Patrick Flanery - Absolution

If I had known what my parents were planning, I have to believe I would have pleaded with them not to do it, not to do anything that would have put them in danger or risked taking them away from me. It isn’t enough to say they were doing it for a ‘good cause’, or that they had ‘noble aims’. The equation doesn’t balance, the losses are too great.

*

I leave Cape Town this morning before the sun is up. Greg and Dylan stand at the gate with the dogs to wave me off. I’ll drive to Colesberg today and on to Johannesburg tomorrow, in time to get the keys for the house we’re taking over from Sarah’s colleague before he leaves for his next posting. Sarah arrives Tuesday from New York.

On the drive I keep myself awake listening to the recordings of my interviews with Clare. It’s also a way of distracting myself from the landscape, which, after leaving the Hex River Valley, settles into the monotony of the Karoo that I could never bring myself to love when I lived here. After Laingsburg there are long stretches of road maintenance and I sit in endless queues of traffic held up by female traffic wardens in orange uniforms; they perch in mobile white units, waiting to let the traffic proceed, while the pied crows hover and dive for scraps. When we move, we go at a crawl over rough surfaces, half-finished, corrugated and unstable with loose bits of asphalt that glint like coal dust against the paler layers of grit and gravel. This may be the main route through the country but it’s still a two-lane road.

I listen to the recording of one of our later conversations, when I asked Clare if her parents — her father in particular, who was active in opposition politics from the early 1950s until his death in the mid-1980s — influenced her own political views.

‘If you mean to ask whether they indoctrinated me, then be direct,’ she says, and gives her dismissive cough, which explodes through the car’s speakers. ‘Don’t prevaricate.’

‘So did they, indoctrinate you?’ I hate the way my voice sounds so tentative, obsequious and wheedling.

‘Not quite in the way that you mean. Listen, my parents represented the first generations of their respective families to rise above the soil, to turn themselves into fully educated professionals, so they had a particular sensibility about the world. That is to say, they held a constellation of values that were both reverent of tradition — they were not exactly secular, while my grandparents and great-grandparents were, I think, seriously devout — but they were also naturally suspicious of totalizing and totalitarian ideologies, as well as authoritarian ones. By the end of their lives, my grandparents on both sides were, perhaps, in the process of being transformed into humanists by circumstance and experience and observation. They were latent progressives forced to look outward and forward, to imagine where possibility might lie for their children, my parents, beyond their rural and quite insular experience — men and women who were in the process of passing from orthodoxy , as much as Methodists might ever be called orthodox, or were compelled by history to make that passage, to alter their view of the world because of what they witnessed happening around them, though the Methodists had what we might call a fair if imperfect record in this country. My parents, on the other hand, seemed to have entered the world as fully formed humanists who were religiously observant in a rather casual and fluid way — my mother more than my father, though.’ At that moment, as I recall, Clare was distracted by one of her gardeners, who started up a lawn mower that registers as indistinct static in the background of the recording. ‘That man does make a terrible noise, doesn’t he? I’ll ask him to stop.’ She shouts out the window in Xhosa and closes it abruptly, but the gardener continued, I remember, and the sound of the mower is still audible, making some of her words difficult to pick up. ‘What I’m saying is, our parents might have trained my sister and me in the ways of their faith, had us christened and confirmed, but I was never instructed that I had to marry one kind of man or another, although if I had come home with an Afrikaner or a Jew or a Muslim, or especially a man who was not white, I have no doubt that would have given them pause — pause or worse than pause. I think of their shock when Nora announced her engagement to Stephan, and my mother was not entirely happy when she discovered that my own intended was from a Catholic family, no matter that he himself was an atheist. Even humanists have blind spots.’

‘But did they indoctrinate you, politically speaking?’

I remember Clare looking surprised at my implicit suggestion that she hadn’t answered the question. There is a long pause in the conversation as the noise of the mower continues. I can hear the blade catch on a tree root or a stone. I hear myself shift on the couch, move a folder against the recorder, and click my pencil to advance the lead.

‘I was about to say that obviously they had, given the relative unity of my and their political beliefs. But there is nothing obvious about that relationship. My sister was as un-indoctrinated by my parents as it was possible to be. She chose the opposite way. So it was not inevitable, it was not a natural relationship. It is a question I cannot entirely answer. I do not know, in the end, how much influence parents can have over the beliefs of their children, or how they choose to act on those beliefs. One can but sow the seed and provide the proper environment, and hope that the flower promised by the illustration on the packet is the one that will grow, trust that the hybrid will not revert to the characteristics of some earlier generation, or be so transformed by unpredictable and wholly external factors — a drought, a storm, environmental pollution — that the seed mutates and something unrecognizable grows.’

‘And that is what you’re suggesting happened with your sister?’

‘A mutant, yes. Nora’s soil, the water she drank, the air she inhaled, it was all polluted. And while she and I grew up with the same conditions, more or less, I had higher tolerance, natural immunities against the environment that tried so hard to twist our growth to its own malign purpose. But not Nora. She was always susceptible. She was weak.’

‘And your daughter? Would you say that you indoctrinated her?’ I hear the tension in my voice, the way it suddenly sounds choked, afraid of the very words it says.

‘Sometimes a plant is more vigorous than its parent. But Laura — I do not wish to speak about her, as you well know.’

I stop in Beaufort West for lunch, buy a sandwich, and sit in the car down the street from Ellen’s old house. The town looks unchanged since I was last here, except for the new speed cameras and the sign warning that it’s a WATER SCARCE AREA; the dam is dangerously low and they have to truck in water from elsewhere. After years in the States I’m struck by how American the town seems — the American fast-food franchises, the strip motels, the scrap-metal yard and trailers. Only the occasional sign in Afrikaans or Xhosa reminds me where I am, and the residential architecture, the township, and the people themselves. Demographically, it’s like taking a small town in the Deep South and plopping it in the middle of a Nevada wasteland.

Ellen’s old house looks as unchanged as the town, and I realize I’m parked in the same place that Lionel and Timothy must have stopped twenty years ago.

‘Is that the house?’ Lionel asked. Of the two, he was always the more concerned about me.

‘Yes, it’s that one,’ I said, looking out the rear window. I had been there enough times to show them the way from the outskirts of town. Though I didn’t know the exact address, from the prison roundabout I could find the house without difficulty. At the time there was bougainvillea with orange flowers growing all along the roof and spilling down to enclose the front porch with heavy drapes of leaves and flowers. The porch is now bare — less cover for anyone to hide.