“The past always resurfaces,” Kurt says as he scans the horizon. He’s leaning with his back on a rock outcrop, his left arm on his bent knee. Zoe squints her eyes into the bright sunlight, breathing in the salty air. When she opens them again, it’s to face him with a direct question: “Which past are you talking about: humankind’s past, that of my family, or your past?”
She cannot conceal a note of distress — even resentment — in her voice. She’s on the verge of a breakdown, right in front of this man, whom she doesn’t really know, in whom she blindly — most probably imprudently — confided. And then there’s Dario, his sweet memory, the harrowing feeling of having betrayed him for just being out here, with a stranger: so soon, so quickly.
There is a long and suspended silence, in which they both look out at sea, each seeking different things. Looking for the courage to speak out, accepting what might come with one’s words.
It’s such a glorious sun-day though, so unsuited to the tension Zoe feels mounting between them. She’s wearing jeans and a printed silk blue blouse — one of her mother’s — whose plunging neckline reveals glimpses of her cleavage. Even this seems so inappropriate now.
“I hear your frustration, Zoe,” Kurt finally says, tapping his pack of cigarettes on the rock. “I owe you an explanation.”
She turns her head to look at him and he locks his eyes into hers — his usual mocking sneer is gone. She craves his confession — the mutual breaking of the silence between them — but now that his words are about to come, she’s afraid to receive them.
“I have never forgiven myself for what happened fifteen years ago.”
The high-pitched screeching of seagulls pierces the air, almost anticipating the rawness of what he is about to reveal.
“When I started teaching at the university in London, I met Jasmine, a Vietnamese student four years younger than me. She had escaped the war in her country and lost most of her family.”
Zoe looks at him, but he keeps his eyes fixed on the rock under his bare feet, as if he needs a solid point onto which to hang his words. She goes back to the image of that beautiful young woman with almond-shaped eyes and silky hair, trapped in a picture in Kurt’s study.
“We got married after we had been dating for less than a year but, given the circumstances in South Africa at that time, we kept it a secret.”
Kurt glances at her, then resumes his story.
“Three years after our wedding I decided to briefly return to South Africa under a false name and in disguise, hoping to make contact with the anti-apartheid underground movement,” he says, his sombre voice almost drowning in the surf’s sound. “They arrested me the moment I tried to get in touch with my contact. Someone, probably within my inner circle of comrades, gave me away.”
Kurt pauses and mechanically pulls a cigarette out of his pack. Instead of lighting it, he puts it back.
“When Jasmine found out, she decided to fly to South Africa. I tried to dissuade her as much as I could in the brief phone calls I was allowed to make, but she was adamant. I knew nothing would stop her. She could be impossibly stubborn, but also incredibly naïve. She wanted to report my case to Amnesty International. She didn’t have a clue of how the security apparatus worked.”
Zoe bends her knees, pulling the legs up against the chest and wrapping her arms around them. She rests her chin on the knees, trying to make herself even smaller — no more than a blue silk cocoon abandoned on an ocean’s shore, under a violent southern light.
Kurt takes a deep breath and goes on with an even more sombre, more distant tone. “At the time I was still locked up in Pretoria. My wife took a room in a hotel near the prison, hoping they’d let her see me. That same night, two men entered her room and beat her to a pulp. She died a few hours later at the hospital. They both died, she and the baby. She was three months’ pregnant. I found out about her pregnancy only much later, from a letter addressed to me that she had left with a friend of ours in London.”
Zoe would stop breathing if she could. Kurt’s face has morphed into a mask. But the pain in his voice is all too revealing.
“The killers were never identified, but they were clearly at the behest of Hendrik van Den Bergh’s office.”
Another of Wilhelm’s heroes.
“Security matters were censored, as you may remember. But the media often carried success stories on how the Bureau of State Security was busy protecting Afrikanerdom from the swart gevaar and international communism,” says Kurt in a crescendo of sarcasm. After a short pause ha adds: “Well, they did not report on this one.”
