Son

by Sonnekus, Neil

  “And who might your client be?”

  “Kay Greenwood.”

  “What are the charges?”

  “Rape,” Nathan said.

  Was it my imagination or were people avoiding making eye contact with me? I went back to subbing someone’s editorial opinion, but I was thinking I’d been told off by Kay and Klara, the old man and I weren’t talking to each other and now I had to deal with something that would probably end my brilliant career at the paper.

  I didn’t sleep or listen to Beethoven that night and the next morning the chief of HR, Herman Sebogodi, called. He spoke to me circuitously when all he really meant to say was that, because I was up on charges I was being suspended from work, with – and here he sound deeply regretful – full wages.

  “Thank you,” I said curtly, put down the phone and told Butch we were going for a walk, which got him delirious. We went down the road with its bare trees, high walls, electric fences and furious dogs, which, in the absence of a reachable quarry, turned on each other. Mandla wasn’t at the gate, but there was a notice on the new palisade that if anyone wanted to contribute towards his funeral they could put money into the following bank account.

  There was an icy wind blowing off the late-snowed ’Berg and across the Free State plains, sweeping over the presently dull Suikerbosrand, picking up more dust from the last gold dumps in the south, getting radioactive from the Brixton tower and screaming through the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s skyscraper, down into the Auckland bowl and over the ancient Melville koppies, where it marched along that corridor of yellow grass between the city and the cemetery, where my maternal grandmother lay.

  That night I went to Jay and Veron’s, told them most of what had happened and they were fully on my side. Veron said I needed a woman to defend me, made a call and I spoke to Aisha Mohammad, who said I could come to see her in her chambers “in town” the next morning. Jay still wasn’t drinking, so I decided I wouldn’t either and after a quiet, pleasant supper with him, Veron and the girls I went home.

  Whether anyone else in the office knew what was happening to me I did not know, nor did I particularly care: the powers that be could gloat as much as they liked in their little political certitudes. I needed Klara badly and wondered, if I had abused her had I also abused my mother, once again. After about an hour of pacing I got into my car and went out looking for Ruth. What was I going to do if I saw her? Repeat our previous and sole exercise? Offer to take her away from her miserable life? Get some Nigerian pimps howling for my blood? She could be drugged, infected, dead, her children motherless. Well done, Mr Bezuidenhout.

  Having decided that I’d stop looking for her, I thought I’d cruise the strip one last time, as if I were going somewhere, away, keeping an eye out for some pedestrian who might walk up to you while stationary at a traffic light, just to blow your brains out for your cellphone. Then it occurred to me that it was not beyond the realms of possibility that Kay’s fancy lawyer might have me tailed to get evidence of my moral character – or lack thereof – so I kept a third eye on the rear-view mirror to see if anyone was tailing me. Or had I been reviewing too many thrillers lately? Whatever the case, so busy was I keeping eyes out for all these phantoms that it took me quite a while to realise that there was a familiar car not behind me but ahead of me. It had a Blue Bulls sticker on its rear bumper and it was heading towards that area where a certain kind of prostitute plied her mincing trade. In fact, right now Dolf was stopping and bartering with a tranny who, after a short exchange, gracefully entered his Mazda. So much for Dolfie’s impotence and his agricultural products.

  I went home and tried to sleep but couldn’t. I was grateful that Klara had always insisted on using a condom – was it because she knew or suspected what Dolf was up to? should I warn her? would she believe me? would I believe me? – round and round.

  Next I tried to listen to the A minor, informed as it was by pain. But it wasn’t getting through to me. I was drifting off on a tangent, wondering where that famous temper came from. Had it been something in Bonn or later Vienna’s water? And if it was true that the old man’s genes had come from that neck of the woods, had we inherited that particular temper? Possibly. Why exactly had the dying man lay shaking his fist at the heavens? His work was done, I, ever the expert, thought, though I hadn’t heard the allegedly more conventional sixteenth yet. Surely it wasn’t because he hadn’t consummated his relationships with unreachable, upper-class women, or because he’d failed to provide the suicidal Karl with a moral upbringing. Was it because he had failed to produce as much work as Herrn Bach, Haydn and Mozart as a result of his concerns with Karl? Possibly, but doubtful. So what gave? Maybe, just maybe, he lay there venting because that temper, that vehemence, that intensity – which released all kinds of enzymes – was his only way of cursing the heavens for their cruelty and thus he remained defiantly present and alive to the very last mortal moment.

  When dawn came Butch and I went for a run before I drove to the CBD.

  Ms Mohammad was wearing a chador and gave me a firm, henna’ed handshake. We made some small talk in which she briefly and unsentimentally told me how she and Veron had been involved in the struggle and endured such pleasantries as solitary confinement (while I tried to find my precious white soul at some country college), after which we got down to business.

  “You’re going to have to tell me everything.”

  “Sure,” I said, feeling very small.

  “Did you or did you not wear a condom?”

  “Always.”

  “Why?”

