He believed his client’s protestations of innocence, at least at this stage, but even if he had slept with the woman, so what? In a civilised society, a white man sleeping with a black woman shouldn’t even be frowned upon, let alone considered worthy of a criminal charge. But over the last few years things had been changing; the Nationalist government had been hardening its position even further and the few remaining remnants of the English-speaking community’s values were in rapid retreat. From separate seats on buses and ‘Whites only’ benches and toilets, it was a surprisingly small step to these further pieces of legislation, pushing relentlessly onwards towards total segregation. The pass laws had long existed, restricting the movement of black people into the cities and keeping them confined to their ‘homelands’, but here was a law that seemed to him to be equally damaging, one that reached deep into people’s private worlds and most intimate personal relationships – the right to express their physical and emotional feelings for another human being. To love someone of another race was no longer a matter of preference or choice; it was a criminal act. And to defend someone accused of breaking the law in such a high profile case was also a risky business. It might damage his chances of getting ordinary commercial work; there would be many who would be only too quick to characterise him as one of those new politically motivated advocates, a Jewish rabble-rousing communist. But would it also, perhaps, make him the object of unwanted attention by the authorities? He’d heard of advocates who believed themselves to be under scrutiny, nothing too obvious, just a sense of being on the Special Branch radar. The mood in the country was darkening. Who knew where it was all leading?
These things had to be considered; it would be foolish not to. Cohen had told him to use his head not his heart and that’s what he’d been telling himself that he would do. He’d remain coolly analytical, forensic, do a good job and walk away with his reputation intact. He wouldn’t let it damage him – he owed that to Renee. And to himself. It’d taken him long enough, God knows, to get this far; years of studying, against all the odds. His father hadn’t lived to see it but his mother was able to witness it and he knew how much pride she took in his successes. Her son Jack, who had started out with so little to show for himself, an educated man, an advocate in a good set of chambers, making a proper living for himself, appearing for the first time in the most important court in the land! He had told himself that he’d have to take cognisance of this. He was building up a practice for himself and beginning to do well. It was important not to put a foot wrong. Use his head.
And yet…This case spoke to his heart, however hard he tried to deny it. The politics and the racial aspect, he’d known about before. It interested him hugely, from a professional point of view. It was a testing ground for values he’d come to hold dear. It felt good to be right at the heart of an important case, one of national importance, whose outcome would change things, not just for his client but also for his country, for South Africa as a whole. But behind all of that there were other things. There was Terence. He remembered Terence, sitting cross-legged with him in the sawdust on the Handyhouse floor, lining up his Dinky cars for a race, or playing five stones, his head bent forward in concentration. It was hard to forget him.
Now, having met his client for the first time, he could see that there was also another aspect to it all that he would struggle to put to one side, in the interests of cool logic and professionalism – a man and a woman, a husband and wife, a marriage teetering on the brink. This was his case, through and through.
Head or heart? He put the papers back in the file and set them to one side. Then he stood up, pushed his chair under the desk, took up his briefcase and left the room. He locked the door behind him and as he did so his eye lingered on his name etched onto the gold plate on the door, ‘MR J. NEUBERGER, ADVOCATE. He touched it, feeling the ridges of the letters under his fingers.
He’d go home and talk to Renee. He’d tell her about his day. But he wouldn’t share with her these thoughts, not yet. He’d give it a bit of time. No point in worrying her; he’d just wait and see what happened.
Chapter 6
1940
One morning when I woke up and called for Ma, Ada appeared beside my bed instead, looking flustered and pale. Her eyes were red and puffy, as if she had been crying.
‘Ag, man,’ she said. ‘It’s a blerry good thing you slept through last night, Jackie. All hell let loose. Your ma was goin’ to come and wake you and take you with her, but she decided to leave you to sleep, with all the upset and the shouting and that. She’s told me to bring you to her this morning.’
