No. 4 Imperial Lane

by Jonathan Weisman

  “We’re coming.” Van Heerden chuckled. “South Africa’s going to send those dirty Cubans back to their little island in the sea, yah?”

  João stood in silent wonder, suffering yet another revelation that he had absolutely no idea what was happening in the land he had lived in for the past four years. The South African army was here, in Angola? Pulling the strings, controlling the sluice gates of colonial history? Fighting Cuba? He felt like an idiot.

  “Doctor Major, the pleasure is all ours,” Van Heerden said, with a big, mocking guffaw that Roos joined in with obvious glee. “Your departure means we get to do things our way now.”

  Samuel stood patiently, allowing the mirth from their little joke to ease off in its own time, in on it but not amused.

  “I’m not so sure those dirty Cubans are going to be so obliging,” he grumbled, as he pushed his way past Roos to the South African receiver to radio a ship in the harbor, receive some instructions in Afrikaans, then herd his team back out the same way they came.

  “Give my best to your commander when he arrives,” Samuel called out to the South Africans as he reached the door.

  “Shouldn’t be long,” Roos and Van Heerden shouted in unison.

  The little Angolan man smiled, bowed and muttered, and let them out the back again before slamming the door and latching it violently behind them.

  The launch was already at the dock when they arrived, oversized for the task and bristling with large guns held by menacing white men. Not far from shore, a freighter awaited, actually a military materiel transport. With no government of any kind left in Lobito, the South Africans simply floated into the harbor and began off-loading weapons, officers, and supplies for an army on its way. Its load dumped on the docks, the ship rode high in the water, the officer cabins available for Elizabeth, João, Cristina, and Samuel. But even the biggest cabin was a spare affair, whitewashed neatly but with only two narrow bunks, one of which Elizabeth and Cristina would share.

  The Angolans hoping for escape did not dare approach Samuel and his band. Instead, they parted like the Red Sea to allow two white men, a frazzled white woman, and a raven-haired child to reach the dockside. Samuel had already slipped payment to the four young soldiers. Now he was cutting them loose. In Portuguese, he assured them their comrades would be there soon, within days. In a panic, the boys’ voices rose. They gesticulated wildly, pleading for passage. One of the men from the launch stepped into the fray, holding aloft his FN MAG, an imposing heavy machine gun of South African vintage. The boys backed off and watched silently as their travel companions stepped into the skiff and headed into the harbor.

  “You’ll stay with us in Johannesburg, won’t you? At least until you decide what to do with your lives. You know, João, there is always room for a good doctor in South Africa.” Greta Vanderbroek was beaming with happiness. It all seemed like a great adventure and joyous good fun for Greta. Her friend Elizabeth, looking a little tired but all in all not too worse for the wear, was standing before her on a dock in Cape Town. The Vanderbroek children would be caring for little Cristina again. Samuel, back by her side and in her bed, would be sipping brandies with the dashing young Dr. Gonçalves. And all of this far, far from war and strife. Angola be damned. Deliverance was complete, thank you very much, and her husband had been the shepherd. She was proud.

  The shepherd, of course, had only been taking orders. Four days before, Elizabeth climbed into a tiny cabin aboard a South African freighter, relieved and exhausted, to find a telegram resting on the pillow of her bed.

  “Elizabeth, dear, it is time to come home. Your father.”

  For four nights, Elizabeth and João had fought sotto voce, trying to win the night without waking their worn-out child. The game was over, Elizabeth said that first night at sea. It was time to go home, to Lisbon if not to London. They could book a flight from Johannesburg as soon as they landed. There may even be direct flights from Cape Town to London. As Elizabeth pressed her case, João dug in deeper. There was still a future for them in Africa, possibly even in Nova Lisboa, if they had the patience to wait it out, see how things settled. This was where they were almost happy. He could see it on the horizon.

  “I’ve seen the whole damned South African army on the border. This could be over in a month or two, a friendly government installed, the university back up and running.”

  “João, what has happened to you? You have a family too. They’re waiting for you. They miss you. Where is this obsession with Africa coming from?”

