by Andre Brink
When he learned about Elise and discovered my anxiety about her and Bernard in my absence, he was adamant: “Not a damn. Then you must tell her to come to you. It’s enough for one of us to have lost a woman that way.”
In my turn I tried my best to prod him into applying for permission to return to South Africa. But, by a curious coincidence, on the same day I received Elise’s cable to announce that she was coming over, Welcome was given his final No from South Africa House. And as it turned out, he never met her after all. He got an appointment at Stanford (for the hell of it he’d always posted applications for all sorts of posts all over the world) and a week before her arrival in England he left. The day of his departure was the second – and last – time I got hopelessly drunk during my stay abroad. Once again Welcome was with me. And it was so bad that he very nearly missed his plane.
We assured each other that he would come back to attend our wedding and that we would visit him in the States. But it came to nothing. Our correspondence dwindled and died. And something extraordinary happened: in all the months of our friendship I’d never even stopped to think of the fact that Welcome was black; it had been the only period in my life when it had truly not mattered. But from the day Elise arrived I became aware of an inhibition in me. Sometimes, having started a conversation about Welcome, I would allow it to end unresolved the moment she began to show interest. In a strange way I couldn’t reconcile the two of them.
I remember his last letter, three months after our wedding. He reminded me of my promise to bring her to the States with me. It made me feel guilty: not about breaking the promise, but about the mere idea of introducing her to him. I never even told her about the letter; and I didn’t reply to it either. It would have been useless anyway, for a few months later I happened to see the small report, somewhere in the middle pages of a newspaper, about a South African, one Welcome Nyaluza, who’d fallen to his death from a building in New York. Suicide was suspected. How can one hope ever to understand another person?
Round me the conversation was going its confused way, relaxed, yet with submarine tensions. The women had formed their own little group, discussing servants and wages, pilfering, the cost of living. Loekie opened every statement with: “Gert always says —”, or: “Gert thinks it’s —”, or: “I’ll ask Gert about it, but —”
At some stage Mr Lawrence pointed to Ma’s little aloe painting which he’d never been able to stand: “So you’ve still got that masterpiece?” He chuckled. “Good thing, pictures. Cover up a wall nicely. You know, when I was young, I zigged and zagged my way through Europe. Instead of going to brothels I spent all my time museum-crawling. But now I’ve had enough. This art racket is grossly overrated if you ask me. Just draws one’s attention away from the real issues. In a land like this there’s no need for art.”
“Look who’s talking,” said Ma. “Who’s packing up and moving away, avoiding the ‘real issues’?”
“Wait, Auntie,” said Gert, returning stubbornly to the attack. “Moving away from the farm doesn’t mean moving out of the country. We’ll never leave the last trench.”
“There were people in Angola who said the same thing,” Louis remarked without looking at Gert. “We saw their farms. The endless ranches of the rich who’d invested in land. And then the war broke out.”
“You can’t compare us to a bladdy lot of Portuguese, man!”
Louis ignored him. “I remember one farm we came to,” he went on. “Just a small plot really. Neatly painted blue cottage. One could see the fields had been well tended before the MPLA had passed that way. They’d plundered the lot. Followed by UNITA. Then us. Anyway, we broke a window at the side of the house to get in. Inside everything was still neat and clean. Not like some of the other houses we’d been in, broken and destroyed and covered in the mess and the shit of animals and people. This cottage was respectable. Not a wrinkle on the spreads covering the beds. Only a bit mouldy, because it was raining nearly every day, and blotches of green were showing up through the wallpaper. There was a small niche in the dining-room, with a plaster cast of the Virgin in it, a cheap little painted statue with a sweet, insipid face. And a row of photographs in front of it. A wedding photo of a young chap with a moustache and smooth hair, and a plain girl in an embroidered gown. And one of the man with two small children. Another of her with an elderly couple, probably her parents who’d come to visit them from Portugal. Everything abandoned just like that when they fled.”
“Those people had no guts, man,” said Gert.
Loekie got up quickly – as if she’d felt a shiver running down her spine – to make sure their three boisterous children were still playing on the white, patchy lawn outside.
