The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  ‘Don’t let anyone ridicule Afrikaans, just because it uses compact constructions. The greatness of English is that it simplified High German, made it more attainable, knocked out the silly declensions. A German purist would have every right to scorn English as a bastardization, just as Dutchmen scorn Afrikaans as a cheapening of their language. That’s unfair. Two centuries from now Afrikaans may be a major language and Dutch may have disappeared, because Afrikaans speaks to simple needs, and therefore creates its own vitality.’

  The more volatile younger teachers were disappointed by the conciliatory approach, and one history teacher whispered, ‘She could be the spokesman for the Afrikaner universities.’ But then she launched into the heart of her message:

  ‘Before Soweto 1976 the black children of South Africa were advised that since their future lay in this country, they should adopt as their second language not English but Afrikaans. And they were ordered to use Afrikaans as the medium of instruction in half their subjects, when they clearly preferred to use English in all. They were right to demand English. To deny them that language would be a most grievous deprivation. [Here several teachers applauded.]

  ‘English is a universal language, a lingua franca in all parts of the world. Airlines fly by English. Scholarly reports from all countries are circulated in English. To have this language is to have a key to the world’s economies.

  ‘English also has a literature probably richer than that of any other language, because in English you have not only the immortal contributions of Milton and Shakespeare, Dickens and Jane Austen, but you also have contributions made by people like Ernest Hemingway from America, Patrick White from Australia and William Butler Yeats from Ireland. To surrender English when you have a chance to acquire it is like throwing away the key to a treasury.

  ‘Learn Afrikaans to help you in your daily life in this country, but learn English to help you live in the whole world. The conqueror who makes me learn his language makes me a slave. The edict that makes me learn a language spoken by only a few people puts me in a cage. The teacher who enables me to learn the lingua franca of the entire world sets me free. If you learn Afrikaans, you will be able to read a few fine books; if you learn English, you will be able to read the greatest body of learning and literature in the world.’

  The principals applauded; the teachers cheered; the students went out and marched with banners. The police looked diligently for Mrs. Saltwood, but she had traveled by back routes to her home in Johannesburg; the next day she flew to Cape Town with a friend who served with her on the board of the Black Sash. What was more important, they made arrangements to bowl together on the Lady Anne Barnard team.

  On June 1 Laura Saltwood rose at seven, read from the little book of Shakespeare’s sonnets which she kept with her, and after a spare breakfast in her friend’s kitchen, dressed in her bowls uniform: white stockings, white shoes with pale blue trim, white dress with heavy braided piping, white sweater with the Lady Anne Barnard colors on the pocket, and a stiff white straw hat with Barnard streamers. A selected group of women, most of them Church of England, had proudly worn this uniform for the past eighty years, and now twelve of them journeyed by different ways to the bowling green in the park, where they were to meet the distinguished Ladies of the Castle. During much of South African history this team had enrolled titled members.

  Most of the players were in position when Laura arrived; some were much older than she; most were in their fifties. They were a handsome group of women, suntanned, each in proper uniform, each keen on the game which they had played for decades. The Ladies of the Castle could be easily differentiated from Laura’s team: they wore brown shoes with very heavy rubber soles, and their hats had wide brims, down in front, up in back, with ribbons that hung neatly from the left side. It was obvious that they intended to win.

  No one, either from the Barnards or the Castles, spoke to Mrs. Saltwood in any way other than their normal greeting on a June morning when the air was brisk and the sides of the playing field rimmed with beds of late-autumn flowers, but their tenseness indicated that this was not an ordinary day.

  Laura was paired with the best bowler on the Barnards, Mrs. Grimsby, a stern-faced woman who intimidated her opponents by wearing on her dress a band of six medals she had won in international competitions. She was formidable, and shook Laura’s hand firmly when they met: ‘We’ll have at them, yes?’

  ‘It’s our turn to win,’ Laura said.

