We spoke little on the drive from the hotel, across town and along Langstraat to the twisting road leading over to Camps Bay before the turn-off to the cable car station. The following day, she told me, she planned to drive over 500 kilometres along the coast to meet her old friends – the cabal from the 80’s, she exclaimed with a smile – at a resort where they often vacationed together to renew their old bonds of friendship.
And what else besides friendship, I asked myself.
She drove one of the new Beetles, a convertible. The rear seat was already stacked with cooler bags and tennis rackets and those flat boards people use to spin through the ocean surf. I could see wet-suits and duffels and wondered who, exactly, she had packed for.
My plans were vague. I had anticipated a long, uncharted absence from Washington, thinking I might, as the whim took me after the conference, ride the Blue Train to Johannesburg, or visit a game-park in Tanzania or perhaps tack my way by airline flight and train through Africa, from Harare to Nairobi and onwards. Cape to Cairo! But now all that had changed.
I had, I suppose, suppressed a lot of the questions that diplomats were supposed to associate with chance encounters. Often enough, in the days of ideological rivalry and sparring, a well-briefed foreign service officer might be lured into some liaison dangereuse with a glamorous stranger only to end up ensnared.
You learned to look for the coincidences that seemed improbable; the invitations to advance into realms of intimacy that came just a little too easily; the tell-tale knowledge of some personal detail that could not be squirreled from any public database.
Zoë Joubert had entered my life effortlessly, moved to the centre of my waking hours, but she had not intimated any readiness for an unseemly rush to the boudoir. We had simply seemed destined to share the same orbit from the very first encounter on the lawns of the Mount Nelson Hotel. Could that behaviour have been part of a subtle double-bluff to hoodwink a naturally cautious target with little recent experience of sexual adventure? But who would be her control? I could not imagine the local goons like Faku and Nieuwoudt reaching anywhere near her levels of sophistication and mental rigour. Ideologically she had opposed all they stood for. Maybe, then, a bigger player. But why? And why was I even thinking of myself with the old mindset of a high-profile, security-cleared public servant privy to confidential cables and closed briefings? I had no current value, or even secrets, unless you counted the undercover role Lily Nyati had assigned to me in her desperation to understand her husband’s death. An affair would hardly compromise a divorced pensioner, even a relatively young one like me.
At first, we ran in an easy rhythm, but on the return leg she quickened the pace. I lengthened my stride to keep up with her. In her jogger’s Lycra, her movements were as fluid as those of a leopard. I had read somewhere that the female leopard, brazenly available, courts the male with assiduous stalking. But that anthropomorphism in reverse seemed false: it was I who was doing the pursuing, and not very effectively at that.
As my speed increased, she seemed to draw on unsuspected reserves to accelerate again, a challenge to my slightly more advanced years. I was aware of the cable car ahead of us, climbing to the soaring buttress at the top of the precipice.
High above, a white, fuzzy fringe of cloud had begun to cascade over the lip of the mountain. Below, the late afternoon sun still burned fiercely on the Atlantic as it rushed to its tryst with the Indian Ocean beyond Cape Point. In the distance, stretching towards the snaggletooth mountain ranges of wine country, the Cape Flats unfolded in monotonous poverty: one dismal wooden shack pushing up against the next in a ceaseless, daisy-chain coupling. The great homes of Bishopscourt and Newlands and Claremont rose up like a scented palisade keeping the hordes at bay, even as it drew their eternal envy.
Again I took up the pace, not simply to keep step with her but to overtake and be the first to arrive back at the cable car station. In her jogger’s vest, she made no attempt to hide the blemish on her upper arm – a mangled furrow of dark, hard tissue looked very much like the aftermath of a gunshot, possibly a crude blade. Or perhaps simply a birthmark.
We were pounding now, no longer jogging but running, no longer in rhythm but competing for a hair’s breadth lead, a neck, a stride. If I had entertained thoughts of chivalry, I abandoned them. If I had thought I might let her win, I forgot the idea because it was all I could do to acquit myself with some kind of honour. Her stride seemed impossibly long, stretching and bounding on perfect legs, her arms scissoring with tight efficiency, her hair falling loose from its elasticated bands and streaming free.
