Cobra lit his cigarette and the odour drew a few more intimates into our circle. From the perimeters, the Professor – John Porter – had been eavesdropping and chose to spoke.
“The necklace was a question of perspective,” he began, probing for a response. “Remember: we weren’t all fighting the same way at Old Deep. A lot of people – Zoë especially – were looking to politicise the whites, stir their conscience. Some of us crossed the lines” – his remark met with grunts of assent and demurral. Cobra rolled his eyes, as if at an oft-told tale.
“On the day of Nyati’s funeral, when we heard that the emergency was coming that night, we drove back to Jo’burg at 200 clicks an hour to grab what we could. They came to our offices, just after we left, and smashed everything – presses, printers, copiers. And that was the nub, really. That was our value to the comrades. We had the mobility. Even after the emergency, we could move around the place. We had cars. Kombis. Being white was an ID in its own right. They didn’t expect you to use it against them. But they really hated those that did.”
It crossed my mind to inquire how he had heard of the imminent emergency when only people like the cop-friendly reporter Ray Gilliomee – and the security forces themselves – were in the loop.
“And you were there, at the meeting in PE, the night he died?” I ventured.
“No, no. I had another gig.”
Rod Harris, Zoë Joubert’s former husband, joined us, moving a small folding chair and a parasol to be closer to our sub-group. He was accompanied by a slender young man of Asian descent, introduced to me as Ricky Rajbansi.
Harris wore long, loose pantaloons in black linen and a black shirt in the same fabric, covering his eyes in small, round, impenetrable sunglasses and his head in a gaudy cap that somehow reminded me of the Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland. With the ending of The Struggle, he had lost his raison d’etre as a poet of protest and had turned his hand to other forms of self-expression.
As an installation artist, he had erected the letters G, O and D in steel on the pontoons of a disused road bridge near Plettenberg Bay, obliging motorists to consider whether divinity lay in the swamps and bird colonies of the Bitou River Estuary.
He was well entrenched on the cultural lecture circuit, a regular at the Grahamstown Festival. He had edited collections of African poetry and had taught alongside Coetzee at Cape Town. At one point he had appeared at a conference in the Netherlands, sharing a platform with a noted agent of the apartheid security police who had once hounded him – reconciliation as performance.
“Rod wrote about the necklace, right?” The young man – Ricky, who I took to be a student or some kind of acolyte – gazed intently at the older man. Rod Harris waved a loose hand as if to chase away this adulation. Rummaging through a bright, woven beach bag in black and red zig-zag stripes, the young man produced a copy of the most famous volume from The Struggle years: Powers of Emergency – Selected Poetry from the Frontline of Apartheid by Rodney Harris.
Ricky Rajbansi had found the page he was seeking and coughed.
“Necklace 1985,” he began, looking around at his audience as if to warn them from the title alone that this would not be a pleasant experience for any of them.
Dutifully, we fell silent.
If we are to be free we must be pre-free, ready
To launch on wings not yet feathered
Or built to be
Flown on, aflame.
If we are to be free we must see freedom
As one
For all
Our phoenix freedom burns in another’s fire,
Our freedom rises from the traitor’s pyre
Where we alone would not search for it.
Freedom born not of blossoms but smoke and rock,
For we are slaves of our own hearts
And we must break and burn our own hearts
To be free.
Hounded, grounded, necklace-bound and burning,
the Judas finds no salve of prayer
no thirty pieces
to buy this moment, his moment back,
to end the agony.
His flames
Are our freeing and dying, he redeems.
“Still think that way, Rod?” Cobra focused on the poet with a condescension that had been a hallmark of his courtroom technique, his tradecraft. His thinning hair stood in tufts. His eyes, reddened from the sea and the cigarette he had rolled, panned slowly to the slender young man who had read the poem. His voice took on a cavilling tone, almost braying with scorn.
“It was needed. At the time? A necessary phase,” the young Rajbansi said, looking to Harris for support.
