Off the Voortrekker Road

by Barbara Bleiman

  And then another memory surfaced. Driving out to Elsie’s River, with Vera sitting quietly beside him and the car almost taking charge of itself on the clear, empty road, try as he might, he could not shut it out.

  He had not had an easy childhood, not what you might call a happy one, yet most of the difficulties he had come to terms with in one way or another. Here he was, after all, making his way at the Bar, putting all of the obstacles behind him. Despite it all, he’d worked hard, won a scholarship to a good school, ended up winning a bursary to see him through his studies at varsity, which Pa had refused to fund, and then finally qualified with top marks. Ma had been proud of him, he’d brought her naches, the joy that only a child or a grandchild can bring, she said, and even Pa had grudgingly shown some pleasure in his successes. And yet…

  That late autumn of 1948, when the Nats were campaigning hard in Parow, when they won the election and took the reins of power. There’d been the demonstration, men marching down Main Road, now Voortrekker Road, with placards, handing out leaflets about reds and kaffirs and the big new idea for segregation. And a public meeting, calling on people to come and listen to their election platform. There was a lot of talk in the store, strong words and worried looks. Some of the customers were already supporters, Mr van de Merwe and Mr du Plessis and a few others; some had decided to go along, just to see what these National Party people were all about, so they said. Ouma and Oupa, Ma and Pa and most of the Jewish customers were anti, but they kept their views to themselves, fearful perhaps of being labelled communists or conspirators.

  The day of the meeting, Jack had gone over in the morning to see Terence and then come back for lunch. He’d spent the afternoon studying for his History exam the next day. At 7 p.m., Pa locked the store and Ada packed up her things and headed off to her home in Athlone. Ma made lokshen soup and boiled wiener sausages and cabbage for supper, then went up early to bed, along with Saul and Mikey. At around 9 p.m. there was a sudden burst of noise out on Main Road, a small group of people running past, followed by a larger, ragged band of men and women following on behind. Pa unlocked the store door to find out what was happening and Jack joined him.

  ‘What is all of this?’ Pa called to Cornelius du Plessis, who was hurrying past.

  He shouted as he ran. ‘Showing that the Nats mean business! Giving all those kaffir-lovers a bit of a taste of what’s to come.’

  ‘Come inside, Jackie,’ Pa said, pushing Jack back into the store and locking the door behind him. He put on the extra bolt that was rarely used and pulled the blinds down over the windows, leaving just the glass in the door uncovered so that they could see out.

  ‘What’s happening, Pa?’

  ‘Trouble,’ he said.

  Jack sat at the kitchen table reading his History notebook, memorising the dates of the great Voortrekker campaigns, the Battle of Blood River and the founding of Cape Town by Jan van Riebeeck. He was determined to do well and concentrated as best he could on his revision, despite the noise outside. Already he was aiming for that bursary to university, though he knew he had many years to go. Pa was busy in the store, sorting out his paperwork and tidying up for the next day.

  About half an hour later there was a banging on the door. Jack went through into the store to see what it was. Ma was moving around upstairs; she came down to join them, dressed in her nightdress.

  ‘Shhh!’ Pa whispered. ‘Be quiet.’

  They stood in the darkness at the back of the store watching.

  At the door were May Mostert and Terence. Mrs Mostert was banging frantically on the glass, shouting out to ask them to open up and let them in.

  ‘For God’s sake, help us. I beg of you. They’re at the garage. We need to find somewhere to hide.’

