Betrayal

by Adriaan van Dis, Ina Rilke

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Mulder, a Dutchman, returns at last to South Africa, his memories scattered by forty years and two strokes. Once he fought to free the country from apartheid; now he finds its people asking whether years of democracy have left them any better off. The village where his friend Donald - a comrade from his Fraternité days - lives is as segregated as ever: fishermen struggle to eke out a living and kids wreck their brains with crystal meth. Tensions are high: Donald wages a campaign against the local mayor; every day the whites add inches to their perimeter fences. So when Mulder and Donald attempt to help a young tik-head get clean against his will, their muddled good intentions can only be misunderstood...

Release date: August 1, 2013

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 189

Sample

Mulder explored his new home like a burglar on the prowl. The doors rattled, the floors creaked, the window frames were rotten. A plethora of locks and grilles, all rather flimsy-looking. The bars over the bathroom window had been cut and extra padlocks added. On the kitchen table lay a big bunch of keys. But what was there to steal? No radio, no television. Just a stove weighing a ton, a rusty freezer, a washing machine, and some rickety bits of furniture. Nothing portable worth taking. Unless you counted his red suitcase. A white man’s suitcase. And his laptop. The estate agent had left a note with instructions for the new occupant: “you are safer here without luxury goods”. Well, well. The envelope was addressed in large capitals to MR MARTEN. The name of the man he had once been. There was no getting away from it. Donald still called him by that name – Donald, the old friend who had invited him to come and see the new South Africa for himself. He also had Donald to thank for this clapped-out holiday home. The Marten of the old days was not fussy, not a man to complain of a sagging mattress or some desiccated larvae under the bedspread, nor of flecks of blood on the wall, leave aside the long flight to South Africa – squeezed in tight for a whole day – or the stomach-churning drive through the mountains. Marten took discomfort in his stride, but then he had never had to worry about tingling feet or clogged arteries. Marten didn’t need to take pills. Mulder did, eight a day. Still, he might as well try to raise himself to Marten’s standards. Maybe the name would make him young again.

He opened the windows wide, filled his lungs with sea air, and resolved to make the sitting room a bit more habitable: table up against the wall, sofa by the window, knick-knacks in the cupboards and surplus chairs to the scullery. Freeing up some space for his legs and his eyes.

The house stood on the crest of a sand-dune, overlooking the fishing village and the harbour. That was where he had wanted to live, down by the shore in a village where people worked for their living, not among the high-walled villas of idle whites with electrified fencing glinting in the sun. Just an ordinary little house on the beachfront, was that really so hard to find, especially out of season?

He had discussed the matter at length with Donald by e-mail and phone. “You seem to be on pretty good terms with the fishing community, don’t you ever hear of anything? Don’t you ever see anything vacant when you’re out with the dogs?” He had declined the offer of lodging with his old friend, who lived in the largest house on the dunes. Staying in other people’s homes did not appeal to Mulder: too much embarrassment, too many pills and too many rituals. Plus he would have to carry on conversations with Donald’s wife, whom he had never even met. “Looking someone up after forty years means it takes a while to get back in the swing of things.” People change, like it or not.

After much asking around, Donald had found him an “authentic fisherman’s cottage, nets and boats all around, less than a minute from the sea.” Great, Mulder had promptly gone out to buy a pair of rubber boots. But a week before his departure it all fell through. Donald had spoken to the previous occupants: they had been on the point of going to bed when they were robbed at knifepoint by youths in balaclavas. Fleeced of everything, even their tooth brushes. “Crime is spreading like a disease over the country,” Donald wrote. “It has reached the fishing village, too. I can’t let you live there. Oldies like you and me belong in a safe area. We can’t run as fast as we used to. I’ll find you somewhere else.”

So now he was lumbered with this draughty dump in a white enclave. The view was splendid, admittedly. A pity that everybody had an equally splendid view of him. Unsurprisingly, his arrival had not gone unnoticed. As Donald drove him up the winding track there had already been a bunch of fishermen’s children running alongside the 4x4. As if they had been lying in wait for the new tenant. They swarmed around him as he unloaded his luggage. “Mister Marten! Mister Marten!” one of them yelled. Somebody at the rental office had obviously blabbed. Donald wanted to chase the youngsters away, but he – kindly Mr Marten – had shaken hands with them as they squabbled over his suitcase. The smallest ones clamoured for a biro “for school”. He patted his pockets selfconsciously, but one urchin beat him to it and, grinning widely, handed over his fountain pen. His pocket picked under his very nose! Donald hustled him into the house. No, this was no game, it was a test. “Now they know how fokken dumb you are.” Those innocent-looking lads were fully-fledged thieves. Hadn’t he seen their sticks? Those broom-handles with a nail driven through one end, which they trailed behind them over the asphalt? If you didn’t watch out they’d use them to prise open a window and fish the house keys right off the table. Donald advised him to keep the front door locked at all times even when he was at home, even during the day. And it might be a good idea to defrost that freezer so he could hide his valuables in there. It was just an idea. Mulder had to laugh, but Donald didn’t think it was funny. “Just you mark my words, they’ll be back, and not for a friendly chat either.”

