When old women sat on stoeps in faded house-dresses saying terrible things about their neighbours one day and weeping like hired Greek mourners at their funerals the next. It was where men never quite outgrew those first longings for German engineering, and that rite of passage, the purchase of a Mercedes Benz, new or used, could happen well into middle age.

twenty-one

“The truth is, being contained in the back seat of the car, pinned down by my children’s bodies, their hands searching under my clothes for skin to caress, was bliss. It was also true – I thought as the veld whizzed by and we kept a lookout for kudu and baboons – those two weeks with nobody to attend to, nobody to interrupt me, nobody asking for food or comfort, had been bliss too. Being away and being alone had restored my sense of self. I had been able to think and to write.

Her husband gives her a hug, he’s pretty sure that’s the required gesture at this point. Astrid looks pale and weak, so he decides that a cup of tea with sugar might be the correct next step, and shuffles off to the kitchen in his long johns to make it, failing to see that his wife finds herself in the middle of a storm.

Yes, at this moment, Astrid is being carried by a high, horrible wind, all force with no form, which has plucked her loose from solid objects. How she clutches and cries out as she flies! Till she finds herself blown against a door, at the end of a passage, and knocks on it as hard as she can, though she has no power.

She emerges from the confessional in a state of unease, far worse than when she went in. No penance to ease the burden! She knows she must end the affair but doesn’t think she can, a common human dilemma, not only related to romance. Shouldn’t have gone to the priest, not before she was ready. Who knows what she wanted when she went in there, but certainly not this outcome. Now she’s having a crisis.

Rachel’s boyfriend could not believe that he was enough for her, that she actually was satisfied by him and with him. He needed her reassurance and he needed her to faithfully pick up the phone when he called. In my formulation, he was endeavoring to stave off debilitating feelings of inferiority that surfaced immediately when she was unavailable, feeding the need to cling to her all the more tightly. Right away, as if regressed to a childhood place, he imagined her with another lover. Rachel’s spontaneous cry, “What are you, twelve years old?” was off, in my view, by six or seven years.