“I don’t think he did particularly, but he got tired of looking over his shoulder all the time.”

I’m not sure whether to feel disappointed or vindicated to hear that John Coetzee is as much a victim of white middle-class paranoia as anyone else.

“He does realise that crime in South Africa affects black people to a much greater extent than it does whites, right? White people tend to be disproportionately insulated from the effects of crime.”

“It’s not a question of objective fact. What matters is that he felt this way, and it took a psychological toll on him. I think it was courageous to up sticks like that and move across the world all on his own.”

“Adelaide,” I say. “I would never have guessed . . .”

CHAPTER 8

Ah, Adelaide. Beautiful Adelaide.
It takes forty-eight hours of travel, but I get there at last. The cheapest flight went via Dubai and Singapore, with six-hour layovers in each airport. Then I had to catch a flight from Sydney to Adelaide, but the next one left only in the morning. So it is fully three days since I stood in Prof. September’s office, but already Adelaide is no longer just a concept to me.

It’s real and I’m here.

It is charming—every bit as beautiful as Cape Town, but without the shacks and litter. It is also on the sea, with a river bisecting the city like a mighty penis. Built on a grid, it shows all the fruits of careful urban planning that Cape Town lacks. There are parks and squares and boulevards, with ample parkland on all sides. Everything that makes a city comfortable to live in is right here.

And what a centre of culture it is, with arts festivals running for most of the year, and a foodie Mecca stretching all the way from the Riverbank Footbridge to North Terrace, taking in Currie and Hindley streets.

How beguiling. How white.

If indigenous Australians ever lived here, there are precious few of them left—just a few restaurant owners boasting a traditional Kaurna menu.

Is this why John Coetzee likes it so much? The well-planned order of it all? The taming of the Australian bush into parks and plazas? The corralling of the few remaining Kaurna people into a restaurant district? The mild whiteness of the faces on the streets?

He is on record as saying that there is no room for whites in Africa. Has he found room for himself here, in this place where the violent dispossession of the native population does not throb like a wound in his face every day? Has he found his lebensraum?