“Where in God’s name are you?” Hazel shrieked. She lowered her voice. “Are you really with him? Are you— You know! Is it— Are you—”
“Kobus didn’t call you,” Petra said. “Who’d he call?”
Hazel gave her the whole story: after Kobus’s call Piet Rousseau telephoned his brother, Hazel’s father. Was Petra spending the night with them? No, she was not. Well, then, even though it was midnight, would he mind going around to the house to see why Petra was not answering his calls? He had received a curious phone call from Kobus. He claimed that Petra had run off with a man she hardly knew. Hazel’s father investigated. He found the house empty, the Ford gone from the garage.
“Oh, god!” cried Petra. “I called because I was afraid this might happen.”
“The police are going to be looking for you,” Hazel said. “Your father’s in a blackie. You know, roadblocks, all Fords searched. Are you with Gautier? He might be deported. Where are you anyway?”
“You promise not to tell anyone? Anyone!” Hazel gave a sacred pledge that Petra knew she would violate. “Touwsrivier,” Petra said. It was the only town she could think of on the highway to Johannesburg.
“Touwsrivier!” screeched Hazel. “You’re playing house with a man in Touwsrivier?”
“I’m not playing house with anyone, Haze. Gat’s being a perfect gentleman.” Petra crossed her fingers because that is what she had seen ingenues do in American movies when they lied. “He hasn’t even kissed me.”
“Liar!” squawked Hazel. “He practically ate you alive at the coffeehouse.”
“He sleeps in the car and uses the gent’s. Tell your father I’m still a virgin.”
A long silence. Then Hazel said, “That must be distressing!” She cackled. After a moment she said, “You’re lying, Pet. I can always tell. How is sex?”
“Stay away from it, Haze. It enslaves you. Really.”
“Have you had a— You know.”
“Well, if I haven’t, I hate to think what that’ll do to me. It’s gotten so I can’t think of anything else.”
Suddenly Hazel asked, “Are you crying?” And to Petra’s surprise she was. She sobbed into the phone. “Are you all right?” Hazel kept asking. “Has he hurt you? What’s wrong?”
Petra let it all spill out. She admitted to having real doubts about the wisdom of what she’d done. Sex was wonderful. Really. Too wonderful. Gat was caring, gentle, funny sometimes, a fabulous lover. But he’d done terrible things. You got a charge hearing a man tell you he needed you to rescue him from a black void because you knew he was feeding you a line, trying to win a smile. Then to discover that he really did need rescuing, that was scary.
“Are you saying: Get me out of this?” Hazel asked. “Because we can call your father and he can have police there in—”
“Oh, god!” Petra shuddered. “Don’t do that!” She thought of her father, furious with her, in a blackie, mobilizing the entire police force to hunt them down. “It’s just that— He scares me. He’s done— And he’s so needful. He wants to make love all the time. And I want him to. I’m sure it must be wrong.”
Hazel began to hoot. “Are you in love?”
“Oh, god! I don’t think so. I spent part of the night in a bathtub to get away from him.”
“Does he rape you?” Hazel asked. Her voice sounded deeply shocked. Petra said, of course he didn’t. Had he kidnapped her? No! Was he holding her against her will? No! No! Suddenly she realized that on the table beside the phone were the keys to the Ford. Gat had left them, probably intentionally, to let her flee if she wanted. Gat was wonderful, she told Hazel. Maybe she did sort of love him.
“Then stop crying,” Hazel replied firmly. “If your father catches Gat, he’ll do something awful to him, especially if he hears you’ve been blubbering.” Petra denied that her father would hurt Gat. Hazel reminded her that her father was a colonel in the Special Branch. He knew how to hurt people; that was his job. Petra defended her father. Hazel made an impolite noise into the phone. She said, “Don’t get scared. You’re tasting passion. I wish it were me.”
