A SONG IN THE MORNING

by Gerald Seymour

  A young White policeman was seated by the doorway. He was lounging back on a tilted straight chair. He wore short drill trousers, long socks to the knee, shoes to see his face in, a tunic and a Sam Browne belt onto which was hooked a shined brown leather revolver holster. Jack caught his eye, looked away. He thought there was an arrogance about the bastard, a contempt for these unshaven, crumpled flotsam spilling in from Europe.

  He took his place in the FOREIGNERS line.

  It was brief and it was correct.

  All that anxiety had been for nothing. Passport examined, immigration form looked over, the belt of the stamp on the slip of paper that was stapled into his passport, his passport returned.

  They had given him six weeks.

  He had to grin.

  He would be out in three weeks or he would be dead, or he would be staying as a guest for twenty years.

  He collected his bag, was waved through customs, and took a taxi. He was driven away on a sweeping multi-lane highway. He flopped in the back seat. The tiredness was aching in his shoulders and legs. The driver was middle-

  aged, White, overweight. Beside his speedometer there was sellotaped a photograph of his family, an obese woman and two plump children.

  "You're from England, eh? What brings you to South Africa, eh?"

  The driver ignored Jack's silence.

  "Don't get me wrong, man, I've nothing against you, but that's where our problem is, foreigners, specially English foreigners. People telling us what to do. People who don't live here, don't know a thing about South Africa, and all they can think of is telling us how to get on with our lives.

  The English tell us . . . That's rich, that's a real joke. The English tell us how to treat our Blacks, and they've riots in Birmingham and London . . . What more do I have to say?"

  On either side of the road Jack could see the effects of the months of drought, high dried out grass. Then modern industrial estates, sprinkled with the For Sale and To Let signs.

  "Eh, man, we know our Blacks a sight better than they do. We've had years of them. You know that? What a Black man respects is strength. If you pussyfoot to the Black man then he'll cut your throat. If you're firm with him, then he behaves himself. You have to be firm with the Black man and you have to remember not to trust him, not an inch.

  What I say about the Black man is this - if he can't steal it or screw it, then he'll break it. My sister, she's on a farm up in the North East Transvaal. She's got a neighbour who's come from Rhodesia, started again, started from nothing, building up a new farm. You know what her neighbour told her, as God's my witness? He said, 'Winnie, if there's trouble, just a hint of trouble, first thing to do is to slot the nanny.' Good advice, because you can't trust the Blacks."

  The road was lined now with small concrete bungalows.

  White homes. Perhaps the homes of taxi drivers. Higher up on the hill, on sites that were scraped from the ochre-red soil were the speculators' town houses.

  "What they don't understand, those people in England, preaching to us, is that the violence isn't about Blacks and Whites, it's Black against Black. You didn't know that, I'll bet. You should see what they do to each other. They're savages, they chop each other, burn each other. And people in England say we should give them the vote. Most of them can't read . . . They don't want the vote. Most of them just want to live quietly, have their beer, work on a farm.

  They don't want politics and they don't want violence. The blame's with the agitators and the commies, winding them up. All the encouragement they're getting from liberal places, England, America, it's doing nothing for the Blacks.

  I've a nephew in the police, great young man, in the anti-terrorist unit, uniformed, he tells me it's all the fault of agitators and commies. They're too soft on those A.N.C.

  people, that's my criticism of the State President. They should hang the lot of them. Shouldn't just hang those they get for murder, like those swine that did the court, they should hang any of them they find with guns and bombs."

  "Are they going to hang them?" Jack asked.

  "You know about them, do you? In your newspapers, was it? It was on the radio last night. No clemency, not for any of them. All the liberals in England will be shouting when we hang them, but we're a long way from England and we don't hear the shouting . . . You a rugby man, eh?

  That's the Ellis Stadium . . . "

  Jack saw the huge terraces of concrete, the rows of red seating.

  "My idea of heaven. Up in the West Stand with a few beers and the Boks in their green jerseys, and even that those radicals have managed to spoil. I had tickets for the All Blacks last year, I thought they had more guts in New Zealand, I didn't think they'd cancel on us. Here you are, man, your hotel."