  “Obsession? Obsession? You saw all that we had. A life we had made on our own, without your bloody father meddling, without my father and the church and expectations. You just want to throw it away because Daddy called you home? Pathetic.”

  Exchanges like that made Elizabeth wish João had not spent so much time in London, perfecting the English verbal uppercut. He must have known some vicious women there, she thought.

  “That’s over now, over, and you know it. Nova Lisboa doesn’t even exist anymore. What do you want, a wife and child in Huambo, begging mangoes in the market? You’ve heard Samuel. There will be no end to war.”

  “Samuel, Samuel. Maybe you’re fucking the man. He’s so damned wise.”

  “You’re one to talk about fucking.”

  He shot her a look of boiling rage. He raised a hand as if to strike, then turned away. The quarters were too close for violence, his sleeping daughter practically underfoot.

  They made their way to Cape Town, not a thing settled between them about the life to come.

  The freighter, unencumbered by cargo on a calm sea, slipped quickly past the Blaauwberg Coast. It was early still when the ship eased into Table Bay, but the sun was already bright. They cruised past a forest of loading cranes on the outer reaches of Duncan Dock. Rusted trawlers jostled with modest cargo vessels and military ships.

  The city of Cape Town shone under a blue sky, hard pressed against Table Mountain, with only a few short tendrils tentatively reaching up its sheer rock walls. To the west and south, Lion’s Head and Signal Hill reared up above the buildings and homes to watch over the cloistered city. The rocks, massifs, and mountains were a grand amphitheater for the city below. Robben Island, a low, almost formless gray hump on the horizon, concealed its prison and its human contents, the leaders of the African National Congress seemingly sealed away in perpetuity. Nelson Mandela himself would be waking now. Perhaps he had already turned to the day’s task, breaking more rocks.

  All of that was unknown to Elizabeth and Cristina, who stood on the deck and watched the future approach. As the Victoria and Albert Waterfront came into view, so did its wondrous sights: gray-stuccoed Cape Dutch customs houses with their elaborate white trim and flat-fronted rooflines cut into marvelous dips, curves, and peaks, a French-balconied office building, red wharves piled on top of each other and bustling with black, brown, and white traffic. Successive waves of colonialists, empire builders, and interlopers had built the Cape: the Dutch, who populated it with slaves from Malaysia and Java and built their trading realm; the French Huguenots, who fled Catholic persecution only to slaughter the Khoi tribesmen and elephants impeding the establishment of incomparably lovely towns like Franschhoek, with their lush gardens, statues of Marie Antoinette, and estate wineries grand enough to challenge the Loire for bragging rights; and finally and most thoroughly, the British, who made up for their lack of charm with blinding ambition and the organization to make it work. A Victorian gingerbread clock tower greeted Elizabeth, João, and Cristina at the end of the dock. At its base stood Greta Vanderbroek, smiling broadly.

  João took satisfaction in Greta’s greeting, a vindication of sorts. Life would be good and possible here, until he was ready to declare it otherwise. That may be in six years or six weeks. He didn’t know. In truth, he didn’t really know why he was insisting on staying. He understood the visceral desire to resist Elizabeth’s entreaties, to dictate the terms. But he could have overcome that if he saw a reason to return
home. He couldn’t find one. He also could not allow himself to be another combat veteran adrift, addicted to the adrenaline high of mortal danger or haunted by what he had seen and done. In his psychiatry rotations, he remembered seeing grainy, jerky old films from World War I of trembling wrecks suffering from shell shock, proto-psychiatrists chasing them around English gardens with cattle prods. It had actually been funny, Chaplinesque. The med students could imagine the sound of an old, tinkling piano belting out a rag as the soldiers waddled around in the antiquated herky-jerky films, leaping forward with each painful but ineffectual shock, their doctor-cum-tormenters waddling behind with their odd weaponry.

  Cristina stepped off the gangplank and gawked silently. African-born, she had never seen such wonders. Greta stooped to her level and pointed to the enormous rock perched atop a mountain behind them.

  “It’s called Lion’s Head,” she said, making claws with her hands that swiped at the child playfully. “Roar! He protects us all.”

