Petra said, “Now I know why people are always whispering about this as if it were something extraordinary. It is.”
Far away in the hall downstairs the phone rang.
Gat held Petra so that she would not move. But she had no intention of moving.
“It’s— Let’s see,” she said. “Maybe it’s Kobus calling to see if I feel better. I could tell him the doctor is with me now.”
“His root remedy . . .”
“Yes, works wonders.” The phone continued to ring. “Or,” she said, “it’s Hazel wanting to be sure I got home.”
“Let Hazel wonder,” Gat said.
“If I talked to her, I’d have to tell her you’re here.”
“Why do that?”
“To hear her scream.” They laughed together. “She’d ask, ‘What happened?’ and I’d have to tell her because I’d want to hear her scream again.” Gat chuckled. Petra screamed gleefully herself. “Or it’s my mother. And I don’t want to talk to my mother.”
Finally the phone stopped ringing. Petra gazed at the ceiling and finally asked, “Is there any reason you have to stay in Cape Town?”
“To see you.”
“Then why don’t you drive me to varsity?”
Gat raised himself to his elbow. “Your parents seemed keen on doing that.”
“I want you to do it.” Gat gazed down at her. “We’ll toss my things into my car— The car I use— Get your things at the hotel and be on our way.”
Gat stretched out beside her, took her in his arms, and held her gently. “You don’t know anything about me.”
She pulled back her head to look at him. “All I need to.”
“It’s not enough. There are things you should know.”
She kissed him, held him tight.
“I came down here because— I executed a man in Katanga. Three men actually.”
She said nothing. When her hold on him loosened, he held her more tightly. “Are you on the run?”
“It was an official execution.”
“What does that mean?”
“I was acting under orders from the State of Katanga. Which means from the mining bosses at Union Minière. I got rid of people they found inconvenient.” He added, “Which is inconvenient for me because I became a soldier to protect people, not to execute them so that rich people, who never dirty their own hands, can get even richer.”
The girl sat up, feeling suddenly naked in the presence not of her lover, but of a stranger. She covered herself with the sheet. In bed with an executioner? She had given her virginity to a killer? In the night he had gently opened a closed part of her body, freeing her. Just this morning his body had shaken her with joys she had never imagined possible. That such convulsions, such pleasures, resided inside her had never . . . Now the opened part of her body ached.
She hunched forward, wondering what would happen. Gat lightly laid his hand on her back. She recoiled. He began gently to caress her back, rubbing warmth into it. Finally she began to relax. These aren’t the hands of a killer, she thought. She turned to look at him, her brown eyes large and wanting to trust him. “But you were under orders, you said. So—” Her voice trailed off.
He drew the sheet around her shoulders. “But the State of Katanga does not exist in law,” he said. “So even if there were orders, the killings—” She gazed at him, not understanding. “They might be seen as criminal acts. Murders.”
She scrutinized him, surprised at the word.
They watched each other, Gat wanting to hold the girl, but fearful of frightening her. Executions. He regarded them as murders. “If the Katanga secession fails, I could be hauled before a jury.”
“But you were under orders.”
“But not written orders.” They watched each other. “Could I have refused to act without written orders? No. So it would be my word against that of the rich men. The Belgian mining magnates and Katanga politicians, they will all say, ‘No one was to be executed. Gat acted on his own.’ If that happens, I will pay the price.”
Petra stared into Gat’s eyes. He drew her to him. He was staring now at Petra’s blonde hair, but he saw in his mind the face of the men he had killed, their eyes resigned but imploring. He smelled the odor of gunpowder, heard the gunshots reverberating, felt the chill of the night air and the presence behind him of the state dignitaries watching the murders. With his arms about the girl, he felt emptiness inside him. He tried to let his skin think for him, tried to feel only the girl.
“I can’t believe you’d murder anyone,” Petra said.
“Because you know nothing about me. I did it. I executed them.”
“Who were they?”
“I can’t tell you who.”