  That was Jack’s last memory of Terence, seeing him standing in front of the locked door of the Handyhouse, next to May, as she stood knocking and knocking, her eyes peering through the glass window of the shop door, desperately searching the darkness in the hope that someone was there to help her. Terence had no coat on and he seemed to be shivering. He was just wearing his school jumper and his khaki shorts, a pair of long woollen socks held up with elastics and his brown sandals. He carried a little suitcase in one hand, a scuffed brown cardboard case that Jack recognised as the one that usually sat empty on a shelf in his toy cupboard. They’d often used it in make-believe games, filling it with clothes and toys when they pretended that they were leaving home, or going on adventures, in the jungles of Borneo, along with Tarzan and Jane, or seeking their fortunes on the streets of London, England or New York. Terence held the suitcase tightly, and shifted from one foot to another, looking this way and that, while his mother banged and banged on the door. Ma and Pa stood stock still at the back of the store. They made no moves to go and open up. Jack edged forward but Ma pulled him away. ‘Don’t do a thing,’ she hissed. ‘Do you want those men to come after us as well?’ Pa said nothing, his silence a tacit agreement.

  Jack had buried his head in his hands. He couldn’t bear to watch. After a while, the banging on the door stopped and when he looked up into the street again, they had gone.

  The next day, Jack had gone off to school to sit his History exam. He shut out the events of the night before; he wanted to come first in his favourite subject and beat off the competition from the other boys. If he got the highest mark, he would win the History prize, a book of his own choice and he’d put himself in line for the prize of all prizes, top of the class. First step towards the final prize, the bursary. He was pleased with how straightforward the exam had been and came back home glad to have answered all the questions with such ease. He’d thought of going past the garage to see Terence but decided against; he would come straight home to tell Ma about the exam and how well it had gone. Perhaps he was also afraid to go there, fearful of what he might find?

  In the store, Ada was looking glum and Ma wasn’t speaking. Pa had gone off to Paarl on business. Jack had asked what was wrong but Ma refused to say, so Ada had taken him into the kitchen and told him everything she’d heard from the talk in the store.

  Arnie Fortune had come in first, with the news. He’d gone along to the meeting just to see what was happening. It had been packed with people, with no room to sit and people standing in the doorways, pushing to get in. The candidate, Bertie Bertrand, had whipped up the crowd with talk about the neighbourhood going to the dogs, the coloureds and blacks coming in and taking white housing and jobs, and the threat of communists, insinuating their way in and damaging the very fabric of the community. ‘Who knows, there may be communists right here in this meeting, taking notes on what we’re doing and sending it all back to their masters in Russia,’ he’d said.

  There had been groans and cheers. But he’d saved his most powerful message for the end. There was too much mixing of whites and blacks. It wasn’t natural. One race was superior to the other, and if this continued unchecked, the purity of the whites would be contaminated. Blacks were closer to the monkeys and apes than whites; that was scientifically proven. Soon the whole history of South Africa, the glorious achievements of their forefathers, the Voortrekkers and the Boers, their pioneering ancestors, would come to nothing, lost for ever, as the whole country turned muddy brown, with the dark stain of intermarriage and miscegenation. There were cheers from the crowd in the hall.

  ‘We’ll introduce new laws against this kind of immorality, this flouting of what’s natural. But why wait for the election?’ he said. ‘Let’s take action now, here in our own community. In among us there are people who think it’s fine to do the sexual act with kaffirs. There are others who have even set up home together, living as man and wife. It’s the thin end of the wedge; once we accept this as normal, it’ll become normal. Before you know it, your daughters and sons will be giving you little black grandchildren, little piccaninnies to inherit your money and your homes!’

&n
bsp; A howl went up from the audience and the meeting drew to an end with emotions running high. A group of men gathered around the National Party stewards. Someone suggested striking while the iron was hot. They shouted out names of neighbours, gave out rumours as facts and before anyone could even pause to question the wisdom of it all, they were off out into the street, in a boiling mass, on their way to teach these people a lesson they wouldn’t forget.

  Ada told Jack that the Mostert Garage was the first place on their route. Stones were thrown, windows smashed and Walter was forced to flee for his life. Terence and Mrs Mostert were unharmed but when the crowd moved on, they left the garage to seek shelter, fearful that at any moment the crowd would be back to threaten them once more.

  Jack thought of Terence and May standing in front of the store, begging to be let in, the one place where they thought they might get help.

