Love in the Time of Apartheid

by Frederic Hunter

  “Can’t we move them? The chap needs a ride.”

  “We don’t give rides to— This is South Africa!”

  “Mossel Bay is only thirty miles.”

  “I’ll ride in back with my things.” She left the front seat of the car, slamming the door, and moved to the rear seat where she shifted her boxes and his bags and sat with her arms folded across her chest. Petra wondered if Gat had stopped for the hitchhiker to test her.

  “Get in front with me,” Gat invited.

  “Thank you, baas. Very kind of you, baas.” He smiled at Petra. “Madam. Thank you, madam.”

  The man got into the car, sitting where Petra had been, holding his valise on his lap. He brought inside with him the smell of the dusty road and of sweat raised by long standing in the sun. Gat moved back onto the highway.

  As he drove on, Gat asked the young man about himself. He said he was a student, returning to the University College of Fort Hare, the university for blacks at Alice. He had been visiting in Cape Town and would now see his mother and younger siblings before starting his third year of training. “And you, baas?” asked the student. “Just having a nice motor trip in the summer sun?”

  “I’m visiting from Europe,” Gat said. “From England. The Midlands. I’m loving this sun. It can be very cold in England in February.”

  “Snow,” the student said. “You have snow, do you, baas?” Gat waved his hand to indicate that there was not much snow in the Midlands. “I would like one day to see snow,” the student went on. He glanced over his shoulder at Petra but would not risk addressing her directly. “And the madam? Also from Europe?”

  “Yes,” Petra replied. “But I’ve been living a while in Cape Town.”

  “I hear Cape Town in the way you speak, madam,” said the student.

  “We are on our way to Johannesburg to—” In the rearview mirror Gat saw Petra’s chin tighten, the blood rush from her face. He knew he must be careful what he said. “To visit the University of the Witswatersrand.”

  “That is a fine place to study,” offered the student. “Will the madam—”

  “In a couple of months I’m going to America,” Petra said. “Starting in September I’ll be studying at the University of—” Suddenly she could not think of a single American university, she who had set her heart on attending one.

  “Of New York,” Gat interjected to help her.

  “Yes,” Petra continued, recovering. “New York University. NYU.”

  “Ah, New York!” said the student. “Empire State Building!”

  “Yes,” said Petra, feeling more comfortable.

  “Snow. America. New York,” said the student. “How I would like to see them!”

  Gat and the student chatted on, the silence growing between topics. Petra rarely added a word. After a time Gat asked, “What’s this treason trial about in Johannesburg?” The student said nothing. The tension inside the car was palpable. “I keep reading about it in the papers.”

  “I know nothing about it, baas,” claimed the student. “Very bad business, these blacks who make all this trouble.”

  “But aren’t they working for change?” Gat asked.

  “Blacks are making good progress, baas,” the student said. “Am I not studying at University College? Forcing change. Not a good idea.”

  GAT DROPPED the man off in the center of Mossel Bay. He bowed repeatedly, expressing his thanks. Petra made no move to switch from the rear seat. “Drive on,” she said. When they had left the town behind, she told him to pull over. “What if I drove for a while? I need more experience behind the wheel.”

  “With you driving, am I safe?” Gat joked, trying to play it light.

  “If I feel safe with you”—and she was not at all sure she did—“I guess you should feel safe with me.”

  “You feel safe with me? What a disappointment!”

  Petra was not amused. While he got out of the car, she took a cloth and wiped the seat where the African sat. When Gat looked at her, disapproving, she glared at him.

  When it was clear that Petra was comfortable behind the wheel, Gat asked, “What was that back there?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?” she replied with an edge in her voice. “Haven’t you figured out anything about South Africa?”

  “That you should get out.”

  “White people never pick up blacks on the roads. You put him in the backseat and drive off. He takes out a gun and holds it to your head and—”

  “He didn’t have a gun.”

  “How do you know? Or he fishes a knife out of his pocket and holds it to your throat.”

  “Come on.”

