Up Against the Night

by Justin Cartwright

  Two or three in the audience clapped at this; most were angry. The academics ignored Jaco now, no doubt finding him an embarrassment. I felt sorry for Jaco when he tried to enter the conversation about scientific study and tagging. It was clear he wanted all these sharks killed. When the scientist said they were beautiful creatures, he said, ‘I can tell you they is not so beautiful when they is coming to rip you into two pieces. I can tell you because I have been there.’ It was said in the aggressive, assertive tone of someone who has lost the audience and knows it.

  Jaco comes walking up through the avenue of oak trees from the direction of the slave bell. His walk is strangely uneven, as though he has lost the art of putting one foot in front of the other without having to think. I haven’t seen him since Tannie Marie’s funeral, and in that time he has visibly deteriorated. He looks like a drunk. When he was in England, he was almost preternaturally innocent, a sort of unreformed backwoodsman, excessively muscled and healthy-looking. Brimming with good health.

  His ordeal in California and his failure to make anything of his shark experiences seem to have aged him strikingly. His face, even from a distance, is visibly threaded with small veins and his eyes are watery and unclear. He may have been drinking. When we shake hands, last night’s alcoholic fumes are still clinging to the wreck of Jaco Retief.

  ‘Hello, Jaco. Sorry to drag you here.’

  ‘No, Oom, it’s only a pleasure to see you.’

  ‘I listened to your show the other night.’

  ‘Was it okay? I don’t know all the time what they was saying.’

  ‘You aren’t the only one. You were good.’

  ‘Ag, thanks, man.’

  ‘What’s the situation in Potch? Have you got something to do there?’

  I am interested in the farm. Jaco lights a cigarette and draws deeply. His fingers are ochre-coloured.

  ‘No. I help on the farm and so on, but the brothers doesn’t really want me around. They says Jaco, you fucked off to be a big shot, now when you are on your arse you want something. Anyway, the cousins must sell if they can.’

  ‘Jaco, look, I have been thinking about this possible account of your time in Scientology. I don’t believe it’s a good idea. If you attack them there may be all kinds of denial and innuendo.’

  ‘What issit? In-new what?’

  ‘Sorry, innuendo, it’s like suggesting, like hinting, you are this or that; gay, or an alcoholic or something.’

  ‘Number one, I can promise you I am not gay, that’s for sure. I hate mofgats. And number two, I’m not drinking so much like before. Only white wine with friends.’

  ‘Jaco, I am not saying you are drinking. I don’t know anything about you. All I am saying is that the Church of Scientology doesn’t like people who blow the whistle on them. Anything can happen. There is no good outcome. I think you should forget it. The journalist who wants to interview you is probably out of a regular job and he will be looking for a sensation so that he can make some money. He will want to use you to tell about what went on, the more bizarre the better. It will all be attributed to you. That’s my opinion anyway. You asked me.’

  ‘Thanks for your advice, Oom.’

  I order another muffin and some coffee for Jaco. They go in for heavy muffins like bricks around here. Jaco is dejected. I am not sure what he was hoping for; perhaps he thought I would take a look at his contract or have a word in the ear of a big cheese in a London publishing house. Jaco’s world has undergone a separation from the real world. And I know that I should cut myself off from him too. But I remember his mother, one of those crushed but sweet women who lived a life of uncomplaining drudgery and boredom on a farm, not too different from Tannie Marie’s life. Living on the farm was a kind of imprisonment and farm women were given limited responsibilities, most of which involving appeasing and serving the men. It strikes me now after all these years that it wasn’t only the black people who were enslaved although I didn’t realise it at the time.

  Potchefstroom may be the worst place on earth to come home for Jaco after his traumatic experiences, with the radiance of his brief fame dimmed, his cousins shunning him, his qualifications nil, black people occupying all the traditional jobs. And who knows where his blonde children are.

  Jaco looks around aimlessly, unfocused.

  Suddenly at our table under the trees we are accompanied by an eager and derisive chorus of the ring-necked turtle doves and the ever-curious guinea fowl. Jaco begins to sob. I take him by the arm and steer him gently to a bench away from the café.

