Love in the Time of Apartheid

by Frederic Hunter

  After a moment he informed her that an educated African had asked for a lift into Bechuanaland and that he was inclined to take him there. “Do you mind if I use the car?” he asked.

  “Not at all. I’ll go with you.” She assumed an imperious air, challenging him.

  “No, no. Stay with your friend. Have the day with her. I’ll drive up there and come back.”

  Petra, who had told Gat what good friends she and Gillian were, now said that they really were not that close. “We’ve really come here so that I can show you off.” Gat gave her a skeptical look. “All the girls thought I was goody-goody because I was the policeman’s daughter. Gill was the ringleader. I want to show her I’ve grown up.”

  “Will you tell her what you told your mother?”

  “Of course not! I’ll make her ask.” Petra smiled exultantly.

  “And what do you say when she does?”

  “I’ll tell her to ask you.”

  “And I’ll say I’ve made a vow of chastity,” Gat said.

  “Yes, do that. Chastity looks like being your middle name.”

  A pickup drew up behind them, coming fast. It gave them a warning blast from its horn and hurried past, filling the Ford with dust. Once it cleared, Petra and Gat made out sheep grazing in a pasture with a herd boy keeping watch. “That’s probably the farm up ahead,” said Petra.

  “I’ll run the fellow up there and be back by midafternoon.”

  Petra’s expression showed that she was determined to go along.

  “He probably belongs to the ANC,” Gat said.

  “Of course he does. That’s why I want to go.”

  “I might be arrested. Police might confiscate the car—not that your father will have any trouble getting it back. If you’re not with us, you won’t be involved.”

  “I want to be involved!” Petra exclaimed. “I couldn’t arrive at varsity a virgin and I can’t arrive saying I’ve never helped a terrorist escape from this police state.”

  They saw a bungalow sited on the top of a knoll and came abreast of a sign saying “Prinsloo.” They followed the tire tracks leading up to the house and found before it the pickup that had passed them. The driver’s door was open and the motor still running. In the doorway they spied a couple engaged in a passionate greeting, the young man bending the woman backward as he kissed her, one hand under her skirt grasping her buttock and the top of her leg. When Gat stopped the car, Petra leaned over and sounded the horn.

  “Halloo there!” called the young woman, disentangling herself from the embrace. “Guess who just got home!”

  “Been away for a week,” Dannie Prinsloo said. “I missed home.”

  Petra left the car, ran to Gillian, and embraced her. She shook hands with Dannie and introduced Gat.

  “Where did you find him?” Gillian asked.

  “Floating on a pond in a reed basket,” Petra said. “Just like Baby Moses.”

  The Prinsloos laughed, but the comment, suggesting a jocular and intimate relationship, took Gat by surprise. He stood erect, hands behind his back, and explained, “I’m a friend of Petra’s father. He and I met on an earlier trip I made from the Congo where I’m serving.” Gat managed to seem stiff and boring, and Petra’s comments suggested a ridiculing of that stiffness. The Prinsloos hardly greeted him, thinking about getting Dannie properly welcomed home.

  “The captain wanted to see some of South Africa,” Petra improvised, “and Father suggested he drive me up to Wits as a chaperone. And here we are.”

  Gillian gave Petra a skeptical look, but it was only fleeting for Prinsloo took her by the waist. With a grin he suggested, “You wouldn’t want to look at sheep for half an hour, would you? I’m just home and that would give me time to clean up.”

  “We’re passionately interested in sheep!” Petra declared. She and Gat headed back toward the Ford, Gat walking stiffly, seemingly a rigid presence who regarded Petra as he might a child.

  “Make it forty-five minutes,” Prinsloo shouted, “and I might even be able to shower!”

  As they drove into the pasture, they each thought that, despite the heat, they might occupy themselves in the same way the Prinsloos were doing if only they could find the shade of a tree under which to park. But there were no trees. And as soon as the Ford crept onto the other side of the knoll half a dozen boys ran toward them out of the shanties that were the farmworkers’ houses. The boys stared at the car as if they had never before seen such a thing.

