Wilderness of Mirrors, page 16
During the Q and A, there are no surprises until a young White man accepts the microphone and standing up, announces, “Your books seem a little disconnected from life in this country. Do you have a responsibility to remind your readers it’s a bit of fantasy?”
A small murmur, pitying perhaps, runs through the audience. Heretic. Why come to hear a writer you don’t like?
“It’s as you say. It is a bit of fantasy. I thought you might accuse me of cultural appropriation, you know, writing from the point of view of a middle-aged Black African man. In response to that unasked question, there are truths in my books that are never captured in news stories. And at the end of the day, if all I’ve done is encouraged some woman, somewhere, to write, and write from a different perspective than her own, then I’m content.”
The reading is breaking up; there is a scramble as audience members join a lengthening line to get their copies of the novel signed. Tamsin has seen him. He watches her approach—what has it been, a week since they parted? She holds him, a finger behind one ear, to kiss his cheek.
“How is your father?”
“Robin is well. You’ll come back to the house for dinner with us? Esme’s editor. Nellike too.” That must be the woman that shared the stage with Esme.
“Let me get a signed copy,” he tells Tamsin. I’ll come look for you.”
Esme, when his turn in line comes, is businesslike. “Lovely you came, Emil.” The distant sincerity of fame.
Just as briskly, he asks, “Would you write it out to Vivian?”
Afterward, he rides to Esme’s house with Tamsin for supper, which is being put on by Esme’s publisher, Martin Tallow. The country’s biggest publishing company, Tamsin says. The house has been reordered in some way since he last visited, some of the furniture has been stowed perhaps. Four brown men in white aprons and black clothing wait in the kitchen for delivery of food.
Here is Adam with Dipha, and then several guests are swarming into the living room. Tamsin points out people. Martin stands next to the editor of Garroting, as she calls it. Esme’s friend, the poet Simone Burgess, is also here. Simone lives in an isolated hamlet down the peninsula.
“Literary Stadmutter,” Tamsin says with what sounds like unironic pleasure. She picks sweetmeats from the tray of a waiter going by. “The writing ecosystem here is tiny and so it breeds lots of feuds. Feuds on feuds. ‘He stole my agent,’ she mocks. ‘She plagiarized parts of my prose poem.’ In fact, Jacob Mason from the university’s writing department would be here ordinarily, but he’s got some beef with Simone.”
The poet is strapping. She is in conversation with a striking woman. “Adam, there’s your fave author.” Tamsin gestures with her chin. “Children’s book writer,” she tells Emil, holding his arm.
“Voetsek, Tams.” Adam, too, is enjoying himself. He tells Dipha something that makes her giggle.
People-watching quickly palls for Emil. “So, the visit with your father was fine?” Emil says. Tamsin waves the question away. Her attention is repeatedly drawn to Jillian Lord, and as if to cover her interest in the editor, she tells Emil, “Simone hates big events. She does small readings for six or seven in the living rooms of friends.”
Nellike has found time to change clothes and she’s not the only one: when Esme enters the room, the publisher Tallow starts to clap, and the other guests—they are now ten—take up the applause. Esme wears a long close-fitting dress that sets off her figure. Here, she is more than a celebrated novelist fresh from releasing new work to her audience. Woman, mother, perhaps even lover. And yet, even surrounded by those that are, presumably, her closest intimates, there is some hesitancy in coming to stand in their midst as the handclaps slowly die; doubt or reticence flickers in her eyes before the alter ego restores itself. That self-scrutiny even in a moment of clear triumph strikes Emil as a trait seldom seen in men. Esme deflects the attention with a brisk “Let’s eat.” Tallow takes her hand and, kissing it, leads her in to sit.
There is chilled soup for supper. Springbok loin. The dining room is too small for so many bodies. Martin is like a handsome satyr near the head of the table, surrounded by women—Jillian is there, Nellike, who seems to be drinking too fast, Esme herself at the head. It is his triumph as well as the writer’s, it seems. From the kitchen comes the sound of the chef issuing curt instructions to the servers of food and drink.
