Off the Voortrekker Road

by Barbara Bleiman

  ‘Is everything OK? Can I – Oh, sorry...’ She took in the scene, realised her mistake, then backed out quickly, shutting the door behind her.

  Jack reached into his desk drawer and found a clean linen handkerchief. He handed it to van Heerden.

  ‘I think we’d better start from the beginning, Mr van Heerden. If I’m really going to be able to help you, I need to know exactly what I’m dealing with here. I can’t be worrying about all kinds of unexpected things suddenly being hurled my way when I’m standing in that courtroom trying to defend you. You need to be straight with me. I need you to tell me everything.’

  ‘I understand,’ van Heerden said.

  Chapter 21

  1957

  The day that his father was taken into hospital Jack was out at a small court in Stellenbosch, with his pupil-master, Louis Abrams. It was his first time speaking in court, acting on his own, and Louis had accompanied him, agreeing that he would listen, observe and later give him his comments on how it had gone but wouldn’t intervene in court unless absolutely necessary.

  The trial was a case of arson, where a young white man was accused of burning down a farm building in an act of revenge against the employer who had given him the sack. Jack emerged from the courtroom elated. After a shaky start he had managed to put across the case tolerably well and in the end all the evidence of reasonable doubt that they had marshalled had convinced the judge; the man was acquitted.

  Louis had suggested lunch in a small restaurant nearby to celebrate, over a steak and a glass of wine. But just as they were leaving the court building an usher came hurrying up.

  ‘Mr Abrams? Mr Neuberger? We’ve had a phone message from Cape Town. I’m sorry, Mr Neuberger, your father has been taken to Groote Schuur hospital and your mother has been trying to get hold of you. She wants you to meet her there as soon as you can.’

  Louis had driven him straight to the hospital. At first during the long car journey they talked, both men’s shock and worry bringing an outpouring of anxious speculation about what might have happened and how best to deal with it. But soon Louis went quiet, concentrating on getting them there as fast as he could, and Jack was left to his own thoughts.

  In the previous few years, now that he’d started his career and met Renee, he’d hoped for a rapprochement with his father; some of the anger of the early years had faded and he realised that there were more things that perhaps he’d like to know about him, that might allow him to see his behaviour in a different light. It had been hard to feel so little respect for one’s father; he would have preferred to find a way of redeeming him from the role of villain he had seemed to play when Jack was a boy. And, as he’d grown older, Jack had also gradually become more aware of his mother’s part in the problems of his childhood. Difficult though it had been to acknowledge it at first, he had begun to see how easily and willingly she had inflamed his father’s fury. If he had been a difficult husband and father, perhaps she had helped him towards this, in being an ungiving and unsupportive wife.

  Renee coming into his life had been the start of the change in his feelings about his father, the catalyst for going back through it all, remembering and re-evaluating Ma and Pa’s marriage. It was partly that he suddenly understood what a woman could bring to a relationship if she genuinely loved and respected a man; the joy of their first year together was something he could scarcely believe or make any sense of. It was amazing, staggering, to spend time in her company without the kind of bickering and simmering resentment that had characterised his parents’ everyday lives. So that’s what love is, he thought. So that’s what a marriage can be.

  But it was also Renee’s relationship with his parents that was an eye-opener. Renee actually liked his father. Once Pa had got over the irritable grumblings about the foolishness of getting married so young, the preoccupation with how much money Renee was bringing to the marriage and the ridiculous cost of setting up home together, he soon became a model of politeness towards Renee. He seemed to positively look forward to her visits. And when she started to show a willingness to help out in the store if they were short-handed, Pa was completely won over. Ma had been nothing but a hindrance in the business, as far as he was concerned, Jack hadn’t been remotely interested, and Sauly, for all his early enthusiasm for practical things, had ended up following the same path as Jack into a university education, opting for dentistry as his career. By the time Mikey hit high school, Pa had given up the ghost and allowed him to continue his academic studies without a fight. None of them had wanted anything to do with the one thing that meant something to Pa, his whole life, his raison d’être, the Handyhouse that bore his name. But here was practical, down-to-earth, head-screwed-on Renee, happily joining him in slicing biltong, sorting nails and scooping measures of chicken feed out for customers.