She was not looking at me all. Her eyes focused exclusively on the car park, moving towards us at a giddy pace. Walkers, strollers, joggers stood back to make way. Some cheered but most looked askance as if this were not the place for such shenanigans. Try as I might I could not claim a lead over her. Neither could I allow myself to fall back. My lungs were bursting but I could not slow down. Perspiration stained my sweat-shirt and ran between my shoulder blades. I knew my hair would be plastered black on my forehead and above my neck, exposing the retreat from youth.
We were close now; no more than 50 yards and incredibly she found the reserves to accelerate once more. I doubted I could hold this pace but pushed to break through the pain of cramps and tiredness in my calf muscles. At the final moment, just yards from the base station, she nudged ahead then slowed, allowing me an impression of victory.
We climbed into her car and drove in silence to the hotel. She parked and we crossed the lobby, astonishing some of them more sedate guests in their cocktail-hour finery with our clamminess. The hotel seemed full of men in dark suits, women in neat, black dresses clutching small evening bags. I half-recognised some of our co-conferees. A world-famous novelist, winner of many prizes and awards – a man with a straggly beard and lizard eyes – approached and began to inquire about Zoë’s paper on perpetrators.
“I was intrigued…” he began.
For a moment, she seemed inclined to hesitate but I took her hand, propelling her forward towards the bank of elevators that sped up and down the atrium, leaving the writer to gaze in ill-tempered astonishment at an affront he evidently considered scandalous.
We entered a glass-sided lift. She pressed the button for her floor almost at the top of the hotel. We soared high above the lobby. Far below, the famous writer and the other delegates dwindled into miniaturised forms of themselves. I had not let go of her hand. We left the elevator together, walking quickly and urgently along the deep beige pile of the corridor carpeting, below small chandeliers, past cream-painted doors and fancy, half-moon tables laden with vases of cut flowers.
A trolley bearing fresh towels and replacement bottles of shampoo blocked the way but we danced around it in step. We reached her room and she entered the key-card. A small green light signalled us to enter. The maid had already turned down the queen-sized bed (chocolate mint on pillow!) and the big picture window with the drapes undrawn showed us the broad sweep of the mountain that had been the arena of our joust.
A girl in her early teens jumped up, laying aside a magazine. A backpack lay on the bed beside her, a tennis racket strapped to it. She was wearing a navy blue skirt and white uniform shirt. A matching blazer with a school coat of arms in gold had been tossed over an armchair near the window. I could hear water running in the bathroom.
“Hi, Ma,” she said, addressing Zoë Joubert but looking quizzically at me. “All set?”
“Mills! So Dad dropped you off early?”
Six
TABLE TALK – A DIFFERENT restaurant this time with heavier, Mediterranean food and waitresses wearing white tank-tops printed with the word “Greek” in blue.
She has insisted we meet to “get things straight” while her daughter joins friends back at the hotel coffee shop for an end-of-term splurge of burgers and shakes. The noise from other tables is insistent, so we lean together, mutually unfulfilled. She is wearing a loose black outfit and her hair frame
s the oval of her face. There is no make-up. To ease our embarrassment, I have asked the usual questions required of conversations with parents devoted to their children.
School?
An upmarket academy for boarders. (She hangs her head in mock shame to make this elitist, counter-revolutionary confession).
Prospects?
Straight As, Harvard or Oxford.
Zoë Joubert flushes with pride but does not dwell on the logistical and custodial arrangements she has with the father, identified to me as long divorced, still “best friends.”
Her tanned, brown hand slides across the white tablecloth and takes mine, loosely, more in consolation than ardour.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“There’s nothing to be sorry for.”
“I think I gave the wrong impression. I lead a very quiet life. This has all come as a surprise to me. Hotel rooms! Dinners à deux!’ She smiles ruefully and withdraws her hand despite my slight pressure to suggest it is fine where it is. “I’m not used to it. And we are virtual strangers.”
