Patrick Flanery - Absolution

When Ellen enrolled him at the local school, he had less time for his own reading, but began to jump around the bookshelf, teaching himself what he could without realizing it was an education. He read Schreiner and Millin, FitzPatrick and Bosman, Paton and Van der Post. These were all stories he could read and have no trouble understanding: the story was exactly what it claimed to be. He exhausted the contents of the bookcase, and then, as the autumn began to close in and the days shortened, he discovered another collection of books in the lounge, hidden behind stacks of National Geographic magazines. Why, he wondered, were these books hidden? They were not hidden as carefully as his parents had hidden books, with some of their covers removed and brown paper pasted on in their place, secreted in plastic packets under the floorboards. Ellen’s hidden books were still intact, with their covers and all their pages, but they were tucked out of the way, where visitors could never chance to see them. Sam began with a book called Dusklands , which at first appeared to be one kind of story — a story unlike any he’d read before — and then turned into another kind of book altogether halfway through. He wasn’t sure what it all meant, but as he read it in his room at night, with a torch under the covers of his bed, he felt a kind of thrill that no other book had given him before. There were others by the same author that confused and excited him even more than the first. From there he moved to another writer whose stories he found still more confusing: The Late Bourgeois World he had to read with the dictionary open next to him, but he became convinced that such books were teaching him, both about the country and himself.

The last of the books hidden behind the stack of National Geographic magazines were by Clare Wald. When he’d first discovered the cache, he hadn’t noticed her name, and now, picking up the first of Wald’s books, Landing , he wondered if she could possibly be Laura’s mother. He opened the book to the back flap and looked at the photo of the author holding a baby cheetah, its tongue sticking out. He had only seen Mrs Wald twice in his life, but he knew it was Laura’s mother, the woman who had stood in the background at his parents’ funeral, and who later slammed the door in his face. He tucked the book under his shirt and read it through the course of a single night. And though it made even less sense to him than all the other books he’d read, slipping into Laura’s mother’s words was like discovering that the house he had lived in with his parents had other rooms — and not just rooms but whole floors and staircases and wings of space that were at once in keeping with the architecture of the small house he knew, but at the same time made it something else altogether, so that he understood the original space in a new way. He read the other books by her — Cacophony, Dissidence, In A Dry Month — and began to understand that Wald’s stories were not only spaces to inhabit as real as the house he lived in with his aunt, the house he might have hoped to live in with Clare herself, but they were also keys that opened the library of his memory.

Sometimes, at night, he would hear Ellen on the phone. It changes everything , she would sigh. All my own plans are finished. But what can I do? There’s no one else to take him now that Bernard’s dead. If I could, you know, I’d leave in a heartbeat. Maybe he’ll be hit by a truck. No, of course I don’t mean that .

There was something about his family, Sam began to think, that was careless of life. His mother had it, Bernard certainly had it, his aunt had it too. And Sam himself had it. He knew he did.

You need a better school , Ellen said when the winter holidays arrived. It’s time to set our sights higher .

With Ellen’s tutoring, he won a bursary to a school in Port Elizabeth and moved there the following year.

Life at school was normal boarding-school life. Holidays were normal holidays, mostly at Ellen’s, sometimes with trips to the coast. He read other books from other countries, but kept coming back to his own, and especially to Clare Wald’s.

Ellen suggested he try to forget the years before he came to live with her. It’s better that way , she said. You can remember your parents but try not to think of those times. Your parents didn’t know what they were doing, in so very many ways. The poor fools. Better to forget everything they ever did . Sam didn’t know how to separate events from the people involved in them, and once Clare’s books had given him the key to his own past, he did not want to close that door again.

He moved to Grahamstown for university, voted for the first time in 1994, finished first in his class, read for an MA and finished first in that class, too. All the while, he read and reread Wald’s books. Every time a new one was published, he bought it the first day it appeared in the bookshop. If he could not actually live with Clare, he could live in the house of her words.

*

When Sam first arrived he went straight from the airport to the high-rise that had been converted by the university into a student dorm. It was around the corner from Bellevue Hospital so he heard sirens at all hours and couldn’t sleep without earplugs. He had thought of Cape Town as a city, but he knew after only an hour in Manhattan that this was something else entirely. Trees were stunted and corralled into holes surrounded by concrete. He strained to see a large expanse of sky. Everywhere he looked the space was crowded with buildings that dwarfed and enclosed him. It had not occurred to him that he might miss the great openness of the Karoo, an openness that had often felt claustrophobic and oppressive in its own way.

Once his phone was working he called Ellen to tell her he was there safely. She believed that phone calls were not for chatting but for the brief communication of essential information. They promised to write to each other and hung up after two minutes. Sam would have liked to talk for longer, only he didn’t know how to keep her on the line.

At the end of his first week in the city there was a party for new graduate students in the Arts and Humanities at one of the brownstones owned by the university. As Sam arrived a jazz trio was playing and a caterer pushed a glass of white wine into his hand. He saw a group of people he recognized from one of his seminars, but when he joined them he had difficulty keeping up with the references to plays and concerts they had attended just in the first week. Plays and concerts would require money Sam didn’t think he could afford to spend, even with the scholarship that had allowed him to come. He had vowed to himself to save as much as he could, in anticipation of returning home.

Without being missed, Sam retreated to a corner table where finger food was arranged on platters. As he was making up his mind to leave a voice next to him said, God this is depressing. I’m Greg. What are you? You’re familiar .

Sam looked up at the man, surprised to hear a Cape Town accent.

I decided you were the only person I could bear to talk to, other than the Israeli over there , Greg said, nodding at a woman with a shaved head who was talking to the Dean of Arts. These Americans undo me .

How did you know I wasn’t American?

Your clothes , Greg said. The way you stand. Your hair. Your shoes. Your hair especially .

Sam put his fingers to his hair and brushed it away from his brow.

No, like this , Greg said, mussing his own hair to demonstrate. The backs of Greg’s hands were patterned with tattoos of astrological symbols. Say something else and I’ll tell you where you’re from and where you went to school .