“Everywhere we went we found refugees,” said Louis. “Hundreds, thousands of them. Black and Brown and White, all the bloody colours of the rainbow. Some on foot, pushing wheelbarrows or carrying bundles on their backs. Others on rickety vegetable vans with wooden scaffolding on the back for all the chickens and pigs and beds and pots and pans and grandfathers and grandmothers. Rich, oily blokes in posh cars. Large pantechnicons. Baby prams. Some of the cars had broken down along the road or run out of petrol. They offered us all they had if only we’d help them. There was one woman, a smart lady with golden earrings, who started tearing the clothes off her body offering to sleep with the lot of us in exchange for a few litres of petrol. We saw them every bloody day, right from the border all the way up to Luanda, and back again. It felt like something dying inside one, seeing them like that. Because one knew: One day it will be our turn to take to the road just like that, with our little vans and our cardboard suitcases and our rolled blankets and our water bottles. And who will help us?”
“That’ll be the bladdy day,” said Gert. “I’ll shoot to the last bullet, and then I’ll get at them with my naked fists, man.”
(Prof Pienaar: “I shall go on fighting until the blood rises to the bridles of our horses.”)
“Now, Louis, you’re much too young to talk that way,” said Ma, dissatisfied. “Don’t tell me you became a coward in Angola.”
“It’s not a matter of cowardice, Gran,” he said calmly. “It’s just that I saw what was happening.”
“Don’t worry about what you saw over there,” said Mr Lawrence. “It can’t possibly happen here. Don’t be silly.”
“You’re already leaving the Eastern Frontier.”
“But my goodness, we’re not running away! We’re free people in a free country, aren’t we?”
“This is really too ghastly,” complained Mrs Lawrence. “How on earth did we get on this topic?”
“There was a murder last night,” Louis reminded her flatly.
“Let them kill one another if they want to!” Gert blurted out. “They won’t lay a finger on us.”
“Quite,” agreed Mr Lawrence, filtering his voice through his beard stained by coffee and tobacco juice. “It’s their tribal customs and things. Surely it’s got nothing to do with us. One has to be very patient with them. After all, they’re just like children.”
“And for how long d’you think you’re going to be safe in the cities?” Louis persisted. “Just a matter of time, then our frontiers will shrink as we draw our little laager more and more tightly. And what happens then?”
“Oh, nonsense!” said Mr Lawrence, poking the long stem of his pipe back into the moist hole in the middle of his hairy face.
“You think you can keep everything nicely separated through apartheid,” Louis went on, like a bloody fly on a window-pane. “White here, Black there. But this isn’t chess. It’s people.”
“I can’t see how we can solve our problems in any other way,” I said firmly. “It was easy enough for England and France and those countries: they built up their colonial empires overseas and the moment things became too hot to handle they could drop them just like that. But we’re living right here in the heart of ours. And unless we separate conflicting interests —”
“How can you do any
thing else but defend the system that has made you rich and powerful?” asked Louis with increasing insolence.
“You can add a bit of salt to your ‘rich and powerful’,” I told him. “You have a terribly simplistic view of things, Louis. To you it’s a matter of making or breaking here and now. I’ve seen rather more of life than you have. And I know what that sort of breaking can lead to.”
“And I’ve seen what happens to people who refuse to change in time!”
“‘We in our green youth,’” said Mr Lawrence as if he were quoting, “‘must settle eternal questions first of all.’”
“The point,” said Gert, “is that we can best protect our interests in the cities. That’s where we Whites belong. Here on the border we’re exposed to the Blacks. If the crunch comes, the Government will abandon us without batting an eyelid, that I can tell you. They’re only feathering their own nests nowadays.”
“They should have done more for the Blacks in time,” suggested Mrs Lawrence timidly.
“They should have done more for us!” countered Gert.
“All I know,” said Mr Lawrence, puffing away, “is that none of this would have happened if old Jan Smuts had still been alive.”
“I got a good price for my farm,” said Gert. “Much more than it’s worth in these times. I had to jump at the chance while it was there.”