“I don’t feel that way. It’s been just a few days but I feel I have known you much longer. Frankly.” I’m blushing as I recall these words, just as I blushed when I uttered them.
“You know,” she says after an awkward silence, “in the German spa towns, people sometimes take up with other people for the length of their cures and baths and massages, and the term they use for this dalliance is the Kurschatten – the spa shadow. The person who is there and not there, a figment, without a counter point in reality. And, of course, when the cure is over and the mud is washed off, the shadow disappears and reality reasserts itself. But I’m not a shadow, Tom, and neither are you.”
“Reality is what you make it. It can be the future. It doesn’t necessarily mean disappointment. What has happened between us is not a shadow, a figment. You know that. And so do I.”
“But you know nothing about me, Tom.”
“Then tell me about you. About The Struggle. The old days.”
“It’s history now,” she says.
“Isn’t there a saying about ignoring history at your peril?”
She takes a sip of wine.
“How much time do you have?” she laughs then becomes serious. “Well, we all lived at a place called Old Deep. A mine settlement outside Johannesburg. I don’t know if you would have known it? Cottages with narrow stoops and tin roofs? Dirt roads? Not on the usual diplomatic circuit! Where you lived was important in those days – I’m sure you remember.”
“We called ourselves the Old Deep Action Committee – ODAC. Can you imagine? But we wanted to make a statement against the system. It was a bit like a commune. Crèches for the babies like little Mills. Gardening cooperatives. The alternative society.” She says this with her fingers imitating quotation marks.
“I had a grant, money from home, but I didn’t want to make too much of it, to make it ostentatious. No one was going to call me a trust-fund liberal. So we lived simply. A simple married life. Rod – my husband – had his notebooks and pencils. The poet of The Struggle.”
“You can smile now but it was deadly serious then. There was a cost. Okay, we weren’t thrown out of the windows at John Vorster Square. But our lot paid a price – Aggett, Lubovsky. They died, dammit. Died for their country. Sorry, I didn’t mean to be sharp. People forget. It wasn’t all play-play. Sure we had escape routes if we’d wanted them but we didn’t just want to go back to Ma and Pa and the big house and the servants. The cops gave us a hard time. Obviously not nearly as hard as for the blacks, or the freedom fighters. But they tapped the phones, poured acid on the cars, slashed the tires, strip-searched you for handing out pamphlets at the demos. Teargas in the nursery. That kind of stuff. For the bigger fish they could arrange a suicide, a fatal car accident. But who were we supposed to talk to? How were we supposed to contribute? Please stop me if I’m boring you.”
“No, no. Please.”
She recounted the story with unexpected passion, as if memory had rekindled the ardour of the fight.
Did I encourage her recollections as suitor or spy? Even now I’m unsure.
“We’ve all moved on,” she was saying, “a prosperous bunch, really, with our law firms and foundations and newspaper columns and businesses. But then, it was so intense. Who did you talk to if you were separated by the system? What we wanted was a multi-racial front, a rainbow struggle. But a lot of blacks didn’t trust us. Why should they?”
“So what I’m getting around to saying is that our problem suddenly seemed to be solved when we heard about Nyati. He was our Mandela. He wasn’t in prison. He was free, available. He was open to multi-racial politics and his credentials were impeccable. If anyone could show us our place in The Struggle it was him. But how could we meet him?”
“We?”
“Yes. We. ODAC. The Old Deep set.”
“All of you?”
“That’s an odd question. Yes, all of us, I think. I don’t recall. I only know we went to meet him in Port Elizabeth and he came to meet us and he never got home again. And you? How did you meet Lily? I thought from the way she looked at you during her speech that there must be something sort of special?”
Seven
I HAD MY LEGEND PREPARED, built around the grain of truth at the core of all such fictions, the grist of all good lies.
Those many years ago, to borrow from the language of the times, I was a temporary sojourner in Nyati’s land, assigned by law to living in its different worlds defined by skin colour, joined only by the shared humanity that official separation was designed to deny.
