Tales of the Metric System. Imraan Coovadia
too late, that the call was likely to be recorded. It was an impossible situation. She couldn’t live her entire life in code. They didn’t care about the books.
—You know everything I know.
—Then why do I hear it from Nadia?
—Ann, how could I predict any of this?
—You couldn’t.
Nothing could be foreseen. Unpredictability was a force to be reckoned with. It was no less relentless than the Special Branch. There was no place in Durban for extravagant jewellery or listening to music. Ann felt that the veneer furniture they bought at Joshua Doore, on a hire-purchase plan, and the lines of brown-brick warehouses along Umbilo Road proved something dismal about their own state. It would be an offence to try to live better. What had been attractive in Paris was twice as expensive here, not at all beautiful, in this context, but repulsive. A gullwing Mercedes was ravishing on a street in Rome but abhorrent over here.
On occasion Ann thought that she would die at the hands of her thousand worries. There was hardly the space to be taken up with one when another was knocking and then another and another. They were soon hammering out any other idea that might have been in her head. Neil was more efficient. He put out of his mind anything that could not be mitigated.
—You’re making a fuss out of nothing, Ann. I sent Nadia to the house to complete some work. If you want, I will ask her to return the key tomorrow. Does that suit you?
—And come home now, please.
—I want to hear about Edward Lavigne.
—When you get here.
Despite the suspicion that it was a false alarm Ann took the box of books out of the house. In a section of the outside wall, adjoining the Mackenzie place, was a garden cupboard. She opened it to reveal the neat heaps of tools, stiffening green coils of the hose, a jam jar filled with a gravy of snail poison, and a shovel.
She put the box under the hosepipe, which was heavy to lift. It would do nothing to keep the books away from the Special Branch. If they wanted to confiscate Neil’s contraband they would be sure to look outside and in the trunk of the car and at the bottom of their suitcases. And where would they put everything they had confiscated? One day, under the new government, which was coming as surely as the day, people would use this library of everything that had once been forbidden.
The house was old by Durban standards. Over time it had developed a sound and structure of its own. It had a good position at the top of the Berea. It had been put up by a sugar baron for the use of his manager, a man who promptly contracted yellow fever on the ship from Lourenço Marques. The place closest to it, in Ann’s opinion, was the house in Amiens, in the French countryside, to which they had been invited by Neil’s cousin, a baronet expatriated from the United Kingdom.
The baronet drove at reckless speed along the flower-lined roads, kept the two of them in residence for a fortnight when Neil wanted to return to his dissertation in Paris, and subsisted on pigs’ knuckles and luckless rabbits which tasted of gunpowder, litres of red wine, and, most memorably, the Atlantic lobsters, whose speckled green brains he grimly but proudly beat into a sauce. The Amiens house had been calm, undecorated, and filled with lengths of sunshine.
Ann wanted to hear Paul’s voice. However, they wouldn’t connect her to Newnham House if she called at this hour. You could telephone your son at school between eight and nine in the evening on a week night, or between three and six on a Saturday afternoon when the sports teams had finished their matches.
Ann didn’t know which person she would have to battle next. She went on with dinner. The leg of lamb came out of the refrigerator. It was hardly colder than when she bought it yesterday, and still so perfectly pink that she believed the butcher’s boast that the animal had been playing in the Midlands on Sunday. The meat reminded her of a polony. In Paris their butcher and his apprentice had been professionals, as impeccable in their aprons and unswerving in their opinions as doctors and lawyers. They didn’t say too much. Whereas you could rely on a Durban butcher, with his smudged red hands, to patter on, never noticing that the customer across the plywood counter wasn’t smiling.
Ann put on the oven to heat. She washed the lamb under the tap, turning it around to clean the entire leg. Then it was dried with a paper towel, stretched out on the cutting board to be hammered flat, and rubbed with salt and rosemary she took from the kitchen window. She waited for the oven to reach two hundred. The cleaned scent of the meat and the clatter of the water in the sink, the branches of rosemary, the dogs finding each other’s ears in the evening, the children being called indoors, servants standing on the road for the Indian bus, and the rising heat of the oven against the remaining heat of the day made her aware of her own happiness. This happiness was like the sea wind when the temperature of the water and land reversed and everything was free in new darkness.
She put the radio on. It was Radio Port Natal, playing translated copies of American pop music, a programme that commenced when the English service ended for the day. The voice of the announcer was as thick as gravel. It was odd that she could be happy when she had been married twice to two such different men, odder still that she had cried to leave Gert although she had made the decision to get a divorce. Ann saw that she wouldn’t cry for a minute if she and Neil should separate, and yet she was closer to him than she had been to Gert by a factor of a thousand. That was her contradiction.
The contradiction was Neil’s all-purpose explanation. This country was in a state of contradiction, starting with an economy which made many rich and far too many poor. The individual was also in contradiction between his heart and his mind, his angel and his demon. Anywhere there was life, there was contradiction.
It was a contradiction in which Ann found herself, settling the lamb into the roasting pan, trying not to burn her hands, while wishing for the end of her marriage. She would rather see her second divorce decree on the luxury paper the solicitors employed than find Nadia in the house again. She would give her husband to Nadia in gift-wrap to keep from having to look into her long mouth for one minute longer.
Did she have anything to worry about? The students at Howard College, along with the members of the Free University, idealised her husband. In his thirties, he was the local equivalent of a Sartre, a king of the revolution. There were no queens. While there were women overseas who smoked in mini-skirts, spoke openly about abortions, bombed aeroplanes, it was also true that heroic men like Sartre and Che Guevara assumed the same rights over women as kings and millionaires.
One afternoon in Paris, for example, Jean-Paul Sartre had made a pass at her while she was slicing a ham on the dining table, using the other hand to keep it in place. Neil had just run down the stairs to find a tin of mustard. Sartre had been examining Neil’s poor student library, holding the volumes of Kojève and Heidegger in his hands and making comments about individual passages which he read out to her in excited French. He found his way closer to the table, set the books on the edge, advised her on the best cutting procedure, and, without moving his wall eye from the direction of the ham, established his astonishingly strong, bony, and discoloured hand on Ann’s thigh. Yet it seemed to interest him less than the texture and fineness of each slice she carved. Ann removed the philosopher’s hand, once she understood what was happening, set his plate on the opposite side of the table, and allowed him to continue examining the bookshelves, where, after a minute of displeasure with her, he was pleased to find several editions of his own books.
Ann kept her distance from Neil’s supervisor for the remainder of their time in France. He treated her as if she had let him down. He looked disappointedly in her direction at gatherings, although his mistress and his wife were present as well, and then, as if to punish her, monopolised her husband’s attention. She could still summon the memory of Sartre’s touch, too hot and yet too cold at the same time.
It had taken Ann a fortnight to tell Neil. He hadn’t been nearly as exercised by her story as she expected. She didn’t want him to fight with Sartre and lose the work he had done on his dissertation. He never took up the matter with his professor. It wasn’t something that mattered to him. Neil had the strength of his convictions. It made him inhuman in certain respects. Gert would have hit