“And you were there, hey, Ricky? In The Struggle? In your diapers?”
“Leave it, Kaplan, for God’s sake.”
“Touchy, Rod, are we today? Rough night?”
“I said leave it, man.”
I wondered when the conversation had really begun.
The beach was filling with the post-lunch crowd. People in wetsuits and surfer tops like mine paddled out to find The Wave to end all waves, skimming back to the beach on their flat, Styrofoam boards, laughing at the thrill. With hi-glo orange, life-saver rings on their upper arms, children sloshed around in the boisterous, frothy shallows, watched over by parents and, here and there, plump nannies in pale green uniform, the blackness of their skin all the more remarkable for its infrequency in this particular enclave.
Teenagers bobbed in lines as the waves foamed over and around them. On the beach, sons and fathers lofted oval rugby balls, larger than American footballs, mimicking their national heroes from the Springbok team. Families played noisy games of tennis using wooden paddles. If you went to the beach in this country, you did not go to slumber over a thick novel, or to baste yourself with sun oil.
Just overhead, no more than 100 yards from the shoreline, motorised gliders on pleasure rides skimmed the waves, held perilously aloft by their broad wing-span. Farther out, you could see the powerful tourist boats scudding across the swells towards the Robberg Peninsula. Sporty catamarans traced wild zig-zags as the wind caught their sails, propelling them on a single pontoon as their crews leaned out to prevent them from capsizing.
Just beyond the surf line, quite suddenly, grey, triangular fins broke the surface. I inhaled sharply and pointed, my mind running through the computations of swimming children and sharks.
“Dolphins!” Zoë Joubert cried and ran helter-skelter to the water, her daughter at her side, arcing perfectly into the surf at the point where the breakers threatened to slow her progress. Others followed – Kaplan and Ferd and Porter and Ricky Rajbansi. Even Riaan van Rensburg lumbered towards the waves. From a distance they might have looked like they were members of some arcane sect seeking terminal marine fulfilment.
“And Nyati?” I said to the poet when all the others had scampered off to the water, towing children and partners with them towards the dolphins – six of them, I counted, gliding within the glassy walls of the outermost swells. “Did Nyati approve the necklace?”
“Why Nyati?”
“Just an idea for a post-conference article. No poetry, of course. Just 2,000 words to appease the organisers.”
“Well, read the transcripts of the TRC. You’ll see that Nyati talked two games. One to white folks like us. One to the townships. And the townships message was war, blood, fire.”
“So he approved?”
“It was never so much approved, among the top echelon. More like: ‘who will rid me of this troublesome priest?’ Sometimes you don’t have to give orders to make things happen. Sometimes there’s no point standing against the flow and the comrades, the street-fighters, the grunts as you would say – they liked it a lot. It felt good to them.”
“You sound as if you were convinced.”
“Look. Kinzer. It’s history. We’ve moved on. Maybe it’s not all perfect. Maybe it’s corrupt, getting like the rest of Africa, but it’s ours. We don’t owe it to anybody. Not to A
merica or Britain or anyone else. This wasn’t decolonisation – lowering the flag when some prince or queen told us we were allowed to run up our own. This wasn’t Zimbabwe: now here’s the new constitution, Robert Mugabe, and don’t break it! We did this ourselves and the rest of the world reacted – sanctions and so forth. I was never a great believer in what a few whites could do. It was not our Struggle. What were we struggling against? Our parents? Our protectors? Ourselves? The system that gave us everything? But in the townships, they knew what to fight against. They felt it every minute, every day. They started it and the necklace made damn sure that everyone with any sense stayed onside. It was no time for wavering. You were either with The Struggle or against it. You made your choices. Necklace or not. Commitment or punishment. Loyalty or pain. And it gave us what we have today – peace, harmony. Not perfect. But ours. And a damn sight better than before. The end justified the means. I should imagine that Americans would understand that after your civil war. Nyati certainly did.”
