Patrick Flanery - Absolution

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Dear Sam,

Thank you for your generous message about Absolution . I am glad you think it — rather politely, I fear — a not wholly uninteresting foray into that well-charted country of life writing that I claimed to revile and mistrust. You see how unreliable I am.

Regarding the speaking events in May. Either such things are now beyond one’s power to police, or I am simply too fatigued to fight in the way I once could. My woman of business says it is the only way for one to operate these days — by this she means that no one but those regarded as the truly exceptional, the recluses (all of them male, I note, most of them dying or dead), can get away with saying no.

For the Winelands Festival we shall spend two nights at a hotel in Stellenbosch, as the organizers have roped me into a reading, a book signing, a panel discussion, a pantomime as well for all I know, spread over the course of three days. My woman of business wanted me to go to America but I demurred. I am too old and too frail, I said, and this she seemed to accept. Such excuses don’t wash at home. The truth is I hate travel, and all the administrative bumf (nasty word for nasty things) that inevitably goes with it these days: travel is, more and more, paper chasing paper. In a moment of weakness, thinking I was being too difficult, too precious about my health, I looked at the visa application to visit your adopted country and discovered its demand that I provide my tribal name. I was minded to invent one and submit the form for sport, then thought better of it, fearing it might get me arrested or detained or rendered to a secret base.

As busy as the Festival is bound to be, I shall nonetheless have ample time for you, please do not fear (I have this hunch that you spend a great deal of your life in states of fear; is that unfair?). What I mean is, almost the only thing about the trip I look forward to is the promise of seeing you again.

Yours,

Clare

Because their flight arrived after dark and they’d been warned that the road into the city was unsafe at night, they stayed over at the airport hotel. The room was small but serviceable and the bellhop put down their suitcases with a flourish that felt out of place in the utilitarian setting. Sarah tipped the man a hundred rand and all at once he looked grateful and astounded but also suspicious, as if the money must be some kind of trap. Sam gave him a confidential nod to indicate it was okay, he should take it. Never mind that five or ten rand would have been plenty.

They watched the news and Sarah was surprised that she could understand what was being said. I thought it would all be more foreign .

Wait till the Xhosa news , Sam said, poking her in the ribs. You won’t understand a word of that .

She tried to sound out words in Afrikaans on signs in the room and he couldn’t help laughing at her mispronunciation, so endearingly wrong with its hard consonants and rounded, musical vowels. Flat , he told her, the vowels should be flatter, and the ‘g’ is a ‘ch’ like in ‘Bach’ or ‘loch’ .

Bahk , she said. Lock . He was surprised that she couldn’t hear the difference.

The next morning he watched her at the buffet in the lobby. There was juice in plastic containers, stale croissants, individual boxes of American cereal brands, eggs that looked as though they had been cooked the day before and reheated and then forgotten about and fried in grease to reheat them again. The coffee tasted like it had been two hours on the boil by 8 a.m. A fresh fruit salad was the only truly local thing available, but at least it was good. Sam felt embarrassed by the meal while Sarah ate without complaint, giving no sign that she thought anything was lacking.

This is not representative , he said. South Africans are usually good with food. This is pretty dreadful .

It’s fine, Sam. I feel like I’m back home .

He thought of the breakfasts his mother and aunt had once made, the habitual parade of courses: first juice and cereal (porridge in winter), then fruit, followed by an egg and sausage and sometimes slices of fried brinjal, ending with toast and home-made preserves and a pot of strong tea. The hotel breakfast was a poor introduction; he wanted Sarah to love his country even though the point of the trip had nothing to do with entertainment or amusement or being a tourist falling for a new place. There was nothing amusing about what had happened, and as he thought about it he felt more on edge, recalibrating his reactions, expecting threat rather than hoping all would be well. A victim was complacent, a survivor vigilant. He had grown up in something like a state of war, and it was difficult to remember that was no longer the case. The potential for danger was everywhere. At school in Port Elizabeth he had been taught how to identify limpet mines and that knowledge and the reflex attached to it had never gone away. Every time he approached a vehicle or entered a building, a part of his brain did an automatic scan for the telltale outline. For the sake of survival and self-preservation, one had to retune the dial, pay attention to the emergency frequencies, receive all incoming communications, and ignore nothing that might tip one off to the presence of danger. Pay attention to the Morse code, the signal fires, the sounds of distant voices and the thunder of feet, and one stood a better chance of staying alive.

There was traffic getting out of Cape Town and a backup in the Huguenot Tunnel. In the Hex River Valley a jack-knifed truck that had swerved to miss a herd of goats was blocking the road. In avoiding the animals the truck had hit their owner, who lay dead in the eastbound lane. With the delays it took them most of the day to drive the 450 kilometres to Beaufort West, the place that had never felt like home, but in which, according to the law, Sam now owned a house. Just before the turn-off to the Karoo National Park he took over the driving again, inching into town.

One kilometre over the limit and they’ll stop you , he said. If we’re going to get stopped I’d rather it was me .

The house looked just as it had a year earlier. Flocks of white pelargonium were blooming and the lawn had been recently mowed. Only the dust on the path, more dust and dead bougainvillea leaves on the veranda, and a film of dust on the windows and shutters betrayed less than a week of inattention. Sam ran his finger along the frame of the door and it came back with a yellow-brown mask of powder. Nature would take over with breathless speed. One had to be vigilant in all kinds of ways.

Opening the front door, the smell worked its way into his nostrils by degrees and then, once it had a firm grip, took hold of his entire body and squeezed in an awful embrace. Wait here , he said, panting and leaving Sarah in the front hall. It was the smell of blood overheated, faeces and urine and dust, gunpowder and drawers emptied out. At first he saw only components of disarray in Ellen’s bedroom, with a Rorschach stain of twin baying goats at the centre, marking the site of an explosion. If the police had come to take evidence there was no way of telling. All was disorder, objects shaken and mixed towards higher levels of entropy, chaos irreversible. He remembered the way his own house had looked after the police had disembowelled it.

He couldn’t help but see the situation through one of Clare’s recent books, in which a farmer returns home from a weekend away at an agricultural show to discover his wife’s dismembered body laid out on their bed, the limbs arranged in a question mark.

The Rorschach suddenly shifted, revealing itself as a three-headed dog in a lane between two houses. A window had been left open and the breeze was blowing dust and movement into the space. He picked his way across the room, put his hands on the burglar bars that were covered with a layer of grit, and looked out at the garden. The window closed with a sound like a stack of books falling to the floor as the dust along the sill shuddered and rearranged itself. Looking back at the stain he took a shallow breath and felt a twist of nausea. It would have to wait until the next day. He closed the door behind him. There’s no one here , he called to Sarah, and realized what a stupid thing it was to say.