by Andre Brink
The children are running wild among the shelves; from time to time I surreptitiously check my watch. At a quarter to one we return to the glare of the sun outside. The girls are skipping ahead, chattering away, clutching their parcels. Anna and I follow in silence. Neither of us really has anything to say; the discovery of this morning lies too heavily on us.
‘I must go to Ouma’s lawyer,’ I tell her. ‘Why don’t you go with me and make an appointment to see him?’
‘No!’ she exclaims in panic, catching hold of my arm.
‘Anna, sooner or later – ’
‘Not now. Please. Please don’t talk about it any more. Anyway, it’s time to go home, I must make lunch.’ She avoids my accusing stare, her mouth again twitching nervously. ‘I’ll be all right, I promise. Are you sure you can get back on your own?’
‘Of course. There’ll be several people. I’ll bum a lift.’
And then they go. It is both a release and an anguish to see her drive off. The girls wave eagerly from the back.
Ouma’s lawyer is a doddering, kind old man. I explain her need to see him. He will go this afternoon, he says.
Now it is time. This is the place.
As I enter the building a group of men come out, preceded by their loud voices. They’re all in khaki, some in shorts, a few wearing hats. It is Casper and his gang. I recognise him too late to take avoiding action. He stops; the others move in. For a moment we are left alone, face to face. I see his expression change, but not in the way I would have expected: instead of becoming aggressive he looks guarded, then ingratiating, like a guilty dog wagging his tail.
‘And how are you this morning?’ he asks, aiming to kiss me.
I sidestep him. Without meaning to, knowing that in fact it is the last thing I should do, I hiss at him, ‘You fucking shit.’ And hurry into the building.
And now the outside world is stripped from me like a covering sheet, and I am left naked.
This time there are no other people in the waiting room. Sam Ndzuta must have given instructions to his secretary. She greets me with a brisk smile. She knocks on the door. A voice replies. She enters, then comes out again and stands aside to let me past. It is unbelievable that Sandile should be here.
As it turns out, he isn’t.
4
FOR SOME TIME I can only stare at them, from one to the other, trying to impose his face on those looking at me. My mouth begins to form a question, ‘Where –?’ But I don’t actually utter it. Perhaps he has gone out for a minute. He’ll be back. Then Sam places a heavy hand on my shoulder and ushers me towards them; in a daze I hear his voice as he breezily proceeds with the introductions, but there is an unreality about the scene, I feel very remote from them. There is a tall middle-aged woman in an elaborate outfit, Nomaza Debe. A man in an immaculate suit and striped shirt, fortyish, Vusi Mabena. And a portly old man whose white hair is starkly offset against the shining blackness of his skin, Thando Kumalo, a legendary name from the years of exile. I remember meeting him a few times, one of the grand old men, always beaming, his eyes filled with distances and spaces far beyond the present; he won’t remember me, I was small fry.
But I’m wrong. He pulls me against him, hugging me. And the remoteness I’ve been feeling begins to dissolve. ‘My child,’ he says contentedly. ‘What a long time it’s been.’ He gently pats my cheek. ‘I’m so sorry about this terrible thing that’s happened to your family.’
I feel the childish need to remain snuggled in his embrace, comforted by his bulk, the expanse of his belly, the deep rumbling tones of his voice; and to be reassured by his fatherly presence. But this is no time to disgrace myself in front of strangers. I must recover some semblance of composure.
Sam takes over again. And suddenly the questions are answered: the group has had to split to catch up with some of the morning’s unfinished business. Mongane Yaya and Sandile are at a meeting in the township, the rest of us are going to a guest house on the outskirts of the town for lunch; the other two may join us there afterwards. I don’t know whether I should laugh or burst into tears with relief. At the same time I feel furious with Sandile: why the hell didn’t he send one of the others to the meeting? How could he do this to me? But of course, he didn’t know; he wasn’t expecting me here. I must pull myself together. I must be patient. Having waited for five years I can get through another hour or so.
