Love in the Time of Apartheid

by Frederic Hunter

  “What a day!” Gat exclaimed. “And it’s hardly more than noon! Early this morning I lay here wondering what would happen to us. And now we’re married!” They rose, showered together, dressed in traveling clothes, checked out of their hotel after eating a light lunch, and got onto the road for Joeys.

  THE NEWLYWEDS passed through the Ramatlabama border post outside Mafeking and reentered South Africa. As they drove toward Johannesburg through the warm summer day, the air made golden by brilliant sunlight, perfumed by flowers and crops, Petra sat close beside her husband. He held the steering wheel with his right hand and kept his left arm around his bride.

  They sang songs to each other, love songs and school songs and patter songs, songs in French and Flemish, English and Afrikaans, songs they had learned while growing up, and taught them to one another in order to create shared experience. Since, they agreed, it was probably a good idea that each one should know to whom he had pledged his life, they recounted to one another those important events of their lives that they had not already shared in their journey.

  Petra decided not to tell Gat, not just yet, that her mother had borne an out-of-wedlock child in Rhodesia or that her father worked for the Special Branch. Gat omitted mentioning various relationships he had enjoyed with women; these did not seem the sort of thing one spoke of driving away from one’s wedding. He also declined to reveal that Adriaan Gautier was not the name his parents gave him. It was the name Petra had made real by giving it context. It was the name he intended to keep.

  As they drew ever nearer to Johannesburg, Petra began to recite stanzas of Afrikaans poetry that she had memorized for her father as a child. Gat watched her with fascination as sounds not unlike Flemish tumbled from her mouth. He began singing to her a Flemish drinking song, laughing and flicking his eyebrows when the lyrics grew ribald, pounding out the rhythm on the steering wheel.

  Suddenly Petra felt a foreboding. She bit her lips and looked away from Gat, out her window. She realized she must telephone her mother. Otherwise, this glorious day, the day of her wedding, was going to end badly.

  She put her hand to Gat’s mouth to stop his singing and he nibbled at her fingers with his lips. She pulled her hand away. He stopped singing. “Is something wrong?”

  “I want to call my parents. To tell them our news.”

  Gat watched the road. Finally he suggested that it might be best to call from the airport, just before they boarded their flight. He sensed that something had spooked Petra. “You having second thoughts?” he asked. She shook her head. “Will your father try to keep us from leaving the country?”

  “He might,” she acknowledged. “He’ll be furious . . .” After a moment she added, “I’m sure he expected to have some say in the man I married.”

  Gat realized that her eyes were swimming with tears and pulled off the road.

  “What is it? What is it?”

  “I can’t just flee, can I? As if I hated them? They’ve been wonderful to me.” She began to weep. Gat held her close. “I love them so much. I don’t want to hurt them.”

  Now that he had married, it shook Gat to think that his wife was weeping on her wedding day. He found a petrol station with a restaurant and pulled into it. Petra went inside to make the call. As he waited for her, he also began to feel a foreboding. Perhaps, he thought, when Petra returned, he himself should make a call to her father. Since they had already married, he could hardly ask for Rousseau’s blessing. But still, he might call.

  “I talked to Elsie,” Petra said when she returned. “They’re on their way to Joeys. She told me where they’re staying.”

  “Let’s call them then,” Gat suggested. “We’ll invite them to dinner. On our wedding night. Our treat.”

  “Thank you.” Petra smiled gratefully.

  Gat said, “Maybe we can get a room in the same hotel. We’ll be a family. Do you want to call them from here?”

  “Let’s get into Joeys first. I need to think about what I’ll say.”

  They drove on. The open veld became increasingly dotted by small Afrikaner dorps with Afrikaner dorp names: Groot-Marico, Swartruggers. Gradually the dorps gave way to towns and small cities—Rustenburg, Krugersdorp, Roodepoort—with African townships dotted about, always sited where South African police or defense forces could isolate them in case of trouble. Finally they saw, looming ahead of them, the tall buildings of the city and the slag heaps from the gold mines that had made it—or at least its white citizenry—wealthy. The mounds of slag seemed to shimmer with a golden sparkle in the sun.