The poet Simone is on Emil’s right. He and she have exchanged a perfunctory greeting and left it there. The waiters never let the glasses stand empty but are careful to avoid hovering, or to be overeager in recharging a glass. Simone is prudent in her drinking, and so too, he observes, is Esme, but the other women are giddied already. Jillian conceals it well by sitting quite still; the telltale is her eyes, which are heavy and slow-blinking.
He himself is in a fey mood, which he attributes to several factors, including his decision—made prior to the conversation with his mother—to leave Stadmutter. He has hoped for a moment to speak with Tamsin about this, but that moment does not come, and tonight is not the night for it anyway. It is right that she celebrate her mother. And so Emil drinks with a kind of caution, sticking with white wine. The din in the room absolves him of the need to make conversation, and in fact seems to be having a similar effect on others. Perhaps the asymmetry of women and men is similarly influential. Emil and Adam are only boys to Jillian and Simone. Whatever its source, the atmosphere provides tinder for a quarrel, some silliness that flares as the diners are being served an overrich, tiny dessert of tiramisu.
Someone farther down the table, Martin probably, has made a throwaway remark about the Movement.
“You used to be National Party once, isn’t it, Martin?” Adam had been talking closely with Dipha but evidently eavesdropping. He leans away from her abruptly. A question that seems calculated to ambush the publisher, embarrass him. The National Party, now disbanded, had been the architect of racial Partition.
“Weren’t we all, Adam,” Martin answers, with a straight face, and then, exchanging quick glances with Jillian, lets his lips quirk in slight amusement. He next turns and murmurs something to Nellike on his other side, and she collapses in giggles.
Esme has a curious reaction to this exchange. Her eyes are downcast, and her face and neck color faintly, but whether in response to her son’s remark or her publisher’s is not obvious.
Adam falls into sullen silence, as if drunk, which he is not; his coloring would give him away. He seems cowed by the glib way his mother’s publisher has drawn the sting from his comment.
Emil feels a sudden—a misplaced—pity, not for Adam but for the woman next to him; misplaced because Dipha is not overawed or excited at being in the room. She is not here on sufferance, a token, to use Torrance’s term from the other night: Dipha comes from eGeld, where such a monochrome scene would be unimaginable, and she comes from a family at least as wealthy as Emil’s own. This crowd is indifferent to her youth and her Black skin, indifferent more than hostile, although the view of many Whites, Tamsin included, is that the country belongs more and more to Dipha rather than themselves. The meaning of Emil’s own presence here is fuzzier: he is brown, but he is also from eGeld; were he from Stadmutter, a real Creole, he might feel he were at supper on sufferance himself.
He is curious what Dipha makes of the racial crusade her boyfriend has taken on. She must tire of Adam sooner or later; he has more growing to do than she. To Dipha and himself, Emil adds Esme as one standing in some way apart from the others at dinner, although he cannot say why.
Tamsin cups her wineglass in both hands and directs a meaningful look toward her mother. Whatever appeal is in that glance, Esme has no desire to answer it. Some game is going on with poor, hysterical Nellike. Esme is in some way part of it, a not entirely passive foil to Martin, whose provocations are mounting. Nellike is struggling to remain upright. Jillian, also tight, is trying to coax Simone into something. The poet holds her eyes tight shut; her entire frame quivers as if with panic. With every new interaction, Emil slips further away: the old dissociative tendency, somehow renewed by what he has experienced in recent weeks.
“I need some fresh air,” he announces to no one in particular, and leaves the supper room, which breaks the glamour of dinner. The kitchen is empty; the waiters, dismissed, have let themselves out of the house.
Tamsin has followed him outside, and then here too comes Adam, trailing them in a curious echo of that night in Kampsbaai. He disapproves of their interaction, although Emil guesses Adam himself does not understand why. Adam jabs a finger at Tamsin. “Do you know any Black people, Tams? Not even Black friends. Acquaintances. Colleagues?”
