Love in the Time of Apartheid

by Frederic Hunter

  Gat swam to her, “This is better!” he said, holding her to him, the taste of salt in their mouths, the feel of their wet, chilled skin against one another in the warm sun, their heads bobbing under the surface as Gat tried to tread water vigorously enough to keep them both afloat. At long last they left the water, Gat still holding their suits. He threw them onto the towels.

  Petra hugged him then, her pelvis thrust into his body. “Can we here?”

  “No,” he said. “Never near sand.” He kissed her very hard.

  A few miles farther on they found a small hotel and had lunch on the patio. As they were finishing, Gat suggested, “What if we took a room for the afternoon?” Petra blushed, grinned mischievously, and blushed even more deeply.

  Gat went to the office to ask if he and his wife could have a room for the afternoon. He explained that they were on their honeymoon. The bottom half of the hotelier’s face smiled obligingly while the upper half, the eyes, examined him carefully. Petra entered and spread her hands on the office counter. She was wearing a wedding ring. The hotelier saw it and agreed to give them a room.

  They climbed the stairs to the room in silence. As he unlocked the door, Gat asked, “Where’d you get that ring?”

  “What a sweet room!” Petra exclaimed. She put her valise on the table under the dormer and opened the window onto its view of the ocean.

  “Where’d you get that ring?” he repeated, beginning to undress.

  “I went shopping this morning,” she said, pleased with herself. “I have one for you.” She withdrew a small box from her valise and gave it to him. He opened the box and gazed at the band of gold. “It won’t bite,” she said. “I had to guess about the size.” She watched him look at the ring. “The rings are my present to you,” she said. “Your present to me is to wear yours.” Gat’s eyes shifted from the ring to Petra. “At least in the hotel,” Petra said.

  Gat looked back at the ring without speaking.

  “I don’t know what happens in the rest of the world,” Petra told him, “but this is South Africa. There are Puritans here, especially among Afrikaners. My father’s one. So is Kobus. A nice girl does not have a lover. She doesn’t even use that word. She doesn’t go to a hotel with a man who’s not her husband.” Petra implored him with her eyes. “My reputation may not mean anything to you. But—” Her voice faded as her emotion rose.

  Gat gently touched her face. He liked her very much and was afraid that he might hurt her. Not wanting to be a child did not necessarily make a girl ready to be a woman. Yet he had made her one. Moreover, pleasure like this, coming to a hotel for sex, was for adults. “We’re having a good time together,” he told the girl. “But we don’t know each other very well.” He kissed her lightly and tried to smile. “And you’re pretty new at this.”

  Tears began to well up in her eyes. “Can’t you just wear it in the hotel?”

  “Yes, I can do that,” he said, but he did not move. She took the ring from the box and slipped it on his finger. “The fit’s pretty good,” he allowed. Then he looked at her. “You understand what’s happening, right? You’re on your way to university and I will be going back to Katanga. That means we can have a good time with each other and then we’ll say good-bye.”

  She nodded.

  “I’m a little worried that I’ve taken you along a path you aren’t ready yet to travel.” She shook her head and wiped away her tears. Well, he thought, the damage had been done. He kissed her sweetly. “Thank you for the ring.”

  Suddenly they were shy with each other. They’d taken the room to make love and Gat was eager to start. The arousal he’d felt on the beach was impatient to find its release. Petra took off her dress, but instead of feeling beautiful under his eyes, as she had at the beach, standing in her bra and half-slip she felt naked. She held the dress up before her. Gat had been watching her and smiled. She went to a chair well across the room from him and sat on it. She lowered her eyes.

  He removed his shoes, put his wallet, handkerchief, and watch into one of them. When he started to take off his trousers, he sensed that she was not yet ready to have that done. This was a nuisance, he thought, but she was very young. If there was to be pleasure between them, he could not take it from her. She would have to give it. He rezipped his fly and fastened his belt.

