Not long ago, we had a few friends over for a braai. Some I have known since we were boys growing up in Johannesburg. Others came into my life much later, although time has a way of making those distinctions feel less important. Eventually, friendships measured in decades and those measured in years begin to occupy the same space.
Their children disappeared into the garden almost as soon as they arrived. Every now and then, one of them would reappear to ask for a drink, report an injury or accuse another child of something that sounded serious but was almost certainly not. The adults gathered around the fire, as adults do at a braai, each man standing just close enough to suggest that he might be useful while leaving the actual work to someone else. I was hosting, so the useful person was me.
By the time the meat was ready, the conversation had already begun to move backwards. Someone mentioned a teacher whose name I had not heard in years, and suddenly we were remembering classrooms, sports fields, old shops and streets that seemed much larger when we were children. We spoke about Johannesburg as it had been, or at least as we believed it had been.
There was, predictably, some disagreement. One friend remembered a particular corner café near Rosebank. Another insisted it had been in Illovo. Someone else was certain it had never existed at all. We argued about which road we had cycled down, who had been responsible for a broken window and whether one of us had really been suspended from school or had merely been threatened with it. Every story produced another version of the same story.
What struck me was not that our memories differed, but the confidence with which each of us defended them. Memory may be unreliable, but it is rarely uncertain. It presents its evidence with the calm authority of a man who has misplaced the facts but remains committed to his conclusion.
Later, after everyone had gone and the house had become quiet again, I thought about the stories we had told. The empty glasses still stood on the table. A child’s plastic cup had been left beneath a chair. The fire had collapsed into ash, and the garden, which had seemed so full of noise only an hour earlier, looked as though nothing had happened there at all.
I suppose this is partly why we tell stories. Not because we remember perfectly, but because so much disappears. Houses are renovated. Shops close. Roads change names. People leave, return, grow older or become the person everyone remembers but no longer sees. Johannesburg has always been good at replacing itself. A building vanishes and, within months, it becomes difficult to recall exactly what stood there before. Give it twenty years and three old friends, however, and someone will swear there was a café on the corner.
The same is true of our lives. We carry fragments rather than complete records: the smell of rain on hot tar, the sound of a parent calling from another room, a school corridor, a song playing from someone’s car, a friend laughing before the joke has properly been told. These details remain while entire years collapse into a few sentences.
I used to think memory was supposed to preserve events as they happened. I am less convinced of that now. Perhaps what it preserves is what they meant. That would explain why an entirely ordinary Saturday afternoon from thirty years ago can remain perfectly clear while supposedly important occasions disappear almost completely. We forget what was said but remember that someone was kind to us. We forget where we went but remember who drove. We forget the argument but somehow retain the silence afterwards.
Stories begin somewhere in that distance between the event and what remains of it. By the time we tell them, they have already been altered by affection, disappointment, vanity and time. We add emphasis. We remove what no longer seems necessary. We improve our own behaviour and make other people slightly more unreasonable. This is not always dishonesty. Sometimes it is simply the work memory does to make a life small enough to carry.
What I keep returning to from that evening, though, are the children. While we stood around the fire reconstructing Johannesburgs that no longer quite exist, they were busy making one of their own. They knew nothing of the shops we missed or the teachers we imitated. They did not care which of us had broken the window or whether there had ever been a café in Rosebank. To them, Johannesburg was not somewhere to remember. It was happening.
One day, perhaps, one of those children will sit around another fire with people they have known for most of their lives. Someone will remember that evening at our house. Someone else will insist it happened in another year. The garden will have been much bigger, the night warmer, the adults older. They will disagree about who was there, what they were playing and which parent eventually shouted that it was time to leave.
They may remember us too, although probably not as we were. Children seldom do. We will become the adults standing around the braai, laughing too loudly at stories they did not understand, and somewhere in the telling that ordinary evening will become part of the story of their lives.
Maybe that is what we carry in the end. Not the past exactly, but what remains after time has had its say. A handful of places, a few voices, the people who were there and the people who are no longer there. Stories we inherited and stories we did not realise we were creating. The facts will shift, as they always do, but perhaps the fact that we were there together is the part worth remembering.
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