“Men I’d heard of?” Gat said nothing. Finally he released Petra, lay on his back, and pulled the blanket to his waist. “That’s why it would have been chivalrous to leave in the middle of the night.”
Petra said, “I don’t understand any of this.” He had been so gentle with her, leading her so safely where she wanted to go, into womanhood. “Why did you come here?”
“My commanding officer ordered me to take some leave.”
“Why not Europe?”
“It’s winter there. I didn’t want to be any colder than I was already feeling.”
“It bothered you then.”
“Of course, it bothered me! I’ve been used by industrialists who want—at any cost—to preserve their wealth. I’m not the only one who’s bothered. There’s another officer down here. He’s sure they’ll send someone to assassinate us.”
Petra felt a cold shiver of fear and turned to snuggle against him. “Why?”
“So we can’t tell anyone.” She turned him toward her. “I don’t think that’s going to happen,” he assured her. “It infuriates me to be used that way. And I may have used you. For that I’m sorry.”
“How have you used me?”
“Ever since this happened, I’ve felt dead inside. I needed to act out the processes of—” He hesitated. “Of making joy with someone like you. I’ve needed to hold on to someone like you. To get my life back.”
“You didn’t use me. I wanted it to happen. For all you know I used you.”
“Anytime,” he told her. “Available anytime for that.”
“Drive me to Joeys,” Petra implored. “I couldn’t stand it if I never saw you again.” She smiled mischievously. “Anyway I want to tell the girls in the dorm that it was my lover, not my parents, who brought me to varsity.”
WHILE GAT showered, Petra put on a robe and went to the small parlor to retrieve the clothes she shed there. As she was returning back up the stairs, the phone rang. “Petra, are you feeling better?” Kobus asked. “I called earlier. Were you asleep?”
“I must have been in the bathroom. I’m a little better.” She realized her voice sounded healthy. “Maybe I should stay in town. You go out to Stellenbosch. I’ll—”
“But when will I see you then?”
She really did not want to see anyone just now, she said. She had been up a good part of the night and parts of her body were feeling in ways they never had. It delighted her to spin not-quite falsehoods and hear Kobus’s concern, his voice cooing with sympathy. She insisted that she could not see anyone just now and hung up as soon as she could.
When Petra returned to the guest room, Gat helped her out of the robe. When she went to bathe and put on a summer dress, he took the boxes that she had packed for the move to varsity and put them into the back hall downstairs. Then he took the towels soaking in the bathroom sink and their bed sheet down to the service porch off the kitchen. He scrubbed the blood out of them and left them soaking.
When he entered the kitchen, he found Petra pushing burnt eggs out of a skillet into the sink with a spatula. “Do you know how to fry eggs?” she asked.
Gat suppressed an urge to laugh. “Yes, I do.”
“I’m sure you think I should know. I’ve watched Elsie, but I’ve made a mess.” Gat could
not keep from smiling. “Don’t laugh at me!” Petra commanded. “I’m trying to get breakfast for my man.”
“That’s why we leave in the middle of the night,” Gat said. He laughed heartily.
“Don’t patronize me!” Petra retorted, amused herself. “You think I’m a useless rich girl, don’t you?”
“Splendidly useless.” She hit at him with the spatula. He grabbed it, still laughing, to keep it away from his clothes. He wrenched the spatula from her hand and retrieved the skillet from the sink. “You need to grease this thing,” he explained, still amused. He wiped the skillet dry.
The doorbell rang. They looked at one another. “We won’t answer it,” Petra whispered.
“Do you have some butter?” Gat spoke in a tone so low she could hardly hear him. He pantomimed spreading butter on toast. She took a plate of it from the refrigerator. He sliced a bit of it and placed it on the skillet to melt.
The doorbell rang again.
Petra and Gat looked at one another. He whispered, “After the pan’s greased, you put in the eggs. How many do you want?” She raised a single finger. Gat broke three eggs into the skillet and whispered, “You try not to break the yolk.”
“And you didn’t!” she replied gleefully, whispering. “Aren’t you smart?”
