A Dry White Season

by Andre Brink

  In the beginning they came one by one, at intervals of a week or more. Later hardly a day went by without some appeal for help. They came in twos, in threes, in droves. More than once Ben felt reluctant to return home after school, dreading the new demands inevitably awaiting him. And Susan was threatening to acquire a dog to put an end to the throng in her backyard.

  The very extent of the responsibilities imposed on him – and the impossibility of withdrawing once he’d offered to help the first few – was threatening to wear him down. There were symptoms of an ulcer developing. He was beginning to neglect his school duties. His manner with the pupils became more abrupt and there were fewer of them visiting him during the interval to chat or ask for his advice. If he had had enough time, ifthere hadn’t been so many other worries, he might have coped. But all the while, ever since the day Stolz had come back to him, there was the awareness of being watched, of acting against invisible obstacles opposing him every inch of the way.

  Often it happened so imperceptibly that he found it impossible to determine a starting point or a turning point. But at some moment, however subtly it was introduced, there must have been such a series of “firsts”: the first time his phone was tapped; the first time his mail was tampered with; the first time an unknown car followed him to town; the first time a stranger was posted opposite his house to check on whoever arrived or left; the first time the phone rang in the middle of the night, with nothing on the other side but heavy breathing and a mirthless chuckle; the first time a friend informed Ben: “You know, I had a visitor last night who kept on asking questions about you—”

  In between were brighter days. Stanley returned from Botswana with a new affidavit signed by Wellington Phetla: having left the country the boy was prepared to tell the full story of his arrest with Jonathan and the time they’d spent in detention together. Stanley had also traced a couple of Wellington’s comrades who’d been willing to corroborate his evidence in writing. The news he brought of Gordon’s second son, Robert, was less encouraging. When Stanley had found him he’d been on the point of leaving for a military camp in Mozambique; he’d been adamant that he wouldn’t return unless he could do so with a gun in his hand.

  But the despondency about Robert was offset by something else Stanley reported soon after his return. For the first time, he announced, they seemed to be on the verge of a real breakthrough: he’d traced an old cleaner working in the police mortuary and this man had told him that on the morning of the autopsy Captain Stolz had handed him a bundle of clothes with instructions to burn it.

  And in Soweto the black lawyer Julius Nqakula was quietly and persistently going his way, rounding up his old clients to take down statements on Jonathan and Gordon. Even the nurse who had lost her nerve after telling them about Jonathan’s spellin hospital was persuaded to sign a new affidavit. And all these bits and pieces Stanley brought to Ben for safekeeping in the hidden compartment of his tools cupboard.

  There were setbacks too. Only two days after signing her new statement the nurse was detained by the Special Branch. Julius Nqakula himself was arrested late in August when, contravening the terms of his banning order, he visited his sister in Mamelodi. It meant a year’s imprisonment, which Stanley accepted with surprising resignation:

  “Old Julius won’t give away a thing, don’t worry. And anyway he’s been hitting the bottle too hard lately. This year in the chooky will sober him up nicely.”

  “A year in jail just for visiting his sister?”

  “That’s the chance he took, lanie. Julius will be the last to complain.”

  “Don’t you think the real reason for his arrest was that they found out he was helping us?”

  “So what?”-If there was one expression which summarised the full reality of Stanley Makhaya it was the way in which he used to say So what? — “Lanie, you’re not getting guilt complexes now, are you? That’s a luxury only Liberals can afford. Forget it.” A blow between the shoulder-blades sent Ben stumbling. “Julius will be back, man. All refreshed by his little spell in the deep-freeze.”

  “How can we just shrug off a man we’ve been working with?”

  “Who said we shrugging him off? Best way of remembering a man, lanie, is to carry on fighting. We doing it for Emily, right?”

  Emily also came to Ben’s house late one afternoon. He was exhausted after dealing with the day’s quota of Visitors. It was Sunday to boot. Susan had gone to Pretoria to spend the day with Suzette and Chris, something she had been doing more and more frequently lately. Johan was out with some friends. For once, Ben tried to ignore the knocking. But when it persisted, leaving him no choice but to trudge wearily down the passage, he found Emily on the stoep. Behind her in the shadow of a pillar, stood a strange black man in a brown striped suit. Thirtyish, pleasant face, but very tense, looking round nervously all the time as if expecting invisible enemies suddenly to materialise.

  “This is Johnson Seroke, Baas,” Emily said meekly. “The man I told you about, the man of the letters.”

  In his study, the curtains drawn, Ben asked: “Do you really work for the Security Police, Johnson?”

  “I had no choice,” the man said with smouldering hostility.

  “Yet you smuggled out letters to Emily?”

  “What can you do if a man asks you and he’s in trouble?” Johnson Seroke was sitting on the edge of his chair, pulling the fingers of his left hand one by one, cracking the joints, over and over.

  “There is big trouble for Johnson if they find out, Baas,” said Emily.

  “Johnson, what do you know about Gordon?” Ben asked.

  “I saw very little of him. “Johnson spoke in a clipped, studied way.