What did she mean? Where was Ma? Where had she gone? What about Sauly? Had she taken him with her, instead of me, abandoned me while Sauly was by her side? And what about Pa, what had happened to him? Had he gone too?
‘I’m going to get you dressed and I’ll give you some nice hot Nutrene porridge and milk for your breakfast, then we’re going over to your ouma and oupa’s house. Your pa’s busy taking stock in the store. You can say goodbye to him before we go.’
An hour later I found myself walking down Main Road with Ada, holding her hand. She was sniffling as she went. From time to time she exploded in a burst of ‘Such a lot of blerry nonsense,’ which then subsided into sobs again. Along the way we met Mrs Levy, who shook her head and tutted. She had obviously heard that something was amiss. Further down, Mrs du Plessis crossed the street to say, ‘I always knew there’d be trouble, right from when they took over that store,’ and old Mr Roach muttered, ‘Well, well, well,’ as he passed.
Ouma and Oupa lived three blocks down, on a side street, in a small house, bounded at the front by a high factory wall and at the back by a piece of scrubby, unused land. Oupa’s workshop was in the front room. It was filled with shoes and boots, slippers and sandals, bags and satchels. In the corner, a grinding wheel usually turned. To one side was a large treadle sewing machine. At the front was Oupa’s table, covered in tacks, heels, chalk, cardboard labels, paper bags, shoes in a state of half-repair. I knew it well.
The front door was open and we walked straight in. Today the wheel was silent, the sewing machine still. Ada took me with her into the back room, where I saw Ma, with Sauly sitting on her lap. Here also were Ouma and Oupa, sitting beside her. The tiny room was crowded with suitcases, wicker baskets, jute bags. Jarpe, my toy monkey, was perched perilously on the top of the pile. The small window, with its mosquito netting, had been flung open wide, but with all these people and bags in it, the room still felt oppressively hot, steamy with human sweat and reeking with the acrid tang of leather, shoe polish, rubber and glue.
‘We’ve left,’ said Ma, pulling me towards her. ‘We’re not going back.’ She burst into tears. Sauly sensed the mood and joined in, along with Ada and Ouma, who was howling curses in Yiddish. ‘May he be dead and not just dead. May he be buried in the earth,’ she howled, ‘not just in it but through it, to the very core. May he grow like an onion, with his head stuck in the ground.’
‘Hush, Bertha,’ said Oupa firmly. ‘Enough.’
‘This is your home now,’ said Ma to me. I looked around and wondered how on earth there was going to be room in this tiny little house for Ouma and Oupa, Olive, the coloured maid, Ma, Sauly, Ada and me.
‘Ada, you must go back to the store now,’ said Ma. ‘You’ll be needed.’
‘Never,’ said Ada fiercely. ‘I’m staying with you.’
‘We have no money to pay you. Your wages are for your work at the store. You must go back now. Be sensible and think of your sick mother. Think of the hospital bills. She depends on you.’
Ada hugged Ma, kissed me and Sauly on the cheeks, burst into a new flurry of tears, then hurried off to make it back in time for the store opening.
Ma placed me on a chair in the workshop. She put Sauly in an empty chest drawer, wrapped a blanket round him, placed one foot underneath one end and
rocked it vigorously with one foot. I listened to the voices of my mother and my grandparents, their noisy Yiddish, and Oupa’s voice the loudest of all.
He said that he understood his family was cursed, that their woes would never cease, that having five daughters and only one son was a tragedy, that a shoemaker’s money only went so far in supporting five useless girls and he’d been overjoyed to get her married, that Sam had been a very good match, better than she deserved, a man with prospects. He said that under God’s eyes a marriage is a marriage for life, that men are men and women are women, that there are two ways to scratch an itch, like so and like so (scratching his cheek with one hand and then bringing the other hand awkwardly over his head to scratch it again and prove his point), that Sam sometimes behaved badly, yes, badly, badly, that he was too preoccupied with money and forgot all the other important things in life, that he didn’t always show enough kindness to Ma, even if he felt it.
