A Trojan Affair

by Michael Smorenburg

  “We’ll see,” Andre scoffed.

  “Pa, please… I’m trying to make you understand that this is bigger than Carnarvon. It’s bigger than the church. It’s bigger than government.”

  “Ja… the government, now that’s another story. They lied to attract this thing here.”

  “I know how you feel about them, but this development is beyond even them. What do you think you’re going to do? Bomb the telescope dishes?”

  “We’re not that crude,” Andre assured him.

  “I just don’t understand what is going on in everyone’s heads around here. Why are you so heated about a bloody telescope? It’s built on the bones of the existing Kat-7 and Meerkat infrastructure. Nobody had a problem with those, but now there’s suddenly a groot geraas, all of you howling about the SKA. It doesn’t make any sense, Pa.”

  “Because you’re no longer here and haven’t a clue what we’re suffering. Before it was isolated to a small area, but this… this thing… it’s taking over, and it brings outsiders,” was all he’d venture.

  “Why didn’t you complain before? Is it really just the outsiders that drive the Dominee to all this madness?”

  “Now you stop with your insolence,” Andre warned. “I don’t question the Dominee when it is a matter of faith. He is a qualified theologian and if he feels that this matter is important, I support him.”

  “Well, I’d like to know from the Dominee then, because this is absurd,” and then it struck JJ. “Is the church behind the Dominee on this? I see nothing about it outside of this little town.”

  The question posed in that way triggered a question in Andre’s mind too, but he was in no mood to admit it to his son, and he could hardly come straight out and ask the Dominee in so many words.

  Andre simply jutted his jaw and stared unblinkingly at his son.

  “And what is it you think you’re going to do? I have a very good idea of what it might be.” It was an outright poker bluff from JJ, fishing to see if his father would reveal more than he was saying.

  “Is your sister carrying stories to you again?” Andre didn’t bite. He’d remembered at that moment how Sonja had listened in from the scullery at the previous meeting in the kitchen. At the time, he’d thought there’d be no harm to her hearing how men can get things done.

  “Please leave Sonja out of this. She’s got no part in anything.”

  “You’d be surprised!” Andre disagreed. “She’s very influenced by the nonsense these people spread. And now you take her to the hospital. I don’t want her to have anything to do with that boy from the accident.”

  “The accident,” JJ repeated. “What an interesting accident he had.” He watched his father intently, and Andre looked down at the tablecloth.

  “Ja… riding without a license.”

  “Perhaps. But it is strange that he was on that dirt road when he lives nowhere near there.”

  “That’s none of my business,” Andre asserted.

  “And I heard that there was an accident on the main road into town that day… the dirt road somebody diverted him onto that runs past Neels Vermaak’s farm.”

  “What are you saying?” Andre looked up with fire and ice glinting in the blue of his eyes.

  “I’m asking you if you know of an accident on the main road into town. Nobody seems to have heard of such a thing.”

  “An accident—is that what that little black bastard told you?”

  “You and I, we passed one another on the road, Pa, when I was coming into town. We drove right past one another, you in a big hurry.”

  “I... WAS… ATTENDING TO POLICE BUSINESS,” his father spat out with staccato menace. “Is this now a court of law? Do you accuse me?”

  “Accuse you of what?”

  “I want to know whose side you sit on,” Andre changed tack.

  “You are my father, but there are facts and truths.”

  “And what does that mean? Where do you sit when our whole community and our way of life is threatened? Where do you sit?”

  “Our community is threatened? Really? You’re just afraid of a culture clash that you’ll lose. In your mind, your old ways are threatened and you’re taking it out on people who have nothing to do with it.”

  “Nothing to do with it?” Andre scoffed. “They are here and don’t belong here, and they want to change everything. Don’t dare tell me they have nothing to do with it.”

  “If you speak to the coloureds or blacks, they’ll tell you that we don’t belong here.”