  “I didn’t want any messy pregnancy or abortion. I’ve been through that before and it’s not nice. Plus I suspected that she was sleeping around, but that was more instinctive than based on any facts. There was one night towards the end that she insisted I didn’t wear a condom and when I refused that was the end of that night’s sex.”

  This woman from another world but the same country was writing assiduously, neatly, firing questions at me, questions that were only going to get more embarrassing.

  “What exactly happened?”

  “We were drinking and coking it up. Lots of coke. She was taunting me.”

  “How?”

  “Dancing naked with her back to me, except for a pair of high-heeled shoes.”

  “What was she taunting you about?”

  “About how her black lover was so much better – and bigger – than me. You know, the usual insults: how I was just an ageing, white racist.”

  Whether Ms Mohammad agreed with that last statement or not, she did not show it.

  “Had she ever done something like this before?”

  “Yes. She seemed to like stripping.”

  “Was there anything about her appearance that was different?”

  “Well, she’d certainly had a makeover. I mean, she’d always dressed really badly. But now she was wearing a corporate black suit and looked good for it. And she had switched to contact lenses.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “No, unless putting on a little weight is unusual. I remember thinking I preferred her – physically – with a little extra weight.”

  Scribble, scribble, scribble.

  “What happened then?”

  “Well, this is very embarrassing …”

  “Don’t worry. I’m a lawyer.”

  “You’re also a woman and a –”

  “– Muslim,” she completed my sentence. “Does that change anything?”

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Well, I started kissing her … you know –”

  “No I don’t.”

  “– her buttocks.”

  “Did she say anything?”

  “Well, I was being quite rough, and … um, she seemed to be liking it. I mean, she said so.”

  “Do you think she might have been acting?”

  “I … hell, I don’t know … I wouldn’t put it past her.”

 
“Then you had anal sex with her.”

  “Ja.”

  “Were you still being rough and was she still encouraging you?”

  “Yes to the first and … once I was nearing orgasm she started shouting that I must stop …”

  “Did you?”

  “No.”

  “Were you wearing a condom this time as well?”

  “Yes, she insisted on it, for once.”

  She carried on writing, which I tried – and failed – to decipher, upside down.

  “Okay,” Ms Mohammad said, anticlimactically.

  “Is that it?”

  “Ja.”

  “So what now?”

  “She doesn’t have a foot to stand on, even if she did make a video or recording of it and cut out the encouraging part.”

  “Oh Jesus …”

  “I wouldn’t put it past her.”

  “I’ll say,” I said. “But what makes you think she doesn’t have a foot to stand on?”

  “First of all, the fact that she only reported you five days after the alleged rape already blows her case out of the water, however traumatic it was and she’ll try to make it sound. Secondly, if you’re telling me the truth about using a condom it’s almost certain that she’s pregnant, whether with Edward Mhlophe or someone else. Three, taking drugs, alcohol and smoking while being pregnant isn’t very responsible. The reason why she wanted you to wear a condom was to show that it was deliberate, premeditated. But I must warn you that she’s going to try to play the media game. She’ll try to blow it up beyond proportion, and even when she loses she’ll say she struck a blow for all abused women.”

  “That sounds about right,” I said, feeling some very warm feelings for this woman. “So what do I do now?”

  “Nothing. You do not speak to the media. You do not speak to your colleagues, no one. Not even Jay or Veron. You refer everything – and I mean everything – to me. The more time goes by and the more pregnant she is, the worse her case becomes.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you.”

  After I’d shaken her hand numerous time and thanked her like the old man had always embarrassingly thanked others, grovelling with gratitude, I walked out into the street and had the real feeling I’d had that day I walked out of the divorce lawyer’s office, an allegedly free man. It was the lingering taste of what the old man would call the not so faint tang of es-aitch-one-tee. Still, I was elated that Aisha Mohammad could help me and guilt-stricken that she first had to be tortured along with Veron before she could practise freely to help someone like me, pro bono. By the same token, I was livid that Kay had taken this vicious little route and knew that Aisha had been right. Kay had abused her freedom as much as a pornographer and his client, me, abused theirs. Abusing others or being complicit in that abuse is not freedom, it’s abuse.

  I felt miserable that I would have to tell the old man what I’d been up to. He would stand by me, I knew, which made the disappointment he’d feel all the more acute. I felt equally bad that I wanted to leave this country, whether he’d advised me to do so or not. If I did I would miss this street, this light, this air, these people as much as I didn’t know what to do with this echoing solitude and restlessness I felt. It also didn’t help much walking past a news poster that said: Girl, 2, Raped.

  On Edge

  * * *

  Now the so-called wheels of justice slowly ground away at my nerves as the days and weeks went by. I wasn’t prepared to call or see the old man, but every time the phone rang I almost jumped out of my skin. Was it one of my former colleagues calling to ask my opinion on the rape charges against me? Was it the old man, asking what was this he’d heard? Was it Uncle Vern calling to say the old man had died? Was it the emigration people saying they couldn’t accept me if I had a court case pending? But most of the calls were for Ms Motsepe, a wrong number without apology or someone trying to sell me something. I could have done a lot of reading and writing in that time, but I did nothing of the sort. Most of the time I spent moping and walking Butch. I was in legal and living limbo and it felt like living, fiery hell. If it wasn’t for Jay and Veron I would quite conceivably have gone completely out of my mind.

