A Dry White Season (46 page)

At about eleven o’clock that night he was run over by a car. According to the newspaper report the accident occurred when he was on his way to post a letter. But how could the reporter have known it, unless Ben still had the letter with him when it happened? And if he had, then who posted it afterwards? And why?

Would that explain the week’s delay before it was delivered? Of course, it may quite simply be due to Johannesburg’s notorious postal services. On the other hand it is possible that having found it on his body and perused it they decided I should receive it. In which case they could have had only one motive: to keep me under surveillance; to follow the trail from here.

They cannot be so obtuse as not to realise I would be suspicious about the delayed delivery. If that is so, they deliberately intended it as a warning or a threat, by making sure that I would be conscious of being watched.

Then why did I go ahead by writing it all down here? Purely from sentimental loyalty to a friend I had neglected for years? Or to pay some form of conscience money to Susan? It is better not to pry too deeply into one’s own motives.

Is everything really beginning anew with me? And if so: how far to go? Will one ever succeed in breaking the vicious circle? Or isn’t that so important? Is it really just a matter of going on, purely and simply? Prodded, possibly, by some dull, guilty feeling of responsibility towards something Ben might have believed in: something man is capable of being but which he isn’t very often allowed to be?

I don’t know.

Perhaps all one can really hope for, all I am entitled to, is no more than this: to write it down. To report what I know. So that it will not be possible for any man ever to say again:
I knew nothing about it.

1976.1978–1979.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born to a South African Dutch family in 1935, André Brink was one of a group of South African writers who, in the 1960s, helped to break down national taboos on the treatment of sex and religion in fiction. In a highly charged atmosphere he insisted on the need for confronting the social and political realities of his country. In 1967 he moved to Europe but later returned to South Africa to, in his words, “accept full responsibility for everything I write—not as a member of a small white enclave, but as a writer belonging more to Africa than to Europe.” Although he has received the CNA Award, South Africa’s most prestigious literary prize, three times, two of his novels,
Looking on Darkness
and
A Dry White Season,
were banned in South Africa. André Brink is currently a Professor of English at the University of Cape Town. In addition to his many other honors, he has received Great Britain’s Martin Luther King Memorial Prize for the literary work best reflecting the ideas to which Dr. King dedicated his life, and in 1980 Mr. Brink was awarded France’s Prix Médicis Etranger. In early 1983 the French Government made him a Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur. His work has been published in twenty countries. His novels include
A Chain of Voices
and
Imaginings of Sand.

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Copyright

Nothing in this novel has been invented, and the climate, history, and circumstances from which it arises are those of South Africa today. But separate events and people have been recast in the context of a novel, in which they exist as fiction only. It is not the surface reality that is important but the patterns and relationships underneath that surface. Therefore, all resemblance between the characters and incidents in this book and people and situations outside is strictly coincidental.

First published in Great Britain in 1979 by W. H. Allen & Co. Ltd.

First U.S. edition published in 1980 by William Morrow and Company, Inc.

A DRY WHITE SEASON
. Copyright © 1979 by André Brink.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition © APRIL 2013 ISBN: 9780062031433

First Harper Perennial edition published 2006.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN-10:0-06-113863-0 (pbk.)

ISBN-13: 978-0-06-113863-8 (pbk.)

09 10 11
RRD
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

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