The image came to Harald from the times he took him birdwatching. She would make excuses not to come, too slow for her, the extended waiting for something to alight, sweeping the empty sky for a cut-out shape to pass across binoculars — the boy importantly looking up the appropriate illustration in the bird manual even when he was still too young to read the text. An image drew close, from time, as the lenses of binoculars do from distance: sunlight fingering the spindly forest (where, what year) and his figure striped with it, like a small animal himself as he moved carefully, not to be a disturbance to any creature in nature; such a respect for life.
When a dog had to be put down — alone, how could she not re-examine this, she was the one who had to do it because he begged her not to let the task be left to the vet. He was ten or eleven, he wanted his doctor mother to do it because he trusted her not to inflict pain, to ‘put to sleep’ (he was protected from killing by the euphemistic phrase) the pet who, while he was growing taller and stronger, had grown too old to walk. She did it without delay because of his painful, almost adult indecision about taking the old animal’s life; and after, in his subdued face, there was his conscience over their having done so, reproachful of her for having been his accomplice; adults should know how to make creatures live forever, abolish death.
This sentimental searching back to what he was is something each, Harald and Claudia, is alert to in the other, not because each seeks the weakness of comfort from the other, but because something vulnerable, incriminating to either, might be revealed. Someone must be to blame. If Duncan says he’s guilty. Sometimes, the hint of a search slips out: while they are taking the dog for a walk (they decided to defy the ruling against animals in the townhouse complex, least they could do, for their son) she remarks suddenly on the way the child would express himself, particularly when he was intrigued by what he had just learnt. Paper is trees, rain is the water that comes up from the earth when the sun heats it. So everything is something else. And tears? When I cry?
I don’t remember he ever had much reason to cry. A happy kid. Never what you’d call punished.
She saw him when his face went into the scarlet paroxysm, white round the mouth, of childhood.
Because that was always left to me.
So you caused the tears.
To answer back was to engage. She let the dog on his leash tug her forward. Both parents were concerned with the preservation of life. Even he, in a manner, assuring that people (at a profit, yes; but she also was paid for most of her services, wasn’t she) would be compensated for misfortunes that befell them, and, lately, providing money for the homeless to house themselves. The army — the army. That was where the life-ethic the son had absorbed from his parents was reversed. When he did his army service he was taught to kill; whether disguised as parade ground drill, field manoeuvres, ballistics courses (the calibre of the gun found in the bed of fern has been established), what was being given was licence to cause death. That there are circumstances in which this is justified by the law of both man and God — though God’s supposed sanction might not have worked its way in, for Duncan, because although Harald had made him a reader, had he succeeded in making him a believer?
War, the right to take life: a truism.
If Harald brings it up, he also tramps it out of relevance under their feet.
Did he really see action? We know he didn’t, we thanked God he didn’t.
You said to him the army was going to be a brutalizing experience.
All right. The alternative we could have taken? You didn’t want us to send him away, did you? Out of the country. A brutalizing experience, a moral mess: but millions have resolved it. He only fired at targets.
He told us they were in the shape of human beings.
Something terrible happened.
Dear Mum and Dad,
A terrible thing happened. It was on Saturday, we were playing football, 2nd team, the one I’m in. A kid from junior school went into the gym to fetch something and suddenly there was screaming, we even heard it on the field. He saw someone hanging from the beam where the punch bag is. It was Robertse in Form 5. He was hanging by the neck. Old McLeod and the other masters went in but we were kept away. But we saw them bring out something carried in a blanket. There was an ambulance and the police. But we were told we must stay in our cubicles or the common room.
The second page of the letter is lost, although she must have kept the letter as something whose validity was meant to outlast schooldays, boyhood. It was among documentation of the protection parents provide for a child, the commitments they assume, for him. Boosters for polio inoculation, record of orthodontic treatment, anti-tetanus and hepatitis inoculations as precautions taken when he went on some school camping trip in Zimbabwe. This letter came back to her, now, she went to look for it among these other bits of paper which, perhaps, there was really no reason to keep.
When Claudia and Harald received that letter they had been strangely disturbed; she saw, now, that this was the forgotten other time, first time, they were invaded by a happening that had no place in their kind of life, the kind of life they believed they had ensured for their son. (A liberal education — whose liberalism did not extend to admitting blacks, like Motsamai, they realized now.) What could it be that led a schoolboy, a companion of their own son, protected in the same environment, the same carefully limited experience, the same selective civilized mores — they would not have confided Duncan to any school that practised corporal punishment — what could it be that brought a boy to put a rope round his neck? The contemplation was horror — once removed, that’s all. The unease they felt came from revealed knowledge that there are dangers, inherent, there in the young; dangers within existence itself. There is no segregation from them. And no-one can know, for another, even your own child, what these destructives, these primal despairs and drives are. Harald and Claudia — they could have been the boy’s parents, they were their clones, paying the same school fees, approving the enlightened educational philosophy of the worldly teaching staff, choosing a coeducational school so that a male child without sisters should mingle naturally with the other sex. What came to them was fear — fear that there could be threats to their son about which they could not know, could do nothing. They wrote to him — she wrote? — or they went to see him. She heard herself saying to Harald, I want you to tell Duncan, whatever happens to him, whatever he has done, no matter what, he can come to us. There’s nothing you cannot tell us. Nothing. We’re always there for you. Always. And so they could feel Duncan was safe. They had made him so.
D’you remember that time with the Robertse boy, what you told Duncan.
I remember you telling him, we got permission to take him out to lunch. We were in a garden restaurant somewhere — there was nowhere else to go. Didn’t seem the right place. Anyway.
No, no, we’d gone over the whole thing, decided we must say something to him he wouldn’t forget, and you were the one.
Why should it have been me? It came from his mother, that would be the obvious way.
Because you’re the man and he was the boy. Perhaps the idea that you would have — I don’t know — some kind of shared male experience, something likely to happen, I wouldn’t have.
What did it matter who uttered the pledge to the boy; it was made by both. It was the document produced when he said in the prison visiting room, I would have understood if you two hadn’t come back again.