Patrick Flanery - Absolution

He thought of trying to find the place in the hills where Laura had taken him. He remembered the graves dug and the bodies going into the ground. The country was caught in a spasm of memory. Perhaps others would find the graves, and among the bodies they would find the crushed remains of Bernard. And the truck? What had happened to Bernard’s truck? He could think of nothing that would connect him to the crime other than the truck.

He knew there had been hearings about his parents but at the time he had made the decision not to come forward. It was his choice and no one could force him to testify if he did not wish to do so. Silence was his territory.

Maps revealed nothing. Maps were a tracery of lies. The place where he thought the farm should have been was in the middle of the Karoo National Park, which had been founded nearly a decade before the events he remembered. Impossibility layered on impossibility. One afternoon he drove high up into the Nuweveld, but could find nothing that resembled what he remembered. There were no buildings, only acacia and a troop of baboons that rained down the cliffs, a shower of cinders. In places the dirt road looked as he remembered it should, and then he would round a curve to see a new vantage that failed to fit his memory of the place. If the gravesite were ever to be found, he would not be the one to find it.

He’d made a room in his mind where such information could live. Bernard lived there, and now his aunt did too. Parts of Sam lived there as well.

Home was a place he wanted to be and one where he knew he could no longer stay. The sun was too close, the earth too dry, the land itself all too familiar, a terrain telling stories he did not want to remember, stories about himself, and his past, and the life he might have led.

He would tell Sarah everything about his past and his parents. He would hide nothing so there could be nothing to hide. He would tell her about Bernard, everything about him, what he had done and how it had felt.

It would be impossible to tell her anything.

One day he would tell her everything.

Sunday. When I arrive at her guest house Clare is waiting outside on the yellow front porch, leaning against one of the white pillars. The sun is flashing off the pale green paint of the metal roof. She looks younger, almost as she did twenty years ago on the porch of her old house.

‘Since it’s a nice day, I was hoping we might go for a walk,’ she says, stepping down into the gravelled parking area at the front and taking my hand as if I were a beau picking her up for a date. ‘What we need to say is not for note-taking and audio recording. Do you agree?’

‘Yes. Today is not for the book.’

We head west, back into town past the university. Clare moves with surprising agility and at times I struggle to keep pace. At Ryneveld we turn south, as I did yesterday, and Clare pauses in a café for a coffee and pastry. ‘I am learning to indulge myself,’ she says. ‘I think indulgence is not such a bad thing at my age. My son says I am too thin and should eat more. He did not stipulate what I should eat.’

As we approach the intersection with Dorp Street, standing for a moment outside an old whitewashed house with a single elegant gable over the door, I thank her for the text she gave me yesterday. I don’t know what else to call it, so I refer to it as the letter, her letter to Laura.

‘Letter, yes,’ Clare says, ‘it’s a letter of sorts. More like one half of a diary I’ve been keeping since you arrived last August. Your coming occasioned it.’

‘Of course, Laura must be dead. You say as much in the book, after all.’

‘Logic would say so. No contact, no word, no sign — at least, no natural sign. There is another me, one afflicted by nightmares, who is not so convinced — the me who is suspicious of certainties, who still clings to the hope of mysterious things in heaven and earth. Miracles and resurrections and hauntings. But we are dodging the main point of the letter. Were you not surprised that I remembered you all this time?’

‘In all our meetings you’ve never given any indication that you knew who I was. For ages you acted as though you didn’t even recognize that I was South African. So yes, I was very surprised.’

‘Cruel of me, I know. But then you have played a kind of game as well, keeping your cards hidden, or at least you thought they were hidden. Little did you know that I had dealt the deck.’

‘I can’t help feeling that everything might have been easier if one of us had said something in the first place.’

‘Or it might all have fallen apart. I might have snapped, or you might have taken flight. Listen, I know I am not an easy person to deal with. Truth be told I have cultivated my difficult persona. But then easy is not necessarily good , as any philosopher will tell you. Part of me felt you needed to earn that recognition. And also, there was a significant part that feared what you might do if I admitted to remembering you. I was afraid of your anger.’

Stopping to finish her coffee, she puts the empty cup in a bin with great attentiveness, as though wanting to credit the cup and its disposal with as much significance as our conversation. She brushes crumbs from her fingers and takes my hand as if picking up a small bird. ‘Did you think you got this job on the basis of your intellect alone, on supreme good luck, the quality of your work, and the references of a few scrappy scholars who think themselves gods?’

‘I supposed that I had. I thought it was chance that brought me back to you. And my own talent.’

‘A flattering rationale, but no. I chose you. I commanded your presence. I said to my editor, “If you’re going to insist on this project, for the sake of book sales after my death, then I get to choose my biographer.” And I chose you, which pleased me a great deal more than my editor, who had half a dozen much higher-profile writers just waiting to do the job. Seeing you in Amsterdam was terrifying but also something like a gift. You were the answer to my problem. I knew immediately who you were: the boy at the door.’

‘I never saw so much as a flicker of recognition.’

She raises a hand in modesty. ‘We’re dealing with two matters here. The first matter is the project at hand, the biography. If it serves to create new interest in my work, and prevents it falling out of print when I am dead, then that will make my son happy, no matter how he protests, and it will make my publishers very happy indeed. The second matter is: why you? I chose you not because I respect your work more than anyone else’s. I have read more insightful scholarship, more theoretically sophisticated engagements, and better written ones, too. You’re here because of who you are, because of your place in my family, or the place that I denied you in my family. You’re here also because I hoped you might know something more about my daughter in the days before she disappeared. Let us be honest about that at least.’

I feel my legs begin to wobble as she smiles her child’s smile, pursing her lips. Standing here with her now, I know I can never tell her what I’ve learned from Timothy and Lionel. Whatever she may or may not guess about Laura, to tell her what I now believe to be the truth would, I fear, destroy her. Despite whatever lingering resentment I may feel about the past, the last thing I want to do is hurt her.

‘I have never forgotten you, Sam. How could I? That day, I saw you before you knocked. Lionel, Timothy, and you, all three emerged from a bright little car and stared at my house, consulting a piece of paper, a slip with an address, I presume, then crossed the street and knocked. My husband was at a conference in Johannesburg and I was alone in the house. Suddenly here were these two strange men and a boy on my doorstep, so it was not a good beginning because I was already on guard. Lionel and Timothy introduced themselves and Timothy presented an envelope from my daughter, and her notebooks, and Lionel’s photographs. One of them asked if I had heard from Laura. I said no, and pointed at you, and asked who you were. Timothy spoke. He said, “This boy was with your daughter. It seems she was taking him to his aunt in Beaufort West. But then we were in Beaufort West some days ago and we found Sam on the street, running around like a stray. He says his aunt couldn’t take him in. She did at first, to please your daughter, but as soon as Laura left, his aunt kicked him out onto the street, in a town where he doesn’t know anyone. We just found him in the street.” I asked them where Laura was now and they said they could not tell me because they did not know themselves. Is this the way you remember it?’