  “At the very least—if he’s in the backseat—he filches some of my things.”

  “Your bras and panties?”

  “There are kaffir girls who’d offer him a lot of favors for my unmentionables.” She added, “He could have had explosives in that case.”

  “You are your father’s daughter.”

  “Very bad business, baas, baas, baas,” Petra said, mocking the African’s accent. “Very bad, these blacks who make all this trouble.” She gazed at Gat disdainfully. “So . . . You think he told you what he really thinks?”

  “No. And I don’t think you’re going to be studying anytime soon at the University of Help-Me-Out-Here.”

  “University of New York?” she mocked. “Doesn’t exist. Of course, how would a bloke from the Mids know that?”

  “How could I know? I never went to university.”

  “You got your university training in the back of a pickup with a kaffir girl who couldn’t even talk to you.”

  Gat answered. “Get out of this fucking country.”

  Petra said, “It wasn’t ‘fucking’ till I met you.”

  Gat guffawed. “You weren’t fucking till you met me.”

  Petra regarded him with distaste. “What are you trying to put right by picking up Africans on our roads? You’re killing them in the Congo?”

  THEY DROVE for miles without speaking. Both watched the road, Gat scolding himself for pushing the girl beyond what she could bear. Petra kept her hands at ten and two as she’d been taught. At last she said, “Once we get to George, maybe we should drive north and hit the main highway to Joeys.” Her father would have police watching that road for their car. That would show Gat how things were done in South Africa. He could deal with her father and then get sent back to Katanga where he belonged. “We’d pass through Bloemfontein,” she added.

  “Whatever you want,” he said. “I’m just along for the ride.”

  “Let’s do that,” she said, pleased that there was now a plan.

  “Whatever you want,” he repeated.

  What she wanted, Petra knew, was that they had made love that morning. She wished right now that his hand were under her skirt, on her knee, or even caressing her thigh. I’m terrible, she thought, but it was true. She knew he desired her. She wondered: Why am I being such a bitch? Maybe they could make love wherever it was they stopped tonight.

  Finally she said, “You talked last night as if my marrying a South African would be a fate worse than death.” She did not look at him. “It’s probably what I’ll do, you know.”

  “The fate worse than death,” he replied, “is a young woman of good family bestowing her virginity on a passing soldier. That lucky sod.” He lightly poked her ribs. “That means nothing can be worse than what you’ve already survived.” When she did not reply, he added, “I expect you’ll be very happy. For a few years anyway.”

  “And then?”

  “Can’t you guess?”

  “You mean I’ll start screaming in the middle of the night and sit up in bed.”

  “Your husband will put his arms about you, but you’ll—”

  “No, my husband will be downstairs. He’ll be checking the locks with a pistol in his hand. That’s what you mean, isn’t it? And I’ll rush to see that the children are all right.” They said nothing for a moment. “And they will be,” she
said, “because people like my father will make the country safe for us.”

  Gat repeated his advice. “Get out of South Africa.”

  “And go someplace where I won’t know anyone?”

  Gat did not reply. He watched Africans at the roadside, the women walking with stately slowness, parcels carried on their heads, toddlers hanging on to their hands.

  “If you came with me, I’d know someone,” Petra said.

  Gat realized that he should not have gone swimming at dawn. He should have been patient, kidded her out of the bathtub and the nightgown, and made things right between them. He wondered what it would be like to go—say, to Australia—with her. She would expect him to marry her, of course, and maybe he would. Petra would be the one eventually to leave. One day after she had made a place for herself in her adopted country, she would look at him and see him for what he was and she would leave, dragging their children behind her as the African women were dragging their children behind them.

  “If I should leave South Africa, then you should leave Katanga, right?” Gat said nothing, knowing she was right. “So why don’t we both go to Australia?”