Petra did not answer. She listened. Hazel said, “You may never taste it again. You’ll end up with somebody like Kobus. You’ll have a safe, comfortable life. You may even love him—when you’re not bored—and you’ll have this to look back on. Drink some coffee and think carefully. Then call me back if you want to be rescued. I’ll get in touch with your father.”
“I won’t call you back,” Petra said. “I just needed to talk to somebody.”
“Do something for me,” Hazel said. “Get absolutely destroyed by passion.”
Feeling better now that she had examined her uncertainties by articulating them to her cousin, Petra went to the breakfast room to join Gat. He stood when she came to the table, held her chair, and asked the waiter to bring her a cup for coffee. “Would you like some rolls?” Gat asked. Petra shook her head.
She had trouble looking at him. After the coffee arrived and she could hold the cup and gaze into it, she told him, “I’m sorry I’m so young.”
He smiled at her. “May I kiss you good morning?” She nodded. He leaned across the table and kissed her. “We can go back to Cape Town,” he said. “It’s not very far.”
She shook her head. She took his hand and kissed it.
AS HAZEL hung up the phone, she wondered if anything Petra had told her was not a lie. She assumed that Petra was all right, despite being somewhat knocked about by passion or whatever it should be called. But Gat? A perfect gentleman? Fat chance. Hazel put on a robe and caught her father drinking his coffee. She reported that Petra claimed to be at a hotel in Touwsrivier—she hadn’t gotten the name—that the Belgian officer was sleeping in the car and using the gent’s and that Petra was apparently fine. Before leaving for the day her father relayed the information to his brother in Pretoria.
Margaret Rousseau watched her husband receive the news. After he hung up, she said, “Before you make a lot of calls, let’s talk a minute.” Piet gave her a hard look. “Let’s let her be.”
“This is the way kaffir wenches arrange their lives,” Piet declared. “A strange man gives them a smile and they give him their bodies.” Then he added, “There can’t be many hotels in Touwsrivier.”
“She’s not there,” Margaret informed him. “A girl like Petra does not have an adventure with a man in a place like Touwsrivier.”
“I’ll put officers watching traffic heading east on every road out of the Cape.”
“Let her be!” Margaret said more forcefully. “She’s chosen to learn about love from this Belgian. I hope she’s enjoying her lessons.”
“Our African wench-daughter takes after you,” Piet Rousseau said.
“Do not say things that I can hardly forgive,” his wife replied. “Haven’t you seen this coming?”
To avoid answering, Rousseau began to pace. Margaret watched him. “And why shouldn’t it come?” she asked. “Petra is now an adult. She should have a healthy curiosity about being with a man.” Piet Rousseau clenched his teeth. “Young men certainly possess that curiosity,” Margaret reminded him. “I expected this would happen with Kobus. He didn’t want to let her go to Wits until he put his mark on her. That’s what the week together in Stellenbosch was all about.”
Rousseau replied, “She’s too young for that. Kobus knows that.”
“Does he? He sees her as the mother of his children. Of course, he wants his mark on her.” She watched him pace. “The afternoon of her eighteenth birthday I took her down to Cape Point. We had one of our little talks about life, men, sex.” Rousseau stopped pacing. He regarded his wife. As a police official he dealt with the seamy side of these matters every day. But the intrusion of these topics into his family unnerved him. “We drove down Chapman’s Peak Road. The cliffs plunging into that clear blue water: they were beautiful. I told her sex was like that: beautiful, exhilarating. But it was a cliff one could fall off and sometimes boulders from above smashed one’s c
ar.”
“She knows about not getting pregnant?”
“We talked about contraceptive devices,” Margaret said.
“So why has she done this?”
“Because you keep her on too tight a leash,” his wife replied. “A little adventure: it’s not such a terrible thing.”
“Look who’s talking.”
“Be careful,” Margaret warned. She watched him. “Why is it so hard for fathers to let their daughters have sex? Mothers worry if their sons go without it.”
Piet paced up and down, ignoring her. When he had made up his mind to put patrols on the highways, he said, “We’re going to find them.”