“Not really. As far back as high school, whenever I started getting close to anyone Black, I’d start second-guessing my motives. Do I actually like them, or is it guilt? There was one girl in my year at St. Therese’s. Lindi, who I got on with, I can’t remember what drew us together. We got along very well, actually. But bit by bit, I pulled back. It was the fact that she felt different from me that made me racist, do you know what I mean? Maybe she understood what was going on because she gave up trying to maintain the friendship. In a sense, I think I’d decided I was racist and couldn’t help it, our history and all.”
“I remember Lindi,” Adam admits. “But that makes no sense, Tams. That’s why you lost touch with her? I had a crush on Lindi, I think she came home with you one school holiday.”
Emil’s phone is ringing; Errol’s name flashes on the screen. He moves a little apart from Tamsin and Adam to accept the call.
“Emil, listen. Stadmutter is going to see some heavy police action in the next day or so. Federal police conducting rolling sweeps to pick up quote unquote subversives, meaning Braeem Shaka. I don’t entirely approve. It’ll only martyr the man, but Kob doesn’t have a bloody clue what he’s doing.”
Emil resists sharing this intelligence with Tamsin; there will be a moment for that later. The party is breaking up, although several guests wait in the kitchen for coffee to finish brewing. He looks in but does not enter: Tamsin is there talking to Jillian. He approaches Esme to wish her goodnight, and she gestures for him to sit. “I hope you enjoyed supper.” She gets straight to the point. “Look, I wonder if I could ask for your help with the book I’m working on. I’m going to need some guidance getting the argot dialogue right. Do you know anyone here in Muttie I could consult with? A student at uni would be great, but anyone who speaks fluently. I’m looking for someone for about a month. The dialogue could be worked out over the phone after an initial face-to-face meeting.”
“You’re setting the new book in Stadmutter?”
“Yes, Muizies specifically. The book will center on a surfer criminal gang, and Muizies is perfect, charming but a little down on its luck. You know Agatha Christie surfed there?”
Emil thinks a moment. “I’ll ask my cousin. If he’s willing, I can pass you his number.”
He is pushing back his chair to stand up, ending the conversation. But Esme is not done. “The detectives trying to smash the crime ring will be Creole.” She glances at Martin. The publisher is staring into his phone. “Fentanyl, abalone, you know.” Andres could be useful, Emil thinks wryly, but he has not his older cousin in mind but the younger.
Tamsin comes to stand between Esme and Emil’s chair. It is Martin she is looking at. “You might want to check on Nellike.”
“Kitchen,” he says, deflecting the pointed remark. “Simone is making coffee.”
Tamsin turns to Emil. “Quick word?” She jerks her head and he follows her outside, catching sight of Nellike in the kitchen. Her eyes are closed, and the counters seem to be steadying her.
“Let’s go back to Scarbs. Tonight.”
“I need to go to my aunt’s house. I was just leaving, actually.”
“Why?”
“Your mother, she asked me to connect her with an argot speaker for the new book. I thought Andres, my cousin, might know someone.” A partial lie.
“I’ll come with you. This dinner party is going to drag on. Nellike may well sober up and have a few more glasses of wine. And then tomorrow is Carnival. It will be chaos.”
“Sure.” He resists the urge to compound the earlier lie. “Grab your things.”
He is in Celeste’s bed. Tamsin is with him, the two of them alone in his aunt’s house. That no one else is there had raised Tamsin’s suspicions, and so he had given her a brief tour of the place, leaving out Andres’s room. In Torrance’s old room, she made no comment, and they passed quickly to the master bedroom, where she looked over Celeste’s perfumes and creams. More than once during her exploration, she said, “Are they avoiding you?” But then she had fallen asleep at once in Celeste’s toosoft bed and he had removed her shoes and skirt before lying down next to her and picking up the notebook.
Germany achieves by accident what America, with its soaring intentions and ‘manifest destiny’, can only aspire to: civilisation, in all its opulent cruelty. Perhaps because Germany is better able to grasp the duality of the word.