  WHEN THEY reached the small city of George, they bought rolls at a bakery—Gat also bought a paper there—fruit at a greengrocer’s, and cheese at a specialty shop. Gat read his paper in the car while Petra went into a hotel, so she told Gat, to hunt for a loo. But she was looking less for a ladies’ room than for a public telephone. Knowing her father, she feared that he really might set constables and police officers scouring the east-west highways of the eastern Cape for what he might report as a stolen Ford. There was only one way to foil such searches: travel north. Petra had a friend, a prefect two years ahead of her at school, who had married an Afrikaner farming outside of Vryburg, almost due north, close to the Bechuanaland border. Like Petra, Gillian was the product of a marriage between an Afrikaner father, even more authoritarian than Piet Rousseau, and a more relaxed English-speaker mother. Each young woman understood the other’s family problems. The difference between them was that, instead of defying her father as Petra did, Gillian escaped hers by marrying a man very much like him. Petra was uncertain how Dannie would react to her turning up with Gat. That they were mere acquaintances traveling the same road was not a story that Dannie would swallow. She would have the drive north the next day to think of something to tell them.

  “Gillian!” Petra cried when she got through on the phone. “It’s Petra! A strange thing has happened. I’m driving up to Wits. I’ve got a bit of time to spare.”

  Gillian was delighted with the thought of a visit, especially since Dannie had gone to Rhodesia where his mother was ill. “But you aren’t driving alone,” said the friend. “Your father would never allow that.”

  Petra crossed her fingers again. “That’s the strange thing that’s happened,” she said. “A friend of my father’s, down from the Belgian Congo, is driving up to Joeys. I hitched a ride with him. He’s older, treats me like a child. But at least my parents aren’t taking me to varsity.”

  The house was tiny, Gillian said, but somehow they’d arrange things. Perhaps Petra and Gillian could share the double bed and the Belgian officer could sleep on the couch in the parlor. “I can’t wait to see you!” Gillian enthused.

  During their picnic in a farmer’s field Petra explained what she had arranged. “Why doesn’t your friend sleep on the couch?” Gat suggested. “I much rather sleep with you.” Petra blushed in a way that caused a stirring in his groin.

  “I said you were a friend of my father’s,” she explained. Gat shook his head at this improbable idea. “Anything in your paper about Katanga? Is that why you bought it?”

  “If I go back, I’ll need to know what’s gone on.”

  “Are you going back?”

  “I thought there might be something about Lumumba.”

  Petra cocked her head and studied Gat. “What’s so special to you about Lumumba? We keep talking about him.”

  Gat cut himself another slice of cheese.

  “I’m serious,” said Petra. “What’s so special?”

  “He was an original,” Gat said. “He had a national vision for the Congo. Which was what everyone said was needed: we Belgians, the Brits, the Americans, the UN. He launched a cohesive movement to build that vision. Created a political party. Sold that party to voters who were also being offered regional tribal parties. Won the election. Took office only to discover that what the West really wanted was what it had always wanted: to be able to play the tribes off against each other. The Belgians wanted a weak government so that it could continue to extract the country’s riches and bank them in Brussels. The Americans wanted a supine government that would follow its lead on the Cold War. The UN, which the Americans controlled, wanted to run things. Lumumba, determined to build a strong, unified Congo, was a nuisance. So they killed him.”

  Gat spoke with such conviction that Petra could not watch him. She said, “I thought he was in jail somewhere.”

  “He’s dead. In a day or two a Katanga spokesman will announce that he escaped from jail. A couple of days later he’ll announce that Lumumba was found in some remote place by villagers who discovered his identity and killed him.”

  Petra stared at Gat, suddenly understanding. She said, “You killed him.”

  He nodded.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  AT BEAUFORT WEST

  WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 1961

  All afternoon they drove north toward Beaufort West, a small city on the main highway linking Cape Town to Johannesburg. After nightfall they found a small hotel, rather rundown, on the southern outskirts of the town. They registered as Dannie and Gillian Prinsloo of Vryburg. The reception clerk looked carefully from one to the other. He spoke to Gat in Afrikaans. When Petra quickly answered for him in her English-speaker-accented Afrikaans, the clerk knew that while she might be Gillian, he was not Dannie and neither was Prinsloo. He handed over a single key.

