Love in the Time of Apartheid

by Frederic Hunter

  Gat watched her, masking his amusement, understanding that she was stuck in that region where she was neither woman nor child and that she could not move until she sorted out which one at the moment she was. Gat rose, went to her, took her hand, and pulled her to the bed. He seated her on one side of it. She folded her hands in her lap. He bounced across the bed to resume his seat beside the lamp. Finally she was able to place her back against the headboard next to his. He took her hand in his.

  “Why was that so hard?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It just was.”

  He kissed her hand, turned to glance at her. “You’re silly,” he said, “but rather likable.” He turned off the lamp. He put his arm around her shoulders. They held each other in the darkness until it was time to go to dinner. The only sound was that of their breathing and the far-off murmur of the waves.

  LOCALS GAVE them the once-over as they passed through the bar. Feeling the weight of their stares, Petra glanced at Gat with an apprehensive expression. Obviously the hotelier had told the locals that he had newlyweds as guests. In fact, they looked newly married, shy with each other, but each still enjoying—and sustained by—the touch of the other. Entering the dining room, Gat drew Petra close to him and whispered, “Head up. Who cares what they think?” Petra smiled at him gratefully and forced herself to stand erect. The hotelier led them outside. He seated them at a secluded table at the far end of the dining porch. With an amused smile playing at the edges of his mouth, he lighted candles, offered them a choice of two entrees, and left them alone.

  Gat whispered, “You don’t like getting credit for what we haven’t been doing?”

  “I hardly know you and they all think I’m married to you.”

  “I wouldn’t say hardly,” Gat objected. “I’ve had my hands all over you.”

  Petra blushed. Watching her redden in the candlelight, he chuckled. He leaned close to her, slipped his hand under her dress and slip, and patted her knee. “What would you like for dinner?”

  “What I would like is that you take your hand out from under my dress.” Amused, Gat complied. “Thank you,” she said, a little primly.

  They both had the fish. While waiting for it to arrive Gat gazed at Petra. It made her very self-conscious. “Please don’t keep watching me.”

  “You feeling that you’ve been on a rather long date?”

  “I’ve never been alone with a man for a full night and day.” He took her hand. “Is this what marriage is like? I mean: it just goes on?” He nodded. “Have you ever been married?”

  “No.” He smiled indulgently. “I like being with you. You’re my friend. So I don’t mind that it just goes on.”

  “I keep thinking I have to make conversation.”

  “Your parents have brought you up to be a good little—What?”

  “A good little something I don’t want to be.”

  “Let’s not worry about talking. Let’s just be friends.”

  It distressed Gat that they had been so comfortable in their room, holding one another, he drawing survival from her, as darkness enclosed them in its quietude. And now, as if that interlude never happened, she needed reassurance that they were linked by golden threads of conversation. But if she needed those connections, he would try to supply them.

  When their dinners were served, he told her about his first years in the Congo: how he had arrived there with a harebrained notion that because he was young and willing to work, he could become a planter. How he had taken it for granted that because he was white, rubber trees would grow out of the soil of the colony’s Equateur province for him, that their latex would flow and provide him a livelihood. How he had assumed that the failure of the plantation from which he rented his hectares was caused by the laziness and drunkenness of the planter, his sexual indulgence with black concubines, not by bad soil and unreliable rains. “I was such a fool!” he told her with a laugh. “I had bought an old pickup and was living out of the cargo bed. I disapproved of the dissolute planter and would not turn to him for help. I probably would have starved if it had not been for the Africans in a village nearby. They took pity on me. I was grateful to eat the scraps they threw away.”

  Petra stopped eating. She stared at him with astonishment as if he filed his teeth and had a bone through his nose. “You ate what Africans did not want?”

  “And was glad to have it.” They stared at one another. “I couldn’t subsist on the fruit of rubber trees.” She put her fork down and folded her hands into her lap. “Shall I take you back to Cape Town? You could telephone Kobus to meet us somewhere.” Petra stared at her plate. Gat went on eating.

  After a moment she shook her head. “I was attracted to you because I’d never met anyone like you.” She glanced at him. “You really are different.”

  “ ‘Was attracted.’ Has the feeling flown?”

  She pushed fish onto her fork with her knife. “Did you ever find that place where the animals had never seen man?”

  She had already asked him that. But he would answer again the question in order to keep them conversing. “Now that I think of it,” Gat said, “I’m sure that story must have been told me by the priest, a man who’d never been anywhere.” Petra glanced at him, grateful they were talking. “Seems that as the Belgians went farther into that peaceable kingdom, they came across what appeared to them to be monkey creatures.”

  “Monkey creatures?” Petra asked. She gazed at Gat with an amused and disdainful expression, no doubt often bestowed on her father.

  “Except they had no tails,” he persevered.

  “You believed this as a child?” she asked.

  “As the Belgians investigated this unexpected discovery, the monkey creatures became aware of them. They scrutinized each other. And they all realized at the very same moment . . .”

  “That they were men,” said Petra.