  Jack slid out of the taxi. He was bathed in sweat. He paid the driver, gave him a tip before he realised how much he loathed the man.

  "Thank you, very kind. I've really enjoyed our conver-

  sation. You have a good holiday, sir. And you take my advice, get yourself to the Ellis Park when the Transvaal are playing."

  There were grinning faces around him, smiling faces of the Black doorman and the suitcase boy. He was led across the ornate hotel lobby, past the jewellery and curio shops, to the front desk. He wondered what they would have to say about the supreme penalty and the Pritchard Five. He filled in the registration form. He reckoned that he was thirty miles from Pretoria Central prison.

  • * *

  As soon as he walked into the room Jeez recognised the colonel.

  Sergeant Oosthuizen had brought Jeez from his cell to the visit. He had known there was something extraordinary when they had walked on past the line of doors for C section's visit rooms, and on into the administration block. He had not been back in that block since his first day at Beverly Hills.

  Jeez stared from the door into the colonel's face.

  Jeez had been through the Spac labour camp and before that through the investigation centre in Tirana. Only the thought of being hanged frightened him. The sight of the colonel did not make him afraid.

  The colonel's empire was the interrogation floor of John Vorster Square police station in Johannesburg.

  On the tenth floor where he ruled, the gaze of the colonel was reckoned to buckle a man's knees, a Black man's or a White man's, to make water of his bowels. The colonel never hit a prisoner, he was always out of the room by the time that a prisoner was stripped, was gasping, was screaming.

  The colonel ordered what happened to the prisoners. The servants of his empire were the captains and the lieutenants and the warrant officers of the security police.

  Jeez knew the colonel. An old acquaintance.

  Jeez had never given him anything. Each time that the colonel had come back into the interrogation rooms of John Vorster Square after the beating, when the torturers were panting from their work, Jeez had stayed silent.

  "I hate you, all you White bastard commies. I want to kill you White filth. I want to shoot you with my own gun."

  Jeez could remember the straining red blotched face as the colonel had shouted at him, early in the days of John Vorster Square. The colonel, with his retinue of phone-tappers, searchers, tailers, letter openers, frighteners, had screamed at him through the spittle. Jeez reckoned he'd given up early. Jeez reckoned the colonel had given up on this one prisoner when he had realised he was fighting a losing battle, and he hated to be close to failure.

  The colonel was Jeez's "visit".

  The colonel and his warrant officer. Jeez knew the W.O.

  He had done time on Jeez at John Vorster Square, hand slaps and punches, and twice the boot. He had started in on Jeez as soon as the colonel had gone back to his office. Jeez had heard in the basement cells of the Pretoria court house, when he was locked in with Happy and Charlie and Percy and Tom, that it was the W.O. who had got Percy talking first, and Tom second, and then Charlie and Happy. They had all been softened by the W.O. and then made their voluntary statements to the colonel.
>
  They were in a senior officer's room. There was a glass-topped desk and comfortable chairs and vase of flowers on a shelf over the radiator and a photograph of the State President on the wall and curtains. Jeez hadn't known that such a room existed inside Beverly Hills. The door closed behind him. Jeez looked round. Oosthuizen had gone. He was alone with the colonel in his slacks and his blazer, and the W.O. in his lightweight suit. Both sitting, relaxed, as if they'd enjoyed a good lunch.

  "I am a convicted prisoner, sir," Jeez said firmly. "I do not have to submit to further police interrogation."

  The colonel smiled, bending the line of his snipped brush moustache. "Who said anything about interrogation, Carew?"

  "Sir, I would like to go back to my cell."

  "You're jumping the gun, man. I'm not here to ask questions."

  He would have seemed a slight, frail figure to them. Jeez thought that the W.O. would have dearly liked him to raise a fist to the colonel, would have enjoyed beating the hell out of him.

  "We wanted to have a talk with you, Carew. We wanted to see if we could be of help to you."

