I did say those things, but in English. Would it have made a difference if I had said them in isiXhosa? Would they have fallen back in wonder and declined to rape this woman who spoke their language? I doubt it. But the helplessness of not knowing what was being said, of being unable to take part in the negotiation, has stayed with me. I dream of a babel of voices around me. The only way I can escape the thing they are planning to do to me is by understanding what they are saying.

So I start to speak in tongues like a worshipper in some charismatic church. Perhaps if I open my mouth and let loose a stream of Xhosa-sounding words, it will turn out that I can speak it after all. But the stream slows to a trickle, and the trickle dribbles to a halt. And the rape begins.

Rape is the gift that keeps on giving. I was raped many times that evening at the farmhouse. Too many times to count. You’d think that would be something you would never lose track of. But I did—and I have also lost count of how many times I have been raped in my dreams. I don’t always remember the dreams, but I wake up with tears on my cheeks and pain between my legs, and I know it has happened again.

It used to be every night. Now it’s not. Perhaps I am getting better.

* * *

Coetzee knew it was my father who interrupted the rape. It was widely reported in the media. A reporter for the campus newspaper, The Constantia Reporter, speculated about what it must have been like for a father to walk in on such a scene. She had a turn for the poetical. She was an English major with ambitions of joining John Coetzee’s creative writing programme.

Her flight of fancy, lyrical as it was, did her no good. Coetzee retired as soon as the ink on his book deal was dry. He never took on another creative writing student, and now he has disappeared.

What was it like for my father to find me in that position? The father in Coetzee’s book is a cold fish. He is undemonstrative and detached. His daughter discourages him from any of the mutual soul-searching he might want to undertake.

The moment my father’s eyes locked with mine over the heaving shoulder of my assailant, they filled with pity.

As a parent, it is widely understood, you would do anything to spare your child pain. You would transfer that pain onto yourself if you could. You feel homicidal rage towards anyone who hurts your child.