Saskia counted herself lucky for not seeking or wanting Emil Coetzee’s love. She had no intention of becoming like the countless others. After the way he had looked at her, she was determined to do much more than simply matter in his life the way Marion Hartley and Kuki Coetzee did. She was determined to supersede them both in the space they took up in his life. Once she had done so, she would tear to shreds the love he felt for Zora Neale Hurston until she, Saskia Hargrave, was the only one left standing. Yes, when she was through with Emil Coetzee, there would be nothing left for anybody else: of this she was sure.

THE BEIGE BAKKIE

Yesterday, when Vida de Villiers had been demobilised, he had found waiting for him at the Llewellin Barracks a letter written in Gemma Coetzee’s once beautiful but now spidery with age handwriting that had informed him on pink paper with roses at the margins that it was sorry that his parents had died, and that he would be most welcome to stay at Flat 2A and call it home until such time as he felt ready to move on.

Now Vida, still in his military fatigues, stood at the corner of Selborne Avenue and Borrow Street and looked at the Prince’s Mansions and at the street-facing windows of Flat 2A. As he did, he remembered the too brief but happy time that he had spent there with an old couple who had loved each other so much that they had invented their own sign language in order to make the world contain their particular kind of silence.

He knew that even now, after the war, Johan and Gemma Coetzee were in Flat 2A, living a very quiet existence, absolutely enjoying the peace all around them. He wished he too could have such a particular kind of love, one that would continue even after the bombs had fallen from the sky, the sound of gunfire had travelled through the air and hidden landmines had ripped the earth apart with loud blasts, but his love had not been so fated. The boy, Everleigh Coetzee, whom he had been allowed to love in Flat 2A, had decided to step on a landmine instead of coming back to him unscathed by the war.

The letter had been a very generous and attractive offer, and Vida knew that if he knocked on the door of the flat, the quiet would welcome him like a long-lost friend. Unfortunately, Vida could not help but feel that he would contaminate the silence somehow because within him there was a roaring and roaming rage.

He had taken his rage with him to war, hoping that it would make him reckless enough to die fighting. His rage had done no such thing; instead, it had put him in the path of Golide Gumede, who could have killed him, but had chosen not to. ‘You will remember me,’ Golide Gumede had said, and Vida had held on to those words as though they were a promise. A promise of what? He was not altogether sure. All he knew was that those words had made him see the war through to its end. He supposed they had given him purpose, something to live for. Memory needs survival to exist and, therefore, Vida had had not only to survive the war; he had to keep on surviving after the war had ended, so as to keep on remembering a man who wanted to be remembered.