  An old trick that Jeez had taught himself in Spac, with the real bastards among the interrogators. Take away the uniform, strip off the shirt and vest and socks and boots.

  See them only in their underpants. See a menacing man in his underwear, see his hanging white belly and his spindly legs, see him without the uniform that makes for fear, creates authority. His mind gave him the picture of the colonel in his underpants. He stared back at the colonel.

  Eyes meeting, neither man turning away.

  "Has the governor seen you today, Carew?"

  "No, sir."

  "You haven't been told of the State President's decision regarding clemency for you?"

  "No, sir."

  The colonel turned slowly to his warrant officer. "You'd have thought Carew would have been told, with it on the radio and all that."

  "Too right, Colonel."

  They were winding him up, Jeez knew that, turning the screw. He stood his ground. He listened to the silence in the room. There would have been a conspiracy between the colonel and the governor, news to be kept from Carew in order that the condemned man might prove more pliable to the colonel of security police.

  "I'm very surprised that you haven't been told, Carew."

  He bit on his lip.

  "When a man's been here thirteen months, waiting to know whether he's going to hang, you'd have thought he'd be told which way it's going for him."

  "You'd have thought that, Colonel." The echo from the warrant officer.

  Jeez imagined the hot sweating hair on the gut of the colonel, and the pig-bladder bulge of his belly, the milk white matchstick legs.

  "You want to know what the State President has decided, Carew?"

  There was an ache of pain in Jeez's lips. He thought the skin must be near to breaking. The colonel's voice hardened.

  "You are an impertinent little swine, Carew, and not for much longer. You are going to hang, Carew. That's the State President's decision . . . "

  Jeez felt the skin open. There was the warmth of the trickle of blood heading for the point of his chin.

  "You're going to hang, Carew, hang by the neck until you are dead. You are going to hang through the due process of law. You can be impertinent for two more weeks, and then you hang."

  He tried to see the men at Century, the men on his team.

  He tried to find the image in his mind of when he had come back from the clinic and they had taken him down to the pub behind Victoria railway station and made him pie-eyed, and made him talk about the conditions in Spac. They couldn't have acted the way they hung on his words, Lennie, and Adrian and Henry, the way the eyes of the youngsters they'd brought along shone with admiration. What was the length of Century's bloody arm? Couldn't be true, that the team couldn't reach him.

  "You have been an enigma to me, Carew. I'll admit to you that we know very little about you, but look at the way you're standing, man. You're standing like a soldier. I don't know which army, I don't know when, but you've been a soldier and served your country. Look at you today, man, you stand your ground because you've got guts. But where i s having g u t s t a k i n g you? T o the rope, and a n u n m a r k e d grave.

  "Carew, t h e r e is nothing about you, that I know of, that gives me an i d e a of w h y you should be associated with Black terrorism, but it is that association that is going to hang you.

  Do you think t h o s e Blacks of the A.N.C. care about you?

  They care shit a l l f o r you. They used you and they dropped you right in it. You know, Carew, there have been some protests in E u r o p e about these death sentences, pretty pitiful protests, and y o u r name's not mentioned. You know that?

  All the talk is of Zikala and Schoba and Ngoye and Mweshtu.

  You'll hang a n d nobody'11 care."

  "Can I go b a c k to my cell, sir?"

  Whatever t h e torment, misery, always address the interrogators w i t h courtesy. Courtesy brought a small victory over the bastards. T h e bigger victory was never to plead.

  He wanted the loneliness of his cell, he wanted the anguish to be private. He wanted to cry alone within the walls of his cell for help f r o m his team.

  "I don't w a n t to see you hang, Carew. It would give me no pleasure to have you hanged by the neck until you are dead. I come h e r e today with the offer that can save you from the executioner. Are you listening, Carew? Don't play the 'Mister' with me, man."

  T h e blood rolled from his chin onto his buttonless tunic.

  " O n your behalf, Carew, I had a meeting with the Minister of Justice this morning. I have made a bargain with him."

  It was the colonel's moment. He took a sheet of headed paper from his pocket. He unfolded it, he waved it at Jeez.

  He laid it on his knee.