  “Yes! And recognizing each other, they rushed together and embraced. And the monkey creatures said, ‘We are men like you!’ And the Belgians said: ‘We will show you how to live more fully! We will make art together and do science and you will be more fulfilled than you ever have been!’ And so they all embraced and danced together.”

  Petra smiled at Gat indulgently. She took his hand.

  “Do you know this story?” he asked her.

  She shrugged. “Go on.”

  “That’s it,” Gat said. “That’s what I learned at the priest’s knee.”

  “Did you also believe in Father Christmas? I did—for a time.”

  “I believed this because the priest told me. Seminary was the most he’d seen of the world. They told him fanciful stories there too. I’m sure he believed them.”

  AFTER DINNER they walked again on the beach. Petra told Gat about her schooling and friends and family vacations, about the arguments she’d had to endure before her father would permit her to apply to Wits. Gat asked about the studies she hoped to pursue and she told him about how those pursuits had raised the ire of her father. Anthropology? No! Sociology? No! Political Science? No! She would take a variety of courses her first year to survey possibilities.

  Petra asked Gat about joining the army. He told her about running out of options, about wanting to make a success of himself after failing as a planter. “So I joined the Force Publique. The surest way to succeed there was to take on the attitudes of the Belgians who were my comrades. They all thought Africans were savages—macaques, we called them, monkeys.”

  Petra glanced up at him. They were walking in step, their arms about each other’s waists, and in the darkness she could make out only the outline of his face.

  “For the first few years I accepted that Africans were savages, at least the ones we were dealing with in the Force. After all, we were the civilizers. But I knew that they weren’t all ‘savage’—whatever that’s supposed to mean—because when I was trying to be a planter, the people in the village had come to my rescue.”

  “They saved your life. Right? Just t
he way I’m saving it.”

  He drew her against him and kissed the side of her head as they walked. “What I’ve come to understand is that there’s raw savagery. I’ve seen plenty of that: people running around all but naked, living in grass huts, and hunting with nets and knives. There’s also civilized savagery; lately I’ve seen plenty of that. Civilized people should know better; they make the rules.”

  Petra stopped walking. When Gat turned toward her, she put her arms around him and held him close. “You’re angry,” she said. He did not move, but she felt him drawing away. He started walking again. She followed beside him. “Why?” He said nothing. She stopped walking and watched him disappear into the darkness. She wondered if he would leave her. At last he returned and put his arm around her shoulders. They began walking again.

  “When I was playing at being a planter,” Gat finally began, “I was near to starving and the villagers helped me. They were the ones who showed me what was civilized.” It angered him, Gat said, that virtually all Belgians in the Congo knew Africans were men, but treated them if not precisely like monkeys, then like a lesser species of humanity.

  “At first we made them carry loads,” he said. “If that worked them to death, no matter; there were plenty of others to take their places. Then we made them gather wild rubber for us. Each man had his quota. When he didn’t fill it, we chopped off his hand. That didn’t matter either, we figured, because there were plenty more. The collector of hands—there was such a person—began to suspect that he was being sent the hands of women and children. So when a man did not fulfill his quota, they began to cut off his penis.”

  Petra recoiled. She had never heard a man use that word in conversation. She stopped walking and turned away from Gat. He came to her slowly, touched her. She brushed his hand away. “Why are you telling me these things?”

  “You asked why I was angry.”

  “Do you even know if they’re true?”

  “They’re true.”

  “Who told you?”

  “The people in the village. I had a friend whose greatgrandfather lost a hand.”

  “I’m going back,” Petra said. She started walking toward the distant lights of the hotel. Gat trudged along behind her. When they reached the hotel, she went toward the small library. “I’ll join you in a bit,” Gat called. He headed to the bar.

  In the bar Gat wanted to order a whiskey. He needed one. He knew he had said too much. The girl might be trying to escape too much protection, but she did not know how to deal with what he told her. If she smelled liquor on him, he thought, she might not let him kiss her. He looked about to see if there was someone from whom he could bum a cigarette. But if he smoked, the girl would smell its odor. She would taste it on his lips if she allowed him to kiss her. She might pull away. So he ordered coffee and drank it in a corner by himself.

  In the library as Petra thumbed through magazines, her mother’s voice chattered in her head, repeating advice she had often provided about strange men luring trusting, inexperienced girls into trouble. Petra glanced about the room. Could she spend the night here? Certainly she could not spend the night in the room with Gat. She paged through magazine after magazine, hearing her mother’s voice, seeing her father’s face.

  After a time Gat entered. Petra glanced at him, then looked away. He took a chair across from her, picked up a magazine, and feigned reading. At last he looked up at her and said, “I’m sorry I’ve frightened you.”

  Petra said nothing. She felt him watching her. She focused on the article before her. She forced her lips silently to form the words of the article in order not to feel self-conscious about being watched. At last Gat said, “I asked about another room. There’s one available.” He had inquired of the bartender.

  “Is that what you want?” She was relieved. But suddenly it seemed unfair that he should have to pay for two rooms. “I could sleep here. Or on the beach.”

  “It’s not that expensive.”

  “I’m sorry I’m so—” She searched for the word.

  “You’re lovely. Don’t apologize for anything.”