“Let them be. The Belgian will see that she’s safe.”
“If I get my hands on him, he’ll be out of this country in two hours.”
“Just don’t throw him out a window at police headquarters.” Margaret said this because she knew it irritated him. “Don’t tell your colleagues at today’s meetings that your daughter’s gone missing. They’ll titter behind their agendas.”
LEAVING HERMANUS, they went inland, away from salt smell and the sound of waves. Gat drove. Petra sat against the passenger door, watching him, her arm along the back of the seat. He stared at the road, conscious of her scrutiny, feeling that even though they had kissed good morning in the breakfast room whatever was bothering her was still not resolved.
He glanced over, saw her watching him. “Why are you sitting way over there?” he asked. “Is that where you sit with Kobus?” Although she did not feel flirtatious, she stuck out her tongue. “Come sit beside me,” he suggested. “I like feeling you beside me.”
She only shifted her position, lifting her knees onto the seat. He reached under the hem of her skirt and rested his hand on her calf.
“What were you dreaming about last night?” she asked. He withdrew his hand from her calf and watched the road. He slowed as they approached a dorp. They moved past its few houses, its Dutch Reformed church, pub, petrol station with general store attached. Whites entered the store directly from the pumps. Blacks went round to the side, where Africans were laughing, idling, and transacting their business through a window. Petra asked again about the dream. “You were trembling,” she said. “You called out. What was that about?”
“It was a soldier’s dream.”
“What do soldiers dream about?” she asked. “Women?” Gat shook his head. “Killing people?” He shrugged. “Or don’t real soldiers have nightmares about that?”
“They do.”
“You said you’d killed three people,” she said. “Was this dream about that?”
He looked back at the road. “What do you dream about?” he asked.
Petra shifted her position and stretched her legs out before her. She stuck her elbow out the window and did not look at Gat. They drove that way for some time, passing farm fields.
Finally Gat looked over at her, reached for her arm. Despite herself, she felt hot flashes at his touch. He tugged lightly. She scooched across the seat. The atmosphere between them softened.
Holding Petra’s knee, Gat thought how careful a chap had to be with a virgin newly born as a woman. She was fragile and feisty at the same time.
For months the atmosphere of Katanga had suffocated him. He had witnessed only deceit and greed from the mining conglomerates’ bland-faced, well-fleshed minions. He had grown tired to death of drinking and black girls brought in from whorehouses or the cités, tired of using their bodies, giving them francs, then tossing them out. He had taken up with Liliane, a conglomerate secretary, even called her his fiancée to make things easier with her. But he had no intention of marrying her. What romantics called love—a person feeling expanded by his devotion to someone else—could not possibly blossom in Katanga.
Could it blossom here? If that were to happen, he would have to tell Petra more about himself.
AS THEY drove along, vineyards stretched away from the road on either side, their vines heavy with grapes and large leaves, deeply green in the sun. They watched blacks bent over crops in fields, saw squatter camps, collections of shacks, where migrant black farmworkers took shelter till they moved on to the next job.
Gat said, “You know what would make sense? To educate these people. We should have educated ours in the Congo. You should educate yours.”
“There isn’t the money to educate them,” Petra replied.
“Cheaper to educate them than to keep the lid on their aspirations.”
She did not look at him, her arms folded across her chest. “Would your Congolese girlfriend have been happier if she’d known how to read?”
The question surprised Gat. Was she picking a fight? He and Petra had not talked politics. But her defiance of her father, her provocations, her running off with him: these had all suggested that she had liberal ideas. Perhaps she did not. He finally said, “I think anyone who can’t read would be happier if he could. Reading opens up—”
Petra interrupted, “Would you have married her then?”
Her father’s daughter, Gat thought. He replied, “Literacy opens new worlds for people. Think of the potential that South Africa keeps locked up inside its Africans.”
“You sound like a missionary.”
“Do I? Why do you say that?”
“You don’t like being told that Africans are savages.”
“Some of them are. Some of us are.”