‘But,’ said Oupa,‘for all that, he’s a good husband to you. He’s not a schlemiel. And he’s not a schnorrer. He may not be the biggest brain in the world, not the great intellectual that you seem to think you are, but never mind – he works hard to put food on the table. And he doesn’t go off chasing other women, from what one can tell. There are much worse men, much worse husbands, and if you had an ounce of sense in that oh-so-clever head of yours you’d count your blessings and be a good wife to him, instead of making a big meal of every little irritation and argument.’
Ma listened quietly, snuffling into her handkerchief. Ouma came and put her arm around her.
‘May he get running sores and ulcers on his skin,’ she muttered, ‘for upsetting you so.’
‘Enough, Bertha,’ Oupa shouted. ‘You’re not helping. Leave her to think about all that I have said. She’ll see reason soon enough.’
I woke from my afternoon nap later that day, to find all the bags and suitcases packed again and piled up by the door. Ma was puffy-eyed and not speaking to Oupa. He cursed the day he had ever had daughters. Ouma in turn cursed men and the ugly thing they had dangling between their legs that caused so much trouble and made men think they were so wonderfully important, and the sorrow they brought to their poor, long-suffering wives.
I listened to Ouma and Oupa and drank in all this information about my mother and my father and the adult world of men and women. If marriage was like this, perhaps I would stay single all my life, like my father’s cousin Morrie, or Mr Singer the bookkeeper who came to pore over my father’s accounts each year. I would save myself the trouble of having a wife. I didn’t want to make my wife cry, like Pa seemed to do to Ma. Was it possible to grow up to be a different kind of man, with a different kind of life?
Ma hugged Ouma and then, helped by Olive and her son, Willie, we walked back down the street to the store, carrying all our belongings with us.
When we got there, Pa was behind the counter, in his shirtsleeves, measuring lengths of cloth. He didn’t look up as Ma dragged the bags through the sawdust, out the back and up the rickety stairs. He didn’t offer to help. But he came and took Sauly up in his arms and kissed him on the cheek, and ruffled my hair roughly with his hand, and I was glad to see him, which made me feel all the more confused. Ouma, Oupa, Ma, Pa – how could I decide who was right and who was wrong?
*****
That summer we seemed to be going backwards and forwards to Ouma and Oupa’s every second week. The bags would scarcely be unpacked when Ma would decide that enough was enough and we would head off, back down the road again, with Sauly under one of Ma’s arm and me trailing behind her. All along Main Road heads shook and tongues clicked. ‘Ag, shame, man!’, ‘Poor little kiddies!’, ‘Whatever possessed her to marry him?’, ‘Whatever possessed her to leave him?’, ‘Whatever possessed him to take her back?’
One evening, as Ma lay close beside me in the camp bed in the back room at Ouma and Oupa’s, trying to get me to sleep, she started to tell me about when she was young, before she met Pa.
‘I know you don’t speak yet, Jackie, but I’m sure you understand. You’re getting to be a big boy and you must wonder about all these things that are going on. So I’ll tell you the story of me and your pa. It’s not his fault really,’ she said. ‘And it’s not mine either. It’s just the way things are. Not all marriages are made in heaven, you know.’
Ma paused and smoothed my hair. ‘Are you listening, Jackie’
I nodded.
‘I’ll tell you about me and your pa and how we came to be married. But I need to go back a bit first, to Ouma and Oupa and the years before.
‘When Oupa arrived in Cape Town, he got off the boat and stood with Ouma on the waterfront and the first thing he did was to ask for the synagogue, not because he wanted to pray – he wasn’t frum, like the Levys or the Goldsteins – but he knew that where there was a synagogue, there’d be Jews, and where there were Jews he would find help. At Constitution Street synagogue, someone asked someone who asked someone else to give them a bed for the night and the next day they were sent on to Vredehoek, a little district not too far away. When Ouma and Oupa got there, they found themselves in another little Jewish world – hotter, dustier, than the one they’d come from, odd and unfamiliar but safe, thank the Lord, safer than the shtetl back home, where they always feared the threat of a pogrom, the burning of their house or the theft of their land.