  By contrast, Renee found Sarah quite tricky. Jack was her boy, her firstborn, and she didn’t take well to having to share him with another woman. She also seemed to resent the growing closeness between Renee and Pa. So, while Renee could see all his flaws and his foibles, his obsessions about money and his flaming temper, she could also identify the way in which Ma’s behaviour only confirmed and exaggerated Pa’s worst sides.

  Jack had never had a conversation with his father about any of this. They’d never talked about anything important. Coming to visit him with Renee, they could make friendly small talk, ask about each other’s daily lives and avoid areas of possible disagreement; he could reach out to his father by discussing a troublesome wholesaler, or enquiring about the price of wood, and his father could engage in conversation about the outcome of a case or advocates’ fees. But talking about the past was forbidden territory for both of them. It was too dangerous to start on that path, with no map and no equipment and the risk of getting lost in the dark and dangerous undergrowth.

  But now Pa was in hospital. If Ma was asking Jack to come, it must be serious. He realised that perhaps he’d left it too late, that it was very important to him, after all, to turn back to that past and make a rough, dirty, ugly little track through it, however difficult and treacherous it might turn out to be. He wanted Pa to be straight with him. There were things he wanted to know: why Pa had burnt down the shed and what he’d been doing with that money under the floor; what he’d felt about his relationship with Ma; whether, as Ma suspected, he’d had a relationship with another woman; why, when he’d clearly liked and admired Walter and when his views had been broadly liberal ones, he had failed to stand up for Terence and his family when they were in trouble. Finally, and perhaps most important of all, he wanted to know whether his father had ever forgiven him for being who he was and for what he saw as the betrayals of his childhood. Did he still feel disappointed in him, still wish for a son to stand beside him in the store, rather than having to make do with this too-clever-by-half young man, who had become educated beyond him and his world?

  If his father could be straight with him, he too could try to explain things, as he saw them. Most of all, he wanted to now tell his father about the things that had been said, and the things that were left unsaid. In the world of his boyhood, speech had been dangerous, silence safe.

  ‘Yet here I am, Pa, talking for my job,’ he heard himself saying. ‘Being an advocate for other people. Isn’t that funny? Isn’t that absurd? I started out as that little silent boy who wouldn’t say a word. You worried about me, didn’t you? You thought I’d be mute forever. And then when I spoke, all hell broke loose. I seemed to say all the wrong things. Funny, isn’t it? Crazy. Stupid. And very, very sad.’

  ‘How much further?’ he asked Louis.

  ‘Not far now.’

  ‘I feel like I need to get there. I need to talk to him.’

  ‘I know.’

  When they arrived at the hospital, Ma was waiting in the lobby. He could see straightaway that it was over. She shook her head. His father had died soo
n after the phone call to the courtroom. There was nothing more to be said.

  Chapter 22

  1958

  The day after his interview with van Heerden, Jack was sitting in the chambers library, leafing through one of the books, checking a small detail, when Vera knocked on the door.

  ‘Your wife’s on the phone, Mr Neuberger. She says it’s urgent. She needs to talk to you. I said I’d come and get you.’

  ‘The baby?’ His first reaction was the panicky terror that a phone call like this induced in him, flashing past like still frames from a film.

  ‘Oh no. She said to tell you she’s fine but she needs to talk to you straightaway.’

  He hurried down the corridor. ‘I’ll take it in my office,’ he said.

  ‘Listen, Jackie, something’s happened. I’m absolutely fine but I want you to come home.’

  ‘What is it? Are you OK?’

  ‘Don’t worry about me, that’s not it. But I don’t want to talk on the phone. I think it’s best if you come home.’