I take a deep breath, but I can feel the tension throbbing behind my eyes. The feeling of remoteness seeps back. I follow the others as they troop downstairs. Whatever happens is filtered through a screen, distanced by a telescope.
On the pavement outside an old woman in rags and tatters, her legs stretched out before her like two broomsticks, is selling bruised grapes, blackened bananas, apples, wilting carrots and beans and lettuces.
In a flush of demonstrative benevolence Vusi Mabena bends over her. ‘How are you, mother?’ he asks.
She stares vaguely up at him through her cataracts; a fume of methylated spirits wafts over us.
‘What do you think about the elections?’ he persists. ‘This is going to be a new place, I tell you.’
‘I’ll still have trouble selling my vegetables,’ she says.
It is old Thando Kumalo who takes some money from his pocket and buys a bunch of bananas, a plastic bag of apples, a wretched lettuce. ‘Keep the change, Sisi,’ he tells her. Bewildered, she stares after him, shaking her head. This man is bloody mad, she must be thinking.
Behind the building, where Sam’s car is waiting, Thando offers the wares to a boy begging under the pepper trees. I get into the car, squeezed between Thando and Vusi. The splendid woman Nomaza sits in front, her bottle-green head-dress blocking out the view. Not that I’m seeing much anyway. I’m thinking: Sandile, Sandile …
Thando puts a large hand on my knee. ‘It’s so very good to see you, Kristien. All of us together again. I almost can’t believe it.’
‘I’m not really back yet,’ I remind him, feeling inexpressibly guilty. ‘I only came back – because of my grandmother.’
‘All this violence. And it’s so unnecessary.’ He shakes his grizzled head. ‘You know, I went to see those kids in prison this morning.’
‘This is not a place for humans!’ I say impulsively, angrily.
Thando raises a bushy white eyebrow. ‘That’s where you’re wrong, if you don’t mind my saying so. It is a place for humans. It’s our place. Human beings are full of shit and misery and violence. But don’t forget, they’re also full of compassion and hope and courage. I’ve seen a lot of both since I came back. You can’t have one without the other.’
I know I must direct this conversation away from me. And I ask him the first hackneyed question that springs to my mind. ‘Thando, did you ever expect – while you were over there – that you’d really come back one day?’
‘One doesn’t think of things like that,’ he says, almost sternly. This is not what I expected. ‘If you do,’ he continues, ‘you’ll fall to pieces. So you just do what you’ve got to do. Because when you live in exile you’re struggling every day of your life against both the possible and the impossible.’
‘Now it’s happened?’
‘No, it hasn’t happened yet. It’s still happening. It started off badly when I just came back, I must tell you. After thirty-four years of exile.’ For a while his eyes cloud over. ‘Thirty-four years, right?’ And then he wades in. ‘You know, I grew up in this great old family house in Natal, on a green hill, overlooking the Indian ocean. I remember it so well. It was huge, huge.’ A smile. ‘Of course, everything was huge in those days. My father’s Black Australorps came up to my waist. Now, when I came back, it was all gone. Not just changed. Gone. As in nothing.’ He draws me the picture of the day he went back. Not a brick or a stone was left. Except the tree, of course. The old bluegum he’d planted himself was still there. The oleander, the syringa, the dark squat tree whose name Thando can’t remember, once enormous, now small and stunted. But the house was
gone. There were a few shacks on the property, squatters who’d moved in. A patch of mealies, a straggling pumpkin, scrawny chickens scratching in the long grass, a litter of kittens. He turns his deep round eyes to me. ‘But I have my memories, you see. So I can go on. And our little family graveyard was still there when I went to look for it. It was a windy day. There were insects in the grass. And a fine sun overhead. And I visited all the people who’d died while I was gone. My mother. My father. My two brothers. Some cousins. And the old people too, generations of them. Some of them killed way back by the Voortrekkers. All those hills are inhabited by the ancestors now, they never go away. And while they’re there I can always go back. Just to sit there and look out over the sea. So I know I belong here, it’s my place.’ He pats my knee again. ‘We’ll make it work.’ Adding more softly, ‘My God, we’ve got to.’