  The teams bowled in sets of four, two opponents at one end of the rink facing two at the other. Today Laura would be bowling against Mrs. Phelps-Jones, who consistently beat her, but she felt that with Mrs. Grimsby at the other end, they just might pull off a surprise victory.

  Laura won the right to send down the target bowl, the jack, which she did with some skill, landing it almost exactly the right distance from the backstop, but a little too much to the right. Since other foursomes would be playing at the same time on adjoining rinks, it was customary to move the jack into the center of the lane, at the distance set, and when this was done, the game began.

  Laura and Mrs. Phelps-Jones were each to bowl four balls, Laura’s marked with a small blue triangle inset into the wood, her opponent’s with a green circle. A small mat was spread to protect the grass where the bowlers would be standing throughout the game, and on it Laura took two firm steps, swinging her right arm at the same time and delivering a ball with a decided spin. She launched it far to the left of her target, but since it was not perfectly round and since she had been careful to start it on its largest axis, it gradually twisted itself to the right, ending up not too far from the jack.

  Mrs. Phelps-Jones was not daunted. Taking over the mat, she swung her first bowl well to the right, watching with satisfaction as it cut a large parabola toward the left, ending closer to the jack than Laura’s. At the end of this first head, Mrs. Phelps-Jones scored one point, for her first ball rested closer than any that Laura could send down, but Laura escaped disaster because one of her bowls was better than her opponent’s second closest.

  Now it was Mrs. Grimsby’s turn, and she was a terror. Sending her wood right-to-left, she seemed to have implanted a magnet in the jack, for it drew her wood to it, and at the end of that head she had scored a cheering three. The game continued close through the twenty-one heads, with Mrs. Grimsby scoring the points that Laura failed to make. It was a splendid competition, with all four ladies delighted by the closeness.

  It was Mrs. Grimsby who first saw them. She had delivered a smashing wood, sharp right-to-left, that knocked away two of her opponent’s bowls, and when she looked up, they were standing off to one side, two men in dark suits watching the game, saying nothing.

  Mrs. Grimsby’s opponent saw them next, then all the women on the far ends of the rinks. No one spoke, but gradually their changed expressions alerted the women, whose backs were to the men. Finally Mrs. Phelps-Jones said matter-of-factly, ‘Laura, I think they’ve come.’

  Mrs. Saltwood did not look up. She was checking the position of the balls sent to their end by Mrs. Grimsby and her opponent, and she said, ‘I think Esther has two, do you agree?’

  Mrs. Phelps-Jones bent over to inspect and said, ‘Two, right.’

  The game continued, as the men intended it should, and although Laura did poorly, the remarkable bowling of Mrs. Grimsby enabled their side to win 25–21, but as Laura knelt to recover the bowls, she saw that Mrs. Phelps-Jones was weeping, and when she moved down the rink to congratulate Mrs. Grimsby, she found that she, too, was crying.

  It was Mrs. Grimsby’s opponent who spoke: ‘Laura, you were the dearest woman in the teams. May I kiss you?’

  Tears streaming down their faces, the women gave her their farewells, aware that they would probably never again compete with this fiery, wonderful woman. When they were finished, the two men moved forward, stood facing Mrs. Saltwood, and said quietly, ‘Laura Saltwood, you are banned.’

  She sat in her house, alone. For the nex
t five years she must never be seen in the presence of more than one other person. She could attend no public meeting of any kind, nor address any gathering of even three, nor publish anything, nor consult with anyone except her doctor, her dentist and her lawyer, but not even them in unison.

  No mention of her could be made in the public press; no quotation could ever appear in print of anything she had ever done or said or written or thought. She could not receive money from abroad, or appear on radio or television. If she went into town, she must never appear with more than one other person, and if friends stopped to talk with her, she was obliged to turn them aside.

  It was because she had anticipated this imprisonment that she had sent her son and his family out of the country, for as a banned woman she would not have been free to meet with them or to travel with them on vacations of any kind, and she did not want them to share such painful limitations.