  AT SUNSET Piet Rousseau joined his wife in the garden where she was reading an American novel called The Invisible Man. Her sister in England had sent it to her. Piet carried drinks for both of them, gin tonics, and wore shorts, sandals, and a faded madras cloth shirt. He gazed out across the roofs of Cape Town and broke the news to his wife that there was nothing to report on the disappearance or kidnapping of their daughter.

  “I heard from her,” Margaret said. “She said to say she loves you.”

  “But she made sure to call when I’d be gone,” he grumbled. “How is she?”

  Margaret told him that she sounded happy enough. She neglected to mention the lilt and merriness in Petra’s voice, her assurance that she was in love, or her pleasure in the new adventure she had discovered, namely lovemaking. “She wouldn’t tell me where she was. It’s ever so much more delightful an enterprise if we don’t know.” Rousseau grunted. “She also claimed that Kobus tried to seduce her.”

  “She must have looked ready for it, the way she’s been acting.”

  “You really are annoyed with her, aren’t you?”

  Rousseau took a long swallow of his gin tonic, nurturing his anger. “Is she with that Belgian?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Does she give him what she withheld from Kobus?”

  “I don’t ask questions when I don’t want to know the answers.”

  Rousseau swore under his breath in Afrikaans. “He better be taking her to Joburg, not Katanga.”

  “She said they’ll be there tomorrow.” Then Margaret added, “She’s not happy about your trying to hunt her down.”

  Rousseau swore again in Afrikaans. It infuriated him that Petra had run off, just the way a kaffir would, with a man she did not know. He was sure that she had given herself to that man with the same casual abandon that had caused her mother problems at the same time of her life. It was his conviction that if women were introduced to sex too early, it came to dominate their lives. They hungered for it, became wanton. Wisely he had never expressed this thought to Margaret. Still, he considered her an example that proved the rule. Once he began to take her places, she had offered very little resistance to his importuning for sex.

  As a young man he had supposed their lovemaking confirmed his personal magnetism. By the time he learned of her child, he had fallen too much under her spell to break off the relationship. During the early disagreements of their married life, he brooded over her association with the child’s father. He pestered her with questions about other lovers and would not believe her contentions that there had been none. Once the marriage became solid, he stopped worrying about other men she had known. Instead he congratulated himself on saving her from a dissolute life. Now he felt affronted that his wife’s blood had passed her profligacy to his daughter. While Petra’s action reminded him of his own defiance of his father, he resented her defiance of him. And he hated the fact that men, both Kobus and this Belgian, sought to dally with his well-brought-up girl.

  He himself had dallied with African girls; that was where young white men should work off their lusts. He vowed to himself that he would punish Captain Gautier. In doing so, he would right the wrong that a college student had done Margaret so many years ago. He sat nursing his resentments in the same way he nursed his drink. “We should fly up to Joburg to see that she’s all right,” Rousseau told his wife. “We can find her at varsity.”

  “Darling,” Margaret said with as much patience as she could muster, “she’s not your little girl anymore. W
e trained her for eighteen years. Now she wants to be on her own. I feel certain this business with the Belgian is not ‘an adventure.’ ” Although she knew that Petra was truly having an adventure, she said the word in a way that mocked it, mocked him. “She’s just guaranteeing that she does not arrive at varsity looking like a child starting school. We have to stay here.”

  Rousseau swore again under his breath, determined that Captain Gautier would be called to account. And interrogated about his connection to the man murdered in District Six. He thought of the various tortures he might inflict on the man whenever he caught up with him. He was certain that he would catch up with him.

  AFTER DINNER while the day’s last light faded from the sky Dannie Prinsloo walked Gat around the farm. Petra remained inside to help Gillian clean up. She asked if Gillian thought she had done the right thing in choosing the hard life of farming with twenty-four-year-old Dannie in preference to pursuing her education. Gillian gazed out the open kitchen window. “If you love the man, why not be with him?” she asked, speaking as much to herself as to Petra. “You saw how eager he was for me this afternoon. That makes me feel good.”