  Jack put down the phone, grabbed his jacket and left the office.

  Vera looked up anxiously.

  ‘You’ll need to postpone my meeting with Agnes Small’s counsel. Oh and can you ring my brother and cancel my lunch with him? And please tell Mr Cohen that I’ve been called home urgently, just in case he needs to talk to me. I don’t know what it is, but Renee wants me there.’

  ‘Fine, Mr Neuberger. I hope it’s nothing serious.’

  ‘So do I.’

  Later that day, Jack returned to his chambers. He dropped his briefcase by his desk, then looked round the room, surveying the row of law books on the bookcase, his desk, crowded with papers, his filing cabinet, the hook on the door with his coat, the second hook next to the door with his gown, his table, with its glass ashtray, jug of water and pile of Cape Arguses, the lamp stand and the single light fixture in the middle of the ceiling. He looked at the cream walls of the room, and the single painting by Boonzaier of a District 6 street, vibrant with colour, which he’d bought with the proceeds of his first big case. He looked at the faded Persian rug on the floor, its weave breaking down in places, unravelling its threads of wool.

  He called Vera in. ‘Can you spare ten minutes? I want to take a little walk with you, out in the Company Gardens.’ He spoke quietly, almost in a whisper.

  Vera looked puzzled. ‘Of course, Mr Neuberger.’

  Walking in the park he told her what had happened. Renee had been sorting linen with the maid when the doorbell had rung. She’d opened it, thinking it was the laundry van, and two men had been standing there. They’d politely but firmly asked to be let in. She’d said that she wanted to phone her husband but they said that wouldn’t be necessary and she had been persuaded to let them come inside.

  They walked straight into the living room. Without asking permission, they sat themselves down and started to question her, politely enough, it was true, but nevertheless with singular determination, about Jack’s past, about how they’d met, his political persuasions, his friendships and his contacts. They wanted to know whether he’d ever been a member of a Zionist group, or the Communist Party. Perhaps he was just a fellow traveller? They questioned whether he’d associated with members of the African Nationalist Congress, or with known enemies of the Republic of South Africa. They mentioned names, Ruth First, Albie Sachs, Sam Kahn, Walter Sisulu, Nelson Mandela and others, a few of which she recognised. In among the names were a few old university friends and members of the university debating society that Jack had chaired, including Sol Levine, of course. It came as no surprise to her that his name was there, given his notoriety. They looked her in the eye when they asked if Jack had known Sol. She tried hard to keep her face blank, so that no flicker of a change of expression would pass over it when she heard his name. She claimed ignorance of Jack’s previous friends from the time before he knew her. There was a long pause before the questions continued. Had Jack ever travelled to Russia? Had he been out of Cape Town, on visits to Kwazulu, or Niasaland, to the African homelands, to Rhodesia? Did he consort with natives, or coloureds, with Malays or Indians?

  Renee had refused to answer any more of their questions. ‘I think you need to speak to my husband,’ she’d said. ‘I’m tired now and need to lie down.’ They flipped over their notebooks, put them back in their pockets, and got up to leave.

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Neuberger. We’ll be back sometime to speak to your husband, as you suggest. We wish you the best with your baby.’

  Jack had asked her what the men had looked like. The description tallied with that of the two men who’d been to see him at his chambers.

  As soon as they’d left, Renee had called him at his chambers.

  ‘But why didn’t your wife tell you all this over the phone?’ Vera asked.

  ‘She was afraid. She thought that perhaps their visit wasn’t just to ask questions. Maybe they’d come to plant a device or something.’

  ‘So that’s why we’re walking in the park.’

  ‘I didn’t want to take any risks. It’s probably silly – they’re just trying to intimidate us. But nevertheless… I want to make sure that you understand what we’re dealing with. We’re going to have to be careful about what’s said in the office from now on. Just as a precaution.