  Gat noticed in the rearview mirror a police car following them. Once again he felt a foreboding. He slowed to let the car pass. As it moved beyond them, the officers studied both occupants of the Ford. Gat pulled off the road. He had a very strong sense that something was wrong. Even so, he did not want to alarm Petra.

  She regarded him as if she, too, sensed danger. “The police,” she said.

  “I suspect something’s gone wrong. Military instinct.”

  “You feel it too?”

  “I think we should go directly to the airport and take the first plane out to Australia.”

  Tears rose in Petra’s eyes. “It’s my father, isn’t it?”

  Gat did not want to criticize Petra’s father on their wedding day. But the man was a high-ranking police official accustomed to protecting his daughter, to having prior approval of the life choices she made. He was certain to be furious that a man unknown to him intended to separate her from the volk to whom he had dedicated his life.

  They looked at one another. “Can I just leave?” she asked.

  “We know he’s trying to stop us.”

  She looked away from Gat and stared out the window. Tears ran down her cheeks. Gat handed her a handkerchief. She wiped away her tears. “I don’t think he would do anything to hurt me,” she told him. “But I’m not sure.”

  Gat pulled back onto the road. “Here’s a plan,” he said. “We go to the airport and check what possibilities are for a flight to Australia. If it seems a good idea for you to call your parents from there, you can do it.”

  Petra leaned closer to him. “Thank you,” she said. “This seems crazy since I’ve just committed myself to you. But I couldn’t just leave.”

  “You’re my wife,” Gat said. “I trust your judgment.”

  One thing to say that, Gat told himself, another to believe it. As he drove on, he hoped he believed it.

  AT THE Jan Smuts airport, they parked the Ford and sat in it conferring about how to proceed. They took account of what was left of the two thousand American dollars Gat had received as blood money. It would be enough to see them to Australia, to buy them groceries, and get them into some kind of lodging. Gat would need to start earning money almost immediately. The Rousseaus had opened a bank account for Petra’s use at Wits; unless it was canceled, they would keep that as reserve. Petra would take two suitcases of clothes and leave the remainder of her belongings in the trunk of the Ford. They would telephone either her parents or Hazel to notify the family as to its whereabouts.

  They took their luggage and entered the terminal. Checking a listing of departures, they discovered a flight leaving that evening for Melbourne. They hugged each other with relief.

  “It’s been awhile since Lobatse,” Petra told Gat. “I’m going to spend a penny. Then you can spend one and we’ll get our tickets.” She headed off toward the ladies’ room.

  Gat watched his wife walk off across the terminal. How lucky he was, he felt, that such a woman was willing to commit herself to him. Still, that feeling of satisfaction was tinged by a sense of danger. He glanced about, but saw nothing to arouse his suspicions. He paced back and forth before the luggage. Finally a woman and two men approached him. One of them said, “Adriaan Gautier?”

  Gat recognized the police. “That’s right,” he replied.

  “We have a warrant for your arrest.”

  “On what charges?”

  “Kidnapping. Corr
upting a minor. Car theft. Come with us, please.”

  “What about my wife? We were married this morning.”

  “The matron will stay with her and explain everything.”

  When Petra returned from the ladies’ room, she found a woman she had never seen before standing beside her luggage. Gat was gone.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  JOHANNESBURG

  SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1961

  Piet and Margaret Rousseau arrived at Jan Smuts airport in Johannesburg shortly after noon. Rousseau took charge of their luggage. He had brought a single suitcase; Margaret had brought four. Because their relationship had grown strained, he did not question or comment on the difference in the amount of luggage each had brought. He did not expect to spend more than a day or two in the city. He wanted to resolve the matter that had brought them there quickly, get Petra settled into Wits expeditiously, deal with the Belgian officer as befitted his case, and return to his responsibilities in Cape Town.

