Every morning he recalled the occasion the previous year when he woke up in the middle of the night, in a cold sweat, and thought he was having a heart attack. The doctor who examined him said it was a warning. A warning that there was something completely wrong in his life. Now, a year later, he had to admit he had done nothing at all to change his life style. In addition, he had put on at least three kilos.
He drank coffee at the kitchen table. There was a thick fog over Ystad this morning. But soon spring would really have arrived, and he resolved to go and talk with Bjork this coming Monday about vacation plans.
He left the apartment at a quarter past seven, after scribbling down his direct number on a scrap of paper and leaving it on the kitchen table.
When he came out onto the street, he was enveloped by fog. It was so thick, he could hardly make out his car parked a short way from the apartment block. He thought maybe he should leave it where it was, and walk to the station.
Suddenly he had the feeling something had moved on the other side of the street. A lamppost seemed to sway slightly.
Then he saw there was a man standing there, enveloped by fog just like himself.
The next moment he recognized who it was. Goli had returned to Ystad.
Chapter Nineteen
Jan Kleyn had a weakness, a well-preserved secret. Her name was Miranda, and she was as black as a raven’s shadow.
She was his secret, the crucial counterpoint in his life. Everyone who knew Jan Kleyn would have considered her an impossibility. His colleagues in the intelligence service would have dismissed any rumor about her existence as preposterous fantasy. Jan Kleyn was one of those very rare suns that were considered free from spots.
But there was one, and her name was Miranda.
They were the same age, and had been aware of each other’s existence since they were kids. But they did not grow up together. They lived in two different worlds. Miranda’s mother, Matilda, worked as a servant for Jan Kleyn’s parents in their big, white house on a hill outside Bloemfontein. She lived a few kilometers away in one of a cluster of tin shacks where the Africans had their homes. Every morning, at the first light of dawn, she would make her way laboriously up the steep hill to the white house, where her first task of the day was to serve the family breakfast. That hill was a sort of penance she had to pay for the crime of being born black. Jan Kleyn, like his brothers and sisters, had special servants whose only assignment was to take care of the children. Even so, he used to turn to Matilda all the time. One day when he was eleven, he suddenly started to wonder where she came from every morning, and where she went back to when her day’s work was done. As part of a forbidden adventure-he was not allowed to leave the walled-in yard on his own-he followed her in secret. It was the first time he had seen at close range the clutter of tin shacks where African families lived. Of course, he had been aware that the blacks lived in quite different conditions from his own. He was always hearing from his parents how it was part of the natural order of things that whites and blacks lived differently. Whites, like Jan Kleyn, were human beings. The blacks hadn’t yet got that far. Some time in the distant future they might possibly be able to reach the same level as the whites. The color of their skins would grow lighter, their powers of understanding would grow greater, and it would all be as a result of the patient upbringing the whites gave them. Even so, he had never imagined their houses would be as awful as those he could see before him.
But there was also something else that attracted his attention. Matilda was met by a girl of his own age, lanky and slim. That must be Matilda’s daughter. It had never occurred to him that Matilda might have children of her own. Now he realized for the first time that Matilda had a family, a life apart from the work she did in his home. It was a discovery that affected him badly. He could feel himself getting angry. It was as if Matilda had deceived him. He always imagined she was there for him alone.
Two years later Matilda died. Miranda had never explained to him how it happened, just that something had eaten away her insides until all life left her. Matilda’s home and family had broken up. Miranda’s father took two sons and a daughter with him to where he came from, the barren countryside far away on the Lesotho border. The idea was that Miranda would grow up with one of Matilda’s sisters. But Jan Kleyn’s mother, in a fit of unexpected generosity, decided to take Miranda under her wing. She was to live with the master gardener, who had a little cottage in some remote corner of their large grounds. Miranda would be trained to take over her mother’s job. In that way, the spirit of Matilda would live on inside the white house. Jan Klein’s mother was not a Boer for nothing. As far as she was concerned, maintaining traditions was a guarantee for the continuation of the family and Afrikaner society. Keeping the same family of domestic servants, generation after generation, helped to provide a sense of permanence and stability.
Jan Kleyn and Miranda continued to grow up near each other. But the distance between them was unchanged. Even though he could see she was very beautiful, there was in fact no such thing as black beauty. It belonged to what he had been taught was a forbidden area. He heard young men his own age telling secret stories about white Afrikaners traveling to neighboring Mozambique on weekends, in order to bed black women. But that just seemed to confirm the truth he had learned never to question. And so he went on seeing Miranda without actually wanting to discover her, when she served his breakfast on the terrace. But she had started appearing in his dreams. The dreams were violent and sent his pulse racing when he recalled them the following day. Reality was transformed in his dreams. In them, not only did he recognize Miranda’s beauty, he accepted it. In his dreams he was allowed to love her, and the girls from Afrikaner families he associated with normally faded away in comparison with Matilda’s daughter.
Their first real meeting took place when they were both nineteen. It was a Sunday in January, when everyone but Jan Kleyn had gone to a family dinner in Kimberley. He was not able to join them because he was still feeling weak and depressed after a lengthy bout of malaria. He was sitting out on the terrace, Miranda was the only servant in the house, and suddenly he stood up and went to her in the kitchen. Long afterwards he would often think he had never really left her after that. He had stayed in the kitchen. From that moment on, she had him in her power. He would never be able to shake her off.
Two years later she got pregnant.
He was then studying at Rand University in Johannesburg. His love for Miranda was his passion and at the same time his horror. He realized he was betraying his people and their traditions. He often tried to break off contact with her, to force himself out of this forbidden relationship. But he could not. They would meet in secret, their moments together dominated by fear of being discovered. When she told him she was pregnant, he beat her. The next moment it dawned on him that he would never be able to live without her, even if he would never be able to live with her openly either. She gave up her position at the white house. He arranged a job for her in Johannesburg. With the help of some English friends at the university, who had a different attitude toward affairs with black women, Jan Kleyn bought a little house in Bezuidenhout Park in eastern Johannesburg. He arranged for her to live there under the pretense of being a servant for an Englishman who spent most of his time on his farm in Southern Rhodesia. They could meet there, and there, in Bezuidenhout Park, their daughter was born and, without any discussion being necessary, christened Matilda. They continued to see each other, had no more children, and Jan Kleyn never married a white woman, to the sorrow and sometimes even bitterness of his parents. A Boer who did not form a family and have lots of children was odd, a person who failed to live up to Afrikaner traditions. Jan Kleyn became more and more of a mystery to his parents, and it was clear to him he would never be able to explain that he loved their servant Matilda’s daughter, Miranda.