  ‘What are you going to do, Jack?’ It was the first time she had ever used his first name. He was aware of the whole range of reasons why that might be and he appreciated them all. She had been part of this case with him and it had brought them closer than he’d ever imagined possible at the start of her working for him.

  ‘About the men? Nothing. Just wait and see what happens, whether they pay me another visit or not.’

  ‘What about the case?’

  He was silent.

  ‘I know this isn’t my business and I have no right to interfere, but I want to say something.’ They had reached the small boating lake and begun to walk round the edge, skirting past little children riding tricycles, women throwing stale bread to the ducks, gardeners pulling up weeds in the flowerbeds next to the path. The gravel was crunchy underfoot. Jack noticed that Vera was struggling a bit in her high heels, her gait awkward and wobbly, as her shoes got caught between the small pebbles. ‘I don’t think you should do anything risky. You’ve got a wife to think of and a baby on the way. Your duty’s to them, not to anyone else. I know how you feel, Mr Neuberger’ – she was back to the more formal form of address – ‘I know you have principles. You’re a liberal and all that. But this country’s a bloody mess, if you’ll pardon my language, and you’re not going to be able to sort it out single-handed.’

  He was taken aback by the intensity in her voice, the directness with which she expressed her feelings.

  ‘These aren’t times for heroism, you know, Mr Neuberger. You’ve got to be smart, not stupid. Those men, those Special Branch people, you’re on their list now. They’re interested in you. And if you’re not worried for yourself, then think about your wife and what’s best for her and for the little kiddie on the way. What’s that word you sometimes use, “shtum”? Keep shtum. What my mother calls keeping your trap shut. Best all round.’

  ‘You seem very sure about this, Vera.’

  ‘I am.’

  He didn’t reply and they walked on in silence.

  ‘Just think about what I’m saying, promise me that. There are a lot of people relying on you. You don’t want to let them down.’

  They turned off the gravel path, out of the wrought-iron gates and back onto the road. When they reached the chambers, he suggested that, since it was already late afternoon, she might go home early. No point in coming back in, just for half an hour, when everyone else in the building would be getting ready to leave. She thanked him, said she hoped she hadn’t said too much, taken any liberties or caused offence, then walked
off towards Wale Street and her bus home.

  He watched her go, then climbed up the steps to the front door of the building. As he entered, Charlie greeted him.

  ‘Those two men, Mr Neuberger, they were back here again. They said I had to let them go up to your office. So I said OK. Not for long though, just five or six minutes, then they came back down again. I thought I should let you know. Did I do the right thing?’

  ‘Thank you, Charlie. It’s not your fault. You had no choice – you did the right thing.’

  Vera knew what she’d been saying. They did mean business. And now he was going to have to decide what that meant for him. For Charlie, it had been simple; he’d done the right thing. But what about him? For him, what might that be?

  Chapter 23

  ‘Your honour, my esteemed colleague Mr du Toit, members of the jury…’

  The moment had finally come. He was ready to set out on this journey. He’d been born and raised on the Voortrekker Road. He’d already travelled a long way, from sitting swinging his legs on a sack of beans in the Handyhouse and wetting his pants in the schoolyard of Parow Elementary School, sitting next to Terence in the car on the way home from Hout Bay, to now standing up in court as advocate for the defence of an Afrikaner of high standing, in a case that had made it into the newspapers, with crowds of people jostling each other on the front steps of the courthouse, clamouring to get in.

  The last few weeks he had slept badly. He woke in the early hours, going back over every detail of the case, rehearsing each move he thought he would make, getting up quietly so as not to wake Renee in order to jot down fresh questions to put to his client, to Laura or to the small band of church members who had, in the end, agreed to speak for the defence.

  In the mornings, he went into his chambers with his head buzzing, still unsure of whether he was doing the right thing. Renee had refused to advise him on his decision – ‘The way things are at the moment, with the baby on the way, I’m not sure you’d get a sensible view from me. All I can say is, whatever you end up doing, I’ll do my best to support you. The decision has to be yours.’