A Dry White Season

by Andre Brink

  “Oh stop nagging!” He undid his trousers and allowed them to drop to his feet. The buckle of the belt tinkled. He folded the trousers and hung them over the back of a chair, then stepped into his pyjama pants and tied the cord.

  “Did you have to do it this way? Why didn’t you discuss it with the Security Police first? I’m sure they would have cleared everything up just like that.”

  “I’ve already been to see them.”

  She lowered her hand, staring at him in the mirror. “You never told me.”

  Shrugging, he went to the bathroom.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” she called after him.

  “What difference would it have made?”

  “I’m married to you.”

  “I didn’t want to upset you.” He started brushing his teeth.

  She came to the door, leaning against it. With a more urgent tone in her voice than he was used to she said:” Ben, everything we’ve built up together over the years – for God’s sake make sure you don’t spoil it.”

  “What on earth do you mean?”

  “We have a good life. We may not have everything we might have had if you’d been more ambitious, but at least we’ve got somewhere in the world.”

  “It sounds as if you’re expecting me to go to jail or something.”

  “I don’t want you to do anything reckless, Ben.”

  “I promise you I won’t. But how can I allow people I’ve known for years to be—”

  “I know.” She sighed. “Just be careful. Please. We’ve been married for nearly thirty years now and sometimes it still seems to me I don’t really know you. There’s something in you I feel I’m unprepared for.”

  “Don’t worry about me.” Coming towards her he impulsively took her face in his hands and kissed her briefly on the forehead.

  She returned to the dressing table and sat down. Stretching her neck she began to massage the loose skin of her throat.

  “We’re growing old,” she said suddenly.

  “I know.” He got into his bed, pulling the blankets over his legs. “I’ve been thinking about it more and more lately. How terrible it is to grow old without ever really having lived.”

  “Is it quite so bad?”

  “Perhaps not.” Lying with his arms under his head he looked at her back. “We’re just tired tonight, I suppose. One of these days everything will be all right again.”

  But after the light had been turned out he couldn’t sleep, however exhausted he felt. He was remembering too much. The dirty bundle in the newspaper they’d brought him. The stained trousers. The broken teeth. It made him nauseous. He moved into another position but every time he closed his eyes the images returned. From a distant part of the house he heard sounds and raised his head to listen. The refrigerator door. Johan fetching something to eat or to drink. There was something both terrifying and reassuring in the knowledge of the closeness of his son. He lay back again. Susan turned in her bed, sighing. He couldn’t make out whether she was asleep or not. Dark and soundless the night lay around him, limitless, endless; the night with all its multitudes of rooms, some dark, some dusky, some blindingly light, with men standing astride on bricks, weights tied to their balls.

  The application for a court order nearly failed when the man who had allegedly seen Gordon at John Vorster Square refused to sign an affidavit, scared of what might happen if he were identified. But on the strength of the evidence of the bloodstained trousers and the teeth Dan Levinson managed to provide his counsel with an impressive enough brief which was presented to the judge in chambers that Saturday afternoon. A provisional order was granted, restraining the Security Police from assaulting or mistreating Gordon. The following Thursday was set as a deadline for the Minister of Police to provide affidavits opposing the application. And Mr Justice Reynolds made it clear that he regarded the case in a very serious light.

  But at the official hearing of the application the following week, the position changed radically. The Special Branch submitted their affidavits: one by Colonel Viljoen, denying categorically that the detainee had ever been assaulted; one by a magistrate who had visited Gordon shortly before and who testified that the detainee had appeared normal and healthy to him and had offered no complaints about his treatment; a third by a district surgeon who stated that the police had called him the previous week to examine Gordon after he had complained of toothache: he had pulled three teeth and as far as he could judge there was nothing wrong with the prisoner.

