Frederic Hunter
Copyright © 2016 by Frederic Hunter
All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of historical fiction. The names of historical persons have been used. As far as fictional characters are concerned, any similarities to persons living or dead are purely coincidental.
For information, address:
The Permanent Press
4170 Noyac Road
Sag Harbor, NY 11963
www.thepermanentpress.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hunter, Frederic, author.
Love in the time of apartheid / Frederic Hunter.
Sag Harbor, NY : The Permanent Press, [2016]
ISBN 978-1-57962-444-6 (hardcover)
eISBN 978-1-57962-514-6
1. South Africa—Politics and government—1948–1994—Fiction. 2. South Africa—Social conditions—1961–1994—Fiction. 3. Social change—South Africa—Fiction. 4. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. 5. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 6. Historical fiction.
PS3558.U477 L69 2016
813'.54—dc23
2016025195
Printed in the United States of America
For Donanne
CHAPTER ONE
JOHANNESBURG
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 1961
As he opened his hotel room curtains on his third day in Johannesburg, Gat saw the tawny slag heaps on the edge of the city. Back in a mining town, he thought. How did I let that happen? It was after nine. He had not slept so late since his childhood. Or so badly. I must get out of this place, he told himself.
He had soaked in the tub for an hour the night before. Still he showered. Afterward, gazing at himself in the mirror, he saw a face that he did not think an employer would hire. Nor would a woman find it attractive. What woman would look beyond the jaunty beard and the sad eyes to see the man he really was? He could hardly stand to look at himself.
In Katanga where Belgians were midwifing the birth of a mineral-rich, breakaway province, trying to separate it from a newborn country called the Congo, Gat’s commanders had decided he needed a change of scene. They had given him a round-trip ticket to South Africa, a thousand American dollars, a new passport, and a new driver’s license. They had presented him a box of condoms, twelve dozen of them, and instructed him to use them all before he returned in four months.
But in his first two days in Joburg he had hardly left the room. If he ventured out, he supposed people would smell the taint on him. They would see him slinking along sidewalks like a man who had turned into a hyena. He had escaped the room only for meals, liquor, and exercise. And to buy newspapers. Their employment want ads had made him aware of how many jobs were available for which he possessed no qualifications.
He paced the hotel room, studying the slag heaps. They looked like huge lions lying just beyond the reach of civilization. Lions no longer roamed the mining towns of Katanga—Elisabethville and Kolwezi, Jadotville, Shinkolobwe—or this one, Johannesburg. Now they were places of other predators, places where rich men made use of men like him who were not rich. Gat stroked his beard and made a vow to himself: Today we leave this room.
He returned to the bathroom. There, as if by its own volition, his hand reached into the canvas bag he used as a shaving kit. It removed the scissors it found there. Gat began to trim his beard. The less hair there was on his chin the better he felt about himself. His eyes looked brighter; his body felt less burdened with weight. He scissored the beard completely off his face, the mustache too, leaving only stubble the way loggers clear-cut jungle leaving only tree stumps. He put a new blade into his razor and shaved so close that his cheeks, upper lip, and chin showed white below the brow browned by the Katanga sun.
Breakfasting in the hotel dining room on eggs fried too hard and cold toast, his upper lip still tender, his jaw red from the scrapings of the razor, Gat made another vow to himself: He would become a new man. He would put behind him the wreckage of his life: a career turned sour; no money put by; no connection to family; no woman. He would get himself new clothes and work more to his liking. Something he chose this time, not something he fell into. But how would he find that?
TWO HOURS later in the men’s department of a clothing store, he looked at himself in a three-sided mirror. Yes, the suit would do. Lightweight, dark blue. It would allow him to pass himself off as someone he wasn’t. A businessman. Or an up-and-coming professional. One who spent a good deal of time in the sun. A man whose business was the land. He gazed at his image, threw off the hyena-slink set of his shoulders, and approved of what he saw. The suit helped.
He bought the suit, two dress shirts, three ties, two short-sleeved sport shirts, and a safari suit (trousers and tunic) for casual wear.
ON THE streets of Johannesburg wearing his blue suit and tightly knotted tie, carrying his packages, the army captain began to shed his military identity. He strode along as a businessman might: erect, but relaxed, without the cocky set of the shoulders needed for commanding men, without the challenging glint in his eye. He felt less tainted now, almost fragrant with confidence.
