Dead at Daybreak

∨ Dead at Daybreak ∧

60

Williem Nagel died in the hospital and I went back to my house in my bloody clothes.

She wasn’t there. I drove to his house and she opened the door and saw the blood and my face and knew. I put my hands out to her. She pushed me away. “No, Zet, no, Zet, no.” The same despair in her voice as I had in my soul. The same hysteria, the same torment.

She went into the house. She didn’t just cry; the sounds were far more heartrending than that. I followed her. She closed a door and locked it.

“Nonnie,” I said.

“No!”

I stood in front of that door. I don’t know for how long. The sounds eventually subsided, much later.

“Nonnie.”

“No!”

I turned and walked out.

I was never given the opportunity to confess.

I didn’t go to her that evening to take possession of her. I went to confess, to tell her that I had eventually been weighed as a man, as a human being, and found myself despicable. After so many years of hunting evil, I had discovered an infinity of evil in myself. And I deserved it because I had seen myself as above it all.

But I cannot deny that I yearned for her forgiveness. I didn’t go to her to tell her that I didn’t deserve her. I sank far lower than that. I went to seek absolution.

After that it was a combination of self-pity and the extrapolation of my personal discovery – that the rot is hidden in every one of us – that drove me.

Despite my mother’s best efforts. She came to the Cape, bought the smallholding at Morning Star, and remodeled and rebuilt, and I moved in there, something like a tenant farmer, while she tried to keep me from the abyss with love and sympathy and compassion.

This is who I am.