  “But you did talk to him from time to time?”

  “He gave me the letters.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Just before he died.”

  “Were you there when they interrogated him?”

  “No.” He went through all five fingers of his left hand again. “I was three offices away. But I saw him when they carried him down the passage.”

  “When was that?”

  “The Thursday. The twenty-fourth February.”

  “Do you remember what time it was?”

  “It was late in the afternoon.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “I could not see. He was limp.”

  With an effort Ben asked: “Was he dead?”

  “No. He made a sound.”

  “Did he say anything you could make out?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What could I do? I was there in the office. I pretended to be busy. They took him down to the cells.”

  “Did they say anything about it afterwards?”

  Johnson Seroke jumped up and came to the desk, leaning forward on outstretched arms. The whites of his eyes were yellowish, with small red veins showing. “If you tell anybody I was here today I shall deny it. See?”

  “I understand. I promise.” He gazed up at the man leaning on his desk, upset by the look of panic in the bloodstained eyes. “No one will know you’ve been to see me.”

  “It was just because Emily asked me.”

  “I tell him the Baas is good to us,” said the big woman uneasily.

  “You never saw Gordon again?” Ben insisted.

  “I was there when they took the body away to the morgue.”

  “When?”

  “Next day.”

  “You sure you don’t know anything about the night in between, Johnson?”

  “How should I know? I keep away from such things when they happen.”

  “Why do you stay with the police?” Ben asked point-blank. “You don’t really belong there.”

  “How can I go away? I love my family.”

  After they had left, the nervous young man and the large lumbering woman, Ben made brief notes of their conversation for his file.

  The next morning, in plain d
aylight, his study was burgled while he was away at school and Susan in town. As far as they could make out nothing was stolen, but his books had been plucked from the shelves and the contents of his drawers emptied on the floor, the chair cushions ripped open with a sharp object.

  “It’s this lot of good-for-nothings swarming round the house all day,” Susan said indignantly. “If you don’t put an end to it soon something drastic will happen. And it’ll be your own fault. You can’t be that blind, Ben! Don’t you see the writing on the wall?”

  He didn’t reply. He waited until she’d taken a sedative and gone to lie down before he hurried to the garage. But the tools cupboard was untouched.

  6 September. Melanie off to Rhodesia last night, via Malawi. At least, that is the official version. Really going to Lusaka. For which she’ll have to use her British passport. I warned her it was asking for trouble. She shrugged it off: “It’s the only favour my mother has ever done me. So I use it when it suits me.”

  When her South African passport expired a month ago she was worried that it might not be renewed. In the end there was no hitch. Got it last Friday. Laughingly showed me the new photograph inside. She thinks it’s hideous; I rather like it. She gave me one to cherish like a schoolboy in her absence. Only ten days, she tried to reassure me. But a strange emptiness surrounds me, as if she’s left me wholly unprotected.

  Over the weekend a new bit of information from her contact at the Square. It appears that he’s responsible for serving supper to the detainees. On third February he was instructed that in future only white warders were to be admitted to Gordon’s cell. That was the day of his “headache” and “toothache". Next morning Dr Herzog came.

  Even more important: when the warders went down to the cells on the evening of twenty-fourth February he saw people at Gordon’s door. Was told by one of his black colleagues: “The man is sick, the doctor is with him.”

  So my suspicion is confirmed. Herzog knows much more than he’s prepared to tell. But who’s going to get it from him?

  In today’s sudden desolation I drove round to see Phil Bruwer. Playing the piano when I arrived. Still that air of having slept in his clothes. Smelling of wine and tobacco and farting. Overjoyed to see me. Cold day, we played chess in front of the fire. He lit his pipe with long twigs kept in an iron pot specially for that purpose.

  “How’s the Sleuth?” he asked, his eyes twinkling under the brushwood of his brows.

  “Making some headway, Prof. I suppose Melanie told you what she heard from the warder?”

  “Mm. Like to have a game with me?”

  Amazing for how long we went on playing without saying a word, yet without feeling isolated. Surrounded by those thousands of books. Cats sleeping on the rug in front of the fire. A wholeness about it all. That’s the only word I can really think ofto describe it. It seemed so whole, so unlike all the bits and pieces of my jigsaw.

  I’d never been so pertinently conscious of it before, but when I said it I immediately recognised it, so it must have been there all along, like the inside of a jacket you wear every day:

  “You know what really frightens me, Prof?” He quietly stared at me through the smoke of his pipe, waiting for me to explain. “Here we’re going on gathering our bits of information. Sometimes it seems to come to a standstill, yet all the time we’re making progress, step by step. But suppose one day the picture is complete and we know everything that happened to him down to the smallest detail – then I’ll still not know anything about his life.”