  He assumed that Margaret felt that Petra might need a good deal of mothering while she both returned to earth after the excitement of her adventure and began her new life at varsity. He personally thought it might be best for Petra to return to the Cape and enroll in the University of Cape Town, living at home. That or go out to Stellenbosch where she would be close enough to keep an eye on. When he had mentioned such notions to his wife, she had refused to discuss them. He had decided that, given the circumstances, it was perhaps better to agree to Margaret’s staying a week or two near Wits where Petra could reach out to her if need be.

  As a taxi drove them to their hotel, they did not speak. In fact, daily conversation between them had become difficult. He knew that Margaret and especially Petra regarded him as having “blacks.” But it was Margaret who now seemed to have sunk into one.

  Rousseau was known at the hotel and so there was no problem about having to wait for their suite until three P.M., the customary check-in time. They went to the rooms, ordered sandwiches from room service, and had their lunch there. Rousseau moved a lounge chair near a window so that his wife could gaze out over the city and arranged a lamp beside the chair so that she could read. She ensconced herself in the chair, her book unopened in her lap, looked occasionally at the city, but more often at the mirror above the dresser where she could see an image of herself. With her taken care of, Rousseau made phone calls from the adjoining room.

  As the afternoon wore on, with Piet busy in the other room, Margaret Rousseau gazed at her image in the glass. She saw past the middle-aged woman reflected there and discerned the child-woman she had once been. In the days since Petra had run off, Margaret had thought time and again of her youth, of the lad and the love they had felt, of her running off to Rhodesia to have their baby and give it to his sister. She realized now that she might have been wiser to reveal the truth to her parents, certainly at least to her mother. She wondered if her parents had understood why she went to Rhodesia. Probably. It was surprising what a little experience of the world taught people. She wondered why they never asked about her time there. Were they honoring her adulthood, letting her take the lead? Since she had not talked to her parents then, she was determined to talk to her daughter now. She was not prepared to let her husband damage something fragile and meaningful to Petra.

  In Petra’s call to her two days earlier she had seemed carefree and pleased with herself and open about sharing her first-love joy. Margaret wanted to nurture that joy and their relationship and the trust that undergirded it. She was very afraid that Piet was determined to smash it.

  If he did, she knew what she would do. She had heard about short-term rentals, small flats designed for business people who needed to camp out in Joburg for a month or two. She would take one of those. She had brought along clothes enough to see her into autumn and even winter. Petra could stay with her until she made a life for herself at Wits.

  Once Petra was established at varsity, Margaret would take a trip to Rhodesia. Perhaps even to England. She had long wanted to check on things in both places. Then? Perhaps she would return to Grahamstown, get a job of some kind, perhaps at the varsity there. In her spare time she would take courses, less for the degree she had never received—although she would work for a degree—but for the enrichment that learning and new views on the world would provide.

  She wondered if Piet had any inkling that he was threatening a rupture in his marriage that might never be repaired. Probably not, even though it could not have escaped his notice—he was an observant man—that she had brought four suitcases, clothes enough for an extended stay. He was observant, yes, but also what he called principled. One of those principles was that his women behaved as he expected them to. At the moment he saw himself saving both Petra’s future and her reputation. Margaret saw him as bent on ruining her happiness.

  She understood that he meant well. That was what made it so difficult. After he finished his telephoning, he had nothing to do but wait for the call that might come from Jan Smuts. He had brought reports to read, but he could not focus on them. Instead he paced in his stocking feet. Margaret looked out the window or pretended to read. She did not want to talk.

  Finally the telephone rang. Rousseau answered it immediately. He spoke into it in low tones. Margaret continued to sit at the window, her novel in her lap, her eyes still on a page she had hardly looked at all day.