  It was August, that month that always brought bad news for me; that time when winter won’t let go of itself, even though it teases you with premature signs of spring. The wind blows and cartwheels around your hollow guts. Aimless, acute, aching. September came but had no sense of renewal about it whatsoever, but at least the jacarandas bloomed in October and towards the end of that month Butch and I were walking in the park – it was a Saturday – when I bumped into a trauma shrink I knew from those days when we’d all been young, fabulous and united in our opposition to the tedious horror of apartheid.

  “How are you?” I said, habitually.

  “I’m fine thanks, Len,” she said slowly. “And you?”

  “Just great, thank you.”

  “How is your father?” she said in that methodical, interrogatory way of her profession, knowing I’d meant exactly the opposite about myself but was not prepared to indulge it.

  “My father?”

  “Ja. You told me about your father one night. On the jol.”

  “What did I say?”

  “You said he’d been in the concentration camp, that your family only went to one place for your holidays, that he never went out anywhere and that he was paranoid about little things like paying his bills on time.”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you know why that is?”

  “No. I thought that’s just how he is.”

  “I’m asking because I met someone similar recently. He’d come back from the war and had lived in Pietermaritzburg ever since. He had taken a menial job at the municipal swimming pool, but do you know how many times he’d been to Durban in those intervening sixty years?”

  “No?”

  “Once. And then it was for his daughter’s wedding. He could hardly sit through the reception afterwards because he wanted to get back home again.”

  “Why?

  “Because they’re terrified. They think if they trespass in any way they’ll be punished, as people were in the camps. But they don’t think they would have been punished. They think they will be punished, now, in the present. They generally tend to take menial jobs in order to remain as far below the radar as possible. They stay at home, where they feel safe. Does that apply to your father?”

  I could scarcely bring myself to nod, realising she was effectively telling me that in a sense the old man had never left the concentration camp. I thanked her and went home, determined to call him. As I walked towards the phone it started ringing in that way it has.

  “Hello, Bezuidenhout,” I said, expecting the worst.

  “It’s me,” the old man said, sounding frail, breathless, embarrassed.

  “How are you, Dad?”

  “When are you going to come and visit me?”

  That was as much of an admission of guilt as I was going to get and it was more than enough: I had felt a complete shit for everything I’d said to the old man. No matter what he’d said or done, I was a big boy now and had to steer my own ship.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow morning at ten.”

  He thanked me passionately and early the next morning I washed the Civic and felt so good that I remembered the old man used to sometimes play a song on Sundays. It wasn’t the usual upbeat rhymes of his youth but ‘Funiculi Funicula’ by a woman called Melissa Gorgeous. Funny names the Italians have, I’d thought. I pictured her as a short Latin beauty like my mother, like our living-room print of Tina. Her voice was high to start with and would then go higher still and could surely not go possibly higher but, good God, it did!

  Then I showered, had a thought and, dripping, typed the singer’s name into Google. I discovered her real name was Miliza Korjus, she was blonde and Estonian, and someone had put that song onto YouTube. The old Decca record, scratching over the decades, had not been recorded in Italy or Germany, but Europ
e.

  I put it on loudly so that I could hear it while I shaved. Then I got dressed and drove to Centurion, thinking about the Sundays of my youth. The old man would get up early, as always, and work in the garden. When his wife got back from having raised the church’s roof with her forced soprano – for she was an alto at the opera – he’d philosophise over tea, saying he’d probably live until he died. He’d often cook a potjiekos stew in a three-legged, cast-iron pot, getting the mix of vegetables, potatoes and lamb just right. If visitors came by after lunch he’d ruffle his straight, combed-back silver hair, put matchsticks in his eye sockets and mouth, extend his fingers, hunch up his shoulders, chase us, and we children would squeal with terrified glee. In the late afternoon he would make ginger beer in summer, marmalade in winter. At seven o’clock we would listen to Dennis Smith read the news on Springbok Radio and all was well in the world.

  But the old man still wasn’t waiting for me. The gate was locked so I hopped over and got to the brick heart before the dog started barking. I told it to piss off and that is exactly what it did before it calmed down. Then we went past the garage, which was locked, over the back lawn and I didn’t have a good feeling. The old man wasn’t at the wash line or walking around the perimeter of the yard, so he could be in the washroom or house. But he wasn’t doing any of the above. He was sitting on an old upright chair he’d brought out onto the cement apron, dressed in his Sunday best, dozing in the sun, close to tilting over. This was how it was supposed to be, I thought: he had earned his right to nod off in the sun with his silver hair, leather skin, broken nose, wrinkles, sun moles and dog.