“Ja, Gert was saying that right from the beginning,” confirmed Loekie, blushing.
“That’s all that really matters, isn’t it?” I said, deliberately avoiding Louis’s eyes. “To conclude every transaction as favourably as possible.”
After the guests had left, Ma hurried into the kitchen to make sure dinner was served without any delay. She was irritable, as it was already half-past twelve and normally the Sunday dinner was announced promptly at noon.
“Well, Ma,” I said as we sat down, “now you’ve heard what they’re saying. So why don’t you also make up your mind and have done with it?”
She looked at me attentively for some time. Then she said: “The important thing is not for me to make up my mind, sonny. The way I see it, I’m giving you time.”
“For what?”
“To open your eyes and see what you’re doing. Now please say grace for us.”
6
BUT WHEN MA withdrew to her room after dinner “to lie down for a while”, something quite foreign to her nature, I realised she must be more perturbed than I’d thought.
“Don’t tell me your age is catching up with you after all?” I intended it lightly, even sympathetically; but it sounded cruel.
“I didn’t sleep too well last night,” she said flatly. But on her doorstep she stopped for a moment to look round at me. “Sometimes, you know,” she said, “sleep is like prayer. A way of appealing for help to a place you can’t reach otherwise.” Before I could answer she closed the door between us.
Louis was lying on his bed already, covered by the eiderdown, reading the comics. I took off my shoes and my trousers and moved in under the blankets. Rest invaded me like warmth. But beyond the superficial satisfaction it stirred up older, familiar things. Turning my eyes away from Louis, it was easy to imagine he was Theo (except that I would have preferred not to think of Theo) and we were children again.
In our childhood holidays there had been an oppressive feeling of being caged in on Sundays which had made it different from any other day of the week. Especially in the afternoon, those endless summer afternoons with the sun burning over the valley, windless and hot. Grandpa and Grandma had always taken a nap after dinner; Dad too, while Ma would retire somewhere with the Bible. And we boys would be instructed to stay in the stoep room until four, the curtains drawn to shut out the world outside. The slightest sound coming from our room before four o’clock would invariably result in a hiding for both of us, with the worn grey strap Ma had taken with her wherever she’d gone, even on holiday. Possibly that had been my earliest associations of good and evil: “sin” meant making a noise on Sunday afternoon; and being “good” consisted of lying motionless on your bed with the heavy heat pressing down on your body and itching in the perspiration in your armpits and between your legs.
As a special favour we’d been allowed, as we’d grown older, to take some reading matter to the room with us on those afternoons: religious journals Grandma had selected for us, or the brown volumes of Fanny Eden. Sanctity had been identical with boredom. Even in submitting to it – neither of us would have considered for a moment the possibility of resisting parental authority, unlike today’s children! – there had been something about those Sundays disturbing me long before I could formulate it to myself: an awareness of the unnatural discrepancy between the two young boys imprisoned in that oppressive room, and the wild summer world outside, the dam and the stream, and moist earth and virgin forest and shady wild-figs; the green smell of foliage and the shouting of piccanin voices down by the water; and all the extravagant ferocious heat of the sun. It wasn’t the stuffiness of our little room in itself, even though that had been bad enough, but the shocking discovery of being separated from that luxuriant world you yearned for with an almost physical, almost sexual, fervour.
Sunday after Sunday we lay in that baking-oven of a room, counting off the progress of the clock in the passage: one o’clock, quarter-past, half-past, quarter-to, two o’clock – and then three o’clock – and, incredibly, hallelujah!, the redemption of four decisive strokes, followed by Grandma’s coffee and rusks and milk-tart and green fig jam, and deliverance to the freedom of the farm. Only once in all those years had I dared to slip out on a Sunday afternoon, taking Theo with me, down to the piccanins cavorting in the dam. That had been the occasion on which I’d nearly drowned, to be saved by Pieletjie of the swinging prick. It had been God’s way of punishing me. Followed, mercilessly, by Ma’s grey strap.