The doorbell rang yet again, quite insistently.
“It must be Kobus,” Petra said, disconcerted. “No tradesman would ring like that.”
Gat tossed salt and pepper onto the eggs. Petra stayed his hand on the pepper. “Do I turn yours?” Gat asked. “Or leave it looking at you?”
“Looking at me, I guess,” Petra said. She held her breath, listening. “I think he’s gone.” She smiled. “Whew!”
Gat pulled her to him “Are you paying attention here?” he asked. “When you spend the night with men at varsity, you’ll want to know how to cook their eggs.” She elbowed him.
A knocking, very loud, came at the back door. Petra froze. She looked toward the window in the back door and saw Kobus Terreblanche staring at her and Gat. “Petra!” he cried. “Open the door.”
Petra seemed unable to move. Gat went to the door, unlocked and opened it. Terreblanche burst into the kitchen, confused by what he saw. Even so he breathed out righteous indignation. “What’s going on here?” he demanded.
“I’m teaching Petra to fry eggs,” Gat said. “Do you want to learn?”
“I know how to fry eggs,” Terreblanche retorted. “What are you doing here?”
“There are three eggs here,” Gat pointed out. “Would you like one?”
Terreblanche looked at Petra. “What’s he doing here?”
Petra told him, “He’s driving me to Wits.”
“Your parents are driving you to Wits!”
“Change of plan,” said Petra.
Terreblanche blurted, “You don’t even know him!”
“Plates?” asked Gat.
Petra opened the cupboard and reached for breakfast plates. “Are you having an egg, Kobus?”
“I’m very good with eggs,” Gat assured him.
Terreblanche glared at Petra. “No, I’m not having an egg!” he said with a voice that sliced the space between them. “And you’re not sick!” Petra turned her back to him, took two plates, and handed them to Gat. He served the eggs. Terreblanche scrutinized him. “You haven’t shaved!” Then it dawned on him. “You spent the night here!”
Petra got out forks. Gat put the plates on the table where Elsie usually ate.
Terreblanche took Petra by the arm and whirled her toward him. “Did he spend the night here?”
Gat took a fork from Petra and began to eat his eggs. “It’s getting cold,” he reminded her. Petra pulled loose from Terreblanche’s grip and sat down to eat.
“What’s going on here?” Terreblanche cried. “You don’t even know him!”
Gat and Petra ignored the man. But he would not be ignored. He leaned over the table and put a large open hand over each plate. “Answer me, Petra!”
Petra got up from the table to face Terreblanche on her feet. “You always treated me like a child, Kobus. He treated me like a woman. Now get out of here. My life isn’t any of your business.”
“Does your father know about this?” Terreblanche asked.
Gat stood and looked at Terreblanche with all the patience he could muster.
“I should beat you to a pulp,” the young man said.
“He’s an army officer, Kobus,” Petra said. “He can beat you around the block.”
Gat and Terreblanche glared at one another. The young man was taller than Gat and well-built. But he was a student of the law, not warfare. At last he turned his back on Gat as if he would not stoop to the indignity of a fight. He went to the sink, washed his hands, and left the kitchen without a backward look.
Once he had gone, Petra sat down and covered her face with her hands. Gat knelt beside her and stroked her back. “Will he telephone my father?” she asked. “What will he do?”
PETRA DROVE up before the Protea Hotel in the 1957 Ford sedan, the Rousseaus’ second car, the one she was allowed to drive (though not at night). She examined the Protea’s façade and turned at Gat. “This is certainly not the Mount Nelson. No wonder you preferred to stay with me.”
“I knew the bed would be better.” He thought it unnecessary to tell her that he’d spent nights in places infinitely worse than this, had been billeted in brothels, had slept for months in the bed of a pickup, had rejoiced on occasion to find shelter in a mud hut. She gazed at him both fondly and uncertainly and answered his grin with one of her own.