  The advocate instructed by Dan Levinson to handle the family’s application, protested as vehemently as he could against the secrecy surrounding the case and pointed out the destructive implications of the rumours caused by it. But the judge obviously had to reject allegations based on speculation and hearsay; and so he had no choice but to refuse a final injunction. However unsatisfactory many aspects of the case might have been, he said, it was impossible to find, on the basis of acceptable evidence submitted to him, that there had been any proof of assault. He had no further jurisdiction in the matter.

  Ben did not hear from Emily again.

  About a fortnight later he was alone at home one night – Susan had gone to the SABC for the recording of a play and Johan was at an athletics event in Pretoria – when it was announced on the radio that a detainee in terms of the Terrorism Act, one Gordon Ngubene, had been found dead in his cell that morning. According to a spokesman of the Security Police the man had apparently committed suicide by hanging himself with strips torn from his blanket.

  TWO

  1

  For the first time in his life he was on his way to the black townships of Soweto. To Sofasonke City, as Stanley used to refer to it. Stanley was sitting beside him, his eyes obscured by sunglasses with large round lenses, a cigarette stub stuck to his lips, a checkered cap perched at an angle on his head, striped shirt and broad multi-coloured tie, dark pants, white shoes. They were driving in his big Dodge sporting a pink plastic butterfly on the bonnet; the wheel was adorned by red and yellow tape wound tightly round it; and a steering knob had been fitted to it, made of transparent plastic or glass, through which a voluptuous nude blonde could be seen. From the mirror dangled a pair of miniature boxing gloves. The sheepskin covers on the seats were a venomous green. The radio was turned on loud, snatches of wild music interspersed with incomprehensible comments by the announcer of Radio Bantu.

  Uncle Charlie’s Roadhouse marked the end of the city. Pale yellow and greyish brown, the bare veld of late summer lay flat and listless under the drab sky. A dull, dark cloud obscured the townships: there had been no wind all day to disperse the smoke from last night’s fires in a hundred thousand coal stoves.

  “For how long have you been driving this car, Stanley?” Ben asked mechanically, just to break the silence, aware of his companion’s sullen disapproval of their excursion.

  “This one?” Stanley shifted on his large buttocks with an air of proprietorial satisfaction. “Three years. I had a bubezi before this. A Ford. But the ctembalani is better.” In a sensual gesture, as if caressing a woman, he moved his hand along the curve of the wheel.

  “You like driving?”

  “It’s a job.”

  It was difficult to draw anything from him today. His attitude suggested: You talked me into taking you there, but that doesn’t mean I approve.

  “Have you been in the taxi business for a long time?” Ben persisted patiently.

  “Many years, lanie” – using again, but playfully, the contemptuous word of previous occasions. “Too much.” He opened up momentarily. “My wife keeps on nagging me to stop before someone tries to pasa me with a gonnie” – making a stabbing gesture with his left hand to clarify the tsotsi expressions he seemed to relish; the Dodge swerved briefly.

  “Why? Is it dangerous to drive a taxi?”

  Stanley uttered his explosive laugh. “You name me something that isn’t dangerous, lanie.” Light flickered on his black glasses. “No, the point is this isn’t an ordina
ry taxi, man. I’m a pirate.”

  “Why don’t you do it legally?”

  “Much better this way, take it from me. Never a dull moment. You want to diet, you want to feel a bit of kuzak in your arse pocket, you don’t mind a touch of adventure – then this is the life, man. Spot on.” He turned his head, looking at Ben through his round dark glasses. “But what do you know about it, hey lanie?”

  The derision, the aggressiveness in the big man unnerved Ben: Stanley seemed bent on putting him off. Or was it some sort of test? But why? And to what purpose? The unimaginative afternoon light kept them apart from each other, unlike their previous meeting, which had taken place in the dark: an evening which now, in retrospect, appeared almost unreal.

