Patrick Flanery - Absolution

Yes , she said, it sounds like an amazing place. But there are people in it, too, Sam. And I want to hear about them. I want to hear more about your parents. You’ve never even told me their names .

Peter , he said, and Ilse .

Before we were married, I finally told Sarah what my parents really were, that they had died in an attack, but that they were the attackers, that they had killed themselves by accident, and killed others in the process — some innocent, some complicit in the institutions of apartheid.

I told her in the car on a trip to her parents’ house in Virginia. I waited until we were driving, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to back away from what I had to confess.

‘You’re saying that your parents were suicide bombers.’ Her voice was so quiet it was almost inaudible above the sound of the road.

‘Their deaths were accidental. As I understand it, they were going to leave the car outside the police station and phone in a warning, but there was a problem with the device. While they were waiting for the right moment, the appointed time, before they’d left the car, the bomb detonated.’

‘I thought the anti-apartheid struggle was non-violent.’

I had imagined she would scream and shout in anger. Instead, she sounded stunned, like someone struck by a sudden and incomprehensible grief.

‘You have to understand it in context. It was an accident. It wasn’t supposed to happen the way it did. Innocent people were not supposed to die. You can read the TRC testimony about their case. Their deaths were an error.’ I remember struggling to catch my breath, feeling my throat constricting. It seemed perverse to talk about my parents in this way, as though their deaths were the equivalent of a clerical mistake: the wrong file pulled from the records, the wrong order processed, the wrong employee terminated.

For ten miles we drove in silence. I opened my mouth and felt myself beginning, almost despite my own better sense, to tell Sarah the truth about Bernard. My heart was racing to collapse but I wanted her to know. I wanted finally to tell someone what I’d done.

‘I guess in the end it doesn’t matter,’ she said, before I could find the courage to speak. ‘But I wish you’d told me in the first place.’

In the end I didn’t tell her about Bernard. I still haven’t. I tell myself that now it’s too late, and that no good could ever come from the telling.

With no one left to ask which year I received the train set, which the red tricycle, I stew all the Christmases before my parents died into a single hot, chaotic day with a trip to the beach, a Hawaiian-themed feast, a Mexican lunch, twelve guests, two guests, grandparents, no grandparents, and my mother and father always drinking sundowners out of a plastic thermos, wearing swimming costumes and rubbing sunscreen into my skin. The first Christmas that I spent with my aunt in Beaufort West, the heat shimmered off the painted metal roofs and my arms stuck to tables, my legs to the plastic chairs on the back veranda. Friends of Ellen’s came for lunch and she made five different salads and a roast chicken and there was Christmas cake with rolled icing and marzipan, bought from a woman at the church. She gave me gifts designed to comfort more than cheer: new shoes, a pair of shorts, an anthology of short stories. As I opened them I felt no happiness and struggled not to burst into tears, and then I cried anyway when I opened the photograph of my mother as a teenager, which Ellen had put in a silver frame. Whether Ellen had any gifts to open herself I can’t remember.

I’ve managed to forget the first Christmas after my parents died, alone with Bernard in his house, surrounded by beer and beef, hot from the braai. There were no gifts that year, none that I want to remember.

I decide to believe that my parents doubted, withdrew at the last moment, considered, consulted each other, confirmed they were doing the right thing no matter the risk to themselves or what their failure would mean for me. They couldn’t believe they were driving to their own deaths. They couldn’t have wished to kill. I’ve tried to convince myself it was only supposed to be an exercise to prove the power to kill, assuming a bomb can ever just be an exercise.

The container from New York came a few days ago and I go searching for the file I’ve kept of transcripts and clippings relating to my parents.

*

CAPE TOWN, 29 OCTOBER 1999 — SAPC

MK COMMISSAR DESCRIBES TRAINING FOR CAPE TOWN SAPS BLAST

The TRC today heard that the 1988 bomb that killed five people outside of the Cape Town Central Police Station was a justifiable attack on a government target designed to demonstrate to the apartheid regime that they were not untouchable.

Six former members of MK, Umkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress, made applications for amnesty in relation to their involvement in this and a number of other attacks on government installations in the 1980s.

Among the applicants was Joe Speke, 52, who planned some of the attacks during his tenure as head of the ANC’s Special Operations Unit, including the attack on Cape Town’s Police Station. Mr. Speke described how the Cape Town Central Police Station bomber Peter Lawrence underwent training in the use of a remote-controlled device that malfunctioned, inadvertently killing both Lawrence and his wife, the reporter and ANC activist Ilse Lawrence, who was with him in the car at the time of the blast. One police officer and two civilians were also killed when the car, loaded with 10kg of explosives, prematurely detonated.

Mr. Speke, who is represented by Cape Town-based lawyer and Professor of Law at UCT William Wald, was cross-examined by Carlo Du Plessis, SC, who is representing the families of the two civilians killed in the blast. The families oppose the amnesty application of Mr. Speke on the grounds that the victims were civilians whose deaths could serve no political purpose. Mr. Speke suggested it was possible that the Lawrences’ cell had been infiltrated by the security services and the bomb sabotaged.

Mr. Speke will finish his testimony on Monday.

© South African Press Corporation

*

I read a report like this and struggle not to be angry. What stupid people, I think. What stupid people to risk their lives in that way. Even if the bomb hadn’t gone off prematurely, they almost certainly would have been caught and sent to prison — or if they’d managed to escape, taking me out of the country for a life in exile, as must have been their plan, then they still might have been assassinated. I know that they loved me but how much can they really have loved me if they were willing to risk my own wellbeing? I put the file away before I make the mistake of reading anything more unsettling. If their mission was compromised, perhaps there is a kind of solace in that, knowing that they were killed not in error, as a result of their own mistakes, but by the enemy itself, the state.

We take only a few days off for the holidays and then both go back to work. I shut myself in the office at the university and return to the recordings of my interviews with Clare, making careful transcriptions that take much longer to complete than the conversations themselves. I’m still only in the first days of the interviews, early in the process. My voice always sounds strangled, pinched and otherworldly as it comes out of the computer speakers. Clare, though, sounds just like I remember her.

‘Did motherhood change the way you wrote?’ I can hear the inflection in my voice, a modulation I know was intended to suggest a judgement already formed.

‘You forget that I was a mother,’ she drawls, clearing her throat and coughing, ‘before I was ever a writer.’