I hadn’t noticed them until now, white men in short-sleeved shirts and long Bermuda shorts, moving among the bathers, watching the young blacks from behind their sunglasses. “The ones who lose the races could get fired,” Rachel said. “The ones who lose a lot of races, I mean.”
The supervisors clapped their hands and shouted, “Vas, vas,” urging their employees to outrun the others, shaking their heads and muttering “Luiheid” when someone else’s workers got to a customer first. “It means ‘lazy,’ ” Rachel explained.
“Would you like something?” I said.
“Sure. I wouldn’t mind a Popsicle.” Before I had a chance, she raised her finger in the air and several pairs of vendors raced toward us. Two tall young men, one in blue shorts, the other in red, outran the others easily, taunting them in what I thought might be Zulu.
They set the cooler on the sand to Rachel’s left. “What would you like, miss?” the fellow in the blue shorts said. Rachel rolled onto her side as, dropping to one knee, he unhooked the handles of the cooler. Propped on her elbow, she peered into the cooler, reached inside and moved the various treats about in search of the pineapple Popsicle she said she wanted. Her large, white breasts dangled over the side of the cooler, from which frost billowed out like smoke. Her nipples quickly stiffened.
“What would you like, Wade?” she said.
The young man in the blue shorts stared at her breasts, then looked at me and grinned. I grinned back just as Hans appeared beside the young man and struck him across the face with his folded newspaper. “What are you looking at, boy?” he said. He glared at me as if he expected an answer from both of us. The young man’s face went blank as he gazed at the sand. He didn’t flinch, didn’t move.
“Dad!” Rachel shouted.
I got to my feet, intending to tell Hans that the young man had merely smiled at me. Before I could utter a word, however, a tall, blond, heavy-set supervisor in a lime-green shirt stepped between Hans and the young man and shouted in Afrikaans; the young man mumbled something under his breath.
“Dad!” Rachel said again, hastily donning her T-shirt as she stood up. She gripped her father’s arm with both hands. The supervisor shouted again, and again the young man muttered something, at which the supervisor slapped him so hard across the face that he fell down. The other young man tried to help him to his feet, but the supervisor struck him again, bringing his massive hand down so hard that the sound of it hitting the young man’s cheek set my ears to ringing. The young man, still on one knee in the sand, face as blankly defiant as that of someone who, while being interrogated, refused to say a word, looked furtively at me. I looked away. Everyone on the beach was staring in our direction.
“He was leering at my daughter,” Hans shouted at the supervisor, tapping the newspaper against his hip. “He was leering at her.”
“No,” I said. “He was looking at me, that’s all. He smiled at me and I smiled at him and that’s all there was to it.”
“He had no business smiling at you,” Hans said, “and you had no business smiling back. The two of you exchanging smirks about my daughter, my youngest daughter who is only twenty-three.”
“But—” I began.
“Please,” the young man in the red shorts said to me, looking nervously around. He joined his hands palm to palm. “Please. My friend has been punished. We will go now.”
He reached down and helped the other young man to his feet, speaking urgently to him in Zulu. He kept looking about as if he expected the police to show up any minute. “He has been punished, master,” he said to the man in the lime-green shirt. “He is very sorry.”
“Give me my money,” the supervisor said. “All of it, don’t keep any for yourself. I will lose money today because of this.” The young man spoke to the other in Zulu. “My money,” the supervisor said. The young man dug a fistful of bills and coins out of his pockets and handed them to the supervisor. But the one who had been slapped, his expression still implacable, shook his head slightly—and then turned and ran. The supervisor shouted something after him, but, winding his way among a gauntlet of sunbathers and umbrellas, he didn’t stop.
“I know where he lives,” the supervisor said to Hans, who nodded, still tapping the newspaper against his hip.
“I’m going to lodge a police complaint,” Hans said.
“Of course,” the supervisor said, folding his massive arms. “I don’t blame you, I don’t. I am very sorry about your daughter. The boy will be found and sent to jail. I will see to it.” The young man in the red shorts hung his head. “You, go,” the supervisor said. “Go on, get out of my sight. I have other boys who will work for me without causing trouble.”
“Did he touch you, Rachel?” asked Myra, still sitting beneath her umbrella with her knitting on her lap.
“No, Mom,” Rachel said. “He didn’t touch me.”
“That boy who touched your daughter,” the supervisor said, “he won’t get far.” He shaded his eyes with one hand as he watched the young man in the red shorts walk away from us. “Neither will that one,” he said. “They’re not allowed to go anywhere outside Langa without me. I drive them here and drive them back. They’ll be picked up as soon as they leave the beach.”
“What happened, Rachel?” Myra said.
“Nothing happened,” I shouted. “He smiled at me and I smiled back—that’s all that happened.”
“No,” Hans said. “He looked at Rachel and then he smiled at you and you smiled back. What do you think his smile meant? What did yours mean? What do you think that was all about?”
“Now, now,” Myra said, “I’m sure Wade didn’t mean anything.”
“You’re blaming Wade?” Rachel said.