Such had been the conditioning of the Sundays of my youth which had contributed to my dazed bewilderment, that afternoon on Bernard’s farm, when Elise had taken off her clothes and dived naked into the dam. It had been an heraldic act, a ceremonial liberation from all the prescriptions of a Calvinist religion, a fleeting but unforgettable glimpse of a wholly free existence in a paradise beyond sin and Sundays and measured hours and the anger of God. She’d suggested something which, before that, had been no more than presentiment or hope. She would teach me to be free. She’d confirmed, in my absolutist adolescent mind, the possibility of innocence.
And it had all come to nothing. Those words on our wedding night – “Let’s first ask the blessing of the Lord” – denied everything I’d hoped to find and achieve through her. Had it been no more than illusion then? Had I really misjudged her? Or had she herself been unaware of what, in that ephemeral magic moment, I’d recognised and fallen in love with in her? She had been the conclusion of my Early Romantic Period, my dreams of becoming a writer, my preposterous faith in happiness. And it was just possible that I’d never quite forgiven her for it.
I preferred not to read the papers that afternoon. I didn’t want to see what they had to say about the riots at Westonaria; and I was even less inclined to read about Bernard’s trial. So I turned past the news pages, glancing only briefly at the political comment. But in the business section something caught my eye: a photograph of myself in a column of the paper’s Businessman of the Week. I scanned the report, mainly in search of errors, knowing one couldn’t trust any journalist; but it was reasonably accurate. There had been numerous similar articles on my achievements in the newspapers before, mostly in connection with “Afrikaner leaders in business” etc.; occasionally more personal profiles of “the man behind the success formula”. One learned to accept it as part of the routine; still, it remained reassuring, a barometer of achievement – like success with women.
Theo was also mentioned in a paragraph of the column, “Mynhardt’s younger brother, an architect of considerable standing”. In my interview with the reporter I’d made sure he took down the particulars about Theo, feeling th
at in a sense I’d owed it to him.
Perhaps I wasn’t quite fair to Theo when I referred to him a little while ago. But I honestly believed at that stage that this narrative could do without him. Now I realise it’s inevitable I bring him into it. Strange how compulsive this sort of writing can become.
I was amazed when he telephoned me that morning to find out whether he could come and see me at my office.
“Why don’t you and Marie come over for dinner one evening?” I suggested. “Then we can relax and have a proper chat. It’s a long time we haven’t seen one another.”
“Good idea,” he said. “But there’s something else I’ve got to discuss with you alone.”
I consulted my desk diary. “What about Wednesday week? We’ll be back from our visit to the farm by then.”
“Actually I’d prefer to see you before you go. It’s something – well, rather important —”
“When will you be in Johannesburg again?”
“I’m in town at the moment.”
“Oh, well what about this afternoon then? I have an appointment for lunch but I can always cancel it.”
“No, I’d rather not go to a restaurant. I prefer your office.”
“You sound terribly secretive.”
“It’s not really as bad as that. It’s just – oh well, I’ll see you at three then.”
It was in March, just after Dad’s cancer had been positively diagnosed for the first time, fifteen months before his death; the time when, in spite of the discomfort and the actual suffering, he still found it possible to read and live with so much enthusiasm.
In the long-winded way reminiscent of Dad when he was embarrassed, Theo spent half an hour talking about irrelevancies without giving any indication of the real reason why he’d come. I had a lot of work to do and was planning to drive round to Bea’s flat, too, in the evening, but I knew it would be futile to goad Theo.
Almost absently I sat studying him while he carried on with the small-talk: taller and younger than myself, his hair thicker and fairer, his body in better shape and without my middle-aged spread, rather “too handsome for a man” as Ma had once said disapprovingly. The looks of a ladies’ man: which I didn’t think he was. I suddenly realised how little I really knew about him. Since high school we’d had almost no contact. Those had been the days I would make a habit of stealing his girlfriends, not in earnest really, more for the hell of it, to try and get some reaction out of him, which had never happened. Poor old Theo: without exception they really had been very attractive girls. Unfortunately his wife Marie tended to be bitchy. She didn’t like me very much either. I had a pretty shrewd idea why, but there’s no need to go into it now.