  “Kafferboetie talk. That’s the shit you learn in the city! I don’t think your sister should go to that communist university.”

  “Pa, stop. Cultures mix, populations move… that’s reality. You can’t avoid it by pretending it away. The fall and failing of our people has always been our clinging to fantasies, to the way we want things to be instead of the way they are. We’re the champions of not facing facts.”

  There was a long silence before JJ continued.

  “That young boy over at the hospital. His mother is here to do a job in Carnarvon, and he has a right to come with her. As I understand it, he isn’t even going to live up here—he’s going to Cape Town—and he has only tried to come into the community and fit in. And then we have clowns like that Neels who attack him in the school corridors and probably had something to do with what landed him in the hospital now.”

  “And that’s what you think, my son?”

  It was getting close to the time that the Dominee would arrive and Andre wanted JJ out of the house. Dominee Gert let his displeasure in the boy’s fall from his grace be unambiguously communicated.

  “And if you want to talk to me, don’t keep fiddling with that machine of yours. Rather, go work with it somewhere else.” Andre waved his hand at the computer.

  “That is what I think, yes. Don’t worry, I’m on my way out, Pa; my feelings about the Dominee are mutual. I’m just sending something off and I’m on my way.”

  As he said it, JJ clicked the record button on the computer’s built-in video recording feature, then stowed the recording window out of sight to the taskbar and reduced the backlit screen illumination to blackness.

  “And I think it’s not going to end here. I think his mother is not going to let this thing with Neels blow over.”

  “What does she say?” There was a shimmer of concern in Andre.

  “She’s said nothing to me, but she isn’t stupid. The facts as I understand them don’t match the stories I’ve heard. I’m not against you Pa, but I can’t be against justice and facts either. I don’t want to be forced to choose. I just think everyone around here better start thinking things through before they run into walls they didn’t even know are there.”

  Andre remained silent.

  “And I also think that you should all re-think whatever it is you’re planning to talk about tonight.”

  Chapter 18

  “Pa gets so upset when you come visit. It’s always the same, he’s always angry… angry that Morgan took away your faith, angry that you don’t believe anymore,” Sonja said emphatically.

  JJ sighed and shook his head. “Sorry for the tensions,” he responded. He felt no urge to defend against the accusation. Sonja understood that the claim that his wife had taken his faith was nonsense. “I always remind myself to ignore him and pretend… but I can’t. I get frustrated with the same story. It’s not even a conversation I want to have, but when he starts, I can’t seem to stop.”

  “You drive him nuts when you ask why believing something without evidence is a good thing.”

  “I think it’s a fair question; believing can’t be worth more than learning or knowing.”

  Sonja nodded. She’d come to the same conclusion but only talked to JJ about it. “He says you must just have faith in order to know that answer,” she ventured.

  “Faith!” JJ looked out of the window into the far distance. “Faith is pretending to know something you can’t know.”

  “He says he can
feel it in him.”

  “I don’t doubt that. Faith is an emotion and of course, he can feel the emotion. Faith is nothing if it isn’t a feeling… like love and fear are both emotions. But to gamble your life on emotions is dangerous, Sonja. It’s fine to live out your emotions, but you don’t navigate by them.”

  They were almost at the clinic now.

  “I’m looking forward to Cape Town,” she said.

  “Your heart still set on Stellenbosch?”

  Stellenbosch was a university town on the outskirts of Cape Town. It taught mainly in Afrikaans—making study the easier option in Sonja’s first language—but it had a reputation for being relatively conservative compared with its rival university, UCT, University of Cape Town.

  “I’m on the fence. Stellies would be easier, but I’m increasingly leaning toward UCT. Dad said I’m on my own if I follow in your footsteps to UCT; he says it ruined you. I think I only wanted Stellies to please him.”

  “Don’t let him bully you, Sonja. If UCT’s your choice, I’ll back you. You follow your dreams, you have too much talent and smarts to do any less.”