  ‘Oom, I was kak. I know. I should of shut my big mouth. I was nervous so I was drinking. I was drunk and they pissed me off. I was the hell in. Thanks for speaking nicely about me but I was shit. You know when I was with the Scientologists I believed all that crap. I was going to fly to Mars using only my mental powers. Jissus, I have been so fucking stupid always looking for the quick fix and always ending up in the shit. Please help me, Oom. Please. I am begging you.’

  Mucus is flowing from his nose to be joined by the tears that are rolling unstoppably from his injured eyes to form a small delta above his mouth. The injury to his eyes is a psychological one, a kind of accumulating wariness. They are the eyes of self-loathing and failure.

  A small group of middle-aged, upper-class English tourists pass us, speaking loudly and confidently.

  One, in a light anorak, says, The British planted these oaks for the Royal Navy’s use, you know. But they grew too fast out here in the sun and they were no use for building ships.

  Jolly interesting, Simon, but we need a drink pronto.

  Right, the wine-tasting cellar is just here. We have a choice, the wine-tasting after the big house or the wine-tasting before the big house? Yes, all right, I know it is a damn silly question. This way.

  On behalf of Jaco, I find myself bristling at their loud and ineffably confident pronouncements. They are mostly wearing walking boots as if they were going to do some climbing. In a very English way they glance surreptitiously at the stricken Jaco as they pass. Jaco is trying unsuccessfully to regain his composure as he gulps for air. I am desperately sorry for him, but I also feel urgently the need to protect my family from exposure to him. He is out of control. He’s dangerous.

  I speak to him in Afrikaans as if that will be more welcome, more soothing.

  ‘Kom, Jaco, kom ons daar onder die eikebome sit. Kom nou.’ Come, Jaco, let’s sit over there under the oak trees. Come now.

  I don’t want him to be seen crying in full view. He stumbles after me and we sit on a bench under the oaks. He apologises again. After a while he stops sobbing. I see the plight of Jaco as symbolic of a wider tragedy, one that is way beyond Jaco’s comprehension. I think, in the midst of the choking sobs, of Piet Retief, and I wonder if our ancestor was really just an innocent, shaped by Bible stories and obsessed by the belief that God was reserving a Heimat expressly for his people.

  In his manifesto justifying his emigration from the Cape Colony, he wrote:

  We complain of the severe losses which we have been forced to sustain by the emancipation of our slaves and the vexatious laws which have been enacted respecting them. We complain of the continuous system of plunder which we have ever endured from the Caffres and other coloured classes, and particularly by the last invasion of the colony.

  On this evidence, it seems unlikely that Retief was proposing to live in a free state with the Zulus. There is nothing in his history, including his advocacy on behalf of slave owning, that suggests he would have lived peaceably with the Zulus. Dingane understood this.

  And here is poor Jaco, the product of this immense and fatal misunderstanding, a victim of the consequent culture clash, of hundreds of years of unthinking brutality and plunder, of slavery and exploitation and betrayal. Dingane’s disquiet was at least understandable. He already possessed the perfect universe, with his beautiful cattle and the elaborate ritual that surrounded them, his scores of wives, his thousands of warriors, his medicine men a
nd his vast savannahs, deep forests and magical rivers. He did not want anything to change. He had no good reason to welcome the white man in the person of my ancestor: I see that every white man is an enemy to the black, and every black man an enemy to the white. They do not love each other and never will.

  Who could blame Dingane for murdering Retief? Not me. Yet my ancestor has a huge statue in his honour at the Voortrekker Memorial, as if he were a hero. It stands, forming a corner of the monument. It’s a monument to delusion. But then many monuments are.

  A pigeon lands at our feet; it waddles complacently a little closer, perhaps in search of crumbs or peanuts, which are known as ‘monkey nuts’ in these parts. Suddenly Jaco swipes violently at the pigeon, which flies away in alarm. He punches the bench. Hitting hard objects in frustration is an American habit; perhaps he learned it in California. I am startled by this pent-up emotion. I think that in his imagining he was striking me or Dingane or some of those black people who are wandering so confidently around their own country. He has hurt his hand, and holds it tenderly. This, too, happens in American movies.