*

Six keys lay on the table. Menacingly. A bundle of rust to scare him. He weighed them in his right hand. No idea which one belonged where. He tried them all. Half of them didn’t fit anywhere, and the key to the front door required some force. A shiver ran down his spine as he slipped the keys into his trouser pocket – he felt like his own jailer. He inspected the chisel marks in the windowsill. There were greasy fingerprints on the glass. He tried to rub them off with his handkerchief. His spittle squeaked. The fingerprints were on the outside.

The freezer hummed. Mulder pulled out the plug.

*

The cable of the laptop was too short. The front room had only two electrical sockets, and the nearest one was already in service with hundreds of ants crawling in and out. Small red slaves politely greeting each other in passing. He went down on his knees and blew them away. They fell over each other, recovered themselves and proceeded in single file towards the socket. The route was fixed. When he covered the two entrances with his fingers the ants massed together on the back of his hand. They didn’t bite, merely explored his knuckles, the scar between thumb and forefinger, the creased skin. They ventured onto his wrist, tasted the hairs, his watch strap … they crept up the tunnel of his sleeve. There was a crumb on the floor. Mulder laid it carefully among the ants. The ants assessed the gift, lifted it up and hauled it straight through the multitude towards the blocked entrances of the socket. Minutes ticked by, filled with wonder, endearment and cruel thoughts: he pinched an ant between his fingertips, just one, and squashed it with his nails for the juice, for the heck of it. He dropped the corpse back into the queue. His watch couldn’t tell him how many minutes had elapsed – the glass was red with ants.

There was no alternative: he had to push the table over to the other socket, up close to the sofa and the window. That way he could watch the boats putting out to sea from behind his keyboard.

Mulder stared vacantly out of the window, tired from the journey. He had refused all offers of help settling in. It was nobody’s business how neatly he folded his trousers over a hanger – the crease, the crease, in Africa of all places! – nor the number of shirts he had brought. Not to mention the pills. He wanted to find his way around on his own the first day. His way around the house, around the village. In his own time. He would be meeting Donald in the morning for his first long walk in the area. That would give him a different perspective, no doubt, and he would also be meeting Sarah, Donald’s wife.

But first the sink had to be scraped clean, the rooms swept, and a rug draped over the sofa to hide the hideous upholstery. During his search for bedding he had stumbled on a box of newspapers and magazines left behind by previous tenants. Reading material for rainy days, news from umpteen summers ago. He was about to throw the box away, but couldn’t resist riffling through the old papers – a whole stack of yellowed crime and political infighting. He stared at the photos of black government ministers, badly lit, drowned in printing ink. They wore stiff suits, sat behind desks sporting little flags. He recognised faces from the old days – so he thought, so he hoped – men he had met in the flesh, only younger, in another world. The world in which he had been Marten. Strange past, even stranger present.

*

Marten. How many people had known him by that name? Twenty or so at the most, he reckoned, eight of whom would have been women. It was as Marten that he had been trained in Paris, groomed for a mission to South Africa. In the winter of 1972, a young student called Mulder flew to Johannesburg, sweatypalmed, travelling on his own passport and entering the country without any trouble. The customs officer was so pleased to see the well-thumbed Bible poking out of his hand luggage that the big suitcase got a dismissive wave. Meneer could proceed (with the most pious of looks on his face). Past Immigration he played Marten again, with whom a second Bible slipped into the country: this one hollowed out and containing false passports.

Marten the hero. Especially after a drink or two.

That same Marten had been Mulder’s constant companion ever since – that is, until he fell apart a couple of years ago, one night in Paris. It wasn’t only Marten crashing to pieces, it was Mulder’s whole life. His words had come tumbling out of the bookcase as he slept. All the shelves broken, the floor strewn with letters, letters that no longer resembled words. Letters without sense. Close enough to touch. He wanted to pick them up, but they slipped from his grasp. A few hours later he rang a girlfriend to tell her about his weird dream. She couldn’t understand what he was saying. Had he been drinking? She was alarmed and consulted a neurologist friend, who promptly sounded him out. Same story. “You’re not making sense,” he had said. An hour later Mulder was admitted to La Salpétrière. A stroke. His second.

After little more than a week he was beginning to make some sense again – in Dutch. First the rhythms came back; the spelling took much longer. He sat for days with an old dictionary on his lap because he couldn’t come up with the first letter of a particular word, while the sound of it zoomed in his head. Within a month his native language was once again lined up on the shelf. French was more problematic. The unwritten language seemed especially hard to reclaim. The French to do with love. Terrified of losing it for good, he spent days drifting along the boulevards and sitting behind young couples on pavement cafés, taking in their happiness. And so their words nourished his memory.

Only South Africa remained patchy.