  When anyone visited her, she had to leave her door open so that police or even strangers could satisfy themselves that she was not conducting a meeting, and if more than one person came to her house, with spying neighbors knowing that they were there, she had to provide chairs for the extras so that they could sit outside and be seen as not participating in the visit.

  Since she would never be told what charges had been brought against her, there was no way to defend herself against the banning or clear herself once it had been imposed. Some eighty or ninety minor officials had the right to recommend to higher authorities the names of those they disliked, but the victims would never know who the accusers were or what had provoked them. In Laura’s case heavy emphasis was placed on the report from the secret operations maintained by the South African government in London:

  Our agent 18-52 followed Mrs. Saltwood to Cambridge University, where her brother Wexton enrolled in the Communist Party prior to his escape to Moscow, and here she visited his old college Clare, from which she went to the banks of the River Cam at King’s College, where a courier in a long coat approached her once, went to a telephone, and approached her a second time with messages not heard.

  Only certain types of citizens were apt to be banned: newspapermen, writers, clergymen who strayed from the dictates of the Dutch Reformed Church, women who agitated, and of course any black who showed signs of potential leadership. The good thing about banning, from the government’s point of view, was that it involved no prolonged court case, no publicity, and no obnoxious statements by the accused in their defense. It was clean, effective and final.

  On the third night of her banning, Laura Saltwood was not surprised when at four in the morning a bomb exploded outside her door. When the government designated a person like Mrs. Saltwood as objectionable, she became a free target for every hoodlum in the neighborhood, and the police did little to discourage the rabble from bombing and firing the homes of banned persons. In recent years six hundred and seventeen such bombings and attacks had been made, and never once did the police track down the culprits. Always the authorities said, ‘The bombing was despicable. Every effort is being made to identify those responsible.’ In some of the cases, including Mrs. Saltwood’s, fragments of the bomb contained serial numbers comparable to those issued to the police, but the best detectives in the country could not track down the perpetrators. They could trace a lone fountain pen sent into the country by a church in Geneva and know every person who handled it before it found its way to some black scholar, but they could not track down a bomb whose serial number indicated its place of manufacture, its designation, and who had signed for its receipt.

  Of the previous attacks, many had resulted in disastrous fires, several had maimed and two had killed, but no suspect had ever even been listed, let alone arrested. In Mrs. Saltwood’s case, the bomb destroyed a door and left a heavy fire-stain on the woodwork, but that was all. What the next one would do she could not know, but there would surely be a next one, which the police would investigate and the officials in Pretoria deplore.

  The harshest aspect of Laura Saltwood’s banning was that on the morning of the day when her five years expired, the same two men could appear at her door and say quietly, ‘Laura Saltwood, you are banned for five more years,’ and after that, there could be another five, and another.

  That was why the members of the Lady Anne Barnard Club wept as they bade her goodbye that first day of June. They expected never to see her free again.

  In his discussions with young Afrikaners, both at the fossicking and at Vrymeer, Saltwood was disturbed by the cavalier manner in which they dismissed world opinion. The United Nations would pass a resolution condemning South Africa for its racial policies, or its treatment of Indians, and the Troxel boys would laugh: ‘What can they do about it? They need our minerals. To hell with them.’ Newspapers in London and New York would print bitter editorials, and the young geologists working with Philip would sneer: ‘What can England and the United States do? They’ve got to rely on us as bulwarks against Communism, so the bleeding hearts can bloody well drop dead.’

  No outsider could talk with these vital young people without becoming convinced that they intended using military force to defend their way of life and were prepared to use their guns against either outside threats or internal ones. ‘Let their armies step one foot across our borders,’ Frikkie said, ‘and we’ll blow their heads off.’

