“My mother sees too many movies,” Petra said.
“She said, ‘Petra wants to see Half Dome in Yosemite Valley and hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon.’ ” They stared into the darkness. Gat kissed her hair.
“I don’t really want that,” she said.
“You want kangaroos jumping through your backyard, do you?” Neither of them spoke. “And duck-billed platypuses in your—” Gat paused. “What do duck-billed platypuses get into anyway?”
“Your bathtub.”
“Your mother says you want to go to American drive-ins and order gallons of American ice cream.” He added, “I wouldn’t mind doing that myself.”
Petra reached up to touch his cheek.
“She says you want to finish your studies at UCLA. Or Harvard. Or Yale. Or ‘the University of New York.’ ” They were quiet for a time. Finally Gat said, “You can’t do any of those things in Australia.”
“I want to be with you,” Petra told him. “And you’re going to Australia.”
They talked for a while and Petra swore that she wanted to do whatever Gat wanted. After all, the goal of her life was to please him. Which made him burst into laughter. “Oh, do you?” he asked. “You who are not a dishrag?” Anyway, he said, she already pleased him more than he could tell her. She suggested then that he might give her proof of that fact. He declined, saying they must first straighten out their destiny. Then he would provide all the proof she needed.
They talked on. Each assured the other—repeatedly!—that whatever the other wanted was fine. Not only fine, but super. What was really important was being together. They finally agreed that this kind of talk was not only stupid but, in fact, almost infuriating. They ended up deciding to go to America. And while Petra slept peacefully in his arms, Gat worried about how to get her there and how to provide for her once they arrived.
Getting the proper papers for entering America was no simple matter. It took Gat several months to trace his sister and her American husband through his parents to their new home in Tucson, Arizona, a place neither Gat nor Petra had ever heard of. Neither could they pronounce it. Since the sister had not heard from him in a decade, it required a number of expensive phone calls to explain what had become of him and to secure her and her husband’s agreement to sponsor his and Petra’s immigration. Then visits to Pretoria were needed to push the papers through the American Embassy.
As their departure drew near, Petra sent her father an overnight telegram. She announced that she and Gat would leave shortly for America. She urged her father to come to Joeys to see them off. He could collect Margaret at that time and take her back to the Cape. But Petra heard nothing from him. He did not appear at the airport.
By the time they left, Gat had fully recovered his strength. So fully, in fact, that as he and Petra walked across the tarmac, he picked her up in his arms, trotted up the movable stairway and onto the plane.
FOUR MONTHS after they arrived in America, Petra wrote her father a letter on his fiftieth birthday. She included their phone number, hoping that he would call her. A week later she received a telephone call from Cape Town. “It’s so good to hear your voice!” she kept telling him. When she asked how he was, he said he was fifty. He insisted he had called to find out how she was.
She told him that the first weeks in their new homeland had been difficult. Neither she nor Gat wanted to stay in Tucson. It was a small city in a desert and saguaro cactuses frightened her. They had moved on to San Diego, a place slightly reminiscent of Cape Town, where they had rented a small house. She was looking for a position; Gat had found a job. She would not have gotten through all the trying times, she said, had she not been with someone she loved. Her father did not react to that declaration. When she asked again how things were with him, he told her what she already knew: that her mother was still in Johannesburg. “She’s waiting up there for me to beg her to come home.”
“You can do that, Father,” Petra assured him. “She’s worth it.”
“She wants to humiliate me,” her father complained. “Even though she knows I was only doing what I thought best for the family.” He sounded older, feebler. Confidence had gone from his voice. As she said good-bye, Petra urged him to call again. They did not have the money right now, she explained, for her to call him. But she wanted to stay in touch. When she hung up, she wondered if he would ever actually go to Joeys for her mother.
At Christmas Gat sent his parents a photo of himself, the first image they had seen of him in many years. The photo showed him sitting on the fender of a used Chevrolet coupe before a small house—a “ranch,” he called it. Beside him stood quite a beautiful young woman. The photo, he explained, would serve to introduce them to his wife, Petra, whom he had met at church in Cape Town. She had taken him, not only to America, but to a country he had never known before, the undiscovered country of love. He explained that he now managed properties for a real estate company that developed housing tracts. Petra worked as a receptionist for a firm of attorneys. In the coming year she would be resuming her university studies. They planned to have children, but not until they had framed her college diploma and hung it over their mantel.
He wrote that he had taken a new name for a new country. He was now called Adriaan Gautier. In San Diego the name was pronounced “Gow-tire.” His “buddies” at work were beginning to call him Ty. Now and then even Petra used that name. He wrote that the man he had been when they last saw him had disappeared. The man he was now could not be happier in this new country he and Petra had discovered together.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
For information about the execution of Patrice Lumumba, I am indebted to Ludo De Witte and his book The Assassination of Lumumba. London and New York: Verso Books, 2001.
Love in the Time of Apartheid Page 28