*

He was still in pretty bad shape that afternoon when he went to the newly opened Musée du Quai Branly, where he was waylaid by a tall man: “Aren’t you Marten? Marten the Dutchman?”

Marten? Mulder savoured the name and gave a start: yes, that was a name from way back. But who on earth was this man grabbing his right hand and kneading the scar between the thumb and index finger?

“I stitched up that wound, remember? It’s me, Donald.”

Donald! Another name that rang a bell. And in a flash he was back at that table, sitting next to the Algerian stamp-forger, seeing the gouge shooting into his thumb. Donald had staunched the wound. Donald from South Africa, with whom he roamed the streets of Paris, with whom he holed up in attic rooms, committing secret codes to memory. The Donald he wrote letters to in encre sympathique – the term for invisible ink came rushing back to him. Donald, son of a prominent Afrikaner who had broken with his family and now worked as a cleaner in a hospital to pay for his medical training. Clever Donald, serious Donald, grinning Donald, yes, he was the one who had stitched up the wound with a filched operating needle and sterile thread from a glass ampoule.

How long had they been in Paris together?

Months, months.

And how long ago was that?

They counted the years, leaping back and forth in time, shutting their eyes … thirty-seven, no, it had to be thirty-eight years ago. And here they were, face to face again. What a coincidence! Or was Africa the magnet, the dark heart of the museum, where both men were drawn to a dimly lit mask from Gabon – ghostly yellow, with the high cheekbones and almond eyes of a Bushman.

The name Fraternité cropped up, with a sigh and a smile. Fraternité, the organisation preparing them for underground activities in South Africa. Donald, excited, groped for the language they used to share, a mix of Afrikaans, French and English. “Hey, remember the friends we had, the tricks we played … and the booze? Et cette vampe de la filature?” He meant the puss-in-boots who taught them the art of stalking and shadowing. “Didn’t you make tracks for her bed?”

Mulder chuckled, although he wasn’t sure who or what was being referred to. The wrong faces flashed past, mean-looking, fanatical. There wasn’t much time for recollection, anyway. Donald’s wife was with him; she was waiting in the museum restaurant.

“Have you been back at all?” Donald said

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Too complicated,” he said. “My memory’s not too good these days.”

Donald looked surprised. His mobile rang softly. A text message from his wife. What was keeping him?

They exchanged addresses hurriedly, smiling at each other’s real surnames – information that had been taboo during the Struggle. Everybody had an alias, some nondescript forename. Donald had kept his ever since – it belonged to the new South Africa. To Donald, the Dutch student he had known all those years ago was still simply Marten.

Marten was from Amsterdam, right?

“Yes, but living in Paris now.” (Marten, Marten, amazing how snugly the name still fitted, a Danish name bestowed on him by the boss of Fraternité, on account of his pink skin and northern accent.) Yes, Paris, for several years now … Best decision he’d made since his first stroke: “You’ve got to use the time you have left to do the things you always wanted to do.”

Donald nodded, a look of concern crossing his face. It was his last day there, otherwise they could have gone for a drink together. He was tied up with a medical conference, and had a formal dinner that evening.

Ah, so he had taken his degree in the end? Mulder had to suppress an overwhelming need to confide all his ailments. His unreliable memory … could a stroke announce itself in a dream? Oh, there was so much he wanted to ask.

The same was true of Donald. Was Marten still in touch with anyone from back then? No? Never run into anyone by chance? Not even at some demonstration or other?

“I’ve put all that well behind me,” Mulder said. “I never was much of a political animal, you know.”

Donald’s mobile went off again. He made a helpless gesture. “Married?”

No, no. Mulder made the same gesture: “Well, I suppose I’m married to my freedom.”

He laughed. “So nothing’s changed.”

And Donald? Kids?

No, no. He glanced quickly at his text message.

They would be in touch by e-mail, or rather, why didn’t Marten come over to South Africa – since he was a free agent? Good exercise for the brain. A chance to see what had become of their dream, too.



Their dream, their hazardous dream. Money was what they needed – to smuggle people out of South Africa. And passports – false or real – to provide exiles with new names and new nationalities. They broke into the homes of embassy staff, planted listening devices, hid microfilms in hollowed-out Bibles … all stuff they had learned together and put into practice together. Mulder thought he had forgotten most of it, but the e-mails they exchanged brought it all back … How he had managed to rack up thousands of dollars on behalf of Fraternité by looting a medieval manuscript. Pour la cause. Mulder felt the old thrill again. He went back to being Marten, word for word. He needed to type out his memories to put them into some sort of order.

Bibliothèque Nationale. I wonder if they would still know me at the rue Richelieu: the eager medievalist in owlish glasses, shirt buttoned up to the collar, unruly hair carefully slicked back? Maps were what I was after, ancient manuscripts. But they would only let me see the microfiches. I abided by the rules. Handed in my briefcase and my pen in exchange for a government-issue pencil and ditto notebook. I gained access to an . . .