Patrick Flanery - Absolution

‘A goat midst the sheep,’ she says, nodding towards the boy. ‘He’s the one who’ll make a mark, for better or for worse.’

Words begin to pile up in my mouth. I edit and reorder them. ‘Because you’ve trusted me with so much, there’s something I feel I’d like to trust you with,’ I say, knowing the story I’m about to tell is no longer the truth.

‘A secret?’

‘Assuming Laura is dead, it’s a secret that no one else knows, not even my wife. I still don’t have the courage to tell her. It’s a secret that should change the way you think about your daughter. It seems fitting that you should be the only other person who knows. In telling you, I’m putting everything in your hands — my freedom and my life.’ The story is for Clare’s sake, not for mine, and for the sake of Laura’s memory.

Clare nods as the parade of children passes around the corner. I assemble the version I want her to know, the feeling of doing it, my foot on the accelerator and my hand on the wheel and gearshift. It runs like a film on a loop that lives inside me and which I live inside.

‘Laura was mysterious, a fighter and a force of nature, but she wasn’t a murderer, not a killer in cold blood, not as you imagined her in your diary. She didn’t kill my uncle.’

As Clare’s face clears and she turns her body to look at me more closely, I know this is the right thing to say.

‘Are you telling me what I think you are?’

‘Yes. But you were right about the truck.’ The words come out in a croak, my voice breaking.

‘It was what she wrote in her notebook, that she ran him over with his own truck. But somehow, ultimately, I could not believe she would be so indirect. A truck makes more sense if the driver is a child.’

‘What does that make me?’

‘It makes you little different from me, but as a child — at least as a white child in those days — you almost certainly would not have been held accountable. What I did to put my sister and brother-in-law in jeopardy was worse in a way, because it was careless and selfish. It is a crime that has haunted me in a very real sense. Writing this last book was my attempt at self-exorcism, a casting out of my demons and my sense of complicity in their deaths, as well as my sense of great failure in not being a better mother to my daughter — and not only my daughter, but to my son as well.’

‘There’s more,’ I say, and struggle to tell her the rest, about the bodies in the truck, about the grave and Bernard’s burial, as I remember it. I tell her about once trying to find the place again in the hills above Beaufort West and now not knowing whether to believe what I remember. Clare listens, looking at me even when I can’t bear to look at her.

‘The historical record would suggest you are mistaken,’ Clare says, her voice cool, analytical. ‘As far as I am aware, there have been no discoveries of mass graves. There are two things to say about that. First, that history is not always correct, because it cannot tell all the stories that have been, cannot account for everything that happened. If it could, historians would be out of work, because there would be nothing left to do with the past but to interpret what is known. Second, that the record of memory, even a flawed memory, has its own kind of truth. Perhaps the literal truth is not what you have remembered, but the truth of memory is no less accurate in its way. Our whole country has been a mass grave, whether the bodies are in one location or in many, whether killed in one day or over the course of decades. There is still a further thing to consider. It is possible, through a sense of vanity, either conscious or unconscious, to attribute crimes wholly to oneself in which one has had only a partial hand. Do I know with certainty that the people to whom I spoke were responsible for transmitting the information I revealed about my sister and brother-in-law to the person or persons responsible for their assassination? No. There is only a temporal link. I spoke carelessly and the result, it seemed to me, was their deaths. But I have no incontrovertible proof of my own involvement apart from my sense of my own involvement. That is why, as Dostoevsky says in his quotation of Heine, that a true autobiography is almost an impossibility , because it is in the nature of humans to lie about themselves. You look confused, Samuel. I am not suggesting that what you have told me is a lie. But to remember yourself as, in a very real sense, the agent of your own emancipation, that is a kind of vanity. Let us assume that you did kill Bernard, that you were also complicit in the transport of the bodies of people killed in apartheid atrocities. Without wishing to excuse the killing of your uncle, it is possible to explain it as the result of both historical circumstance and your own highly personal experience of trauma. In the same passage, Dostoevsky says that everyone remembers things he would only confide to his friends, and other things that he would only reveal to himself, under the cloak of privacy. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself . The question I think you have not asked is why you hated Bernard such that your rage had no choice but to express itself — or, seen another way, that you had no choice but to defend yourself. There are gaps in your narrative. Perhaps you did not tell me the whole story. You need to ask yourself what Bernard himself must have done to make you act as you did.’

‘Some might call that moral relativism.’

‘Indeed. Should you have killed Bernard?’ she asks in a matter of fact way, as if weighing the options. ‘No. Objectively you should not because that kind of killing is an evil act. But if you wanted to survive, did you have any choice to act except as you did? Again, I suspect the answer is no. You killed in self-protection. And if we want to satisfy the rigid moralists, we might say that, young as you were, you did not appreciate the consequences of your actions.’

I open my mouth to disagree but she raises a hand to silence me.

‘In fact it doesn’t matter. What matters, I think, is that there are still things you are hiding, and that are hidden from you. I have felt this since the moment you walked in the door last August. Here, I thought, is a young man who does not yet know himself. I look at you now and I know there are things you are not yet telling me, that you may never tell me.’

*

Monday. While I see Clare again Sarah finishes her story on the Festival. On Sunday afternoon the Australian author got drunk with a group of students and punched a former fan who had accused him of selling out.

Setting aside the more recent past, Clare fleshes out the details of her time in Europe as a young woman, her return to South Africa, her marriage, the births of Mark and Laura, and the beginning of her work as a censor. We speak once again of Laura and she shows me her daughter’s notebooks and final letter, in which Laura takes responsibility for Bernard’s death. My false confession, I realize, made no difference whatsoever.

‘I have no further use for these,’ Clare says. ‘And anyway, I have kept photocopies for myself. The originals are yours to keep. Marie will confirm that I am compos mentis and witness the gift, lest my son should ever dispute it. Perhaps one day you will get something else as well, something like what you truly deserve.’ She takes a breath as if about to say more, but then shakes her head. ‘I myself cannot wholly make up for the way you were denied — denied by myself, and also perhaps by others. What different lives we might have led if I’d had the courage and generosity to take you in, a second son. Will you tell your wife, now that you have told me? Will you tell her everything about your past?’