  A breeze lifted the hair hanging over Petra’s forehead and cooled her face. Her friend tiredly returned to her chores. “If I’m here in ten years with more tots underfoot than I can count, I may wish I’d gone to varsity.”

  Petra smiled. She wondered where she would be in ten years. And what would have happened to Gat?

  Walking around the farm together, Prinsloo told Gat, “I apologize for being so ardent with my wife when you arrived this afternoon.”

  “I doubt she minds being missed.”

  “I needed to be sure everything was all right with her,” Prinsloo explained. “The best way to find that out was to—Well, you saw what we were up to.” The men walked on. “I stopped in town on the way out here. Heard some news. Got out here as fast as I could. Wanted to be sure she was safe. That she felt safe.”

  “What news? Mind if I ask?”

  “Two kaffirs were murdered outside of town. Terrorists, probably. Late last night, early this morning. In a place they had no business being.”

  Gat said nothing. They walked on.

  “Police found them. Tried to get them to their own hospital to save them. But it was too late.” Prinsloo spat into the dust. “Bloody kaffirs have no regard for life. Kill each other every weekend in knife fights over women. There are warrior gangs in every hostel. Terrorists come through here, demanding food and lodging. Terrorize our people. Rape girls. No wonder some of them end up dead. I know you’ve seen this very thing in the Congo.”

  “The men killed in Vryburg were terrorists?”

  Prinsloo nodded. “Up by Zeerust near the border the ANC has stirred things up. The kaffirs refuse to pay taxes. A chief was assassinated not long ago for being a government lackey. Anybody tries to accomplish something: he’s a government lackey. A kaffir dies violently: it was the police killed him. No one’s hurt around here but the kaffirs mutter we caused it. Why would we kill kaffirs? For God sake they’re our work force!” Prinsloo shook his head with frustration. “Why would we kill the people who do the work that makes it possible to farm here?”

  Gat gave a noncommittal grunt.

  “My wife doesn’t know about the murders,” Prinsloo confided. “Don’t say anything. I’ll tell her after you’re gone.” He swore in Afrikaans. “I love living on this land. But one day we’ll have to move into town. Before any babies come.”

  Back in the kitchen Gillian was apologizing to Petra about the smallness of the house. It served for now, she said, but if she and Dannie were to have children, they would need to add bedrooms. “I’m sorry there’s no bed for the captain.”

  “He’s been sleeping in the car anyway,” Petra said. “I guess after places he’s slept in the Congo that Ford is pretty luxurious.”

  Gillian examined her face. Because two years had passed since they’d seen one another, the examination offered no clues as to whether Petra was telling the truth. “Do you still see Kobus Terreblanche?” Gillian asked.

  Petra nodded. “He tried to get with me the other morning in my bedroom.”

  “What was he doing there?”

  “Trying to get into my bed!” The women laughed.

  “You might have enjoyed it. I do.”

  “I’m going to Wits to meet other men.”

  “What’s wrong with Captain Gautier?”

  “He’s years and years older than Dannie.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Gillian teased. “He knows the drill.”

  Petra turned up her nose. “He seems a little stiff, don’t you think?”

  “Stiff is just the thing in bed, you know.”

  LYING ON the sitting room couch, waiting for sleep, Petra heard snickerings and shushings from the bedroom. Next came the steady rhythms of poundings and thrustings followed by gasps and sighs. Petra gritted her teeth, wishing it were hers and Gat’s bodies making those noises. They had not made love in what seemed an eternity. She wondered if she dared go outside to the car.

  Outside in the Ford Gat could not sleep. The front seat was not long enough for his body. His head kept jabbing the handle that raised and lowered the window. Now and then his legs bumped the steering wheel. He had rubbed his body with sticky insect repellent. Even so, he had closed up the car against mosquitoes and wore socks to cover their favorite places of visitation. He sweated in his shorts and tee shirt. The smell of Petra’s perfumed belongings annoyed him; it reminded him that with better planning they could have been together in a hotel.

  Then out of nowhere he heard faintly the distant throbbing of drums. The Africans in the workers’ camp of the farm must be dancing. He wondered about the African who said he needed to get to Lobatse. Who was he? What dangers were involved in taking him there?