“Then why get touchy about it? When we were talking about Lumumba—”
Gat said, “I don’t want to talk about Lumumba.”
“Why not?” She seized on the question as if hoping it would lead them to a confrontation. “What’s wrong with talking about Lumumba?”
Gat glanced at her. She regarded him as innocently as she had her father when talking about the police throwing people out of windows. “Seriously,” she said. “What do you know about him?”
“I read parts of a book he wrote,” he said. “Somehow the Force got hold of the manuscript, passed it around. Something to jeer at. Reading it you can’t help feeling sorry for the poor chap.”
“What?” She laughed, astonished. “Sorry for him? He’s a Communist.”
“Reading his manuscript you realize he wants desperately to be recognized as capable of contributing more than a monkey creature’s allowed to contribute. He laid out a plan for Belgians and Congolese to work together to create the Congo of the future. And all we did to people like him was to piss on them.”
“You gave them the country,” Petra pointed out.
“We’re small-minded,” Gat said. “We got frightened by the way the world was changing.”
“Lumumba’s a Communist. He was ready to turn the Congo over to the Russians.”
“An African Communist is someone who got pissed on by colonials.”
“Are you a Communist?” Petra asked.
“You smell the piss on me? Is that why you ask?”
They rode along without speaking. Petra studied Gat’s face; he studied the road. He turned on the radio. “How about finding us some music?” he suggested.
Petra stopped dialing at a station playing a kwela. She wondered what he was thinking. Finally she asked, “Why did you say those things last night?” Gat glanced at her, puzzled. African children were playing in the road. He slowed the car. Radio music drifted from it, arousing the children. They began to dance, flailing their arms, throwing their hips in exaggerated poses. Gat waved and watched the children in the rearview mirror. “Last night you told me to get out of South Africa,” Petra reminded him. “If I did, where would I go?”
“Australia,” Gat replied.
“Not America?”
“You have to have money there. And it’s hard to get in. Go to Australia.”
“Would you come with me?”
Gat glanced at her, wondering if she were serious.
“I haven’t the courage to go alone. I’d need courage, wouldn’t I?”
He nodded.
After a time P
etra asked again, “Why were you having nightmares last night?”
She was like a child, Gat realized. She would pester you with a question until it got answered. “Not everyone in Katanga supports the secession,” he said. “The Baluba of northern Katanga do not support it. After secession, I was sent up there to—” He shrugged. “ ‘ Restore order.’ I believe that’s what they told the press.”
“The men you took up there: who were they?”
“Black infantry, black officers, white advisors.” Gat told her briefly what happened. “Soldiers don’t kill civilians,” he said at last. “Murderers do. When we got back to the Copper Belt, everybody called us heroes. It made me sick to my stomach.”
Petra had moved back against the passenger door. She drew her legs up against her body, her chin resting on a knee. She thought: How could I let him touch me? He’s killed children.
AT THE roadside Gat spotted a man in glasses and a fedora, young, possibly a student. He wore shined shoes, now well dusted by passing traffic, and his clothes included a vest and suit coat, emblems of status. The man stood erect, innately dignified, and moved with grace as he reached out in supplication toward passing cars to solicit a ride. A plastic valise, tied by a rope, rested at his feet. Gat pulled off the road. “What are you doing?” Petra asked, alarmed.
“This fellow needs a lift.”
“Not in this car!” Petra said.
Gat ignored her, leaned his head out the window, and asked the man, “Where you headed?”
The man picked up his valise and ran toward the car, studying Gat to assess what kind of ride this might be. “To George, baas,” he replied. Then he bent down to witness the panic evident on Petra’s face and revised his destination. “Or to Mossel Bay, baas. Mossel Bay, if you please.”
“We’re not giving anyone a lift,” Petra declared.
“Why not?”
“He’s a kaffir.” Gat’s disapproving expression made her change the designation. “An African.”
“There’s plenty of room on the backseat.”
“My things are there!”
Love in the Time of Apartheid Page 13