We reach the guest house, an old manor newly restored, in green and white, with rambling roses on trellises and a wave of lawns. Inside we are joined by a handful of other guests, the town’s VIPs and their spouses (‘spice’, Sandile used to joke): mayor, magistrate, a few local party leaders, all bursting with goodwill, flashing large mouthfuls of teeth, real and false. The women are dressed to kill, not swiftly and efficiently but hacking away with a blunt knife.
It begins, for me, on an unfortunate note when the starters are served, smoked salmon, and Vusi Mabena cracks a hoary chestnut. ‘Good. All the true delicacies in life are raw, aren’t they? Salmon, oysters, power.’
If Sandile had been here I might have taken it as a joke; now – from sheer spite, I suspect – I react viciously: ‘So power is still the name of the game?’
A silence descends.
Then, with a slightly forced laugh, and winking in my direction, Nomaza comments, ‘Don’t pay any attention to him, Kristien. It’s the death-rattle of a chauvinist.’
‘He doesn’t seem close to death to me,’ I say, trying to keep it light, but aware of the tension below which I find hard to suppress.
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ says Vusi, directing his most seductive smile at me. ‘I’m the first to admit that throughout the struggle women fought side by side with the men.’
‘But now that it’s over,’ Nomaza reminds him, ‘you think you can send us back to the kitchen, don’t you?’
‘I don’t think it’s a good thing for women to meddle with politics,’ says the mayor’s wife, the sort of woman who gives pretentiousness a bad name. ‘We can’t forsake our God-given role, can we? I mean, look at what happened to Winnie Mandela –’
‘This country has had many courageous women, black and white,’ says Thando in his deep voice. ‘We needed them in the past and we need them now.’
‘Behind every man you still find a woman,’ says the mayor’s wife as if she has just thought it up herself.
‘Isn’t that the problem?’ I ask, heedless. ‘Why must we always be behind them?’
‘Oh, but we hold the real power,’ says the magistrate’s wife. ‘It’s the woman who makes or breaks the man.’
‘And is that the only criterion?’ I ask. ‘To measure yourself in terms of what you can or cannot do to a man?’
‘We women have already achieved a lot,’ she retorts. ‘I’m thinking of Afrikaner women in particular.’
I raise my eyebrows.
She takes up the challenge: ‘We were right beside the men on the Great Trek, were we not? Every inch of the way. And when they were ready to give up it was the women who kept them going.’ She is on a roll now. ‘Even in our own century it was women who proof-read the translation of the Bible, wasn’t it?’
‘And who did the translation?’ I ask.
‘Anyway,’ says Vusi, ‘we were really talking about large political issues, about democracy, not about purely female matters.’
Swiftly, calmly, efficiently, Nomaza moves in. ‘If you deny women their self-esteem, you end up with a crippled democracy.’
‘How come?’
‘Because the whole Western model for democracy is the nuclear family.’
‘Nothing wrong with family values, is there?’ interrupts the mayor’s wife.
There is, as so often in such conversations, a feeling of déjà vu about it all; yet the fire with which Nomaza speaks lends new conviction to the familiar arguments. ‘You have a father who exercises all the authority,’ she says, ‘and a mother who’s expected to fulfil herself by living through the others, while the children are treated as their possessions. So how do you expect to arrive at democratic values if your every point of departure is inequality?’
‘I’m not sure I understand what you mean,’ says the mayor’s wife.
‘Don’t worry, dear,’ her husband consoles her. ‘I’ll explain it to you later.’
‘I think we should drink a toast to the women,’ Thando intervenes diplomatically. ‘Past and present.’ He raises his glass of mineral water.
‘To the women,’ says Nomaza. ‘A luta continua.’
And the dust settles, temporarily. Which requires a deliberate change of subject; as always.