Kurt gazes back at the rock, his jaw tensing under the weight of those memories: “I have never forgiven myself for this. My selfishness and my unforgivable artlessness killed my wife and my child. I abandoned them to play the hero and fight to change things in this country. But change has its own dynamics: Petty, short-sighted men are of no use to it.”
There is only the sound of the sea between them now, with its staccato rhythm. And yet, there is so much more. There is a wife ruthlessly murdered, an unborn child, seven years of brutal imprisonment. And, above all, an insurmountable guilt: the real curse keeping them apart.
The invisible walls Kurt erected around himself are those of a mausoleum for lasting memories. Trying to breach it would mean to desecrate a temple of perfect love. She cannot tell him what she feels. How she craves for another chance. How she is attracted to him. How she will not suppress this mounting feeling of being so fully, irreproachably alive.
Instead, she must accept she is no more than an intruder in his life — the imperfect replacement of a by-now-idealized lover. Even if he let her in, she would find herself playing the same role over and over again. For him, the past still matters more than the present. If she vanished in this precise moment, it wouldn’t make any difference.
The sky has suddenly dimmed, rolling in banks of dull-grey clouds. The breeze picks up, pushing back her hair. Zoe shivers in her light blouse.
“Here,” Kurt says, taking off his jacket and wrapping it around her shoulders. There’s a moment of hesitation on his part. They’re so close ... He gently puts a hand behind her neck, caressing it ever so lightly, his eyes closed. As if he wished to make amends for the bleakness of his confession.
The first drops of rain begin to fall.
“We should go,” he says, shaking out of his daze.
They follow the return path between the sandstone domes and then along the beach. The drizzle turns into a light rain. She keeps her eyes fixed on the footprints left by Kurt, who’s walking in front of her.
Kurt, water dripping from his hair onto his cheeks and his white shirt, turns and helps her step over a final rocky outcrop before reaching the park exit. She grabs his hand but drops it as soon as he helps her to hoist herself. Suddenly, Zoe misses Dario — his warm, inviting smile, the radiant levity with which he faced life. But Dario is dead. And Kurt, she feels, is dead too.
Dead inside.
32
ZANZIBAR
“STRANGELY, WE KNOW less about our species than about any other hominid species,” Dario wrote in his notebook. “The most important event in human evolution — the emergence of Homo sapiens — remains wrapped in mystery.” Zoe has decided to use this quote, a tribute to her deceased colleague, to introduce the topic of her lecture at the upcoming conference. It’s the least she can do to pay homage to Dario’s legacy, hoping she doesn’t break down when she utters his name in front of her audience. Thank goodness we’ll be in Zanzibar, away from home.
At a symbolic level, the island represents the ideal setting to expound her thesis. Once a cradle of slavery, it will now offer a suitable stage from which to plead for the liberation of research from its last ideological and geographical shackles. Zoe will point out that archaeological efforts have been disproportionately focused on East Africa, sidelining relevant evidence coming from the southern tip of the continent. She’ll corroborate the theory that the first modern people
evolved in southern Africa and not in the east of the continent, as mainstream academics still maintain.
She hoped to come up with her own hard proofs. Instead, she’ll have to openly admit the Kalahari denied her the striking, unequivocal discovery — a skull, if not a whole skeleton — thus teaching her a lesson against scientific hubris and vain ambition. Nonetheless, the findings at Langebaan lend enough support to the thesis of the ‘alternative cradle.’ What she fears most is having to descend into the academic arena to contend for it. She has always avoided the pomp and clash of big egos on the loose. She’s not cut out for heated disputes, although these are part and parcel of how science progresses.
Unlike her colleagues, lodged in an anonymous chainstyle hotel, Zoe has chosen an inn at the edge of Stone Town, the old part of Zanzibar City. Practically nothing has changed since her first visit ten years before. She finds again the geometric antique tiles; the hand-carved fourposter beds; the mosquito nets suspended over garden chairs for the afternoon siesta; the half-timbered balconies and the hand-crafted verandas overlooking the ocean.
