Love in the Time of Apartheid

by Frederic Hunter

  Seagulls were riding the air currents out over the waves. Gat and his friend watched them for some moments without speaking.

  “May I ask you about something that perplexes me?”

  “Go ahead,” said Gat.

  “Why are white people like this?” The man seemed genuinely baffled. “They are treacherous, greedy, deceitful. They hate us for the color of our skins. Why is this?”

  “Not all white people hate you. I hope you know that.”

  “Perhaps. But it is the same story everywhere. White people go to America for religious freedom. And what do they do? They exterminate Indians. They enslave us to work their plantations and in their constitution they declare that we are three-fifths of a person. Why is this?” The man looked at Gat for an explanation, the Lumumba goatee on his chin moving as he clenched his teeth. “The Belgians go to the Congo and kill Congolese. The Dutch and the French and the English come here and kill us. The Germans go into South West and try to exterminate the Herreros. Like they later killed the Jews. And these whites all claim to worship a Christ who told them: ‘Love one another. Love your enemies.’ Why is this? Is it all treachery?”

  Gat finally said, “I’ve stood in front of a mirror, looking at my white skin, and asked myself those same questions.”

  Finally the counterman looked at his watch and said, “I must go back.” Then he added, “You are the first white man who has looked at me and seen that with my mustache and goatee beard I honor Lumumba.”

  “How can that be?”

  “Because white people look at me and see nothing. I’m invisible to them.”

  “You’re not invisible to me,” Gat said. “And I wish you well.” He extended his hand to the African. “Put your hand in mine to prove you’re not invisible.”

  They shook hands. The man took Gat’s hand in both of his. When he released it, he touched his right hand to his heart.

  RETURNING TO Cape Town, Gat walked through the gardens of Parliament, thinking of the counterman. Whenever he passed an African, he tried to make eye contact so that each individual would know that for at least one white man he was not invisible. Met with Gat’s nod, Africans glanced behind them to see who Gat was greeting. When they realized he might be looking at them, they hurried away. It was as if an unknown white man’s looking at them could only bring them trouble. Still, Gat persisted. The command to “Disappear” gave him license to be different from the man he’d been in Katanga.

  Down at the Foreshore he stood at the edge of Table Bay and looked out at the fog beginning to engulf Robben Island. Once a leper colony, now a prison, that was where the Justice Mr. De Wet, about whom he’d been reading, would send the treason trial defendants if, in fact, he decided to spare their lives. Gat suddenly felt as lonely and forgotten as the prisoners on that island.

  The sun left Table Mountain and behind him the city began to clothe itself in lights. He wandered up into District Six. It was a section of labyrinthine streets that smelled of densely packed people of many races, their spices and their cooking, an area of Cape Dutch houses that seemed smashed together with a force that had squeezed them thin and elongated them. Some of the buildings had balconies. People sat on them, taking the air, calling to one another, singing along with their radios. There were young men on the streets, some pushing girlfriends against buildings to kiss them. There were women, too, Coloured and Bantu, as they were called here, and occasionally young white women, students or young office workers, tasting a teeming life of racial jumble from which marriage and maturity would separate them forever.

  His soldier’s eye told Gat that District Six would be a useful bastion from which to fight a revolt. The sheer numbers of residents militated against effective occupation or control. From the balconies and rooftops snipers could fire and escape, simply disappear. The streets and alleys could provide avenues of retreat and then be barricaded. No wonder the government was talking about declaring District Six a white area, tearing down the old buildings, removing the Coloured population to the Cape Flats, and straightening the streets.

  Gat came upon a place in an alley with a sign announcing Hollywood Pizza. He went in and had pizza that was soggy and a beer that mostly failed to foam. The place was empty except for him and the two Coloured women who ran it. He tried to converse with them, but could not get beyond the “baas” that they insisted on calling him. Sitting alone he felt all the bad stuff of Katanga creeping back on him.

