A SONG IN THE MORNING

by Gerald Seymour

  He yearned for quiet outside his cell. But the C section corridor, and the small corridor through C section 2 were never quiet in the daylight hours. There were always the voices of the prison officers as they told stories, laughed, talked about the papers and the television. There was always the shout of a duty officer approaching a locked door, and the door clattering open, and the smack of it closing.

  Those were the noises that were on top of the singing.

  No singing that morning, and that meant no hammer of the trap being tested in the afternoon. Each time he heard the shout for the doors to be opened, and then the clatter, and then the smack, he stiffened, and the sweat sprang to his forehead and his armpits and his groin.

  There would be a shout and a clatter and a smack when they came to tell Jeez that it was commutation, or when they came to tell Jeez which day it would be, which dawn for the short walk.

  He often thought of the others.

  He hadn't seen the others for thirteen months, not since the passing of the sentence and the drive in the meshed police wagon across Pretoria and up the hill to the gaol. He hadn't seen them since the apartheid of the reception area at Beverly Hills. They had gone right to B section, he had gone left to C section. That was "separate development" for you. Four for B section because they were Black, Jeez for C section because he was White. They'd been laughing that day thirteen months before, walking loosely, easily in their leg irons and hand-cuffs. He wondered how they'd be now, waiting to learn if they'd all go. A bastard, that, if one or two of them were reprieved, and the others were taken to the hanging room . . . Wouldn't be a bastard, they'd all five go, because it had been a policeman. He'd meet them again in the preparation room. There they'd be together, apartheid waived, "separate development"

  non-operable . . .

  There was a shout. There was the clatter of a door opening.

  There was the smack of a door closing.

  Still and upright on his bed, Jeez waited.

  He knew all the distances that sound carried through the unseen parts of the gaol. He had heard the door that was the entrance to the C section corridor. There was a murmur of voices. Another door opening. The door into C section 2. The unchanging ritual. He wondered why they always shouted their approach to a locked door, why the door was invariably slammed behind them.

  He felt the wetness on his skin. He saw the flash of a face at the grille.

  He stood at attention. He stood every time a prison officer entered his cell. A key turned in the oiled lock.

  Sergeant Oosthuizen, smiling benignly.

  "Morning, Carew. You slept well, did you, man? Your room's a picture. Wish my lady kept our house like you keep your room. You're going to have your exercise early, straight after your lunch . . . "

  Jeez closed his eyes. All the shouting, all the clattering of the doors, all the slamming, to tell him that he was to be exercised an hour earlier than was routine.

  "Yes, Sergeant."

  "There's a nice afternoon for you, you've a visit."

  * • •

  He was very slight. With his crash helmet on, Jan van Niekerk seemed almost misshapen. There was something grotesque about such small shoulders capped by the gleaming bulge of the helmet.

  The Suzuki 50cc was his pride and joy. For insurance purposes it was a moped, but in Jan's mind it was a fully-powered scrambler/road machine. He passed only cyclists and joggers, he was forever being buffeted in the slipstream of overtaking lorries and cars, but the Suzuki was his freedom.

  In term time he came each morning from his parents'

  home in Rosebank down the long straight Oxford, onto Victoria and Empire, and then along Jan Smuts to the University of Witwatersrand.

  He loved the moped, whatever its lack of speed, because the under-powered Suzuki provided him with the first real independence of his 21 year old life. His club foot, his right foot, was a deformity from birth. He had endured a childhood of splints and physiotherapy. He had had to be ferried in his mother's car to and from school, he had never played rugby or cricket. The wedge that was built into the raised heel of his leather ankle boot gave him a rolling limp and prevented him from walking any great distance. Before the moped he had been dependent on others. Along with the moped came a black leather two-piece riding suit. The combination of his stunted physique and his taste for biker's gear made Jan a student apart. In the huge university he was virtually friendless, and that bothered him not at all.

  His friends were far divorced from the Wits campus. His own comrades. He had his own contact codes. He enjoyed a secret area of life that was undreamed of by his colleagues on the Social Sciences course. In this society, dominated by muscle power and sports skills where he could play no part, his Suzuki and his comrades gave him the purpose he craved.

  His parents marvelled at the difference in their son's attitude since they had bought him the moped. They thought of him as a good serious boy, and one who showed no inclination towards the radicalism that they detested and that seemed so rife on the campus. At home, Jan gave no sign of interest in politics. They knew from their circle of friends who had kids at Wits that their Jan had no links with the students, mostly Jewish, who led the university demonstrations and protests, who were whipped by the police, savaged by the security staff dogs. Jan had described those activists to his parents as ridiculous middle class kids with a guilt complex. They knew Jan had left the campus early on the day that Dr Piet Koornhof, Minister of Cooperation and Development, had been pelted and heckled.

  On another day he had walked away from the burning of the Republic's flag and the waving of that rag of the African National Congress. His parents thought the making of Jan had been his moped and his studies.