  Then she stood and held Cristina’s hand, leading the family off the dock and onto the waterfront. She smiled at her husband, who signaled he would catch up to them after he finished a little business. Porters would carry the Gonçalveses’ scanty cargo after a respectable time had lapsed to get them clear of the unrespectable pile.

  “Are you tired? Do you want a hotel?” Greta asked, as they walked past the Queen Victoria. The sky was a rich blue, the sun friendly, warming the air to the perfect temperature of a British day in June. Elizabeth gazed at the pink faces sipping tea with their breakfasts inside a sunlit lobby. She could not imagine anything more civilized.

  “You know what I’d really love, Greta? I’d really love some good English food.”

  Greta smiled down at Cristina.

  “Does that sound good to you too, love?”

  Cristina, her mouth closed tight but a smile wide across her face, nodded happily, pigtails bobbing by her side.

  They spent three days in the warm, dry bliss of apartheid Cape Town. In the townships of Langa, Guguletu, and Khayelitsha, far from view, young men idled away another day of unemployment drinking or sealing their shacks with pillaged corrugated scrap, while women hustled for domestic work or sold their bodies for a few rand. The Group Areas Act of 1966 was building steam. The authorities had taken to the pencil test to sort the blacks from the Malays, Indians, and mixed-race coloreds and decide where to put the carefully separated races. If the pencil stayed in the hair, the test subjects were black, destined for the worst of the shantytowns. If it fell, they would still be leaving their homes, many of which had been in their families for centuries, but their shacks would be slightly larger. If the pencil dangled inconclusively, the Afrikaners would have to resort to complicated charts measuring lip size and nose breadth to make a determination.

  Elizabeth and Greta strolled through the Company’s Garden and De Waal Park unencumbered by such things. The flowers—mesembryanthemums, proteas, leucadendrons, and restios—were anarchic, the royal palms burst like fireworks, the baobabs and magnolias were a British pensioner’s dream, a Victorian garden in the tropics. Cristina chased long-beaked guinea fowl and red-winged starlings. Only once did Elizabeth take note of the throb of bulldozers on a hillside above the harbor.

  “They’re clearing District Six still. It’s been taking ages really, Lord knows why, but they’re in the last stages,” Greta said with relief.

  “District Six?” Elizabeth responded.

  “There.” Greta pointed to a barren area, largely scraped of its homes and the sixty-six thousand people that once lived there. “That had been a colored area, a real mess and in such a nice area. Look at that view. Now Cape Town will be able to make something of it.

  “Oh, don’t worry, Elizabeth,” she continued, responding to the anxious look on the young Englishwoman’s face. “They’re being relocated to Cape Flats. It’s better for them there. Lots of room. And the ones with jobs will have their Dumb Passes to get into the city. It’ll make things so much more orderly, you know?”

  Like their Portuguese colonial brethren, white South Africans were gracious hosts to the white outsiders who washed up on these shores. A friend of Samuel’s lent João his car so he could take Elizabeth up the coast road to Camps Bay. They drank South African pinotage wine, ate springbok and ostrich carpaccio, and walked hand in hand along Glen Beach, watching the white surfer boys in the cove. Under the Twelve Apostles, ancient, eroded pinnacles standing guard on the bottom of the unfrozen world, Elizabeth and João tried to mend their marriage.

  “I know I’ve been a horrible shrew. It’s been hard, but I’ll try not to be so, so…I don’t know, domineering,” Elizabeth said, swallowing her pride as they stood on the white sand and watched fruitlessly for whales.

  João looked out to sea. Elizabeth tucked a hand in the crook of his arm.

  “Domineering,” João repeated absently. “Yes, that would be good. Try, Elizabeth.”

  He gave her a quick glance and a wan smile. She searched his face for more, for some reciprocity. But he turned it back to the sea.

  “It’s beautiful here, no?” he said quietly, patting her hand. “I told you it would be alright.”