  Wandering on he came to a jazz club. He went in, bought a drink, and listened to the music of a five-piece band of Coloureds. A young woman, her skin very yellow in the dim light, her face flat and cheekbones prominent, came to sit with him. She placed her hand high on his thigh and asked him to buy her a drink. He removed her hand. The woman left him. Other women tried their luck. Their enticements only increased Gat’s depression.

  As he left the district, moving along its sidewalks, his soldier’s instincts gave warning: he was being followed. By whom? An assassin. Why not? After all, those who lived by the gun . . . Now it was his turn. He took refuge in an alley and watched the street. And shrugged. If that was his fate, so be it. If the assassin were professional, his work clean and quick, Gat would know only that he’d arrived at the next place. If that place existed.

  He stood in the alley for long minutes. Nothing happened. Resuming his stroll, he received the same warning. How, he wondered, had the pursuer picked up his trail here? And who was he? Michels? A grim smile at the thought of Michels as an assassin. What a way to die! Michels made a mess of every assignment he undertook. Gat ducked around an entire city block, trying to shake his pursuer. The same warning came again. The pursuer was on his trail.

  Moving toward the Mount Nelson Hotel, walking fast now, he came to a movie theater. He paid his admission. He slipped into the theater’s darkness, into a seat in the back row. He kept watch. The movie had already started, a vehicle for Doris Day. He noticed an exit door at the side of the screen. If his pursuer entered, he would flee through there. No one came in. Keeping watch, Gat heard the movie’s cheery prattle. He began to watch it. After walking through District Six with its jumbled vitality, its pungency and its music, he felt disoriented to move into the American dreamland of Doris Day. Did Americans really live in such affluence? What about the sit-ins and the southern states’ apartheid the counterman had mentioned? Did none of that find its way into their movies? Were there really American women like this one, pert, relentlessly cheery, professionally virginal? Did they permit love-making? Were their bodies as scrubbed and lightweight as their brains?

  After a while, still feeling on edge, Gat perceived the nature of his condition. The pursuer was inside him. Realizing that, he left the movie. He walked back to the hotel. He sat in the lobby, thumbing through newspapers. Ten p.m. He was feeling lonely, lost. Could he go to the actress’s door and knock? Could he look bashful and say, “I think I left my toothbrush.” Or he could phone her. Say simply, “Could I come up?” He truly wished he could disappear.

  He made himself remain in the lobby. There he remembered the village girl who had brought him food when he was living in the back of a pickup in the Equateur. He told himself the story of their meetings. His loneliness increased. Well after eleven he went to his room. A note was waiting under his door. A woman’s writing. An invitation to depression. He crumpled it without reading it and threw it into the trash. In his shorts and tee shirt he did pushups until he could rise no longer from the floor. He crawled into bed and waited for sleep, trying not to think about Katanga and what had happened there.

  CHAPTER THREE

  CAPE TOWN

  SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 1961

  Gat sat up in bed. He was dreaming again, trying to run from Francqui Dam and the smell of gunpowder in the air. His body felt icy although it was soaking in sweat. He realized he was in the hotel. Alone.

  He slid from the bed, found his way to the bathroom, located the sink, turned on the water. He filled the cup of his hands, drank, and
bathed his face. He felt for the light switch, drops of water swimming off his face onto his tee shirt. Light on, he glanced confusedly about, looked for his toothbrush, pushed toothpaste onto it. In his dream, vomit rose in his throat. He had to scrub that taste away.

  He shucked off underwear. He turned on the shower and entered it. Cold water jarred him awake. As it warmed, he regained his calm. He let the water stream over him, getting his bearings. He thought: What’s the matter with you?

  DRESSED IN the suit, the white shirt, and a tie he had not yet worn, Gat strolled through the Parliament gardens to an imposing church. He had decided to get with people. A plaque at the entry designated it the Groote Kerk, on the site where Cape Town’s first church was built in 1678. Gat had hardly ever entered a Protestant church. So strong was his desire to connect with people, however, that he would risk attending a service.

  Worshippers—whites only, of course—streamed into it, the men in black suits and broad-brimmed black hats, the women in summer dresses, heels, and hose. Gloves protected the women’s hands; demure hats, some with veils drawn over their faces, covered their heads. Gat followed the faithful inside.