  "If, even at this late stage, you agree to co-operate fully with me, to make a detailed and verifiable statement concerning every dealing you have had with the A.N.C., then the minister will go to the State President and get an order of clemency for you . . . "

  He heard the singing, and then the trap, and then the spurt of water, and then the hammering, and then the cough of the van engine.

  "A detailed statement, Carew. Personalities, safe houses, arms caches. Give us those and you get clemency, that is the bargain, here in writing."

  Jeez was rocking on the balls of his feet. Swaying as a sapling in light wind. Moisture bursting all over his body.

  Tickling fear at the nape of his neck.

  "Make it easy for yourself, Carew, help us to help you.

  There's a good chap. The A.N.C. doesn't give a damn for you. It's martyrs they want, photographs of martyrs to drape round Europe and America. You owe them nothing, man.

  You owe it to yourself to co-operate with me. Are you going to be a good chap?"

  He was burdened with his secret. He had never reneged on that secret, not during the years in Spac, nor during the weeks in John Vorster Square, nor during the months in Pretoria Central. To renege on the secret was to believe that the team had abandoned him. Better to hang than to believe Century had ditched him. Still the small kernel of hope, whittled down, the kernel said the team at Century would never believe that Jeez Carew would betray his secret.

  He turned on his heel. It was a parade ground swivel. He was facing the door.

  "You're putting the rope round your neck, Carew," the colonel snarled.

  The warrant officer shouted for Oosthuizen.

  * * *

  Still in his clothes, his shoes kicked off onto the carpet, Jack slept. Beside him on the wide bed was a copy of Star, open at the page that reported the decision of the State President that five convicted terrorists should hang.

  10

  From his eighth floor window in the Landdrost Hotel Jack Curwen stared out over the city and beyond to the open ground. He looked past the office towers and away across the pale yellow pyramids of goldmine waste. He s
aw a modern city where less than a century before there had been only flat veld. He had read the books in his hotel room, and had to smile. An Australian, one George Harrison, had come here in search of gold, and stumbled on the main seam, and been given his discoverer's certificate - and sold it for ten pounds. It was all down to George Harrison from Oz, all the towers, all the wealth, all the unrest. And poor George Harrison had disappeared with his ten pounds into the Eastern Transvaal, never to be heard of again. All that Jack saw was built upon the discovery of George Harrison, poor sod, loser. Waste heaps stretching to the south into the early morning haze mist, the towers to the east and north, the concrete streets to the west. Wherever he was, George Harrison, he must be crying in his box.

  He took the lift down to the lobby. He had wondered if he would be contacted on his first afternoon, first evening, in the hotel. He had lain on his bed, sometimes reading, sometimes asleep, and waited. He hadn't taken breakfast, couldn't face a meal.

  Time to find the target on which he would prove himself.

  He was crossing the lobby. He heard his name called. The Indian day porter was coming from behind his counter.

  "You want a taxi, Mr Curwen?"

  "No, thank you."

  He saw the frown pucker the Indian's plump forehead.

  "I'm going to walk," Jack said.

  "Be careful where you walk, Mr Curwen. Some very bad things happen to tourists. Definitely, no walking after four o'clock, Mr Curwen. Please not, sir."

  "I'm just going to walk around the main streets."

  "Anywhere, sir, it is better by taxi."

  He had seen the printed slip on the desk in his room.

  "You are warned pickpockets have been known to assault tourists in Central Johannesburg." He walked outside into a bright sunshine.

  Once he had turned the corner from the front of the hotel he lost the sun. Buildings too tall for the width of their streets. Into shadow. Into the grey of concrete buildings and cracked litter-strewn pavings where the grass sprouted. A dirty city. He passed two paint-peeling, dowdy-fronted escort agencies, then on to Bree Street. Clothes shops and dismal coffee shops. The few Whites went on their way and hesitated not at all, and the Blacks leaned in the doorways, tilted themselves against the lamp posts. A beggar pleaded to him, Black, squatting over a crippled left leg, and Jack flushed and hurried on. The Blacks seemed to watch him, size him, weigh him.