‘There in Vredehoek, they settled in among Jews but lived close to other people of the kind they’d never seen in their lives before – coloured people and Chinese, black and Indian, Afrikaner and English.
‘Oupa rented a small house from an old Afrikaner doctor. Ouma lit candles on a Friday, cooked chicken soup and barley, boiled salt beef and made borscht, just like back home. She only spoke Yiddish when she arrived but by the time they moved to this house, here in Parow, Oupa was making enough for them to have a maid, so they hired Olive and Ouma picked up some scraps of Afrikaans from her, enough to buy what she needed in the shops. She bought mealies from the market and boerewors sausages from the local butcher, kosher or not. She found out how to make hot Malay chutneys and brought home new fruits from the market – mangoes, paw paws, loquats, sharp granadillas and creamy avocado pears.’
‘One by one new children arrived and each time Oupa sighed as the midwife proclaimed the dreadful news – another girl! Oy a kappore - what a catastrophe! Enough was enough.
Ma was thoughtful for a moment. ‘Are you still listening, Jackie?’
I nodded and pulled my knees up to my chin. Ma wrapped a blanket round my shoulders to keep me warm.
‘Times were changing, the old matchmakers in the shtetl were halfway across the world, and the Jewish boys in Cape Town were all of a sudden going crazy, meshuggah, breaking with tradition and making their own foolish choices. Ouma had to do all the arranging herself, seeking out good matches for my sisters, talking to friends and neighbours, letting it be known that she was on the lookout for a good catch. Sometimes it seemed like an impossible job but in the end she found husbands, of one sort or another, for all of them, Ethel, Esther, Sadie and even Fella, with her ugly moles. All the girls were finally married and off Oupa’s hands, except, that is, for me.
‘By this time I was doing my matric, in the last year of school. My sisters had not been great scholars. “Dumb cows,” Oupa used to say. “Useless beasts.” They had all left school as soon as they could, with Oupa’s blessing.
‘But I was different; I was clever. I’m not boasting, Jackie bubala, really I’m not. Everyone said so. I looked set to pass my matric with flying colours. I locked myself away in the shed in the yard to get a bit of peace, away from Oupa’s workshop, and I studied hard. When the results came through, I had gained the top marks in the class and my teacher came to talk to Oupa one evening, to tell him that I should think of becoming a teacher myself. I would be the first girl in the family to continue my
studies and have a profession.
‘Oupa said no. Absolutely not. “We’ll find a husband for her, like all the others,” he pronounced. “Times are tough and I can’t afford to keep her for ever.” There was no point in arguing, so my teacher went home.’
Ma paused. She was looking away, staring into the distance, as if caught up in her thoughts, her eyes suddenly swimming with tears. I prodded her arm; I wanted her to carry on. She wiped her face with her hand, sighed for a moment, and then continued.
‘I begged and I whined, I cried and I cajoled and finally Oupa agreed that I could start my teacher-training course, but said that I would have to give up as soon as a suitable husband was found for me. I could not believe my luck. If I just got started on the course, I would have a little time to come up with a plan.
‘So when February arrived, I found myself studying to be a teacher. It was wonderful, leaving the house each morning with my satchel on my shoulder filled with exercise books, pens and pencils, walking out of the Jewish quarter, and into the streets beyond, passing the Malay shops, the poor white district and from there entering the neighbourhood where the college was situated. Not far to walk but as far as leaving one country and arriving in another. In the classes I sat next to Avis Pretorius, an Afrikaner girl, who became my best friend. I got to know Deidre Jones, whose father worked as an administrative assistant for de Beers and then there was Vicky de Wet whose great-uncle managed a vineyard in Groot Constantia. When I came home, I said nothing of my new friends.
Off the Voortrekker Road Page 5