Above all, she rediscovers that unmistakable Zanzibar smell: a mixture of salt water, seaweed, sun-dried fish, cinnamon, mango, nutmeg and cloves. It’s the smell of life, and of restrained sensuality. Zanzibar feels like a woman who gives herself sparingly, in the secrecy of forbidden alcoves. The contrast between the moist spells of the “Spice Island” and the dry heat of the bush from which she has just emerged couldn’t be starker.
Zoe looks back and marvels at what she experienced in the Namibian desert. She runs her fingers over the scratches left by the camel-thorns and relives the bush, its disarming hostility, its luring emptiness. She hears again the women singing in the night, the rhythmic step of the medicine men, Koma’s stories, the laughter with which the elders dispel any tension and the quiet dignity with which they accept their destiny. They’re still there, in a world so distant in time and space as to seem almost unreal. The Kalahari has left its mark, in its own right, and its memory now sings inside her — beautiful and hauntingly sad, like a Portuguese fado.
But even now that she’s in Zanzibar, so far away from that land of thirst, there’s no time to be lulled by the Tropics. Not yet. She still has to focus on her speech, which, as Kuyper hopes, will reignite the long-due debate about the true birthplace of modern humankind.
“Professor Du Plessis, why are you so keen on arguing that the African Eve comes from South Africa rather than from Kenya?” asks the reporter from Dar es Salaam’s Daily News during the press conference held after Zoe’s talk. “Is this a way to emphasize the change of heart that white Afrikaners are willing to undergo in post-apartheid South Africa?”
That’s the kind of question she’s been waiting for. She spent whole nights under the stars of the Kalahari, thinking of how she’d answer, what she’d be willing to reveal about herself once this issue would be out in the open. All this is part and parcel of what it entails to go back into the world, among the men and women of her time. It means exposing herself, putting at stake her reputation and, being an Afrikaner, letting herself be torn apart by the ferocious adversity of moral verdicts.
“Ideally, science should be free from politics and its influence; in fact, it isn’t,” she says, betraying a painful weariness in her voice. “No one and no thing is immune to its tight grip. Not even some primitive bones, which over time have become its unaware victims.”
Despite the air conditioning, the room feels suddenly torrid, as if she were back to her scorching desert — her mouth parched with thirst, her mind bleached by the sun. She bows her head, trying to focus and summon her strength. She can’t see the people in front of her, but she senses the mounting tension coming from the floor. She gathers what forces she can to deal one more blow to a stunned audience: “Our country has finally climbed out of the darkest period of its history. Apartheid has been abolished and a democratically elected black government has been established. Now, it’s time for our fossils, for years tainted by the stain of segregation, to find their way into the spotlight.”
As though a weight had been unloaded from her shoulders, she raises her head and looks towards the audience. Sitting in the front row, Professor Kuyper shows unequivocal signs of discomfort. She glances over the sea of faces, gauging the impact of her words. Her eyes come to rest on a tall figure at the back of the room. Kurt holds his head high and his hands by his sides, in a relaxed but at the same time in-control posture, like a bodyguard on duty. He gives her a nod.
In the silence, only her heart is beating a crazy tune, louder and louder. Ta-tam, ta-tam, ta-tam. She shudders, fearing everyone might hear her frantic tam tam.
She takes a swig of water, a deep breath; then, articulating each word slowly and deliberately, throws her bait. “There are fossil stories from our tormented past that are not particularly flattering for the international scientific community at large.”
“Could you please elaborate on that?” the same reporter asks.
Before answering, Zoe glances at Kurt, making sure he’s still there. Still with her.