  After three days in Cape Town, Greta and Samuel took their visitors to Johannesburg, or rather to their tidy suburban house in Sunninghill, north of the city and an easy drive for Samuel to the Board of Armaments in Pretoria. The rolling hills, green in the South African spring, and gracious live oaks reminded Elizabeth of pictures she had seen of California. The Vanderbroeks’ guarded and gated community was nothing special, a bureaucrat’s haven far from the lifestyle afforded the expatriate in a place like Angola. But if Greta missed her gracious, subtropical home in Nova Lisboa, she didn’t let on. Elizabeth enjoyed Greta’s company well enough, though their talks in the back garden somehow lacked the romance of strolls through Nova Lisboa’s parks.

  The Vanderbroeks had a piano, a cheap upright with a tinny sound, like the dance-hall pianos in American westerns. It beckoned to Elizabeth. She would eye it as she walked by, and in her mind she went over fingerings from her childhood, tempos, dynamics. She tried to blot out the phantom sound of her mother’s yelling, the dynamic that had driven her from the instrument years ago. It would be a comfort, or at least a distraction, to sit down and play, to ease into the music that she really did love. One day, she did. She sat down on the plain wooden stool to run through an aria dragged from her memory.

  “Chopin?” a voice asked softly. Greta’s hand rested lightly on Elizabeth’s shoulder.

  “Purcell,” Elizabeth responded without looking up.

  “I didn’t know you played.”

  “I don’t, not really.”

  But she kept playing, simple pieces like Bach from his Notebook for Anna Magdalena.

  “But you do. That’s lovely,” Greta encouraged.

  “This? This is just something I learned when I was eight. It’s nothing.”

  She played on. She felt herself swept up in something. A hand lifted from the keys to wipe away a tear, and her friend sat down carefully beside her.

  “Are you alright, Elizabeth?”

  “Yes, yes, I’m sorry,” she said, hiding her face in her hands. Greta put a great, heavy arm around Elizabeth’s narrow shoulder and pulled her closer.

  “I never wanted to play piano again, you see. It reminded me too much of home, a home I hated desperately.” Elizabeth spoke in an almost whisper. She wanted to be heard, but not to hear herself. “Now home is all I want, and it is so very far away.”

  “Home is never so very far away, dear. You’ll see.”

  Samuel introduced João around at Sunninghill Hospital, one of the better hospitals in Johannesburg, he assured him, and Gonçalves quickly took a job as an emergency room physician. He was all the more desired because he was willing to care for the blacks and coloreds from the townships in the clinics dotting the less desirable areas of the city. They moved into an apartment complex close to the hospital, and on
ce Elizabeth found a preschool for Cristina, she was alone and miserable. She’d spend her mornings grocery shopping, preparing for meals, looking forward to picking up her daughter at lunchtime, and plotting against her husband. At night, they’d fight.

  She knew her grievances were hackneyed and tiresome, the bored housewife locked away while her husband pursues life and career. But that did not diminish the sting. She had lived the ultimate cloistered childhood, had found the wherewithal to escape, and was now back in purdah. Christmas was approaching. Christmas dinner would be at the Vanderbroeks, thankfully, but Elizabeth set off one morning to prepare a festive flat—a little surprise that might soften João, who so often came home in a foul mood. She had never grown used to Christmas in the summer, but in the suburbs of Johannesburg, the stores were well-stocked with the trappings of winter holiday, the vestiges of Dutch and English pasts. She bought fake pine garlands and wreaths. She splurged on a hand-painted wooden nutcracker from West Germany and picked up some Christmas lights, though she skipped the tree.

  She and Cristina spent a joyous afternoon festooning the flat, baking cutout cookies, and destroying a candy recipe Elizabeth could not quite remember. When they heard João’s heavy footsteps on the stairs, they lined up smiling, Cristina leaning happily against her mother’s legs, Elizabeth’s hands lightly holding her daughter’s shoulders. There was no shout of surprise as the door opened, just two beatific, satisfied smiles.

  João looked into his wife’s eyes, gazed casually around the apartment, tossed his keys on the counter, and kissed his daughter’s forehead. Then he walked into the bedroom to change.

  Elizabeth whipped together a dinner of chicken and the shapeless noodles that seemed to exist only in Africa. João sat down and sighed as he tucked his napkin onto his lap and looked at his dinner.