Love in the Time of Apartheid

by Frederic Hunter

  “Thank you, Petra, for being with me during this time.”

  She said nothing. The grip of his hand tightened. She waited. He released her wrist. They listened for each other in the silence. He was letting her go. Did he know she was leaving? Was he saying good-bye?

  “No other woman has—”

  “I’m just going out for some air.”

  “I’ll stay here.”

  “Sleep well. See you later.”

  She moved quietly, quickly, along the hall and down the stairway into the lobby. As she crossed it, the reception clerk watched her. She tried to smile. He greeted her, “Mevrou Prinsloo.”

  She responded, “Dankie,” and pushed her way outside into the night. She got into the car, settled herself, telling herself to calm down. Driving at night, it was not that much more difficult than during the day. She shoved the key into the ignition, turned it. The motor started. But where was the switch for the headlights? She fiddled with knobs on the dashboard. She started the windshield wipers, depressed the cigarette lighter. Finally the lights went on. She shifted into reverse, searched the rearview mirror from every angle, seeing only darkness behind her tinted with the red glow from her brake lights. She backed out of the parking space and moved out onto the road.

  She drove into town so slowly that she knew she could have walked there faster. That idea made her laugh. Her confidence about driving at night increased. She reached a filling station and had her tank filled with petrol. She asked directions for the highway going north. Continue straight on. She left Beaufort West behind her and began to relax. There was no traffic. All she had to do was stay awake and alert and drive slowly enough to avoid trouble.

  At first she thought of nothing. She seemed to be moving through a huge bowl, the lower half of which was deeply black, the upper half speckled with stars. She could feel that the country was dry and monotonous. She rolled down her window. Warm air swooshed into the car, whirled around her, and helped her stay alert. As she began to feel more confident, she wondered what she was doing driving alone at night through this sparsely peopled country. She thought about Gat. He would be with her all her life. Twenty years up the road there would be times—afternoons having tea alone or at night when she lay awake beside her husband—when he would come to visit. Would she remember having left him stranded in a small hotel in the Great Karoo?

  Driving through the night, she thought of Jan-Christiaan, her brother. She understood now why he stayed in England. JC treated her much the same way Kobus and her father did, as if she were a decorative child to be humored with patience and understanding and protected from things that children and women need not know.

  The siblings corresponded two or three times a year. The intiative always came from Petra. She would get to worrying about JC. Was he surviving? Did he have friends? Father sent him no money; Mum could send only what would not be missed if Father carefully reviewed her checkbook. JC must have a job to meet his everyday needs. Petra would write, asking about these matters. He would answer, always cheerful, asking about their mother, but never mentioning their father.

  JC and Kobus traveled to England together on the trip from which JC never returned. Petra more than once asked Kobus to explain exactly what happened in England. One evening they were at Kobus’s parents’ home, ostensibly listening to music in the library while actually necking. Petra crossed her legs and pushed him away, saying Kobus could not touch her until he revealed what happened in England. Finally he told her that while touring the Cotswolds, passing themselves off as Americans, he and JC traveled with other students on tour. Among them were young Caribbeans. JC fell hard for a girl from Jamaica. They began the kind of summer romance forbidden JC in South Africa.

  “From Jamaica?” Petra asked. “She was black then.”

  “But lekker,” Kobus assured her. “Truly. Not your stumpy Zulu maiden with balaclava and blankets. Slim and sexy. Quite intelligent.”

  “You liked the looks of her too.”

  Kobus smiled. “Why not? We were in England. The girl knew JC was not American even when he insisted that he was. Finally it came to their negotiating sex.”

  “JC wanted that with her?” Petra asked, amazed. The girl was black.

  “He was very attracted to her.” Petra tried to hide her surprise. “She refused him because he lied about being American. So he admitted to being South African. She immediately threw him over.”

  “Why?”