And then an unexpected text, unlike any he has read thus far:
I sat and watched swifts for an hour and more, enthralled by the beatless acceleration of movement, their arrowing flight. For me these birds are more arresting than any machine man has made, any algorithmic calculation. The swift is born to what it is. So too the jaguar or the killer whale or the mole, all having an essence man lacks, and this turns on its head Sartre’s arguments that existence comes before essence. My marvelling at swifts is meaningless. I would watch the death of a swift with the same detached wonder. Beauty and vivacity accrue no right to go on living. So it must also be where humans are concerned.
An argument both more and less impenetrable than many of the others. Lying beside Tamsin, reading under a low light, he grasps that understanding Bolling’s writings is not entirely a matter of having read the right philosophers. And he has complied partway with Bolling’s invitation to throw out his assumptions. Present dislocations have equipped him with a keener intellectual, even emotional vocabulary, but he concedes frankly that it is these shifts that make it so difficult to countenance returning to eGeld, to his old life.
The Kentride etching is a new source of anxiety. He cannot continue to trust it will remain safe at 9 Noel. There is no lock on the door, nothing to bar Andres or even Drool from snooping through his belongings. After caching it somewhere it will be safe, he can leave this city: his preference is to leave the country, taking cues from Bolling’s notebook, from the German himself. And Tamsin.
He is reminded of his father’s brief warning over the phone only when he and Tamsin are on the way to Scarbrough. The police—there are very many of them, some in camouflage carrying machine guns—have set up a roadblock on the outskirts of Ottery, a Creole township. One of them, big-bellied and in the blue and khaki uniform, straightens up and chops his hand with exaggerated slowness. Tamsin winds down the window so they can hear him out.
“Where are you going, Meinherr?” His tongue is working at something in his teeth.
“Scarbrough.”
“This one’s going to Scarbrough,” the policeman calls, consulting his sergeant. Another man responds with a shake of the head.
“Do you live there? That’s your permanent home in Scarbrough? You’ll have to turn back unless you have proof of residence.”
“Is it an accident?”
“I can’t say. Do you have proof of residence?”
Tamsin says, “Give us five minutes please. We’re checking.” She winds the window back up and pulls out her phone.
A call comes in on Emil’s phone as Tamsin tries presumably to reach her mother. “Can you come to the house?” Bolling, but an unfamiliar number. “I need you to do something for me. I’ve texted you the new security codes.” He’s gone.
“So?” Emil asks Tamsin. The policeman approaches again and raps on the window glass.
“We have proof of residence back in town, officer,” Tamsin says, shading her eyes with one hand. “I don’t suppose you’d accept a photo? On my mobile?”
“No, mevrou. You’ll need to go and physically get it.”
Tamsin nods and waves at the officer, then rolls up the window.
“The road on the other coast is open, apparently. Let’s just go around.”
“I need to go to Bolling’s. He asked me to stop by, no idea why. It won’t take long, I hope.” He is peeved at himself for agreeing, or at least not refusing. But he is curious too to learn if this is about the Kentride etching. Bolling has had ample time now to discover its absence.
“Drop me back at Esme’s. I’ll wait there.”
Bolling is not at home. The house feels shut up, unoccupied. On the high kitchen table is a cheap mobile and a note. Only call me on this phone. He leaves the phone and note and passes upstairs. The door to the main bedroom has been locked, but the second room has an air of recent occupancy. The bed is roughly made.
He opens both wardrobe doors. Sitting there on the spacious floor is Braeem Shaka, long legs drawn up against his chest. “Where’s Bolling?” Emil demands without thought.
“Good to see you too.” Shaka pushes out of the wardrobe and, sidestepping, goes into the bathroom and closes the door.
He seems shaken. Emil gives him a moment. Downstairs, he takes up the burner phone; it has one number, foreign, in the contact list, which he dials.
“Ja.”
“I’m in the house with Braeem. What’s going on? He was hiding in a wardrobe.”
“Keep him there. They have an arrest warrant for him. Insurrection, drug trafficking. They’ve already been to his mother’s house. Don’t let him leave and don’t give him his phone.”
“Where are you?”
“Let’s just say out of town.”