  ‘I’m going to Potchefstroom now-now,’ he says.

  ‘Jaco, I will think about what I can do for you, but in the meanwhile I have to look after my daughter. She’s not stable. Here’s some money for a taxi to the airport and some more.’

  I give him a bundle of notes.

  ‘No, I can’t take that.’

  ‘Take it, Jaco.’

  His hands are trembling as he reaches for the money.

  ‘Baie dankie, Oom.’

  ‘I’m not your uncle. Try to remember that. You’ll get a taxi over there where the tourists are dropped off.’

  He gets to his feet with difficulty. He looks at me for a moment. He forms his mouth into a shape that suggests that he has a final thank-you – or curse – for me. But then he walks off unsteadily, and I will never know what he was proposing to say.

  There are no guarantees that he will not drink the money.

  As I drive back over the pass in the direction of home, I recall Retief’s last point in his manifesto:

  We are now quitting the fruitful land of our birth, and are entering a wilderness and dangerous territory; but we go with a firm reliance on an all-seeing, just, and merciful Being, whom it will be our endeavour to fear and humbly to obey.

  I swoop down the mountain, through the forest, past the old winery, past Mandela Park, past the road to the harbour, and I rise up beneath Little Lion’s Head which does look from certain directions uncannily like a huge lion reclining while staring into the distance. Exactly like the lions in Trafalgar Square.

  On the way down to the sea I give Nellie an account of my meeting with Jaco and I assure her that he is safely on his way home via Johannesburg Airport. Oliver Tambo Airport.

  Our trip to the Addo Elephant Park was a huge success although Bertil was a little restless, perhaps keen to get back to Vanessa.

  Nellie and the others have all fallen in love with elephants. Elephants radiate a sense of contentment and good will. Like whales, they offer a kind of example for us. Nellie tells me that she finds the way they take care of the young elephants and the way they reassure each other with a caress from a trunk or with a rumbling call, especially moving. The guide said they have many different calls, rumbles and screeches. He called these noises ‘harmonics’, most of them not audible to human beings. Bertil has been patient and helpful with Isaac, also somewhat caught up in the mystery of Isaac’s provenance. Isaac hero-worships him.

  The Elephant Park is vast – nearly half a million acres. The mountains are covered by tough green trees, dropping vertiginously into ravines, and the coastline is wild and rugged, a landscape of forests and enormous sand dunes in some parts; in others there are water holes and flat prairie. We stayed the night in a renovated farmhouse; with its tin roof and wide veranda it reminded me keenly of the farm and Tannie Marie reading Pinocchio to me by candlelight. She loved me and it was cruel of my father to remove me for ever from her after my mother died, but perhaps there is more to that story than I know or will ever know.

  We saw lions and rhino and buffaloes as well as the elephants in the Addo Elephant Park. I wondered if the lions were causing havoc amongst the antelope. Perhaps they were fed out of sight. The park boasts of conserving the whales, penguins, gannets and great white sharks off its shores. There are plans to proclaim a vast marine sanctuary. We were shown the unique Addo flightless dung beetle. It has a comical, stiff-legged gait, as if it were running on tiny stilts. Sadly it was not at that time rolling up dung, which is the dung beetle’s party trick. It’s all admirable in a way, but I am not sure Nellie understands the subtext, which is to keep as much of this part of Africa pristine and free of the poor in general and squatters in particular. Vast tracts of land are being set aside in the name of conservation.

  I had believed that the new nation was going to be a miracle. My eyes were opened early, in 1990, when I was invited by the ANC to the ceremony marking the return of the body from Conakry, West Africa, of Tsietsi Mashinini, the schoolboy hero of the Soweto Uprising. I was asked because I had raised funds for the ANC in London; for years I was on committees. Although Tsietsi was a member of Black Consciousness, the ANC hijacked the event. When the coffin was opened it was discovered that there was an unexplained hole in the back of Tsietsi’s head and one of his eyes had been pushed right in. His face had suffered a deep wound and his forehead was scarred. What happened to him in those thirteen years is a mystery.