  “Come sit with me here,” he suggested. He went to the bed and sat with his back against the headboard. She came to the opposite side of the bed, still holding the dress before her. She sat beside him and looked out the window at the sea. He took her hand and held it in both his hands. Neither of them spoke.

  Finally she asked, “Why did you come to Africa?”

  Gat glanced at her. He really did like her very much: her beauty, her courage, both her boldness and timidity, her desire to find out who she was and who he was. If he must, he could wait a few minutes to make love to her. He smiled a little embarrassedly.

  She sensed his embarrassment and looked at him curiously. “Tell me.”

  “When I was a kid—I couldn’t even have been ten—I heard about a remote area of the Congo. Some Belgians had visited it. Our cockeyed parish priest must have told me about it. And I was so young that I believed every word. This place was so removed from areas where men went that the animals—zebras, gazelles and giraffes, elephants and hippos, rhinos and warthogs—all lived there in peace. They had never seen man.”

  “I’d love to know that place,” Petra said.

  “When these Belgians found the place, the animals were not afraid of them. They could walk right up to them and touch them.” Gat smiled ruefully, dismayed at his own gullibility. “I thought of it as some enormous petting zoo. Men could go up to grazing animals and pet their hides and put their arms around the necks of gazelles and wildebeests and waterbucks who were grazing. Somehow they could even reach up to giraffes with their heads stretched into clouds of leaves . . . That’s how I imagined this place.”

  “How sweet,” she said. She leaned against him, lay her head on his shoulder.

  “You won’t tell anyone, right?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Your secret is safe with me.”

  “I think I came to Africa to find that place.” He smiled to himself. “Isn’t that dumb?”

  “No,” she said. “I like you for it.” She turned to him, took his head in her hands, and kissed him. Then she left the bed and finished undressing, enjoying the feel of his eyes on her.

  AS THEY lay side by side, listening to the pounding of the distant waves, Petra said, “My father would be horrified at what I’m doing.”

  “Let’s not talk about your father.”

  “He’ll be furious when he finds out. He has very black moods.”

  Gat said nothing. One problem with seducing a girl who had not yet left home was that she was likely to talk about her parents.

  “Sometimes he doesn’t talk to us for several days,” Petra said. “He’ll be at home, moving around in a black cloud, and he won’t say a word to me or my mother.”

  He stroked her blonde hair. “What brings on these moods?” he asked. It was important that they talk. If this was her subject, they would pursue it.

  “His work. He claims that he never brings his work home.” She imitated her father, replicating his Afrikaans accent. “ ‘A policeman should never take his work home.’ He means the mental part. That’s what he always says. But, of course, he does exactly that when he’s in one of his blacks.”

  “He never tells you anything about his work?”

  “Nothing. Ever,” she said. Gat thought that he could tell her a few things about it. “I think he sees things . . . Or reads things . . . That turn his stomach.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “The kaffirs take knives to each other,” she said. “And to their women.” Gat thought of someone knifing Michels and of things he himself had seen in the cités of Congo towns. “I guess there are sexual crimes that are pretty terrible to think about.”

  “
Like me taking you to places like this.”

  “It’s the sort of thing he might get pretty exercised about.”

  “Should I have asked his permission?” Petra smiled. Gat asked, “What about torture? Do you think that causes black moods?”

  The girl was quiet. “He doesn’t torture anyone. Please.”

  “Didn’t I hear you talking about people being thrown out of windows?”

  “Kaffir police do that to other kaffirs. It’s never supposed to happen, but sometimes . . . Do you think he . . . ?”

  “You know him better than I do. I’m sure he doesn’t.”

  “You met him on one of his better days. He’s always in good spirits when Kobus is around. Kobus admires him the way a dog admires its master.”

  “Yes, I thought Kobus had some canine features.”

  The girl snuggled closer. “Kobus is like a second son to him.”

  “You have a brother?”

  “JC. Jan-Christiaan. Like Smuts. He and Kobus were great friends before he left.”

  “He left?”