On my side of town, the sidewalks were neat, the highways smooth. A network of domestic flights crisscrossed the land. (Of course, the flights – like German and Italian trains in the 1930s – ran on time.)
In the shopping malls you could find Picassos in art galleries and hypermarkets the size of aircraft hangars, bulging with produce. Restaurants flourished, along with bars, music stores, bookshops. The best jobs, the best land, the best of everything went to the whites, and when people went home, many went to homes like mine with pools and tennis courts. The cars were late model, German and Japanese. California in Africa!
But then, of course, quite literally over the hill, were the townships. Homes cramped and pokey; squatters jostling for space in shacks of cast-off zinc and plastic sheeting; the police in their blue uniform and armoured yellow Casspirs enforcing their writ with the rifle and the whip, buttressed by a huge edifice of law and edict that redefined the term Orwellian in terms of skin colour: the Group Areas Act, the Morality Act, the Pass Laws. Designed to ensure that no one passed where they were not wanted.
If you had written a fable on the lines of Tolkien, you would have come up with a simple narrative: Race Ogres, the evil ones, pitted against the sylvan oppressed; a master race forging its weapons in great furnaces, forcing its slaves into the deep, dark tunnels of the mines to excavate the raw materials of their own subjugation. Plough-shares into swords, bullets, gun-barrels. Looking back, apartheid’s great reach into the very souls of the people almost seems improbable. But it happened.
“It was my first tour of duty, not long out of law school. A long way from the Upper West Side. In Pretoria. And what we were doing – the policy – was called constructive engagement. Remember? Of course. You would have been very aware. It was anathema but it was the policy. The idea was to stay close to the regime and persuade it to permit limited change. No revolution. No Red Onslaught. It was the way we looked at things at the time. East-West. The fight with Moscow.”
Across the road from the restaurant, through the big plate glass window, a skinny boy in rags lolled against a streetlamp, waiting to beg small change from post-prandial diners. I caught our reflection superimposed on him. Zoë Joubert was still looking at me, chin cupped in hand. She was sitting very still, as if intent on absorbing every word. I felt as if I was on trial, singing for a free pardon as surely as the perpetrators at the TRC.
“Africa was a checker board of client states – that’s how the newspapers put it – some theirs, some ours. We didn’t want to lose South Africa, not after Mozambique, Angola. Not with the Cubans on the borders of Namibia. History now. Of course you remember the protests, the riots, better than I. The cops would move in and open fire. More deaths. Funerals became protests. I always found it weird that one of the very few lawful forms of assembly for blacks – apart from soccer games – was funerals. Well, maybe not so weird. So the funerals were held and the songs were sung and the comrades toyi-toyied – isn’t that what they called that war dance? I felt drawn to the whole thing. It sounds pretty pompous but, for once, maybe the only time, I felt I was in at the ground floor of history. I started heading down to the Eastern Cape. We had a consulate in Port Elizabeth and that gave me cover for the trips.”
“Cover?” There was a knowing edge to the question.
“Wrong word. Sorry. I was from the State Department, not the CIA. What I meant was just the routine stuff of my job. Administrative work. Liaison with the local press – the Eastern Province Herald, the little freelance agencies riddled with young idealists” – I avoided the words “agitators” and “leftists” that peppered the embassy dispatches – “the local black reporters from City Press and so forth. I’d go to the funerals and listen to the slogans and the speeches. See who was saying what. Get the mood, the flavour. Because you could tell a lot about the impetus, the anger, the resolve, just from listening to those speeches. And you could see how rattled the authorities were getting, how many troops were deployed, how many police, what kind of bullets they were firing – bird-shot, buck-shot, live rounds. Who am I to tell someone in your position what that meant? You were there. You were a player. You and all the others helped make it all possible.”
“Not that you would know now, thank goodness,” she said with a surprisingly warm smile, as if was slightly preposterous to think of the onetime master race being acknowledged in the new order. “We all did things then that we thought would help. Maybe they did. Maybe not.”
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