  In the following few days, he asked repeatedly if he could go and visit the garage but Ma said no. It was too dangerous; they’d be labelled kaffir-lovers and then the Handyhouse might be subject to similar treatment. Jews had to be extra careful, she said, or the finger of blame would be directed towards them. Hadn’t they suffered enough? Hadn’t they been ostracised and persecuted, wherever they went, blamed for all the ills of the countries in which they lived, scapegoated and hounded out of their homes? No, they needed to keep their heads down and stay shtum or God only knows what problems they’d bring on themselves.

  He could, of course, have just slipped out unnoticed and run down the road to see Terence, or made a detour on his way back from school, or even walked across from his school to Terence’s in the lunch hour, to find him and talk to him, but he didn’t; he was afraid and ashamed.

  Some days later, Pa asked him whether he wanted to come with him into the town centre on an errand and he agreed. Sitting in the Ford next to his father, they drove along Main Road, past the sweet shop, the Jewish Community Hall, the florist’s, the bioscope, the garage. Jack hoped to catch a glimpse of Terence, or Walter, working on the cars, or Mrs Mostert helping a customer at the petrol pump, but the windows were all boarded up and there was a ‘For sale’ sign on a wooden stake that had been driven into the patch of hard earth and dry grass on the corner. All the cars that usually sat on the road outside and in the workshop had disappeared and the petrol pump was locked. The forecourt was deserted. They had gone.

  When Mrs van de Merwe talked about the events with Ma the next day, she folded her arms firmly and said, ‘Good riddance. That Walter, her coloured fancy man, he’s gone too. That’ll clean up the area, keep it safe for decent people like us, Mrs Neuberger. It wasn’t right what was going on. Shame for the boy having a mother like her, sies tog, up to no good with a kaffir, and for that poor man Simey, her husband, stuck in the sanatorium not knowing anything about the goings on while his back was turned.’ She paused, waiting for a response that did not come, then continued: ‘I always thought that garage overcharged anyway. That boy Walter did a lousy job on our car. Did things that weren’t needed, my husband reckons, then piled them onto the bill.’

  Jack said nothing, too bewildered and frightened to speak. Though it made him feel sick to the stomach to hear Walter described in that way and to discover that Terence was gone for good, worst of all was the knowledge that he and his family had let them down. They had liked May Mostert, all of them had. They had admired Walter; even Pa had thought he was good for the garage and for Mrs Mostert; and Terence was the best friend he would ever have. Yet when the Nats came for them, they hadn’t done what was right, what was decent. They’d stayed silent and kept their door closed.

  A mensch, Jack had thought. Ma talked so often about menschlichkeit, the properties that make one a decent human being. What would a mensch do in these circumstances? He knew that whatever high standards they had set themselves, or pretended to set themselves, he and his parents had failed to live up to them. They had escaped the fate of their own forefathers, the pograms and burning of synagogues, the hostile treatment at the hands of Russian peasants and soldiers, the later atrocities of war and genocide in Europe, and now they watched others suffering in the same way, without saying a word. He too had failed.

  He had not had a bar mitzvah – Pa had not relented – but, for all his bitter tears and anger at the time, it hadn’t ruined his life. Far from it. It was still a source of regret but now he had to acknowledge that it was not so very important after all. When he met Renee she had shown little concern, other than sympathy for him, and when he thought of the son he might have, he had no qualms in imagining himself explaining to him honestly why he had been denied it. Being bar mitzvahed or not had neither defined him, nor changed his life. But the memory of Terence and that night in 1948 was different. He had been marked by it, and the joys of that earlier time spent at the Mostert Garage were tainted; he could never think of Terence and Walter and May without shame, or without fearing for what had become of them.

  ‘You’re very quiet, Mr Neuberger,’ Vera said.

  ‘Just thinking,’ he said.

  ‘About the case?’

  ‘In a way. Just remembering something.’

  They were approaching Elsie’s River and he needed to prepare himself for what was to come.

  ‘I think we’ll try the neighbours first, then go to Mrs Small’s. I’ll do what I did last time and park the car round the corner. That way we won’t announce ourselves too loudly.’