“You met him?”
“Sure I met him.”
“That last night in PE?”
“You ask a lot of questions. What is this? The third degree? John Vorster Square all over again?”
“Just interest. You know, I was in the country at the time. But I never met the Old Deep set. I knew your name of course. You’d gone to Lusaka, as I recall, met the comrades – Oliver Tambo, Thabo Mbeki. Not many people did that.”
“You have a long memory.”
“It must have been tough when you came back. I mean, the police must have given you a hard time.”
“I was called in. Sure. We all were.”
“And they’d want to know if you had been recruited.”
“They certainly did.”
“And were you?”
“That’s not something I talk about.”
“Even now?”
“Even now.”
“And the last night in PE With Nyati. The meeting. You went to that?”
“Sure. We all did. But I’m more interested in the present.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that maybe your motives are none of my business. But Zoë is. Mills is, too. So be careful, right? No destructive engagement.”
He looked out to sea and I followed his gaze out to where the swimmers seemed to be surrounded by grey fins.
Fifteen
ZOË AND CAMILLA, RIAAN, FERD and Kaplan came back from the water, laughing, breathless, and glistening with the surf. Riaan van Rensburg took Zoë’s hand as they walked across the beach. The gesture seemed intended as brotherly, companionable, but it reinforced my first impression of Van Rensburg’s true motives, his yearning for contact.
I turned towards Vanessa van Rensburg to gauge her reaction, but found her watching me with a half-smile on her face. She had swum earlier and her red hair fell in stiff wavelets, almost in the manner of a Botticelli, framing a remotely aquiline face that had none of the angelic detachment of the paintings.
“Don’t worry about Riaan,” she said. “He has always felt that way about Zoë. It’s just that she never has about him.”
“And you?”
“Oh, my feelings are just a little – what shall we say – complicated. But inclusive.” She leaned across me to raid the cooler box. A warm, damp bikini cup brushed my arm.
The dolphin worshippers fell back on their beach towels.
I touched one; I wanted to grab its fin and let it take me to Antarctica; it felt as if they had come to say hello to us; they made me feel special; cool.
“You really missed something there. With the dolphins.”
Riaan van Rensburg squatted beside me, his heavy, tanned gut falling over the rim of baggy black shorts. Uninvited, he fished a Castle Lager from my cooler box, twisted off the cap and drank deeply. When he lowered the bottle, almost empty, his laboured breathing suggested a taxing excursion into the waves.
He gave no indication that he had noticed his wife’s physical contact with me – or particularly cared. With the salt water flattening his black-grey hair to his head, his baleful eyes seemed to protrude even more, emphasised by the dark bags below them. Water dribbled off his shorts onto the sand, like urine.
“Too busy spooking were you?”
“I was talking to Rod about Nyati. About that last night in PE.”
“How would he know? He wasn’t there.”
“And you were there?”
“Of course I was there. I was driving the Kombi. Zoë’s Kombi. The blue one. We all went down from Jo’burg. And what’s the big deal for you about all that? Come to that. Never mind Rod or anyone else. How did you meet Nyati?”
I don’t think he expected an answer, but I told him anyhow. I fancy I narrated the story well. A small audience gathered, Zoë Joubert – I was pleased to note – among them. My text was close to the version I had offered to Celiwe Nyati, conjuring once again the image of a boy on a bicycle, tipped into a ditch. I offered a postscript from our conversation that I had withheld from his daughter.
The boy never did see his father alive again. The brief official notice of death arrived in a brown manila envelope sent by second class post, informing whoever it may concern that a body could be collected from a distant morgue.
By then, he said, it was too late to ask the questions that all good sons want to ask their father before they are parted forever: was I worthy of you? Were you proud of me? Did I fulfil the dreams you dreamt for me?