“There is nothing to blame him or me for,” I said. I turned to Hans. “You struck him with that newspaper, and you”—I pointed to the supervisor—“you slapped him twice, and you’re blaming this on him?”
The man sniffed. “I’ve slapped him before. So have other men. He’s a troublemaker. I told him to apologize to the young lady. He ran off with my money instead. But I’ll get it back. And the two of them will go to jail. That’s all there is to it.”
“You didn’t tell him to apologize,” I said.
“Yes, I did. In Afrikaans.” He shrugged.
“Dad, don’t file a complaint,” Rachel said. “He didn’t do anything to me.”
Hans adjusted his glasses and, hands on his hips, looked out to sea. “Very well,” he said. “No complaint. No charges. But, as this man said, the boy stole from him, and the police will pick him up someplace he’s not allowed to be, so it doesn’t really matter if I complain or not.”
“I can’t have these boys stealing from me,” the supervisor said. “I should have fired their black arses long ago. But they’re all like that. Always up to something. Luiheid. I have eight working for me and there’s not a good one in the bunch.” He ran his hand through his thick blond hair. “He’s a thief and the other one is not much better.”
Hans extended his hand to him and they shook. “Not your fault,” Hans said. “Well done. Well handled.”
“Are you kidding me?” I said. “The two of you assaulted him.”
“This is not Canada,” Hans said. “You’re in a different, better country now, enjoying a holiday that I’m paying for.” He looked at Rachel as if to say it was her he was paying me to enjoy.
“Everyone stop,” Rachel said. “Just stop.” She glared at the supervisor, who nodded at her and lowered his eyes. He closed and picked up the cooler and turned away, trudging off through the sand in the opposite direction from the way the young men had gone.
“We’re leaving,” Rachel said to me. “Mom and Dad, you stay put.”
“Rachel,” Myra said.
“I’ll call you tonight, Mom,” Rachel said. “I’m too upset right now.”
We drove
back toward our apartment in silence, Rachel wrenching the gearshift about as if she meant to tear it from the floor and toss it out the window. When we stopped at a red light, I took her hand, but she pulled away. “They did nothing wrong,” I said.
“You don’t…,” she said, just as the light turned green.
“Don’t what?” I said.
“You don’t…I don’t know what the word is. Engage. You don’t engage them like that. You don’t exchange smiles with them. About anything. You don’t talk to them except to tell them what to do. You don’t introduce yourself to them the way you introduced yourself to Nora at the party.”
“Them?” I said.
“Look, just forget it,” she said.
“You don’t what?” I said.
“You heard me,” she said. “You don’t engage them.”
“So you agree with your father?”
“No. I don’t. I don’t know why…I guess he overreacted. He’s very protective of his girls.”
“Protective?” I said. “What was he protecting you from?”
“You don’t understand, Wade.”
“Explain it to me, then. I’m all ears.”
“There is a history here, a terrible history, but you can’t undo it in one day at the beach.”
“Sorry. You should have loaned me your manual of interracial interaction in South Africa.”
“Look, let’s drop it, okay?”
“That ice cream vendor smiled at me and I smiled back. That’s all that happened.”
“No, that’s not what happened. First of all, he’s not the vendor. Even the supervisor works for someone else. God knows who what you call the vendor is. The two of you, you and the boy, shared a smile about my tits.”
“He wasn’t a boy.”
“It’s just a word, one I’m used to using. You gave me to him.”
“What?”
“You did. Just for a second. Maybe you didn’t know it, maybe you didn’t mean it, but you gave me to him. I’m not saying this because of the colour of his skin.”
“You’re overreacting.”
“No. It was like he was saying, ‘Lucky you, banging that piece of ass every night.’ ”
“What? No, it was just a joke. The steam from the cooler made your—”
“Yes, it made my nipples hard.”
“Yes,” I said. “It was kind of funny, so we shared a smile about it.”
We stopped at another light.
“Look,” Rachel said, “it doesn’t matter why he smiled. It was you smiling back that set my father off. And if you’re so concerned about those two black boys, you might want to consider how much trouble they’re in now.”
“Because of me, is that what you’re saying?”
“I’m not saying Dad was right. He should not have done what he did. That supervisor shouldn’t have done what he did. But neither of them would have done anything if you hadn’t smiled at that boy when he smiled at you, which he shouldn’t have done.”
“Boy? I think he was older than me.”
“I told you, it’s just a word,” Rachel said. “I grew up calling them that. Whether he’s a boy or a man, he’s somebody’s son or brother or maybe even husband, and he won’t be home tonight.”
I said nothing, so infuriated that I was worried about what I might say if I opened my mouth.
I thought of pointing out that I hadn’t “banged that piece of ass” in quite a while. She’d been putting me off with excuses and hadn’t seemed to care how transparent they were.
“Look,” Rachel said. “He should have known better than to smile at you. He should have known better than to run off like that.”
“Maybe he thought it was better to stand up for himself no matter what the consequences. I’m sure he knew that he’d get caught. Maybe what he saw in my smile was that I’m not from here.”