  There was a White girl doing ten years in the women's prison at Pretoria Central. She had been active in radical politics before devoting herself to the collecting of information for the A.N.C. Impossible to make the switch from overt to covert work. Jan had always been covert. Anyone who knew him, his parents, his sister, his lecturers, the students he sat with in lectures, would have been thunder-struck to have discovered that Jan van Niekerk was a courier for the Umkonto we Sizwe.

  A harmless little figure on his bumblebee of a moped, Jan pulled into the campus, parked behind the Senate House.

  He limped past the portico and columns at the front of the building, across the wide paved walkway and down over the lawns. He preferred to walk on grass, easier and less jarring on his right foot. He walked around the amphitheatre, ignored the swimming pool and slogged his way up the steps to the modern concrete of the Students' Union. He saw the posters advertising the evening meeting to protest against police brutality on the Eastern Cape, went right past them.

  His greatest contempt was for the students who shouted against the government from the safety of the campus. He believed that when those students had graduated they would turn their backs on decency and honour, that they would buy their homes in the White suburbs and live out their lives with privilege stowed in their hip pockets.

  Crippled and forever awkward, Jan van Niekerk would be there on the day of reckoning. He believed that absolutely.

  A day of reckoning, a day of fire. His struggle with his disability had tempered his steel strength of purpose. That purpose was the cause of Umkonto we Sizwe.

  On the first floor of the Students' Union he had a metal locker, opened by his personal key. He had depressed the top of the door at the centre, where it was weakest, a full quarter of an inch. The locker was where he kept his biking leathers and it was his dead letter drop. Four other men only in the sprawling mass of the city of Johannesburg knew of Jan van Niekerk's locker. In these days of the state of emergency, of the regulations justifying widened police power, to be cautious was to stay free, to be exceedingly careful was to avoid the interrogation cells of John Vorster Square.

  He stripped off his leathers. He unlocked the door.

  The note was a tiny, folded, scrap of paper. The corridor holding the
bank of lockers was always crowded, a concourse for students and lecturers and administration personnel and cleaning staff. Good and secure for a dead letter drop.

  Hidden by the open door he read the note as he packed his leathers into the locker.

  About once every two weeks he was contacted.

  A small link in a long chain, there was much that Jan van Niekerk was unaware of. A message from Thiroko had been telephoned from London in numbered code to Lusaka.

  Part of that message had been relayed on from Lusaka to Gaberone in Botswana. A smaller part of the message had been handcarried towards the international frontier and on by bus to Lichtenberg. From Lichtenberg that smaller part had been telephoned to Johannesburg.

  He read the message. He had the paper in the palm of his hand as he closed the locker's door. He went to a lavatory and flushed the message away.

  He had to hurry. He was late for the morning's first lecture.

  • • •

  The aircraft lurched, the engine pitch changed. The captain announced the start of the descent.

  Around Jack the South African nationals were crowding to the windows to look down, excited. God's own country was unfolding below them. Jack's mind was a blank. Too tired to think. The stewardess was collecting the blankets and the headsets. He felt as a small boy does, sent alone for the first time on a train journey. The fear of the unknown.

  The stewardess took his earphones that he hadn't used, and his blanket that he hadn't unfolded.

  He drew his seatbelt tighter round his waist. The fear was new to him. He did not know how it should be conquered.

  • * *

  Frikkie de Kok had slept in.

  He'd hardly heard Hermione leave her bed when she'd gone to get the boys up and dressed and fed for school. He was allowed his peace. She was in a fine mood, fine enough for her to have allowed Frikkie, in the night, out of his own bed and into hers. Fine enough for her to bring him his breakfast once he had grunted, coughed a bit, cleared his throat. He thought she was in so fine a mood that she wouldn't bother him if he smeared his marmalade on his sheets. Well, he had capitulated to her, he had promised that she would have her new refrigerator. Imported, of course. And since the rand had gone down and the foreign bankers had sold the South African currency short, the refrigerator would cost him a small fortune, not so small because his mind was working better, because he was waking, counting the cost and the tax. But she was a good woman, and she needed the new refrigerator.

  With his breakfast of juice and coffee and thick-sliced toast, there was his mail. Frikkie de Kok always opened all the family post himself. A postcard from his sister, and a bill from the electricity, and there was a familiar brown envelope carrying the official stamp of the Ministry of Justice, and there was a letter bearing the crest of the boys'

  school. He read the postcard, snarled at the bill. He opened the school's envelope.

  Brilliant . . . The principal writing to say that Dawie's progress was excellent, he was working hard, and could well be university material . . . Hell, there had never been a graduate in Frikkie's family.

  Calculations in his mind. Could he afford the weights that Dawie hankered for? If he could afford the weights as well as the refrigerator then he would be helping Dawie towards a place on the fifteen, and a boy on the school fifteen with good marks would be more likely for a scholarship when the university time came. But if he bought Dawie the weights, if he could afford them, would that make young Erasmus jealous? No, no problem, because Erasmus could share the weights.

  He would have to work harder. Work harder, that was good . . .

  He opened the letter from the Ministry of Justice. The Ministry always posted first and then telephoned two days later to confirm the notification of another early rising.

  * * *

  The judder as the undercarriage was lowered.