  First, there had been the night of the news on the radio. The strange sensation of being totally alone in the house. Susan gone, Johan gone; no one but him. Earlier in the evening he’d been working in the study and it was almost nine o’clock before he went to the kitchen to find something to eat. He turned on the kettle for tea and buttered a slice of bread. In the food cupboard he found a tin of sardines. More for the sake of companionship than from curiosity he switched on the transistor radio for the news. Leaning against the cupboard he’d made for Susan years ago, he stood sipping his tea and started picking at the sardines with a small fork. Some music. Then the news. A detainee in terms of the Terrorism Act, one Gordon Ngubene. Long after the announcement had been made he was still standing there with the half-empty tin of sardines in his hand. Feeling foolish, as if he’d been caught doing something unseemly, he put it down and began to walk through the house, from one room to the other, quite aimlessly, switching lights on and off again as he went. He had no idea of what he was looking for. The succession of empty rooms had become an aim in itself, as if he were walking through himself, through the rooms of his mind and the passages and hollows of his own arteries and glands and viscera. In this room Suzette and Linda had slept when they’d still lived at home, the two pretty blond girls he’d bathed and put to bed at night. Playing tortoise, playing horsey, telling stories, laughing at jokes, feeling their breath warm and confiding in his neck, their wet kisses on his face. Then the slow estrangement, slipping loose, until they’d gone off, each on her own remote course. Johan’s room, disordered and filled with strange smells: walls covered with posters of racing cars and pop singers and pinups; shelves and cupboards littered with model aeroplanes and dissembled machinery, radio carcasses, stones, bird skeletons, books and comics and Scopes, trophies, dirty handkerchiefs and socks, cricket bats and tennis racquets and diving goggles and God knows what else. A wilderness in which he felt an imposter. The master bedroom, his and Susan’s. The twin beds separated by small identical chests, where years before had been a double bed; photographs of the children; their wardrobes on the wall facing the beds, his, hers; the rigorous arrangement of Susan’s make-up on her dressing table, a patterned order disturbed only by a bra hanging limply over the back of a chair. Lounge, dining room, kitchen, bathroom. He felt like a visitor from a distant land arriving in a city where all the inhabitants had been overcome by the plague. All the symptoms of life had been preserved intact, but no living creature had survived the disaster. He was alone in an incomprehensible expanse. And it was only much later, when he returned to his study-and even that appeared foreign, not his own, but belonging to a stranger, a room where he was not the master but an intruder – his thoughts began to flow again.

  Tomorrow, he thought, Emily would come round to ask for advice or help. He would have to do something. But he felt blunted and had no idea of where to start. So he really was relieved when she did not turn up the following day. At the same time it made him feel excluded, as if something significant had been denied him – though he knew it was illogical: for what was there he could do? What claim did he have? What did he really know of Gordon’s private existence? All these years he’d been remote from it and it had never bothered him in the least. Why should it unsettle him now?

  He telephoned Dan Levinson, but of course there was nothing the lawyer could do without instructions from the family. And when Ben rang off, he couldn’t help feeling just a bit idiotic. Above all, redundant.

  He even telephoned the Special Branch: but the moment the voice replied on the other side he quietly put down the receiver again. There was an argument with Susan when she reproached him for being ill-tempered. He quarrelled with Johan for neglecting his homework. The uneasiness persisted.

  Then came the night Stanley Makhaya visited him. Scared of opening the front door when he knocked, Susan sent him round the house to the study at the back, then went to the kitchen to tap on the window as she used to do to call Ben to the telephone or to attract his attention. When he looked up, Stanley was already standing on the threshold – it was a warm night, the door stood open – surprisingly soundless for such a big man. Ben was startled, and it took him a moment before he recognised his visitor. Even in the dark Stanley was wearing his dark glasses. But when he came in, he pushed them up across his forehead like a pilot’s goggles. Susan was still drumming on the kitchen window and calling: “Ben, are you all right?” Irritably he went to the door to reassure her; and for a minute he and Stanley stood looking at each other, uneasy and apprehensive.

  “Didn’t Emily come with you?” he asked at last.

  “No, she sent me.”

  “How is she?”

  Stanley shrugged his heavy bull-like shoulders.

  “It’s a terrible thing that happened,” said Ben awkwardly.

  “Well, we knew it was going to happen, didn’t we?”