  His compliment made her want to trust him. She glanced at him, felt she should explain herself. “When you said you needed me to save your life . . . I thought you were tossing out some enormous whopper to intrigue me . . .” Her voice trailed off. She looked across the room at him. “That is sort of what you need, isn’t it?”

  “I seemed merely a liar. Is that why you took me home?” She looked down. The question embarrassed her. “I’m a bit more complicated than Kobus Terreblanche, I’m afraid.” She glanced at him. “Have there been other men in your life besides Kobus? And me?”

  “My father. You are definitely more complicated than him!”

  Gat had a very strong impulse to cross the room and sit beside her, but he did not move.

  “Why are you so angry?” she asked again. “Can’t you tell me?”

  “I thought I was telling you.”

  They gazed at each other a long moment without speaking.

  “The villagers who rescued you when you were starving. Who were they?”

  “At first there were three or four boys, maybe ten years old, who sometimes watched me work. They must have told people how hungry I was because late one afternoon they appeared at my truck with a girl. She had some food for me wrapped in a banana leaf.”

  “Who was she?”

  Gat shrugged. “A village girl. Sixteen. Maybe younger.”

  “Pretty?”

  “I saw her through my starving stomach. She brought me food. Of course, she was pretty!” Petra watched him, wanting more than an evasion. “By local standards she was too skinny. But then so was I.”

  “Did you fall in love with her?”

  “I’d have fallen in love with a witch if she’d brought me food!” They were silent for a moment. Gat added, “The truth is, we could hardly communicate. But after I’d eaten her food, I rubbed my stomach and kicked my legs in glee. She understood that I was thanking her.”

  “Did she come often?” Petra asked.

  Gat nodded. He knew what she was asking and he told her. “It wasn’t long before she was spending the night.” He watched to see how she would react to learning that he had slept regularly with an African girl. It did not seem to surprise her. “I’d erected a frame over the back of my pickup. There was a tarpaulin on top for when it rained. Underneath that was a mosquito net. And a mattress.”

  “Was she the person whose great-grandfather had his hand cut off?” Gat nodded. “You loved her.”

  “You’re thinking like a schoolgirl. We could hardly communicate.”

  Gat stared off across the room. He thought of nights in the back of the pickup: rain drumming on the tarpaulin, pounding the roof of the cab, streams of it splattering the ground, while mosquitoes buzzed seeking holes in the net, the smell of wet canvas dense in the nostrils and the thick wet air as he and she snuggled, dry in a sheet and light blanket and warm in the darkness.

  “You loved her,” Petra repeated.

  “I loved being nineteen . . .” Gat shrugged, hearing in his mind the rain falling on the tarpaulin.

  “I’ll be nineteen next year,” Petra said.

  “I was out on my own. I savored doomed love and having a girl in my bed every night for a couple of weeks, a forbidden girl who fed my mouth and my body and was warm in the darkness. All this at a time when I had nothing and was sometimes aching with hunger.” He looked at the ceiling, remembering the odor of wood-smoke the girl sometimes carried on her skin when she came from her mother’s hut. “I thought about marrying her. At nineteen you can think of marrying anyone.”

  Not Kobus, Petra thought to herself.

  “I loved the thought of marrying her because I knew it could never happen. I’d ’ve had to give goats to get her and we couldn’t even talk to each other.” Gat stared at the ceiling without speaking. Petra watched him, feeling strangely jealous of the uneducated village girl who evoked such nostalgi
a in him. “It wasn’t all that idyllic,” Gat said finally. “She wanted a child. African women want children. I didn’t want that. I’d seen the truth of that: half-caste was outcast. I didn’t want any kid of mine to face ridicule from playmates because of the skin color I’d given him.” After a moment he added, “Her father didn’t like her coming to me. He wanted nothing to do with white men. He was the one who told me about hands being cut off. And the other mutilations.”

  “How did it end?”

  “She stopped coming. After three or four days I went to the village, afraid she was sick. It turned out she was married.” Petra sat forward as if uncertain she had heard correctly. “Her father had taken goats from a man in a nearby village who wanted a third wife, a young wife. She had not even been able to say good-bye.” Gat pulled his gaze down from the ceiling and looked at Petra. She realized that once again he was in the room with her. “I was devastated,” he said. “I looked around at what I’d accomplished. Which was nothing. So I packed up the pickup and drove out of there.”

  As they looked at one another, Petra realized that it would not be necessary, after all, for them to sleep separately. But how could she let Gat know this? She could tell him, but the words would not come.

  Gat understood what she was thinking. He knew he must go to her, but how—without scaring her? Finally he made himself traverse the four paces to the couch and sat beside her. He did not look at her. He took her arm and placed her hand in his. They sat without speaking. Finally she looked at him. He leaned toward her. They kissed tentatively at first, their lips hardly touching. Then with more passion. Finally Gat said, “I think we better go upstairs.”

  In their room holding one another in the darkness, they chatted and kidded each other. They lay slumbering, caressing, kissing.

  “I definitely like you,” Gat said. It was a promotion from “rather.” “So let me give you some advice.”