“Yes,” Rachel sighed. “Yes, maybe. He shared a special moment with a non-racist Canadian. It happens all the time. Sorry. Erase that last sentence. Look, I feel partly to blame too, you know. I should have said no when my father said that we should go to Clifton Beach. But I have—I still have—this stupid notion that you and he will be able to tolerate each other someday.”
“The way that he and Fritz tolerate each other? They mostly ignore each other. Look, I know that not every white person in South Africa is a racist. There are plenty who speak out against apartheid. But I guess that’s the thing, isn’t it? When you’re white, you can do that and get away with it. If someone gets rid of apartheid, it won’t be the whites. It will be the coloureds and the blacks and the outside world. The liberal whites who stay in the country, the writers who win prizes, what price are they paying? They’re not offering to take Nelson Mandela’s place on Robben Island. Even if they did offer, they’d be ignored. In South Africa, to be white is to be wealthy by comparison with the coloureds and the blacks. And white liberals are not as liberal as they like to think they are. You see how liberal most of them are when something is at stake for them.”
“It’s so much more complicated than that, Wade. In university, I read a book by William Faulkner called The Sound and the Fury. I’m sure you’ve read it. There was a character named Dilsey, remember. The way Faulkner told it, her love was so limitless that she transcended vengefulness and raised the children of her enslavers as if they were her own, ‘without stint of recompense.’ He said that the book was in part a loving tribute to the blacks who, as he put it, endured—the book ends with the words ‘they endured.’ ”
“Yes. So?”
“So Nobel Prize–winning Faulkner romanticized those blacks. They brought him up better than his parents did, not because they loved him or even liked him, but because they had to. As Nora does, and the other maids we had did.”
“So Faulkner was a racist?”
“I don’t know. Then there’s your one-time favourite writer, Thomas Wolfe, who Faulkner named the greatest novelist of their generation. He was revered by the Nazis of pre-war Germany because of his portrait of the blacks of the U.S. South. Wolfe was regarded by many scholars and others as a racist.”
“Thomas Wolfe wasn’t a racist. He loved everyone and everything he wrote about.”
“My point is that these things are more complicated than you think. You’ve never lived among blacks.”
“Not my fault.”
“Wade—look, I’m tired. We’re not going to talk about it for a while, okay?”
“Okay,” I said. “It’s fine with me if we declare a moratorium on trashing my favourite writers.”
“Moratorium declared,” she said. “Starting now.”
We drove the rest of the way home in silence.
* * *
—
Two days later—we’d said no more to each other since the beach than we had to—she poked her head into the bedroom while I sat at my desk.
“I have a confession to make,” she said, not meeting my eyes. “Bethany was right. I have had a few pretty bad lapses since we got here. After we saw that couple fighting along the seawall, I wrote about it in my diary. A lot. I’ve had a couple of other lapses, too. You see, sometimes, since I got better, I’ve given in to the urge to write in the diary, but only rarely and only for exactly an hour at a time. That’s how the doctors told me to handle it. I time myself to the minute. Just like when I read the book. I need two hours to myself, period, consecutive or not. It doesn’t have to be in private as long as no one interrupts me, which means it’s better for everyone if it is in private, but I trust you not to interrupt me. I have to have her diary beside mine while I write.”
“Or else?”
“Or else I don’t feel right. Don’t ask me to explain, because I can’t. So, every so often, I’m a little bit cuckoo for one hour a day, from eight to nine in the evening, and a little bit less cuckoo when I’m re
ading for another hour—maybe I’ll read when you’re asleep. A lot of people are cuckoo twenty-four seven. I used to be. So I think one hour now and then isn’t asking very much, do you?”
“No,” I said, trying to sound unconcerned. “There are worse things to do with an hour than spend it writing. At least, I think there are. How would I know?”
“Don’t encourage me. I mean, thanks for the vote of confidence, but don’t encourage me. I wasn’t a load of laughs back in the bad old days. Also, stop being so down on yourself. Did you know that the average age of first novelists is thirty-eight?”
“What’s the average age of writers when they admit to themselves that they’ll never be writers?”
“I have faith in you.”
“You told me, that day in St. John’s when you showed me the diary, that you were recovering and always would be. Is that smudge on your wrist what you meant?”
“Yes, but please don’t worry. If you worry, I’ll worry.”
“I’m not worried,” I said, all too aware of how unconvincing I sounded.
From The Arelliad (1985)
I dreamed I burned Arellia. I burned the whole thing to the ground.
I dreamed I burned The Arelliad, including my translation of her book. There was nothing to the pages and to those dry and yellow leaves but dust. A single spark and up they went.
I dreamed I built a bonfire, feeding volume after volume into the roaring yellow flame, all my copies of Het Achterhuis, my very first, the mummified one I’d shown to Wade, hundreds of others, her picture on every one, the ever-smiling, cheerful Anne. So many times I burned her likeness and her name.
I wished I could forget that look,
I wished I could forget that book
The Mystery of Right and Wrong Page 24