“And did he tell you that his father ran guns and explosives for the freedom fighters?” Rod Harris broke in. “Did he tell you that the old boy had blood on his hands? No, I thought not. You got the sanitised version, the version for the journalists and diplomats. Nyati knew the risks. And so did his father.”
The picnic finally broke up around seven. I remained on the beach with the last swimmers, the just-one-more-wave surfers. I had contrived to spend some time in semi-private conversation with Zoë Joubert. Disappointingly she told me she would not be able to see me until the following day because of a custom whereby she and other friends from her college years partied privately.
Once a year. Girls’ night out.
We left the beach in a shambling crowd, laden with furled parasols, sand-blasted boogie boards, cooler boxes rattling with cans and bottles drained of every last drop. Somehow, in the melee of loading beach kit and children, Riaan van Rensburg ended up escorting Zoë Joubert and her daughter, occupying the passenger seat of her Volkswagen convertible like some huge protective hound. His teenage children filled the rear seat, squeezed in with Camilla Joubert. I found myself driving an old Jeep Cherokee with Vanessa van Rensburg at my side.
She had not changed her attire, save for wrapping a flimsy cotton cloth around her waist. It fell open at the fork of her thighs and the sunburn on her belly highlighted the merest hint of a fine, pale, gingery down, like the skin of a peach. The car smelled of marijuana, salt, sand, mixed with a hint of beach towels left too long. The rear seat was taken up with a folded easel and neatly bound clusters of brushes and pencils.
“A project? Work in progress?”
“There’s always something in progress. Whether it’s work or not is a question of definition. You drive this old buggie to your hotel. Then I’ll take it on from there. If you like,” she said.
I pulled out ahead of the Volkswagen. The Jeep’s rear-view mirror showed Zoë Joubert and Riaan van Rensburg together, he with his great, bulbous head turned towards her in supplication and she laughing at some joke or other, eyes sparkling below the tennis peak she wore to protect her skin from the sun. With their teenage children, his and hers in the back of her car, they could almost have been an organic couple, a stereotypical, never-sundered, always-happy family – perhaps the couple that Van Rensburg craved. Why not Zoë, too?
Was this the partnership she wanted after her marriage to a man who then brought young men to her parties, a complete man-and-two-sons arrangement simply awaiting her occupation? Then the VW pull
ed past and sped ahead, with Zoë and Riaan both waving back to us. I thought Camilla Joubert flashed a look of triumph in my direction but I dismissed the idea as unworthy.
On a quiet stretch of road, Vanessa van Rensburg asked me to pull over and, with remarkable deftness, chopped white powder into two lines on a vanity mirror in her lap, using a rolled 100-rand bank-note to take the first, thicker line. She offered me the second and I declined, as she had probably suspected I would.
“Waste not, want not,” she said.
I pulled quickly back onto the road, knowing that she would be laughing at me.
“Don’t you ever wonder you’ll get caught?”
“By Riaan?”
“No. By the cops. For the white stuff.”
I peered dramatically into the rear-view mirror, partly to make a joke of my squeamishness about travelling with illegal substances – a leftover from the diplomatic days when discovery might have led to some kind of demarche or similar embarrassment.
She swivelled in her seat.
“What cops? That old Toyota behind us? I don’t think so.”
When I looked in the mirror, I saw only the tail of some vehicle or other disappearing down a side street.
The way she told it, Vanessa van Rensburg had been one of the back-room players at Old Deep, not exactly a groupie, but not one of the frontline, headline-grabbing activists either.
It was easy to imagine her as the artist of the revolution in her paint-spattered smock and torn, blue jeans. She had attended the meeting with Nyati, she said, laughing as she related how she sat at his feet like a disciple as if he were Gandhi, sketching him as she hung on his every word.
“You seem very interested in us all, the Old Deep days.”
“Just Nyati, really. That last night before he died. For a conference paper. You know the kind of thing: Apartheid and the liberal dilemma. You guys seem to have been the last people to see him alive.”
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