  “We didn’t fool him,” Petra said as they climbed the stairs to their room.

  “He’s seen plenty of couples like us,” Gat replied.

  They ate a farm wife’s cooking at a restaurant they had passed and returned to their room. Once inside it, before turning on the light, Gat took Petra by the arm, brought her to him to embrace her. “Let’s talk about why you need me to save your life,” she said. Escaping his embrace, she flicked on the overhead light and moved across the room.

  “What’s there to say?”

  “You tell me.” She went to a corner of the room, pushed out of the way the chair that sat there and settled onto the floor, her legs sticking out before her, her back wedged into the corner. Her arms across her chest, she waited.

  Gat sat on the side of the bed, braced his elbows against his knees, and stared at the floor. “Once this trip started,” he began, “I knew you’d want to know.”

  “Tell me.”

  “That first night with you brought me a peace I hadn’t felt for a long time, well before the Lumumba business.”

  Petra watched, wondering if she should believe anything he said.

  “There’s a woman in Elisabethville.” He shrugged. “She called herself my fiancée. But I felt shriveled inside with her. Dead even. You made me feel alive again.”

  “Did you intend to marry her?”

  “There’s a poison in her. It’s inside most of the whites up there.” He wondered how much he should tell. But why not tell it all? “My first night in Cape Town I spent with a woman I met on the plane.”

  “You don’t have to tell me this,” Petra said.

  “You might as well know.”

  Petra nodded, offering him permission to continue. He gazed at the floor. “Was she glamorous?” she asked.

  “Experienced. Knew how to pick up a man on a plane.” He stared at the memory of— He had forgotten her name. “She told me she was an actress. Maybe she was. She performed in bed for me. I performed for her. That’s what you do on such occasions.
I felt afterward that she had sucked what was left of my soul right out of me.” He watched the floor, finally glancing up. “My first night with you, I felt filled up with— I’m not sure what.”

  Now Petra felt filled up too, proud that, despite her lack of experience, she had pleased an experienced man.

  “It was the honor of being your first. That’s a woman’s greatest compliment to a man. It was your purity and innocence. They’re an antidote for what was just the opposite in me.”

  “There’s a purity in you,” Petra said. “Even an innocence. If there weren’t,” she said, “none of this would bother you. I’ve been watching it bother you.”

  “I haven’t wanted this time to end,” Gat said. “I guess I hoped you’d never have to know about— Who I am. The things I’ve done.”

  No man had ever opened himself to Petra like this. She wondered if she could fall in love with Gat. Maybe she already had. He might be the most honest man she’d known. But being her father’s daughter she knew that some men are virtuosos in the confessional mode.

  “Being with you makes me feel young and very sexy,” Gat told her. “Also very old. Older than your father.”

  “Older than my father?”

  “The worst is ahead for him.” He added, “You really did sort of save my life.”

  They fell silent. She said, “Lumumba.”

  He rose, flicked off the ceiling light, came around to the foot of the bed, and lowered himself to the floor. He stretched out his legs, lodging his feet and ankles against the outside of her calf, finding solace in her warmth. A security light over the hotel’s car park and a neon sign over its dining room gave a faint illumination to his face.

  “It was a Tuesday. January 17. I won’t forget that date anytime soon. They flew him into Elisabethville late in the afternoon.” Gat stared into the darkness as if seeing the events on a screen in his mind. “He’d been held for a month at an army camp south of Leo. In a kind of limbo. That was because the men who’d taken over his government—Congolese with European advisors in the background—kept arguing about what to do with him.

  “Then a mutiny broke out at the army camp. A lot of soldiers there wanted to set him free. The mutiny was put down, but it was clear that Lumumba couldn’t remain there. So they sent him to Katanga, knowing what was likely to happen. That was with the connivance of the Belgian ex-colonial administrators. The American CIA and the palace in Brussels gave their approval.”