  Jack could see the ground below as the Boeing banked for final approach. Row upon row of small squares reflecting back the sun. T h e tower blocks of Johannesburg were on the horizon. He realised the squares were the tin roofs of tiny homes. Endless straight lines of light flashes, and then the patch of yellow dried-out veld between the townships and the city. The chief steward was hurrying along the aisle, steadying himself against the seatbacks, checking that the seatbelts had been fastened and the cigarettes extinguished.

  Jack read through his answers on the blue foolscap sheet for immigration. Questions in English on one side, Afrikaans on the reverse. OCCUPATION - Manager. PURPOSE OF

  VISIT - Holiday. LENGTH OF STAY - 3 weeks.

  If he hadn't managed it in three weeks then he might as well have stayed at home.

  • * *

  They liked her in the office. They thought Ros van Niekerk was one of the most conscientious girls that they employed.

  They thought her sensible, level-headed, and able to take the limited responsibility that could be pushed her way in the Insurance high rise tower on Commissioner.

  She was twenty-four years old. She was plain because she didn't care to be otherwise. She worked in the property insurance department. On most household policies there was reassessment as the policy became renewable at the end of a year's cover. Ros van Niekerk could have told the Minister of Finance where the economics of South Africa were going. It was in front of her from 8.30 in the morning to 4.30 in the afternoon five days a week. Three years earlier when she had gone into the property department, a good bungalow in the better Johannesburg suburbs would have fetched 350,000 rand and been insured for that value. The market had gone from bad to worse. A year ago that same property might have changed hands for 200,000 rand and now it might fetch 120,000 rand, it was that great a change.

  The home owner wasn't going to renew a 350,000 rand policy if his home would only fetch 120,000 rand. But the rates of insurance were going up. The political uncertainty, the unrest, the quagmire of Black and White relations guaranteed that insurance rates would rise. For very nearly every policy that Ros renewed there was a correspondence.

  She was busy. She rarely took more than twenty minutes of her lunch hour. She alone knew her way through the hillocks of files that covered her desk-top.

  She used no lipstick, no eye shadow. She washed her auburn hair herself, combed and brushed it from a central parting. She dressed functionally and without ambition. The men in the office, the married and the unmarried, had long ago lost interest in her. She was not taken out. She had been asked, when she was a new girl, and she had invariably declined, and the invitations were no longer offered. The salesmen and the junior managers were polite to her but distant. If her social isolation in the company disturbed her then she was successful at disguising the disappointment.

  To those who worked alongside her she seemed happily self-sufficient. They knew she came from a good home, that her father was a professional man. They knew she had a younger brother at Wits. They knew very little else about her. In truth, there was very little else they might have known. At the end of each day she went directly home in her Beetle VW, she had her dinner with her mother and father, and her brother if he was back from the campus, she listened to music and she read. They might have thought of her as a boring girl who was on the road to end up an old maid. The young men in the office had decided she wasn't worth the trouble, there was easier game.

  Her telephone warbled. A pay box call. A frown of irritation at the interruption.

  Her brother on the telephone. The irritation was gone.

  Her young kid, her Jan, her crippled brother. Always so close, brother and sister. Since he was little more than a baby she had loved the young kid. Perhaps a reaction to time long ago when she had seen the poorly-disguised dismay of her father that his only son was handicapped.

  Could Ros tell her mother that Jan would not be home lor dinner. Jan couldn't call his mother direct, of course, their mother was out at whist.

  To Ros, her brother was a more precious part of her life than anything she thought she would find in the han
ds of the young men in the office.

  * • *

  A radio news bulletin on the hour. The correct English diction of the South African Broadcasting Corporation.

  "One person was killed in unrest at a Black township on the Western Cape. A spokesman at the Police Directorate in Pretoria said the Black teenager was shot dead when a policeman's relative fired into a crowd that was trying to set light to a policeman's home.

  "A total of 107 Blacks were arrested during unrest in the East Rand following incidents during which administration board vehicles and municipal buses were stoned.

  "In another incident of unrest in the East Rand a White woman driving an administration board car fired in self-defence on a mob that had stoned her. No injuries were reported."

  A pretty quiet night.

  But since the state of emergency had been declared by the State President, and since the curbs had been slapped on Press reporting, fewer details of attacks and incidents and deaths were furnished by the Police Directorate.

  A quiet night, and the unrest was far down the order of the bulletin. The unrest came after a speech by the Foreign Minister, ahead of the results of the Springbok men's gym-nastic team on tour in Europe.

  The message of the bulletin to its White audience was polished clear. Difficulties, of course there were difficulties.

  Crisis, of course there was no crisis. Inside the laager of the old wagons the Republic was holding firm. Holding firm, and holding tight.

  That was the message of the S.A.B.C. as the Boeing from far away Europe taxied on the long Jan Smuts runway.

  * * *

  Jack came down the steep open steps onto the tarmac.

  Around him the passengers blinked in the crisp sunlight.

  Jack was tired, nervy. Had to be nervous because he was going to walk up to immigration and make the pretence that he was a tourist with his head full of sea and sunshine and safaris. He was part of a shuffling crocodile that moved past four Black policemen, immaculate and starched, and into the terminal.