  ‘Are you nervous, Mr Neuberger?’

  ‘A little. Not so much about asking the questions, more about what we’re going to find out. If there’s more evidence against Van Heerden, it’s going to be hard to get him off. I’ve come to like the man, whatever he’s done.’

  ‘What do you make of this law, Mr Neuberger?’

  Jack was slowing down, ready to park. He manoeuvred into a space, pulled on the break and switched off the engine. He looked hard at Vera.

  ‘What do you make of it, Vera?’

  ‘I think it stinks.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Thought so,’ Vera said. There was a moment’s pause. ‘So if he were guilty, you’d still try to get him off? Would you think any less of him for what he’d done, if it weren’t a coloured woman?’

  Jack paused. It was complicated. There was the question of legality and the rights and wrongs of the law, the issue of adultery and the betrayal of Laura, and then the additional question of race. Murky areas that were hard to disentangle. How to explain how he felt to Vera, when he was struggling to understand it himself?

  ‘I know it’s my duty to mount the best defence for him come what may. I’ll try as hard as I can for him as an individual, as his advocate. That’s my job. But it’s also a law that should never have been passed; it makes me ashamed to be South African. So regardless of whether he’s guilty or not, I’d like to do my damnedest to get him off. I want to see him walking out of that courtroom a free man, not just for him but for all of us. There’s a history of juries acquitting on bad laws and if there’s that kind of reluctance to convict, it can sometimes bring about change. The law’s the law, but it has to be by consensus. It can’t flout the will of the people forever. So getting him off would be a way of standing up for a principle that’s been lost. I’d feel proud of that, if it could be done, and if I had the strength to do it. Both big ifs though.’

  ‘And what about Laura?’

  ‘Ah, Laura.’ He knew what Vera meant. It was painful to think that Van Heerden might have betrayed her with another woman, regardless of her colour. Adultery itself wasn’t a crime, but it caused hurt to someone you were supposed to love and respect more than anyone else, your wife or husband. You’d taken vows of love and loyalty. He thought of himself and Renee. There was a different kind of decency at stake to the one that this law had been designed to uphold.

  ‘I don’t think anything short of an acquittal�
�s going to help Laura van Heerden. And even then, I’m not sure what will happen to her and Johannes. Their whole community’s been torn apart. I don’t think the van Heerdens are going to find this easy, whatever the verdict. She seems strong to me, though, despite what everyone says, so who knows? She trusts her husband and she has unswerving faith in God, so maybe that gives her the kind of bravery that others don’t have.’

  Vera nodded. ‘And do you think he did it, Mr Neuberger? Do you think he did commit adultery with Mrs Small?’

  He smiled. ‘Who knows? The crunch question. Let’s see what we find out today.’

  His gut reaction was to say no. The way Clara had described Johannes as a young man, the accounts of the character witnesses that Jack had interviewed, Laura’s description of him and their courtship, his reputation in the community, everything pointed towards a man of supreme self-discipline and control. Yes, his views were more liberal than some in his church, and he had perhaps shown some naivety in visiting Agnes Small on his own, but it seemed so unlikely that he would do anything to jeopardise his position and his marriage; he was such an upright man. Clara’s testimony was troubling, very much so, both for its content and for the fact of her having abandoned her loyalty to her close friends, but then Laura had given him plausible enough motives for that. Clara was in the thrall of her illiberal parents, afraid of Dirk Fourie and his faction. He didn’t doubt that she had seen something that day in Elsie’s River, but surely she had mistaken a brotherly gesture of compassion for something else? It had all then got out of hand and retracting had become impossible. She was swept along by the tide of scandal and the pressure from the reverend’s detractors and she couldn’t row back from it. He could make a plausible enough case for himself for Clara’s story not being entirely trustworthy. Most of all, though, he felt that Johannes Van Heerden just wasn’t that kind of man and nor did he believe that Agnes Small would be swept off her feet by him. Neither seemed to him to be likely candidates for a passionate, risky affair.