  “Aren’t you asking too much?” he said. “What can one man really know about another? Even two people who live together and love one another. I’ve often thought about it, you know—” The fart sounded almost reassuring when it came. “My wife. Our marriage. All right, I was years older than she, and I suppose if you really think about it the marriage was doomed right from the beginning. But I still thought, at the time, that we knew each other. I was absolutely convinced of it. Until she took her things and walked out on me. Then, for the first time, I realised I’d been living beside another person for practically twenty-four hours a day without knowing a thing about her. Same with the chaps who were in that German camp with me: shared everything, got really close. Then something would happen, the most paltry little thing, and you would discover that you really were total strangers, each one desperately alone in the world. You’re on your own, Ben. All the time.”

  “Perhaps it is because one tends to take things for granted,” I said, unconvinced by his words. “But as far as Gordon is concerned, here I’m actually working on him day and night. It’s not a passive relationship, I’m actively involved with him every moment of my life. But when all is said and done, what have I really got? Facts, facts, details. What does it tell me about him, this man, this Gordon Ngubene who must exist somewhere behind all the facts? And what about all the people flocking to me for help? What do I know about them? We talk to each other, we touch each other, yet we’re strangers from different worlds. It’s like people on two trains passing each other. You hear a shout, you shout back, but it’s just sound, you have no idea of what the other man has said.”

  “At least you heard him shout.”

  “That’s not much comfort.”

  “Who knows?” He moved one of his bishops. “Most people have got so used to their passing trains that they don’t even look up any more when they hear the shout.”

  “Sometimes I think I envy them.”

  His eyes shone with malicious glee. “Matter of choice,” he said. “You can also stop asking questions if you want to, can’t you? All you need to do is accept that ‘such things happen'.”

  “Is one really free to choose – or are you chosen?”

  “You think there’s much difference? Did Adam and Eve choose to eat the apple? Or did the Devil choose for them? Or had God willed it like that from the beginning? I mean, He may have figured it out this way: If that tree looked just like all the others they might never notice it; but by placing His ban on it He made damned sure they would have a go at it. Perhaps that was why God could sleep so peacefully and contentedly on the seventh day.”

  “At least, I assume, they knew what they were doing.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “I once thought I knew. I was convinced I was going into it with my eyes wide open. But I don’t think I expected it to be quite so dark around me.”

  Without answering directly, as if suddenly struck by a new idea, Bruwer pushed back his chair and climbed a small step-ladder in search of a book on a top shelf. From there he said over his shoulder: “You’ll know more about it than I do, it’s your subject. But don’t you agree that the meaning, the true meaning, of eras like those of Pericles or the Medici lay in the fact that a whole society, in fact a whole civilisation, seemed to be moving in the same gear and in the same direction?” It was accompanied by the familiar and reassuring crackle. “In such an era there is almost no need to make your own decisions: your society does it for you and you find yourself in complete harmony with it. On the other hand there are times like ours, when history hasn’t settled on a firm new course yet. Then every manis on his own. Each has to find his own definitions, and each man’s freedom threatens that of all the others. What is the result? Terrorism. And I’m not referring only to the actions of the trained terrorist but also to those of an organised state whose institutions endanger one’s essential humanity.” He resumed his search. “Ah, here it is.” When he came down he handed me the book he’d found. Merleau-Ponty. Unfortunately in French, which I cannot read. He seemed disappointed but I promised him I would try to find an English copy.

  And all the time, day by day, there was the awareness of being surveyed. Going shopping in a supermarket of a Saturday morning there would be the sudden recognition of a checkered sports jacket in the crowd: Lieutenant Venter with the friendly, boyish face and curly hair; or Vosloo, the squarely built man with the dark complexion; or Koch, the tall athletic one with the large hands. Us
ually it was no more than a glimpse, often too brief to feel really sure that it had in fact been one of them. Perhaps it was his imagination. One reached a stage where one was expecting them everywhere, even in church.

  The letters in his mailbox, the envelopes slit open as if whoever had opened them had been too contemptuous even to bother about sealing them again – unless, of course, that, too, was done deliberately so he would know his mail was read by others. There never was anything of real importance: who would possibly send him letters endangering the security of the State? What annoyed him was the feeling, like the day in his study when they had searched his box of chess-pieces and the bowl of polished stones, that nothing belonging to him was treated with respect; nothing was sacred or private to them. “It’s like living in an aquarium,” he once noted on a page torn from an exercise book, “your every move scrutinised by eyes watching you through glass and water, surveying even the motion of your gills as you breathe.”

  Or elsewhere (dated 14 September):"It’s only when you realise that you’re being watched like this that you learn to look at yourself with new eyes. You learn to judge differently, to discover what is really essential about your needs and what may be discarded. Perhaps one should be grateful! – It teaches you topurify yourself, to rid yourself of whatever is redundant, to rely less on your own strength or judgement and more on grace. Everything permitted you is pure grace. For any moment of the day or night they may decide to pounce. Even in your sleep you are exposed. And the mere fact that, from day to day, from one hour to the next, you can say: This day, this hour is still granted me – becomes an experience so intensely marvellous that you learn to praise the Lord in a new way. Is this the way a leper feels as he takes leave of his limbs one by one? Or a man suffering from a terminal cancer? Oh it is a dry season. But infinitely precious in its own way.”