  “They’ve picked them up,” Rousseau announced when he hung up the phone. “They’re bringing Petra here in the Ford. They’ll take the Belgian to headquarters.” Margaret heard in the tone of his voice how pleased he was. The police had done their job. His daughter was safe, at least as he saw the matter. “I better get over there.”

  “What will you do?” she asked.

  “Interrogate him.”

  “Which means what?” She looked at him beseechingly.

  “He’s an enemy of the state.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do. He ferried a terrorist across the border.”

  “Petra was with him,” Margaret said. “She loves him—or thinks she does.”

  Rousseau sat in a companion chair nearby. He shoved his stockinged feet into his shoes and laced them up, preparing to leave. “We need to find out about him. He claimed to be a Belgian army officer. But we really don’t know who he is. He could be ANC for all we know.”

  “Please keep in mind that he’s important to Petra.”

  “The man’s a scoundrel,” Rousseau said. He rose and stretched to his full height in a gesture of triumph. “As I see it, he kidnapped and corrupted a minor. Showed her things she didn’t need to know and put her under a dangerous spell.”

  “Will you interrogate him yourself?”

  “I will. If he doesn’t talk, we may have to crush a testicle.” Margaret looked away, aghast. What a barbaric way to talk! Did it not occur to him that Petra would never forgive him? “Excuse me for mentioning it, but Petra may be partial to his—”

  Rousseau’s expression froze. What his wife was about to suggest appalled him. It shook him to think that his daughter might have been transformed into a slave of— He would not allow that thought to form.

  “Pardon my rough talk,” he said. “You know I don’t mean it.”

  Margaret stared at her book.

  “We are civilized people,” he reminded her. “We do not use torture in police interrogations.” Margaret would not look at him. To show his annoyance, he added, “We might give him a love pat or two—just so he’ll know we’re playing by our rules.”

  “Will he have a lawyer?”

  “He won’t need a lawyer.”

  Finally she turned toward him. “Be smart, Piet,” she implored. “Smart enough not to hurt him. Hurt him and she’ll never get over him.” He gave her an exasperated look. It tired Margaret—depressed her, in fact—to see her child’s father so ready to hurt her. “If she loves him, she may follow the path of Jan-Christiaan.”

  This caution stung him. Still he felt forced
to reply, “She hardly knows him.” He stood, ready to leave.

  “You asked me to marry you the second time we were together. You hardly knew me.”

  “He’s one of these fellows who thinks he can take anything he can grab. Well, not this time!” He gave his wife a grim smile and was gone.

  Margaret sat in her chair, her head bowed, her eyes closed, and thought, “I must scrub this out of my thoughts before Petra arrives.”

  AT JAN SMUTS, Gat was handcuffed by the police, his hands crossed before him. As if to maximize his humiliation, he was led from the departure terminal, a policeman on either side of him, holding onto his arms. Gat understood the game; he had played it himself with suspects. People watched as he walked by, hatred in some eyes. The police pushed him into a van waiting in the loading zone and drove him away.

  The ride to the police station was short. There Gat was photographed, fingerprinted, stripped naked, and given a jumpsuit of cotton ticking and canvas scuffs to wear. On the principle that it was humbling, if not degrading, for a white suspect to be herded by a black warder, the biggest African that Gat had ever seen now appeared. At first sight, he reminded Gat of Zuzu, the vicious and enormous African who preceded Patrice Lumumba off the plane at Elisabethville. The warder stood six and a half feet tall, had shoulders and biceps the size of hams, hands that seemed to hang below his knees, a flat, broken nose, mean, unintelligent eyes, and an odor as strong as his body. His huge fists made the truncheon he carried seem as delicate as a conductor’s baton.

  By the reckoning of Afrikaner ideology, Gat thought, he would feel more humiliation at being shoved into a holding tank with drunk and smelling kaffirs picked up off the street. But the ideology demanded racial separation. The black Goliath escorted Gat along a corridor. He unlocked the door of a holding tank, administered a sharp karate chop to the back of Gat’s head, and gave him a push.