“In the last decades, many Western scholars have preferred to focus their research interests on a part of Africa they deemed to be politically correct — I specifically refer to the eastern regions of the continent, Kenya and Tanzania primarily. Actively encouraged by the governments of those countries, much of Western academia emphasized the importance of those areas, which are undoubtedly critical to our research, but neglected the potential, in terms of paleoanthropological relevance, that the region south of the Zambezi had already shown. What I mean is that any significant study or discovery coming from South Africa quickly disappeared into some obscure storage room. In many quarters, to publish and cite articles written by South African researchers and, in general, to study our fossils was heavily frown upon, to say the least.”
Zoe has turned into a raging torrent of words, seemingly unstoppable. Even she finds it hard to recognize herself in this woman who speaks so glibly and with such unusual vehemence. “In the past, in his role as Director of our Department, on many occasions Professor Phillip Tobias officially opposed enforced segregation at universities and the restriction of academic freedom. In 1984 he flew to New York to present the Taung Child, the skull of a young Australopithecus africanus discovered in South Africa in 1924. The conference was organized by the Museum of Natural Sciences.”
Zoe stops to take another sip of water. She clears her voice and goes on, her eyes locked into those of the reporter. “On the day of the conference, outside the museum protesters denounced the presence on American soil of ‘apartheid’s fossils.’ Even those unsuspecting Palaeolithic bones had been transformed into political pariahs. But we all know that the only effective boycott that brought the apartheid regime to its knees after the fall of the Berlin Wall was the economic one. I don’t think that having kept South African scientists away from international academic circles greatly contributed to the fight against apartheid. I might be wrong, but isolating scholars from the global arena as a means of fighting tyranny, fundamentalism or autocratic regimes may even prove counterproductive. Be that as it may, it’s high time to remove African politics from African fossils.”
The reaction to Zoe’s words is instant and inevitable. Each and every one seems to have something to defend or someone to accuse. Some of her fellow scientists start justifying their actions; others attack her for fostering an extremely local and limited vision of paleoanthropological research. Then there are those who call her to account about her past as a privileged white academic during the apartheid era.
“Dr. Du Plessis, what action did you take at the time to support the anti-segregationist movement in your country, at least within your academic environment?” the correspondent of El País asks her point-blank.
Here it is, finally, the question she has been hoping to hear and waiting to answer! Why did they take so long to come up with it? Isn’t this what’s expected of her, the public admission of
a coward’s guilt? She can still sing to herself the opening lines of that Lutheran hymn she heard on the radio so many years ago: Let coward guilt, with pallid fear/To shelt’ring caverns fly/And justly dread the vengeful fate/Which thunders through the sky.
Zoe fixes her eyes on those of Kurt before answering. She’s not seeking the approval of a former political activist nor of a writer driven by his fiction. If anything, she’s looking for the support of a companion, now that she’s taking her first steps out of the cage of their Afrikaner heritage.
“To my greatest regret, and unlike other colleagues and friends, I did nothing. I buried my head in the sand and kept away from the real world, living in a secluded sphere of pure research. Others, many others, braver than me, acted, often incurring enormous sacrifices, to establish a sense of justice, equality and dignity in my country.”
She pronounces these words in a firm, resolute tone. Then she looks down at her hands, still holding her notes, before concluding in a subdued tone: “For a long time now, I have been feeling ashamed of myself.”
It’s all. Her closing sentence, which Zoe scribbled on the last sheet of her notebook before taking the floor, remains only a note on paper: “We all become either victims or perpetrators — at times individually, most of the time collectively. Sometimes, depending on the circumstances and stages of our lives, we may become both.”
“What happened to you, Zoe? What need was there to stir up all this fuss, all this talking about apartheid, the Afrikaner, the Boer’s guilt ...” Kuyper whispers vehemently in her ear as soon as the moderator closes the press conference. Looking over Kuyper’s shoulder, Zoe glances at her colleague Piet, still sitting stiffly, and meets his embarrassed stare.
The Afrikaner Page 19