There is someone who might know where John Coetzee is. Dr. Essie September of the English Department at Constantia University. She is Prof. September now. When Coetzee left the department, they unfroze a chair that had been vacant for years and gave it to her. Essie September is now the Ruth First Professor of Women’s Studies in Literature.

She was a student of Coetzee’s thirty-five years ago when he joined the department as a junior lecturer. Apparently, she had a massive crush on him—adored every hair on his gingery head. She has never married, supposedly because of her unrequited passion for him.

He must have seemed impossibly grown up to her back when he was a twenty-five-year-old lecturer and she was a twenty-one-year-old third-year student. Now that gap has shrunk to insignificance. If he is sixty-two (and his Wikipedia page assures me he is), then she must be fifty-eight. From my late twenties vantage-point, they are the same age. I wonder if she still sees him as the wise mentor who remains as out-of-reach as a shooting star. She probably does. She probably feels this more than ever now that he has achieved international acclaim.

Coetzee used to give the impression of barely tolerating Essie September, but I suspect he liked having her around. She was the adoring acolyte, trotting at his heels, bringing him coffee, and talking up his unpublished manuscript to her students. If anyone knows where he is, it’s her. She used to house-sit for him when he went to frolic in the warm Indian Ocean in KwaZulu-Natal every December. You don’t leave someone alone with your secrets year after year unless you believe you can trust them.

So why do I think she will spill the beans to me?

Because I have something she wants.

Prof. September collects rape victims the way other people collect stamps. She runs something called the Survivor Project. It started out as a website—a kind of Tumblr for rape stories. Then she got funding from the government and published a couple of books based on the source material she had collected.

She has been after me for months to “tell my story.” It bothers her that Cape Town’s most famous rape victim doesn’t have an entry on her website. And my connection to her beloved John makes it even more galling. I am the rare butterfly she is determined to capture. The thing is, I’ve looked at her website and the other contributions are beautiful and moving and inspirational. My story isn’t beautiful. It is an infected boil I can’t lance because its roots are too deep.