  It was a Dutch Reformed service. The minister—the dominee—spoke in an Afrikaans that, Gat thought, must be an offshoot of a much earlier Dutch. His fluency in Flemish allowed him to follow much of the sermon. But instead of listening, he gazed at the fittings of the church and marveled at the piety of the overdressed congregation. He decided to venture out after the service to Sea Point to look for a cheaper hotel.

  As he left the church, a man drew near him, a person of vigorous middle age with a well-muscled frame shaking hands and bantering with worshippers. Appropriately suited, his close-clipped blond hair turning to gray on a head too large for his short body, he held himself erect, almost military in bearing. By no means good-looking, the man was, in fact, square-headedly unattractive. Even so, he exuded selfconfidence. His openness of manner and evident pleasure in being himself drew people to him. Reaching out for the hands of nearby burghers, exuding jovial charm, he moved with an infectious vitality and power.

  Gat sensed that the man’s assured self-possession included the certainty of his own moral probity. It was Gat’s experience that such a quality engendered in some men a capacity for brutality toward others. In this Afrikaner it would be toward blacks and Coloureds, those whose otherness might threaten his view of public order. As the man drew closer, Gat heard those who shook his hand deferentially call him Colonel.

  The man reached out for Gat as he drew abreast of him. “Gooie more,” he said. He extended his hand. Gat shook it.

  “Good morning,” Gat answered, resisting the man’s charm.

  “Good morning then,” said the man with a laugh. “Did you get anything out of the service?” Gat smiled. “You’re a visitor? I’m Piet Rousseau.”

  “Yes,” Gat said. “In Cape Town for a few days.” He now saw a woman, surely Rousseau’s wife, standing several paces behind him. With her were a girl, perhaps twenty, quite attractive, and a young man several years older, no doubt their children. Gat introduced himself, saying that his name was Adriaan Gautier, but that people called him Gat.

  “Welcome,” said Rousseau. “Where are you visiting from?”

  Gat looked more carefully at the girl. She was modest, dutiful, thinking her own thoughts. Gat thought she might prove interesting, even lovely, if someone lit a fire in her. If the man were truly a colonel, Gat calculated, he would welcome an opportunity to quiz Gat about events he had witnessed. And so he replied, “I’ve been in the Congo. In Katanga.”

  “How did you happen to be there?” Rousseau inquired.

  “I’m a captain in the Belgian Army,” Gat said. “Seconded to the Katanga Gendarmerie.”

  “Margaret,” Rousseau declared, turning to his wife, “we must give Captain Gautier some lunch.” Rousseau introduced his wife and the blonde daughter, Petra. She smiled perfunctorily in the way a child might curtsy. As Rousseau presented the young man—“This is Kobus Terreblanche,” he said—Gat watched the girl examine him out of deep, brown eyes as if he were some exotic creature. “Our friend and Petra’s friend,” the colonel continued. Gat turned to shake the young man’s hand. Tall, blond, with large, sturdy bones, he stood casually erect and was conventionally handsome in a way that suggested he lived an ordered life, possessed little imagination, and had no conception that the world might be complex. Rousseau took Gat’s elbow to lead him from the church.

  Gat looked again at the girl—casually, only a glance. But he noticed the girl’s mother watching him as if he were a predator preparing to make a meal of her child. Gat nodded to the woman and made himself smile. The girl did not seem to notice.

  Driving to the Rousseau house, Gat sat in the backseat with the young couple, Petra in the middle. Whenever he brushed her arm or leg, the girl leaned away from him as if singed by his touch. Coming from Central Africa where people in tight quarters—post office lines, for instance—crowded against one another, Gat found this behavior amusing. He began intentionally nudging her elbow. She moved away. Sensing her awareness of Gat, Terreblanche claimed his rights to her by holding her hand so tightly that his knuckles showed white.

  “Sir, did I hear people calling you colonel?” Gat asked. “Are you army?”

