In a Strange Room Read Free Page A

he’d been. All the images and impressions and countries and continents he’d visited had been erased. What you don’t remember never happened. As far as he was concerned, he had never travelled anywhere beyond the edges of the lawn. Irascible and mean for much of his life, he was mostly docile now, but still capable of irrational rage. What are you talking about, he screamed at me once, I’ve never been to Peru, I don’t know anything about it, don’t talk rubbish to me about Peru.
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    He leaves Greece two weeks later. He moves around from place to place for a year and a half and then he goes back to South Africa. Nobody knows that he’s arrived. He rides in from the airport on the bus, carrying his bag on his knees, looking through the tinted windows at the city he’s come back to live in, and there is no way to say how he feels.
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    Everything has changed while he was away. The white government has capitulated, power has succumbed and altered shape. But at the level on which life is lived nothing looks very different. He gets out at the station and stands in the middle of the moving crowds and tries to think, I am home now, I have come home. But he feels that he is only passing through.
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    He catches a taxi to the house of a friend, who has got married in his absence. She is happy to see him, but even in her first embrace he senses how much of a stranger he’s become. To her, and to himself. He’s never been to this house before and he wanders through it, looking at furniture and ornaments and pictures that feel intolerably heavy to him. Then he goes out into the garden and stands in the sun.
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    His friend comes out to find him. There you are, she says, it’s such a coincidence you arrived today, this was in the post-box for you this morning. She gives him a letter which might have fallen from the sky. It comes from Reiner.

 
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    T hey start writing to each other. Every two or three weeks the letters go back and forth. The German is dry and factual, he talks about events in his life from the outside. He went back to Berlin. He didn’t get married. He started studying at university, but changed his mind and dropped out. Later he went to Canada, which is where his letters are coming from now, he is on some forestry project somewhere, planting trees.
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    He tries to imagine him, the dour figure in black with his long silky hair, putting saplings into the ground and tamping down the soil. He can’t remember him very well, not the way he looked, what he retains is the feeling that Reiner stirred in him, a sense of uneasiness and excitement. But he wouldn’t dare to express this, he senses a reluctance in the other man to talk openly about emotions, to do so is somehow a weakness. But however forthright Reiner seems to be about facts, there are still many details missing in his account of himself, with whom did he live in Berlin, who pays for him to go travelling everywhere, what brought him to Canada to plant trees. Somehow, even when these questions are put to him directly, Reiner manages not to answer.
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    For his part, he has never withheld emotions, if anything he vents them too freely, at least in letters. Because words are unattached to the world. So it is easy to write to Reiner about how hard he finds it to be back. He can’t seem to settle anywhere. He stays with his friend and her husband for a while, but he is an intrusion, an imposition, he knows he has to move on. He takes a room in a house with a student, but he is miserable there, the place is dirty and full of fleas, he doesn’t fit in, after a month or two he moves again. He looks after people’s houses while they are away, he beds down in spare rooms. Then he moves into a flat owned by an ex- landlady of his, who occupies the three rooms adjacent and below. But this is a mistake. The landlady comes into his flat at all hours, her yapping poodle follows at her heels,