While Gat went to shave and fetch his luggage, Petra waited in the Ford sedan. She knew she should be wondering who Gat was. Instead she thought about the notes she had left at the house. One was for Elsie, explaining that her cousin Hazel had spent the night in the guest room and had had “an accident” that the two girls had made unsuccessful efforts to clean up. She wondered if Elsie would be suspicious of these falsehoods.
The other note told her parents that attending university in Johannesburg was a chance for her to assert her independence. So she had driven there with a friend. She would return the Ford as soon as she could. Reading that, her father would sink into one of his black moods, especially if Kobus Terreblanche felt impelled to inform him who the friend was. If her father learned that, it would be very hard for her mother to control him.
WHEN GAT entered the hotel room, he saw no evidence that Michels had slept there. He wondered where his buddy had spent the night, where he was now. But Michels would have to take care of himself. Gat shaved, packed his belongings, made certain he had left nothing, and checked out.
Outside the hotel he found that Petra and the Ford were gone. Perhaps she had panicked, he thought. He should not have said so much about Katanga. He took his bags to the awning-covered verandah, bought a Cape Times in the lobby, and settled down to read it.
He scanned for news from the Congo. There was none. Glancing through the paper, his eye caught a report, no more than a paragraph, headlined: Tourist Murdered in District Six. He skimmed the piece until he came to the words “Gabriel Michels, 28, an army officer from the ex-Belgian Congo.” He read the piece carefully. It reported that Michels’s body had been found outside a bar, apparently after a knife fight. That was all.
Gat read the paragraph three times. A“knife fight”? He recalled that occasionally Michels had boasted of taking care of business that way. But he boasted of so much. Had he been carrying a switchblade? Or had he been “eliminated”?
Gat thrust the paper aside and stared across the road at the ocean. Had an assassin been sent to South Africa to eliminate men Belgian officials had ordered to disappear? That seemed a likelier explanation than that Michels, with his dream of Canada and his penchant for stumbling into trouble, had gotten caught in a situation he could not control.
Gat was certain that Colonel Rousseau would learn of Michels’s death. He would pair the Belgian officers together. F
ortunately he had not mentioned Michels to the girl. He resolved to tell her nothing of what he’d learned. But it was just as well to be leaving Cape Town. At that moment Petra parked the cream-colored Ford sedan before the hotel.
Gat grabbed his bags and hurried toward her. “Going my way?” he asked jauntily, shoving his bags among the pile of her belongings in the rear seat.
“Did you miss me?” she asked.
“Didn’t think of you once.”
“Oh, really? Why the grin?”
“Facial tic. You driving some place I might want to go?”
“We could find out.”
Gat watched her, thinking: Christ, she’s pretty. So fresh. Desire tickled his groin.
Once in the car, Petra told him, “I have a present for you. But you can’t have it yet.” She smiled mysteriously. “And I have something in mind for me. I’ll tell you when I give you your present.”
She drove them east out of the city, turned off the main road toward Hermanus, passed through the tiny dorp and out onto a road that skirted the ocean. “My grandmother grew up out here,” she told Gat. “I used to come here with her.” She parked along a deserted stretch of beach. She pointed off toward a small bay several hundred meters from where they were parked. “I love this beach,” she said. “I want you to see it.”
“Let’s take a swim.”
They walked barefoot to the beach, carrying their swimsuits and the towels Petra had brought. Gat held up a towel while Petra changed, peeking over it most of the time. “Don’t look at me!” she implored.
“But I love to look at you. You have a wonderful body.”
She turned her back to him and placed her left arm over the cleft in her buttocks. Gat laughed at her and put on his suit without benefit of towel.
They ran into the surf and swam as lovers do, splashing one another, dunking each other, pretending to be whales, spouting water into the air and at one another, swimming underwater to catch each other’s legs, doing back somersaults, floating, embracing. Eventually Gat treaded water close to her, his hands below the surface. Finally one hand rose above the water holding his swimsuit. “There’s no one around,” he said. “Why not?” Petra scanned the shore, saw no one, and struggled out of her suit.
Love in the Time of Apartheid Page 9