  Ben was shocked by Stanley’s nonchalance. “How can you say that? I was hoping all the time—”

  “You’re white.” As if that summarised everything. “Hope comes easy to you. You’re used to it.”

  “Surely that’s got nothing to do with black or white!”

  “Don’t be so sure.” For a moment his violent laugh filled the small room.

  “When will he be buried?” asked Ben, deliberately changing the subject.

  “Not before Sunday. We’re still waiting for the body. They said tomorrow or the day after.”

  “Is there anything I can do? I’d like to help with the funeral arrangements. Anything.”

  “It’s all done.”

  “What about the cost? Funerals are expensive these days.”

  “He had an insurance book. And he’s got many brothers.”

  “I didn’t know he had any.”

  “I’m his brother, man. We all are.” Once again, unexpected and uninvited, his great booming voice exploded with laughter which caused the walls to tremble.

  “When did they break the news to Emily?” he asked in a bid to stop the bellowing.

  “They never came.” Stanley turned to spit through the open door.

  “What do you mean? Didn’t they send a message?”

  “She heard it on the wireless like the rest of us.”

  “What!”

  “The lawyer phoned the next day to find out. The cops said they were sorry, they didn’t know where to contact her.”

  In the heavy silence, suddenly realising that they were still standing, he made a half-hearted gesture towards one of the two easy chairs he’d taken over when Susan had bought a new suite for the lounge. “Do sit down.”

  Stanley promptly lowered his heavy body into one of the floral chairs.

  For a time they were silent. Then Ben got up again to fetch his pipe from the desk. “I’m sorry I don’t have any cigarettes,” he apologised.

  “That’s all right. I got some.”

  After a while Ben asked: “Why did Emily send you? Is there something she’d like me to do?”

  “Nothing much.” Stanley crossed his massive legs. One trouser leg was pulled up, revealing a red sock above the white shoe. “I had to come this way for a fare, so she asked me to drop in. Just to tell you not to worry.”

  “My God, why should she be thinking about me?”<
br />
  “Search me.” He grinned and blew out a series of smoke circles.

  “Stanley, how did you meet Gordon and his family? For how long have you been friends? How come you’re always there when they need help?”

  A laugh. “I got a car, man. Don’t you know?”

  “What difference does a car make?”

  “All the diff in the world, lanie.” That name again, like a small fierce ball of clay from a clay-stick hitting one right between the eyes. Stanley changed into a more comfortable position. “If you got a taxi like me, you’re right there, man. All the time. I mean, here you get a bloke pasa’d by the tsotsis, so you pick him up and take him home, or you take him to Baragwanath Hospital. There you get one passed out from atshitshi: same thing. Or a chap who drank too much divorce in a beer-hall. Others looking for phata-phata” – illustrated by pushing his thumb through two fingers in the immemorial sign – “so you find them a skarapafet. A whore. See what I mean? You’re on the spot, man. You pick them up, you listen to their sob stories, you’re their bank when they need some magageba”- rubbing his fingers together-“all the time, I tell you. You got a taxi, you’re the first to know when the gattes are coming on a raid, so you can warn your pals. You know every blackjack, you know his price. You know where to find a place to sleep or a place to hide. You know the shebeens. Man needs a stinka, he comes straight to you.”

  “A stinka?”

  Gleeful, perhaps not without disdain, Stanley stared at him, then laughed again. “A reference book, man. A domboek. A pass.”

  “And you met Gordon long ago?”

  “Too much. When Jonathan was just so high.” He held out his hand, a foot or two from the floor. Behind his resounding laugh, moving like shadows, were all the things he left unsaid.

  “Are you a Xhosa too?”

  “Jesus, what do you take me for?” Another bellow. “I’m a Zulu, lanie. Don’t you know? My father brought me from Zululand when I was a child.” Suddenly confidential, he leaned over and stubbed out his cigarette. “You listen to me, lanie: one of these days I’m taking my children back there. It’s no place for kids here in the city.”