  “He and Father disagreed over just about everything. He thought kaffirs should have more rights.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “Of course. But it’s very complicated. We do have different ways of living. Father feels—”

  Lying in bed with the man’s daughter Gat did not care what her father thought. He kissed her mouth to stop her talking. The look of longing on her face told him that she was still thinking of her brother. Finally she said, “JC’s the one who played the piano in the parlor.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “In the UK. London. He hasn’t spoken to Father in two years. Father never mentions him. We never talk about him at home.”

  Gat wondered what Rousseau would do to him if he ever caught up with him. “Is your mother in touch with him?”

  “Now and then. But Father mustn’t know.”

  “Your father must love him very much if he won’t talk about him.”

  “It hurt him very much that he left South Africa.”

  “Would he be hurt if you left?”

  “Not as much as with JC,” she acknowledged. “Father has a strong sense of family. He wants us around. Wants to know the people we do things with.” After a moment Petra said, “I love him very much.”

  “That must please him. Your going off with me won’t.”

  “I love it that he has something he believes in.” She paused, then explained. “The volk. His people. It’s like a religion with him.”

  “Not ‘our people’? You said ‘his people.’ ”

  “Funny, isn’t it? I don’t feel like an Afrikaner. Mother wouldn’t let us speak Afrikaans at home. It’s a big disappointment for Father.”

  THEY DECIDED to spend the night in the little hotel. At sunset they walked barefoot along the water line of the beach where they’d swum, their arms about each other’s waists. Petra breathed deeply of the salt air and watched the sky redden in the west. Was this, she wondered, what it was like to be newly married? On a honeymoon you could drift wherever you liked and make love whenever you wanted. She was a newlywed. She did not feel naughty, felt hardly a trace of guilt.

  How could she? Gat was so sweet. So able to make both her body and her soul feel as she had never dreamt of them feeling. And still as naive and idealistic as a child! Yet admittedly an executioner. How strange!

  “Do you have brothers and sisters?” Petra asked.

  “An older sister. We were great friends. I haven’t seen her in years.”

  “Why not?”

  “She married an American, lives there. They met traveling as students. We write now and then. And I have two younger brothers. I hardly know them.”

  Petra was glad that Gat and his sister were friends just as she and JC were.

  “Why did you join the army?”

  “You’re full of questions.”

  “I want to know you.”

  Gat continued to march along the beach, holding the girl tightly against him, nuzzling her blonde head. “When I finished secondary school,” he said, “my parents sent me to Britain. My mum is English. I was there for a year. I lived with relatives of my mother’s.”

  “Did you have girlfriends?”

  “Five or six.” She glanced up at him. He was grinning and she did not know whether or not to believe him. “Let’s see . . . Brenda and Deirdre and Eleanor.” Were these girls real? She did not know. “Shopkeepers’ daughters.”

  “Did you sleep with them?”

  “Whenever they let me!”

  He halted, laughing. He kissed her and hoisted her into his arms. “Put me down!” she ordered. “I must weigh a ton.”

  He continued the march at the water line, Petra in his arms. “In fact, in England I was very lonely. I spoke bad English with a Flemish accent and all the girls laughed at me.” Petra flung her arms about his neck, making it easier for him to carry her. “At the end of that year I didn’t want to stay in Britain. Or go back to Belgium.”

  “You wanted a place big enough for your dreams.”

  “You’re the corny one!” he said. He took her to dry sand and dropped her onto it. She threw sand at him. He skipped toward the surf. She came after him, stooped to splash water at him, then ran off. He chased her, homed in on her as a predator might on a prey, grabbed her, and devoured her. He once again swept her up into his arms and marched along the beach.

  “The choices of where to go were America or Africa,” Gat said. “I took passage on a boat to the Congo because, being Belgian, I figured there’d be jobs in our national colony for a young man like me.”

  “Were there?”

  “I tried different things. They didn’t work out. The Force Publique needed officers. So I joined up.”