  “She assumed she’d be just an ‘experience’ for him. Something he’d boast about back home.” Petra assumed that any girl would count herself lucky if JC wanted an involvement with her. That the Jamaican girl could send him packing meant that she had a sense of herself. Kobus continued, “She told JC things about South Africa that he’d never heard before from someone he respected. That it was a police state, that secret police tortured and killed people.”

  The Jamaican girl planted bad seeds. Kobus insisted to JC that she was angry because she was forbidden fruit. She was pulling his chain, parroting the insults the liberal Western press threw at South Africans about their homeland. “I told him:” Kobus said, “Look at the advances Africans have made under our tutelage, advances in health care, education, employment opportunities.”

  JC could not be convinced. He began to do research. He read books and talked to people. He decided there was something to what the Jamaican girl claimed. He said he learned things that could not be denied.

  “What things?” Petra asked.

  “Things about your father.”

  “What?” Petra felt astonished.

  “I told him it was ridiculous,” Kobus insisted. He shrugged, putting his arm around her shoulders. But before she let him kiss her he told her, “I said, ‘Look, man, well-intentioned people sometimes have to do these things. Take what the Brits—we’re visiting Britain right now, man!—did to us in the Boer War. Put us in concentration camps. Fed our women and children crushed glass. And now we’re here. Terrible things can happen to gain necessary ends.’ But JC only shook his head. He turned his back on his father and on his people.”

  Because Kobus suddenly became passionate, Petra did not pay much attention then to what he said. She was preoccupied with controlling him. But now, driving through the night, she thought about JC. He saw the Jamaican girl as beautiful; their father would have seen her only as black. She thought of the African hitchhiker Gat had picked up. Riding with him had alarmed her but, despite what she’d told Gat, she did not seriously suppose he might be a terrorist. She hated his obsequiousness, the baas-baas-baas, the calling her Madam. Now she understood that servility was a protective mechanism. It warded off the possibility of— She could hardly think of the word. “Forcing change. Not a good idea, baas-baas-baas.” Now she wondered what he really thought. What did all of them think?

  JC had concluded that their father was a torturer. If he did not inflict torture, he certainly authorized it. That was why JC had not come home. Their father understood this; that was why JC’s name was never spoken. She thought they were a happy family. Now she realized how many things were never mentioned in their home: neither of her mother’s sons, the nature of her father’s work.

  Tears began to fill her eyes. She slowed the car. She bit her lips and brushed the tears away. Was it torture that gave her father his black moods? She wondered if her mother knew. She must at least suspect. Her parents had married a dozen years before the Afrikaners took control of the government. Her mother had had two young children before her father began to get promotions. So what could she do?

  Petra suddenly made out a white form on the highway before her. Some kind of boulder. She panicked, screamed, swerved off the pavement, bumped over the roadside shoulder, and hit a veld fence post. The car died. She sobbed, finally calmed down. She realized that the boulder she had swerved to miss was a sheep. Stupid beast! It was still standing on the road, watching her. She got out of the car, reached into the dust for a dirt clod, and hurled it at the sheep. It di
d not move. Petra circled the car. It seemed all right. She got back inside, nervously pumped the accelerator, and turned the ignition. The car would not start. She tried repeatedly. The motor would whine and grind with complaint as she held the ignition on, but it would not start.

  Petra left the car and walked down the highway toward the sheep. It still had not moved. She ran at it, yelled at the top of her lungs, “Get off the road!” The sheep baaaed and trotted off. Petra turned back. She got into the car and tried to start it one last time. On this try the motor immediately fired into action.

  Petra sat with the motor idling, wondering: Why am I here all alone in the middle of nowhere? What am I fleeing from? The horror of Gat killing Lumumba? Wasn’t that also what Gat was fleeing from?

  She got the car back onto the highway and headed south toward Beaufort West. When she neared the city, she wondered if she could find the hotel.

  The entrance to the hotel was locked. She had to ring the bell several times. When the night clerk appeared, wiping sleep from his eyes, he regarded her through the windows of the door, then opened it for her. “Mevrou Prinsloo,” he said.