He followed three white schoolgirls in light dresses, exulting in the freedom of summer to escape school uniforms. Feeling his eyes on them, they glanced back at him and giggled with pleasure at his interest. They hurried along like frightened birds, pleased by his gaze, all flattered, twittering modesty, their eyes lowered to the sidewalk.
Gat examined the Africans trudging toward him, balaclavas pulled low on their heads. The men’s bodies were thin and work-worn; the women’s beneath folds of clothing had the shape of cigar stubs. Not a single African looked at him. All of them walked past as if he, a white man, had no more human characteristics than a lamppost.
Gat arrived at the Central Post Office. He had been instructed to check there for General Delivery. He found the proper counter, paused to remember the name in his passport, and gave it to the clerk. “A letter for you, sir,” the clerk said on returning. “I’ll need some identification.” Gat offered his passport. The document claimed to have been issued in Brussels. In fact it had been issued in Elisabethville. It gave his name as Adriaan Gautier. That was false, but the photograph was authentic; it had been taken only a week before. The clerk checked it against Gat’s face. “I’ve shaved,” Gat remarked.
“Found you still had a chin, eh?” joshed the clerk. “Sign please.” Gat signed. The clerk handed him the letter and the passport.
Gat went to the section of the post office marked “Nie-Blankes.” No whites lingered there. He opened the letter; the stationery was parchment, embossed with the return address of a post box in Tervuren, the town east of Brussels where King Leopold II had built his Royal Museum of Central Africa. Folded inside the stationery Gat found ten crisp one hundred dollar bills. A second one thousand dollars. As a tip very nice. As blood money very meager. On the piece of stationery one word was typed: “Disappear.”
ONE OF the first passengers on the early afternoon flight to Cape Town, Gat took his seat beside the window, settled into the persona the new suit afforded him, and opened his copy of the Rand Daily Mail. A treason trial of several dozen, mainly non-white defendants, had dragged on for more than a year; now it was drawing to a close. The state was seeking to prove that the African National Congress, apparently an African political party, was a Communist organization bent on establishing a Communist state. It seemed that South African whites were playing the same game that the whites farther north played, claiming that to cede power would only
make a gift of Africa to the Communists. As if African nationalists would free themselves from the rule of white capitalists only to surrender it to white Communists.
“May I sit here? Do you mind?”
The woman was tall, slender, with an athletic figure, and blonded hair cut short. She clipped her words, spoke with an English accent, and indicated the aisle seat.
“Please do,” he said. “By all means.”
She dropped her large purse into the empty seat between them and smiled hello. She was a beauty and conscious of it, young middle age, forty or a bit older, probably had teenage children. She wore a dark blue suit, the female version of his own, with white piping at the edges of the lapels and the cuffs. Perhaps she was a businesswoman, he thought, but, no, her beauty made too vivid, too immediate, an impression for that. His eyes seemed involuntarily drawn to the blue-green pupils of her eyes, invited there by lines of mascara at the lashes and by eye shadow deftly applied to enlarge the sockets. She seated herself, exuding a vitality that made him glad that the Fates had set her beside him.
“I do hope we have a smooth flight. Don’t you?”
Her smile showed perfect teeth, brightly white. She settled herself, crossed her legs with a sibilant rustling of nylons one against the other. He glanced at her legs. Beneath the hem of her skirt a knee peeked. Nice.
Once they were airborne, the woman smiled hello again as she withdrew from her purse a pair of glasses and a manuscript folder. While studiously staring at his paper, Gat was aware of her settling in to her study. He glanced over. The woman adjusted the glasses onto her nose and looked over at him as if expecting him to speak. Instead he smiled; her glasses were comically large. And yet they endowed her beauty with humanity and a whimsical quality; they suggested she had a sense of humor about herself. Gat reached over to her armrest to turn on her overhead light. It spilled yellow onto her. “That should be better.”
“Thank you.” She cocked her head to identify his newspaper. “You aren’t reading that miserable rag!”
“Miserable? What makes you say that?”