(Will Sandile be late? Will he come at all?)
‘Are you satisfied with your visit so far?’ enquires the magistrate without focusing on anyone in particular.
It is again the smooth – the too smooth – Vusi who provides a synopsis of their morning’s discussions. After a briefing session with the mayor, the magistrate and the district commander of police, and a visit to the detainees, they interviewed a group of black community leaders, followed by a discussion with Casper and a hand-picked delegation from his commando.
‘We’re deeply worried about that element in our midst,’ says the mayor. ‘Personally, I’ve always held that apartheid is wrong.’
‘That is very reassuring,’ says Vusi. It is hard to make out whether he is serious or taking the mickey. ‘It’s astonishing how many people say that nowadays. Don’t you agree, Miss Müller?’
Caught unawares, I blurt out, ‘I’m afraid I have more faith in a right-winger who frankly admits that he hates blacks than in all these white males who suddenly try to persuade everybody that they’ve always been against apartheid.’
It is the wives who dart at me their most poisonous glances. But the mayor, no doubt used to handling difficult situations, smiles indulgently. ‘We realise you are obliged to say so, Miss Müller, being related to Casper Louw.’
‘By marriage only,’ I remind him. ‘I’m sure I can’t be blamed for that.’
‘There are some lunatic fringes to my family too,’ Thando comes to my rescue, chuckling. ‘I think it makes us both archetypal South Africans.’
‘This district is certainly no exception,’ says Nomaza. The flashpoint has been passed. ‘We’ve already met some of all persuasions. Those who live in fear of an apocalypse, those who just quietly go about their usual business, those who are praying, those who have lost faith. You name it.’
‘I can tell you one thing,’ says Vusi, ‘I’m just very, very glad that the unfortunate incident that started it all wasn’t caused, as many people first thought, by disaffected MKs. That would have been very bad for the ANC.’
‘I don’t think that is a consideration at all,’ says Thando, more sharply than I have yet heard him speak. (This, I am sure, is exactly how Sandile would have reacted.) ‘Surely there are more important things than political harm. As politicians we should be prepared to live with that. What concerns me is human lives. The point is that people should feel safe in their homes.’
‘The point,’ says Nomaza, ‘is that people should have homes to feel safe in.’
Thando smiles broadly. ‘The woman has spoken. And she is right.’ Then he becomes serious again. ‘The point is that there should be reason to hope, for everybody. All the suffering that has gone before, for years, for decades, my God, for centuries, should not be in vain. There was a very good, brave friend of mine who died before he could come back: he died, after fifteen years, from the effects of the torture he’d gone through b
efore he escaped. And before he died he said something I’ll never forget. He said, ‘All that suffering has taught me is the uselessness of suffering.’ But that’s not true. I tell you, it’s not true. We can make suffering worthwhile. It’s up to us to make that choice. And if there’s something we’ve earned by now, I think, it is the right to dare to hope.’
‘Hope for what?’ asks the magistrate, who clearly requires more facts.
‘For all of us to discover the simple truth that we’re in this together,’ says Thando. ‘That from now on, even if there’s still struggling and suffering ahead, we’ll be struggling and suffering together.’
The conversation continues to swirl past me; I no longer pay attention. This is not what I have come for. Perhaps, suggests what remains of my Calvinist conscience, it serves me right; my expectations were too personal.
Lunch draws to a close. My headache has turned into a migraine. I resign myself to the fact that Sandile won’t come any more; it is too late.
As we move through the glass door to the outside an elderly man emerges from the bar, taking very delicate, small steps, doing his utmost not to let on that he is well sozzled. In the process, not without considerable effort, he puts on his hat; but it is the wrong way round.
From behind the counter the barman, keeping a poker face, calls, ‘Oom Lammie, you’ve put your hat on back to front, man!’
The old man stops, teeters, looks round, and replies with withering dignity, ‘How the hell do you know which way I’m going?’ And goes out.