  Jopie made a much different point: ‘If this Jonathan Nxumalo or any of his kind try to infiltrate us from Moçambique, we’ll shoot them the moment they step on our soil. And we’ll shoot any Kaffir inside our country who raises a finger to help them.’

  ‘You sound like the Götterdämmerung Commando,’ Saltwood said one Sunday afternoon at the farm.

  ‘What’s that?’ Jopie asked.

  ‘A German myth. The gods have loused everything up, hideously, so they go into laager, and to solve their problems, they burn down all of heaven.’

  ‘I volunteer for that commando,’ Jopie said.

  ‘I, too,’ said Sannie.

  ‘You mean you would risk destroying the whole structure of South Africa to prolong your advantage?’

  This was the kind of rhetorical question that would have been effective among university students in Paris or Berlin. At Vrymeer it evoked from Frikkie an answer which simply stunned Saltwood: ‘No American could understand our situation. You have a problem with your blacks which you solve in ways harmonious to your history. But what you do bears no relationship to us. Because God placed us here to do His work. He put us here to serve as a bulwark of Christian civilization. We must stay.’

  Philip gasped. In the United States, Frikkie and Jopie would be professional football players, and he could not conceive of a pair of athletes from the Dallas Cowboys or the Denver Broncos citing God as the sponsor of their political behavior. ‘Do you believe what you just said?’ he asked, and Sannie replied, ‘We were placed here to do God’s will, and we shall do it.’ When Philip tried to question her, she interrupted: ‘If Frikkie and Jopie were to be killed in the first battle, I’d take up their guns.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘To preserve our Christian way of life.’

  ‘You would go out to your rondavels and shoot the Nxumalos?’

  ‘I certainly would.’ And almost imperceptibly she moved toward the cousins.

  Silence fell in the kitchen. This was the first intimation that she had decided to cast her lot with the Troxels and against the American intruder, and Saltwood decided it was futile to speak further. Which of the cousins she would ultimately prefer was not discernible, but it was clear that she had enlisted in their Götterdämmerung Commando.

  Later, when he was alone with her, he dared to reopen the difficult subject, but at the first tentative question she made her position clear: ‘Philip, we’re a small group of white people on the edge of a hostile black continent. God placed us here for a specific purpose and gave us a commission. I assure you that we will all perish before we prove false to that obligation.’

  ‘Sann
ie, it seems to me you’re overpowered by the attitude of Frikkie and Jopie. What do your parents think?’

  ‘What Mother thinks isn’t relevant, she’s English. But if you want to ask Father …’

  They went to Marius in his study, a room lined with books he had used at Oxford and others he had imported from London and New York through the years. ‘In my father’s day,’ he said, ‘this room contained one book, that old Bible. Now I can’t even read the Dutch.’

  ‘We’ve been having a sharp argument, Father. Philip accuses the cousins and me of being members of a Götterdämmerung Commando. Burning South Africa down to save it.’

  ‘He’s correct about your attitudes now. But as you grow older …’

  ‘I’ll grow more convinced. I have no patience …’

  ‘Not now, but when you face the real alternatives.’

  ‘What are they?’

  Marius leaned back. For some time now he had been worried about Sannie’s growing militarism; she behaved as if she thought a machine gun answered all questions. But he also wondered about his own attitudes; had his years at Oxford and his marriage to an Englishwoman contaminated him? Well he remembered his father’s telling him what Dominee Brongersma had said about his marriage to a non-Afrikaner: ‘Now he can never join the Broederbond … never play a major role in our society.’ Brongersma had been right. No man who had chosen Oxford above the captaincy of the Springboks, and an English wife over a loyal Afrikaner, could be other than an outcast from the governing cadre; he had never been taken into the confidences of anyone seriously connected with government and had existed in a kind of limbo, neither Afrikaner nor English. He once said of himself, ‘I’m like an Afrikaner Coloured,’ and having admitted this, he realized that his daughter Sannie, who seemed bent on becoming pure Afrikaner, would hold anything he said in suspicion.