  Ignoring the question, Rousseau mentioned that his forebears had lived in the city for more than two centuries. Terreblanche leaned forward to look at Gat across the girl. “Police,” he remarked with prideful respect. Rousseau called attention to the neighborhood, noting that as a boy he had walked to school along these very streets.

  The family lived in a handsome Cape Dutch house on the upsweep of Table Mountain, not large but well maintained. The parlor welcomed visitors with the reserve of a museum. Antique furniture stood on a polished slate floor. Ancestors in the dark dress of seventeenth-century burghers gazed out from large portraits. A grand piano festooned with sepia photographs in ornate silver frames occupied a corner of the room. Rousseau had small, stubby hands, Gat noticed. They might serve to deliver sharp blows, but did not seem likely to coax melodies out of a piano. He wondered if the girl played.

  The party moved to a sunny, more intimate room—the “small parlor,” they called it. It offered a comfortable pair of couches with matching armchairs. While Petra and her mother removed their hats, pulled off their gloves, and set them on a table overlooking a small garden outside, Rousseau explained to Gat that Petra had just matriculated from secondary school at Herschel.

  The girl glanced at her father, miffed that he should unfold the landmarks of her life as if she were a child too shy to speak for herself. Gat watched her, amused at her predicament. She rolled her eyes to him as her father continued, mentioning that in another week she would leave for varsity, for “Wits,” the University of the Witswatersrand in Johannesburg. It was pronounced “Vits”—for w’s took a v sound in Afrikaans just as v’s took an f sound.

  Terreblanche threw off his suit coat, grabbed the sports section of the paper, and flopped down on the couch. He pulled Petra onto the couch beside him. Gat asked if he, too, were a student. “I’m at Stellenbosch,” Terreblanche replied. “It’s the country’s best varsity, the very heart of Afrikanerdom. Wits is only so-so.” He nudged Petra.

  “They take a rotten apple now and then at Stellenbosch,” she remarked.

  “There may be news here of the Congo,” Rousseau said, giving Gat the paper’s front page. “Maybe you can find out what’s happened to your friend Lumumba.”

  The girl glanced up at Gat with interest. “Is Patrice Lumumba a friend of yours?” she asked.

  “That’s irony, Pet,” Terreblanche remarked from deep within the sports page.

  Petra continued to watch Gat. “Have you met Lumumba?” she asked.

  Terreblanche looked up from his paper. “Pet!” he chided with a patronizing smile. “Is it likely that Captain Gautier and Lumumba move in the same circles?”

  Gat and the
girl looked at one another. “Do you play that piano in there?”

  “Doesn’t Father wish!” she said, laughing. “He tried to make me learn. But every time the teacher came, she ended up running from the house in tears.” She smiled defiantly at her father. “No one plays,” she said, hesitating slightly, then added, “anymore. The piano’s there to show off old photos.”

  A Coloured servant entered, pushing a cart that held a silver teapot and cups for them all. “We’ll take it in the garden, Elsie,” Margaret Rousseau told the servant. Rousseau opened french doors leading into the garden and they all went outside, Terreblanche taking Petra’s hand and bringing along his paper. Rousseau inspected a bed of aloes and their long-stalked orange blossoms. Margaret Rousseau served the tea. Gat noticed the servant’s small dwelling, attached to the garage at the rear of the property.

  “You all have French names,” Gat remarked.

  “Petra’s not a French name,” the girl remarked challengingly.

  “Neither is Kobus,” added Terreblanche.

  “None of us speaks any French,” said Margaret Rousseau. “I’m the only one with a decent excuse. My background’s English. My maiden name was Smith.”

  “Mother will let you think she came from the Smiths who gave their names to Ladysmith and Harrismith. He was a general or something—”

  “Governor, dear,” corrected the mother.

  “But it isn’t true,” the girl continued. “Her father was a blacksmith. A white blacksmith, isn’t that right? Or was he a black whitesmith? I’m never sure which.” She glanced at Gat and bit her lip so as not to break into a smile.

  “My great-grandfather, Petra,” the mother again corrected. “You might as well get it right. And don’t be so saucy.” She turned to Gat. “My father was a small town banker in Natal. I’m an English speaker.”