  “Did you look for that remote place where the animals had never seen man?”

  He shook his head. He put her down and they walked without speaking.

  After a while Petra said, “You don’t seem like an army officer to me.”

  “Oh?” Gat cocked his head. “How should I seem?” Petra did not reply. She feared that if she mentioned what she saw as his idealism, he might take offense. Certainly her father was scornful of idealists. “As officers of the Force Publique, we were really there to maintain public order,” Gat said. “We saw to it that people played by the rules. At least the blacks and the lower-class whites.”

  “Were your Force Publique mates ruthless? I don’t think you are.”

  “You’ve found my failing.” Gat smiled. “Promise to work on that, sir!”

  “My father is,” Petra said. “He can be very charming. In fact, most of the time he is. But he can also be very demanding.”

  Interesting, Gat thought, that Petra recognized her father’s ruthlessness, but seemed not to understand how that trait expressed itself in the work he never brought home. “It’s command quality,” he said. “Most top officers in the Force Publique have it.” They reversed direction and as the light faded from the sky walked back toward the hotel. Gat asked, “You don’t see command quality in me?”

  “Yes, I do,” Petra said. “But you’re not ruthless. If you were, they wouldn’t have had to send you here after whatever it was that happened in Katanga.”

  Gat watched the breakers. The foam, pink-orange at sunset, was now a muted gray. “These men in Katanga . . .” he said. “They were very special men.”

  “Ordinary people: you don’t mind killing them?” Petra teased. Gat did not reply. “These official murders. They’ve been eating at you,” she said. Gat shrugged. He did not want to acknowledge this fact; it seemed womanish to let sentiment complicate duty. “That sort of thing doesn’t eat at my father,” Petra said. “Of course, he doesn’t— He just supervises. So long as he’s convinced that what he does furthers the interests of whites in South Africa, especially Afrikaners, he’ll do it.”

  “And what do you think about that?” Gat asked.

  “I’m not supposed to
think about it. He tries to keep me a child so I won’t.” They walked in silence.

  Finally Petra asked, “What about your parents? Do you love them?”

  “We’ve lost track of each other.”

  “Really?” After a moment she wondered aloud, “You have no one?”

  “I have you.”

  Petra could not tell if he was teasing. But his needing some stranger like her, a woman to sleep with, to save his life now seemed to make more sense.

  BACK IN the hotel Gat made a reservation for dinner in an hour. While he used the public men’s room off the bar, Petra went to their room. She used the bathroom, appreciative of Gat’s delicacy in offering her privacy. She went to the window and stood facing toward the waves she heard, but could hardly make out in the gathering darkness. She wondered what they would do in the hour before dinner. What did people do in hotels anyway? Should they again? Wouldn’t too much sate their appetite for it? If Gat made no moves toward it when he came in, would she be disappointed?

  When Gat returned, he lighted a bedside lamp. He went to her, placed his hands gently on her shoulders, and stood close behind her. He kissed the back of her head. He went to his luggage, opened it, fished around, and pulled out a book. He kicked off his shoes and went to the bed to read with his back against the headboard, the book in the yellow spill of light.

  Petra stood at the window, looking from it, but seeing nothing, feeling hurt, feeling angry. Did he no longer want her?

  Gat opened his book, found his place, read a few words. He looked up. Why did he feel tension in the room? “Come sit beside me,” he suggested. “You can see out the window from here.”

  “There’s nothing to see,” she said. He looked back at the book. She turned toward him. “What are you reading?”

  He had to look at the cover to tell her the title of the book. “Something called The Stranger,” he said. “French. By a fellow named Camus.”

  “You like it?”

  “Hard to get into.” He patted the bed beside him. “Come sit here.” Petra did not move. “It’s about Algeria. I asked for something about Africa at a place on upper Kloof Street. I had time to kill before the coffeehouse and this is what they had.” He closed the book and laid it in his lap. He once again patted the bed beside him. She felt strangely self-conscious, uncertain what to do.