  I began to question the tale of heroic resistance. To tell the truth, I never really went along with the myth of the struggle; it seemed to me to be largely symbolic. I was in Johannesburg when a bomb went off near the Town Hall in 1994. The young white boys in uniform were terrified. Nobody knew what was coming next. There were rumours that the far right had planted the bomb. As I drove away fast in my hire car, I saw fires in petrol drums and groups of men huddled around them, wrapped in blankets against the cold. It was a sight that I felt I had seen many times in television news reports, turmoil and terror shrouded in the fog of dust and mortar that explosives create. When I stopped for a red light, a man swathed in a grey blanket ran towards me holding a cane-cutting machete. I raced away, unnerved; in that moment I understood how fear could unhinge you: shaking uncontrollably, I sped back to the white and comfortable and prosperous suburbs.

  I don’t tell Nellie these dark stories. She prefers the story of a rainbow nation, and who can blame her? She is on holiday, not on a fact-finding mission.

  17

  Jaco is speaking to his wife. He says he misses the children. They are nearly four and three years, he thinks. Or maybe five and four. He’s not a hundred per cent sure. A lot has happened.

  Elfrieda, he says, I miss the children.

  Kak. You buggered off with a whore with big boobs from Sun City. Now she knows that you are a dronk-lap and a liar she don’t want to speak to you.

  That’s all kak.

  I didn’t make it up, I heard the truth. I know what happened, Jaco. Also when I was working in Nelspruit at the hairdresser and looking after the children where were you when they was crying in their bed? I can tell you, you was in California being a big shot. Ooo, vok die great white is going to bite my balls off. God verskoon my, I wish the shark had eaten your balletjies. True’s God. And you were drunk when you was talking crap about sharks on the radio the other day, everyone was ashamed of you. Dank die Here that your children is too young to know what a poes you is.

  Elfrieda, listen, I made mistakes no question everybody makes mistakes but now I want to see my daughters and you if you can forgive me.

  Fuck off, Jaco. Why don’t you fly off to Mars like what you said you can do – you are a loser and a liar.

  Whosez?

  Your cousins on the farm and everyone what we knows. All you want is to get the money what I have saved for the children. Stay away.

  Elfrieda, I have money.

  I am get
ting married, says Elfrieda.

  What did you say?

  I’m getting married to Wynand Vermeulen.

  Jaco puts the phone down.

  Married, never. It can’t be true.

  Jannie holds his hand out. It’s not Jaco’s phone. He borrowed it from Jannie. He left his on the plane or somewhere. He has talked to Elfrieda for twenty minutes and Jannie wants him to pay now–now. He’s sitting in the Bourbon Street trying to get the amount what he owes from MTN so he can pay Jannie.

  Jannie takes the phone. He is a tight-arse.

  Jaco feels sick. Married. How come?

  Jannie says it’s twenty-five rand. Jaco gets out the roll of notes his uncle gave him. It is not as fat as he remembers. He peels off a twenty. And here’s ten for old times. Why you surprised, Jannie? You was thinking I am going to run, neh? You do me a favour I do you a favour, ou pal.

  Jaco and Stoffel stand up to leave the pub.

  Still whatever she says I want to see my children. Six months that he has not seen them. Also I will like to kill Elfrieda who is a hoer. She fucked everyone who was around in Nelspruit as I am told but still she gets the hell in really mad when she hear about this girl Casey at Sun City. Never mind that, it was nothing, niks nie, een-night stand, maybe a few more who’s counting. Nothing. Women doesn’t unnerstan most men need more than one woman no harm done. Except that she told one of her friends who was in PR at Sun City. She only went and tell the newspaper Shark-man plays away from home. Can you believe that. I want to kill the journalis who wrote that. You cunt, I have children. How can you do that to my children?