  When it seemed he had lain on the front seat forever, Gat stuffed his feet into shoes and left the car. Standing outside it, he put on the shorts of his safari suit and trudged off in the direction of the drumming. He moved across the knoll and down toward the workers’ shacks. In a circle before a fire men and women danced, clapping their hands, chanting to the beat of the drums played by men at the edge of the firelight, a leader designating steps from the center of the circle.

  Gat began to move to the rhythms. The drumming, the clapping, the raised voices, the motion of the dance: these all set up a physical longing for Petra. And a deep sense of pleasure in Africa. If he and Petra went to Australia together, would he miss Africa? Some people claimed that its hold—despite all that you complained of it—never released you. Would he feel that way? But he knew he would never go to Australia. He had a job in Katanga. He was owed pay there. Had an apartment and belongings. He could not leave them behind.

  AS PETRA waited for sleep, Dannie’s deep-throated snoring assailed the nocturnal quietude. Petra slipped off the couch. She tiptoed to the front door, pulled it open, and ran barefoot to the car, wearing only her nightie. As soon as Gat wakened, she would—

  Where was he? His shoes were gone. So were the shorts of his safari suit. Had he gone? She dared not call for him. Had he left her? She peered into the darkness, heard the drumming. Had he gone there?

  She stood, wondering what to do: get inside the car and wait for him? Or go back inside? Infernal man! He was supposed to be in the car!!

  Coming back across the knoll, his eyes now well adjusted to the darkness, Gat saw Petra, and her light pink nightgown, standing beside the car. He had a strong impulse to run to her. Instead he stopped stock-still. He made out her arms, waving off mosquitoes. He wanted to be with her, to hold her. They could spend the rest of the night together in the car. He watched her figure turn this way and that, searching for him in the starlight. He might whisper her name. But he did nothing.

  He watched Petra return inside the house. He waited for a time, wondering if she would come out again. If she did, he would go to her. Why, he asked himself, had he done nothing?
Because she was beginning to mean too much to him. He must keep some distance.

  CHAPTER NINE

  VRYBURG

  FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 1961

  At dawn Petra, already dressed, marched out to the Ford, carrying a tall mug of tea, and peered through the windshield. Gat lay stretched out on the front seat, his knees bent under the steering wheel, his spine against the seat backs, his right arm folded beneath his head as a pillow. He looked like a package stuffed into a box too small for it. Petra grinned at the sight and rapped sharply on the hood. At the tinny sound of banging, Gat looked at her sleepily. Through the windshield she showed him the mug of tea. He sat upright. She opened the door and offered him the tea.

  He got out of the car, barefoot and in underwear, stretched, and touched his toes. He took the tea, drank deeply of it, and set it on the roof of the car.

  “Did you miss me last night?” Petra asked.

  Rotating his torso, he shook his head dismissively and beamed. She felt pleased.

  “I came out here in the middle of the night,” she confessed.

  “You did?” Across the roof of the car Gat noticed Gillian Prinsloo watching them out the kitchen window.

  She leaned close to him and whispered, “I wanted you to make love with me on the front seat of a car. So that I can tell everyone at varsity that I’ve done it there.”

  “I don’t suppose I should kiss you,” he said. “Your friend Mevrou—what’s her name?—is watching us. I’m not good at names.”

  “Her name is Gillian Prinsloo,” the girl said. Gat raised his cup of tea to the woman watching them. “My name is Petra.”

  “Petra,” said Gat. “I must remember that.”

  “You might get dressed as well,” Petra suggested. “Where were you last night?”

  “I took a walk to think about today,” he said. He reached inside the car for the shorts of his safari suit and his shoes.

  “What about today?”

  “Look toward the house,” Gat instructed. He turned his back to the car and the house, adjusted himself inside his underwear, and stepped into the shorts of his safari suit. He sat down on the car seat, dusted off his feet, and withdrew socks from his shoes. “I don’t want you to come with me today,” he told her. “It’s too dangerous.” She said nothing while he put on his shoes and socks. Then he stood beside her, drinking tea.