  “Dankie,” Petra said again. “I’m sorry to wake you.”

  The man stared at her a long moment, then let her pass. “Your husband came down looking for you,” he said.

  “I’m sure he’ll understand when I explain things.” She tried to smile. “I’m afraid I’ll need a key to the room.”

  “Maybe there is something I should show you,” the night clerk said. He disappeared behind the reception counter, got a second room key, and returned holding a folder. “The police brought this by awhile ago.” He opened the folder and showed her what was inside it: a photo of her, identified as a missing person. The clerk watched her stare at the photo. “Shall I call the police?”

  “That won’t be necessary,” she said.

  “Are you with Mr. Prinsloo of your own volition?”

  “Yes,” said Petra. “He’s my fiancé. My father, who’s a government official, thinks I’m too young to marry.”

  “You don’t need to explain,” the night clerk assured her. “This government spends too much time regulating our lives. I myself live with a Bantu woman. We pretend she’s my servant.” He handed Petra the photo and the room key.

  “Thank you,” she said as she tiptoed toward the stairway.

  SHE ENTERED the room as quietly as she could. She looked at Gat asleep on the bed in his safari suit and tiptoed across the room to set her purse and the photo and the keys on the bureau. She went to the bed, sat on it slowly so that the changed pressure on the mattress would not waken Gat, reached down to remove her shoes, and lay down beside him. She felt his hand fumbling for hers. He took it, brought it to his mouth, and kissed it. She understood that the kiss was a gesture of thanks. “I don’t blame you for leaving,” he said. “I’m glad you came back.”

  “Your story frightened me.”

  “This is a beautiful little community, but I didn’t want to get stuck here.”

  Petra smiled.

  “If you aren’t sure you like me, knowing what you do about me now . . . Well, I’m not sure I like myself.”

  They lay side by side, his hand enclosing hers. Gat had pulled the shade down before the window overlooking the car park. The red neon light outside the hotel bar had been turned off. Now the ceiling loomed dark above them. Petra felt gooseflesh rise on her arms. She wondered about getting into the bed, about pulling away from Gat’s hand, and standing and taking off her dress and sliding between the sheets. Finally she said, “I have something.” She rose from the bed, got the photo from the bureau, and returned with it. Gat sat up and turned on the bedside lamp. He looked at the photo a long moment. “I was wishing I had one of you.”

  “The night clerk won’t turn us in.”

  Gat pulled her down beside him and put his arm around her. “We could leave right now, but neither of us has had any sleep.”

  “What if we left when the man brings us tea? I could get a couple of hours.”

  Gat nodded and turned off the light. She returned the photo to the dresser, removed her dress, and came to the bed wearing her slip. She pulled back the spread and got in between the sheets. Gat rose and stripped to his shorts. He did not get into the bed, only pulled the spread over him.

  They lay silently for a long time, each feeling a tension that held sleep at bay. Finally Gat whispered, “It’s very hard for me to lie next to you and not want to make love to you.”

  “Maybe we should get married.”

  “You mean as a way to stop?”

  They laughed and lay back, holding hands and staring at the darkness overhead. The pull toward lovemaking was strong, but Petra had been awake all night. Nor had Gat slept once she left. As they contemplated the possibility, sleep crept over them.

  They did not waken until Gat heard the man knock with the tea. It was still dark outside. He gently wakened Petra and went to the bathroom. She joined him in the shower and finished up while he shaved. They drank tea quickly and got on the road.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  EN ROUTE TO VRYBERG

  THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 1961

  Gat drove the Ford north through the darkness. Petra slept on the backseat, her belongings piled on the seat beside Gat or on the floor. The air had an invigorating crispness. The sun would soon cook the entire landscape, turning the air to heat, burning skin, sucking juices out of animals and plants. But right now Gat felt a tingle of pleasure at being alive, moving through star-scattered darkness, the girl asleep behind him, a scent of her rising now and then from the belongings beside him, an occasional gasp in her breathing breaking the quietude, the hum of the motor a kind of lullaby. It occurred to Gat that if he had the power, he would command that his life go on forever like this.

