Truth, Accountability, and Memory Theme Analysis

She doesn’t know what possessed them to plant those trees. To protect them from the wind, the sun, the view? It hardly matters now. Soon the trees will be cut down and cleared away, along with everything else. The people who come to live here afterwards will know nothing about any of them, and maybe it will be better that way.

“Are we dead yet?”

“No.”

“You will tell me when we’re dead?”

“If I can, Roo, I will.”

“So you’re off tomorrow,” he says, already knowing the answer.

“Straight after breakfast.”

“Without a backward glance, I hope.”

“In my experience, backward glances only crick the neck.”

As she speaks, she recalls the times he used to tease her, when teasing—no doubt learned in part from her—was the mode between them. At the time, their world seemed to permit little else: it didn’t even allow them to touch. But now there is no affection in this echo of their old style. Today everything between them seems to bristle with innuendo and hurt.

“If I remember myself correctly,” he says, “I would have wanted to eat that fish.”

“But you were a gentle child, always wanting to please.”

He lets out a sound like laughter and turns away.

“Don’t you mean always wanting to please you?”

She might be cleverer, but he knows he has a far better memory than she: for while she was in the clouds, he has been on the ground, living amongst the rest of humanity, knowing all along how her particular kind of cleverness diminished them.

So naturally he remembers that day they went to fish. It was a thing that was impossible to forget: him learning to cast on the front lawn, weaving the line back and forth through the air, back and forth, and her perched up there on her stoep, ordering him about and laughing at him like he was her toy, her toy monkey, with a battery up its arse.

“What exactly do you want me to be afraid about?”

“What you have always been afraid about: the truth.”

“The truth?”

She says this as though the truth is a concept only children believe in, like dragons and houses made out of bread and cake.

He’s never understood the workings of the house. The fact is it was never his house, but hers, handed down from her father. While he was there on good behaviour. Which is why he thinks he chose bad behaviour.

He was a fool for coming here. But what did he expect? A miraculous transformation? People like her are still sitting in their houses. People like him are still looking in.

“You know what I can’t forgive?”

“Sorry?”

“It is that you wanted to protect your seats.”

“My what?”

Each time, the house is less built. Is it that he is going further back in time? Is he going backwards the more he runs? If so then when will he stop? What is he aimed at? He stands on the large concrete slab in the middle of nowhere and ponders this, and eventually he sits.

It is not so much that he is dead. It is more that no one appears to have been born. They still have their whole lives ahead of them. Nothing that needs to be undone has yet been done.

“The first thing I saw on getting back from boarding school,” he says, “was a black puppy, playing in the garden, chewing a rubber ball to bits. The second was Grace, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. As our love grew, that dog in the garden was growing too. My love and your fear, they grew together. And now, I can no longer separate them. When I think of one, I see the other. I see that double thing, that creature—the beast. Circling the garden, dripping blood.”

“No one knows what I saw.”

Beauty seems to say this with the knowledge that this statement, for the first time, is no longer true: two others now know what she saw. What she saw no longer belongs to her: it will become a part of the general story that is used to define her sister.

She had come to think of Beauty as her friend and she thought she knew everything there was to know about her—but, of course, that was only vanity, or laziness, or wishful thinking.

It may be his dream house—this house transformed almost beyond recognition—but it still comes from her. Perhaps too much from her. Perhaps even today he’s too attached to his pain—and all he’s managing to do is reproduce it, with slight variations, all across the valley.

As they labour along the road, the image of the black puppy keeps finding its way back into her head: the way it would run along the fence of the dog-run after the girls going toward the dairy, stumbling over its paws, while she sat back and laughed at it.

“Beauty – please. You have to tell me the truth.”

“But he said they loved each other desperately,” she says. “He said she was good.”

“Good?”

The world hangs in the air like the word ‘truth’: simply as another way of presenting oneself to the world.

“She had nothing,” Beauty continues, “and uBass—he paid her. Sis’ Grace did not think about good or not good. Ubezama ukuphila.”

“She was trying to survive?”

Patricia has to repeat the phrase in English in order to accept it fully.

“Mesis,” she says, “you must find the truth for yourself.”