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into a frenzy, both came, although not at the same time, exchanged a few exhausted caresses, and finished it all off with a kiss.
    A few moments later he disappeared into the bathroom and took a shower, wondering what he could say to sweet-talk Tracy, then looked at his image in the mirror and decided not to bother.
    Brian Epkeen had been handsome, but that was in the past. There had been too many fuck-ups, too many missed opportunities. Sometimes he hadn’t given enough love, sometimes he’d loved too much, or else gotten it all wrong. For forty-three years he’d been scuttling about like a crab, sometimes wandering far off course, sometimes making sudden sideward leaps.
    He grabbed an unironed shirt, which, in the mirror, vaguely reminded him of himself, put on a pair of black pants, and strolled across the bedroom. Tracy, still lying on the bed, was asking him to tell her more about their Sunday by the sea when Brian switched on his cell phone.
    He had twelve messages.
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    Cape Town lay at the foot of Table Mountain, the magnificent massif that towered three thousand five hundred feet above the South Atlantic. The Mother City, it was called. Brian Epkeen lived in Somerset, a gay area full of trendy bars and clubs, some open to everyone, without restrictions. European colonists, Xhosa tribesmen, Indian and Malayan coolies—Cape Town had had a mixed population for centuries. It was the country’s flagship city, a little New York by the sea, but also the place where Parliament was located, which meant that it was here that the apartheid policy was first applied. Brian knew the city by heart. It had both inspired strong emotions in him and just as often made him nauseous.
    His great-great-grandfather had come here as a ragged, illiterate farmer who spoke the kind of degenerate Dutch that would become Afrikaans, believed in an eye for an eye, and wielded the Old Testament in one hand and a rifle in the other. He and the Boer pioneers with him had found a barren land peopled by Bushmen with prehistoric customs, nomads who couldn’t tell the difference between a game animal and a domestic one, who pulled the legs off cows and ate them raw while they mooed to death, Bushmen they had driven out like wolves. The old man didn’t spare anyone—if he had, there was a good chance his family would have been slaughtered. He refused to pay taxes to the English colonial governor who left them alone to face the hostile natives, clear the land and survive as best they could. The Afrikaners had never depended on anyone or anything. That was the blood that Brian had in his veins, the blood of dust and death—the blood of the bush.
    Whether out of some ancestral memory, or some sense of being a dying race, the Boers were the eternal losers of history—following the war that took their name when British conquerors burned their houses and their land, twenty thousand of them, including women and children, had died of hunger and disease in the English concentration camps into which they had been herded—and the establishment of apartheid had been their greatest defeat 11 .
    In Brian’s opinion, the reason his ancestors had established apartheid was because they were shit scared. Fear of the black man had taken over their bodies and minds with an animal force that recalled the old reptilian fears—fear of the wolf, the lion, the eaters of white men. That wasn’t the basis on which to build anything. Phobia of the other had destroyed their powers of reason, and although the end of the despised regime may have restored some dignity to the Afrikaners, fifteen years weren’t enough to wipe out their contribution to history.
    Brian drove past the quaint old buildings in the city center, then the colorful facades of the colonnaded houses on Long Street. The avenues were largely free of traffic, most people had gone to the beach. He climbed toward Lions Head, managing to get a little