  Soon stars disappeared from the sky. As the sun rose, the air was so clear Gat could see for miles. Eventually—the sun was high now, the air heating up—he felt Petra’s hands on his shoulders. He glanced in the rearview mirror to see her smiling, strands of hair glued to her face by sweat, saliva bright at the edges of her mouth. Her eyes were not yet fully open, sleep dust in their corners. “Meneer Prinsloo,” she said, “are you hungry?”

  “Mevrou Prinsloo,” he replied, “shall we stop somewhere for breakfast?”

  They got eggs, sausage and coffee, bread and cheese at a general store and pub in a tiny dorp. They drove on, Gat at the wheel, one hand steering, the other arm wrapped about Petra who sat with her back against him, her feet bare, watching the road.

  Finally she asked, “Do you think we should get married?”

  “What!” Gat burst out laughing.

  “Why not?” He did not reply. “Wouldn’t you like to keep driving like this forever?”

  Gat would not admit that he had contemplated this very thought while she slept. “Why would we marry? You know nothing about me.”

  “But I do! Unless you’ve been lying.”

  “I’m a practiced liar, inveterate fibber.”

  Miffed, she slid across the seat and put her back against the door. She watched him. She was being provocative and he was damned if he would look at her. Petra swung her body toward him, stretched out her legs, and plopped her bare feet in Gat’s lap. She ground her heels back and forth, hoping to excite a reaction in Gat’s groin. When she succeeded, she crowed, “I know a great deal about you.”

  He grabbed her feet with his hands, steering with his knees, and began to tickle them. She screamed. She kicked her feet. Her kicks veered the car across the road. She screamed again, giggled. Gat grabbed the steering wheel and righted the car’s direction.

  After a time she asked, “Why not? We could go to Australia together.” He drove on for a time. At last she repeated, “Why not?”

  “Because I’m not eighteen.”

  “You’re not going back to Katanga, are you?”

  “Must you keep asking questions?”

  “You say I don’t know you. How am
I going to if I don’t ask questions?”

  They drove in silence, past miserable farms: a house with pepper trees or scrawny acacias, a wind pump, and pond. Some distance away would be brick houses, painted white at a time beyond memory with roofs of corrugated tin weighted down by boulders, the huts of the laborers stuck, generation after generation, in servitude to the farm.

  Seeing these dwellings, Gat felt almost as much a prisoner of his situation as the farmworkers were of theirs. If he did not go back to Katanga, he wondered, what would he do? If he returned, was there a future for him in the Belgian forces?

  Petra said, “I think you’ve had too many women.”

  “My share, I guess. Maybe more than my share.”

  “I hate you for that!”

  Gat reached over, picked up her foot, and kissed it. “Pity me,” he said. “I need a longtime partner. Where there’s love.”

  “We could love each other,” Petra said. “When you hold me, I know that.”

  Gat kept driving.

  “If you haven’t been married—”

  “You keep on, don’t you?” he asked. “Like a little three-year-old!”

  “Then how do you know you wouldn’t like it?”

  He placed an affectionate hand on her foot. “I could love you,” he said. “And maybe I do—although I’m not sure what the hell that is. I’d still be the wrong man for you. You know that, don’t you?”

  Petra watched him, feeling off-balance, hearing at the same time what seemed to be both yes and no. “At least I got your attention.”

  Gat smiled. “You’re young,” he said, quite gently. “About to start university—where I’ve never been. You have your whole life ahead of you. You really have done something like save my life. I cannot repay you by nipping yours in the bud.”

  Petra said, “Stop the car! Stop it!”

  Gat sped onto the shoulder and braked to a stop. Petra hurried from the car, leaving her door open. She leaned over, opened her mouth, and made retching sounds. Gat leaped from the car and hurried to her. “Are you sick?”