the world, she says, in full retreat. And in any case, if she really wants to go out, Marie will drive her.