  She leant over and kissed his cheek and he hugged her head to his, temple-to-temple. Her big brother, the “oops… and then get married too young” she’d heard her father call him when the brandy had loosened his tongue. JJ always made her feel safe. She was just the “oops… I didn’t think it was still possible” from the twilight years of her parents’ passions.

  JJ had parked on the opposite side of the road from the clinic and cut the engine. He put his hand on her knee and looked her in the eye.

  “I love this small town. I love our family and my people. I love community here. I love the peace, the tranquillity, being in the embrace of it all. Everyone’s known me since I was a child; all like family. But going away changes one.”

  She was such a beautiful girl, JJ thought. He saw her future mapped in her eyes, intelligent and kind as they were. She desperately needed to spread her wings on a bigger stage than Carnarvon.

  “Whenever I come back I see the small-mindedness, the bigotry, the pettiness. When you’re done studying, go travel and don’t worry about a thing; I’ll take care of it.”

  “And Ma? Pa?”

  “You can’t worry about them, you need to live your life. You can’t live it for them.”

  “Ma… she’s not happy, with…” she left it unsaid.

  “I can see that. Do they argue?”

  “No, it’s worse than that. It’s silent—Pa rants and Ma changes the subject. I’ve given up arguing with him too.”

  “No point in arguing with him, not while you’re under his roof. Don’t go down the path I’ve gone down, bashing heads with Pa. He’s going to need us as he ages, as the world around him changes so much that he becomes lonely and depressed.”

  “I think he is depressed. He blows up over nothing. Ma can’t take it much more,” she predicted.

  “I understand.” JJ was speaking tenderly, pools of emotion showing in his eyes. “When Pa was a boy, everything he knew was under the thumb of his church and he committed himself to that calling. Everything’s changed… his world went upside down. His career hit the wall of affirmative action. The blacks he’d been taught are children that God put him in charge of, are suddenly now his boss. No wonder he’s confused and angry.”

  “I know,” Sonja agreed.

  “I want you to be smarter and kinder than I’ve been. If you have a choice to be right or be kind, be kind to him. I’ll take the bullets of being right. If you disagree with him, don’t lock horns; you’re too much of a lady for that. And I mean that, you’re no longer a girl, you’re a lady now.”

  She blushed and mewed a small and bashful “Thanks” for the compliment.

  “When you want to make a point, don’t assert a statement; rather ask him questions. Pretend there’s an issue you’re battling with and make a question out of it that forces him to think.”

  “That’s clever,” she agreed.

  “Questions can smuggle conclusions into minds far more efficiently than beating them in can.”

  “I don’t think he’ll change; he’s getting worse, not better.” Her hands in her lap fidgeted with the stress of thinking about it. It was much worse at home than she’d trouble her brother with; her father’s mind more deranged and volatile.

  “He’s got too much invested in his beliefs to ever change. In some ways, he represents our old culture and we represent the new.”

  The truth of JJ’s words resonated within her and she couldn’t hold his eyes for fear that her tears would fall; tears of tragedy and loss for a glorified cultural past she’d been pickled in but never actually known outside of the reminiscence and legends that still burned in proud hearts.

  She’d witnessed her father’s sharp decline first-hand—his rising bitterness, his shortening temper—and it terrified her.

  She dipped her face, her vision beginning to mist, but JJ raised her chin with his index finger just as a tear broke over the lid.

  “Don’t be shy of your emotions—let them go. If we’re gentle and smart, we can bring our family back together, better and stronger.”

  She knew it wasn’t true.

  “Our generation grew into these changes,” he was saying. “Our challenge is to help our parents cope with a very different world to the one they were taught to expect.”

  JJ felt spent. He’d long wanted to say these things to his sister and somehow this moment had scripted itself.

  He hugged her in the awkwardness of the car’s cramped cockpit.

  “C’mon,” he said cheerily. “We’re too serious. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

  They got out and crossed the street, approaching the clinic.

  Through the double glass doors in the lobby, was a stylishly dressed man with dark complexion talking on a mobile phone. He’d been watching their car since it had pulled up.

  Seeing their approach, he ended his conversation and dropped the mobile into his pocket. With a beaming smile and two gracefully fluid steps, he snatched the door open for them.

  “Good evening sir,” the man said in a shockingly cultured British accent. “You can only be JJ? I’m Alok, Dara’s dad. Easy to remember… like the song. You can call me Al.”

  Al was slight of build with very white teeth and a finely chiselled nose. He had an engaging, almost pretty face; the likeness to Dara was unmistakable.

  “I’m so famous that you know me?” JJ’s hand swallowed Al’s. “This is my sister, Sonja.”

  “You’re hard to mistake… and the car.”

  “She’s a beauty,” JJ agreed.

  Al could feel the power in the man’s hands, but also the gentleness.

  “Indeed! I’m rightly jealous.”

  Sonja greeted Al, liking him instantly.

  “Well, Marsha’s running late. That was her on the phone, she’ll be here in ten. Dara’s resting. We can sit in here.”

  Al led them into a small lounge with low couches, low lighting and low tables.

  “They put coffee and tea out for us to help ourselves.”

  They helped themselves to beverages and quickly covered the pleasantries of strangers who’d heard about one another, meeting for the first time, then settled into conversation.

  “I’m really sorry about your boy,” JJ offered earnestly, looking at Al.

  “Well, bad things sometimes happen.” Al shrugged in the manner of British understatement. “Marsha’s still rather upset, but Dara’s being quite remarkable. Still in plenty of pain but he’s darned tough. I’m quite impressed really.”

  “Sounds like it could have been a lot worse.”

  “Quite. No offense please, but this whole palaver is, well, a bit strange, uncomfortable, you know; a bit odd to talk about it with you.” Al covered his lips in contemplation. “I know your roots here, and your father…”

  He let the sentence hang, not indicating if it was a statement or a question.

  There w
as a pause and the men studied one another. Sonja looked on, and JJ kept silent, allowing Al to make up his mind without interference.

  “You’re just like Marsha said. I feel strangely comfortable with you,” he sighed, judging that he could talk freely. “To be blunt—it seems your father had a hand in some events.”

  Al went on to briefly recap and outline the situation as they saw it, including the attack at the school, Dara’s suspicions he’d been stalked, the rumours there had been a contract of sorts on him, and Andre’s part in sending him into an ambush.

  “You must do what you must do; the law must take its course,” JJ concluded, summarizing his own position on the matter just as Marsha came into the lobby.

  Al called to her, “We’re here...”

  Since JJ had last seen her, Marsha had caught up on sleep and looked once more radiant.

  Greetings and more pleasantries were exchanged all around and Marsha went to see how Dara was doing, then quickly returned. “He’s fast asleep.”

  “How’re you holding up?” JJ asked with a warmth she appreciated.

  “Better as Dara improves,” she said. “Thanks for stopping by.”

  “Sorry it’s been a few days but it’s always a whirlwind when I get back here—catching up. I must confess, when I heard Al was in town, I made a gap; I’m quite the fan and very honoured.” JJ bowed his head deferentially.

  “Oh, don’t be silly,” Al responded. “I’m the one honoured. I understand you pretty much financed this facility, and in a very timely manner too, if I might say. You’re a genuine philanthropist and I’m always grateful to meet one.”

  “Well, yes. Of course, I didn’t have Dara in mind at the time, but I’m certainly glad the timing worked out.”

  They briefly discussed Dara’s improvements, who was bouncing back rapidly. Both sides avoided the details of probable legal fallout, skimming only close to the subject.

  “Well, I do hope he’s better before I head back to Cape Town in a few days,” JJ was saying. “The hour I had with him in Loxton was intriguing, he’s got an incisive mind. I was hoping Sonja might get to know him. She’s also heading to Cape Town next year.”