“Every day the same scandal, that treason trial.” Her eyes flashed mischievously as her voice exaggerated “scandal.” “The horrors of the color bar and Bantu education. The misery of the townships. Do they think we don’t know?”
“Maybe some people need reminding.”
“Oh, posh!” she said. “In that sheet today’s news is the same as yesterday’s.”
Gat smiled. “I didn’t read it yesterday. So it’s fresh to me.”
She tilted her head and observed him over the top of her glasses. “You’re not South African, are you? What’s that accent I hear?”
“I’m Belgian.”
“From the Congo?”
“From Brussels. Ixelles.”
“Your people have had a rough go in the Congo! That creature Lumumba: he’s a piece of work.” Again the mischievous flash of the eyes.
He shrugged. For a woman her age she really was smashing.
“What brings you here?” she asked. “We’re wearing practically the same blue business suit. So it can’t be a holiday.”
“I wish my suit had white piping.”
They found each other attractive. She confessed to being an actress, not a very good one, though she had been at it long enough. She was flying to the Cape to do an industrial film. He carefully masked his identity. Because of his suit, she took him for a businessman. He said, yes, he was a Belgian manufacturer of sturdy, low-priced furniture, his uncle’s profession in Britain. He was contemplating a move to South Africa.
On the flight to Cape Town they became pals. When he suggested they share a taxi into town, she offered him a ride in the convertible her producers were renting for her and drove him to the five-star Mount Nelson Hotel where she was staying. Flush with blood money, Gat took a room there because he and Tina Windsor had recognized something in each other. They agreed to meet for dinner. He watched her walk off beside the Coloured bellman: the athletic stride, the way the skirt of her suit fell from her hips, her tapered legs, her ankles, the long heels on her shoes.
AFTER CHECKING into his room, the cheapest available in this pink palace of opulence, Gat took a walk about the city center in order to assess the virtues Tina had claimed for it. Yes, he thought, Cape Town was more civilized, more relaxed, than the urban scabs around Johannesburg. There mining camps grown into cities reminded him strongly of the Katanga from which he was to disappear. Now and then he saw a “non-white,” as the local parlance had it, in a suit like the one he himself wore, possibly a lawyer, doctor, insurance salesman. When two of them met, they greeted each other with laughter and shook hands. Moving along the boulevard, Gat found himself admiring women, the stylishness of their dress and the confidence of their strides. He felt more strongly that somehow only a woman could get him right with himself, only a woman could help him uncover the man he wanted to be.
Gat entered a square. Across it stood a large church with Gothic windows pointing to the sky above. A sign announced: Saint Mary’s Catholic Church. Gat felt the lapsed Catholic’s terror. How had his feet brought him here? He quickly started away.
“Gat!” The sound of the voice raised hair on the nape of his neck. “Captain Gat!” He walked faster. No one knew Captain Gat here. He was Adriaan Gautier, factory boss, manufacturer of low-cost furniture. But the footsteps drew closer. “Gat! That is you!”
Gat reached an alley. Ducked into it, fearing someone sent to eliminate him. A figure in military fatigues flashed past. Gat relaxed. The figure returned. It hesitated, peered at Gat. “Salut, copain,” the man said. He swaggered jauntily into the alley.
“Michels,” Gat said, recognizing him. “Salut.”
Michels moved to Gat and sharply slapped his shaven cheek. “You’ve shaved,” he noted. “You look fifteen.” The man was of medium height, rail thin, and very blond. His hair stuck like straw straight out of his head, not quite officer quality, even for the Congo’s Force Publique. With his prominent nose and pointed chin, the wrists sticking out of his jacket, he looked like an Afrikaner yokel off the platteland.
Gat clapped the man’s body in feigned friendship, patting for weapons.
Michels asked, “What’re you running from?”
“From the bad dream of meeting you.”
Michels had been sent out of Katanga just as Gat had with a mission to disappear. He chortled now, smelling of liquor. The set of his shoulders and the self-satisfied steps of his strut were even more pronounced than in Katanga where they attempted to give the slight body substance and a quality of command. “I knew it was you,” he said in Flemish. “No two men walk the same way.”
“How are things?”
“A lot better here than there. Why the suit?”
“Why the fatigues?” Michels was wearing camouflage fatigues without officer insignias, and a military bush hat, one side folded above his ear. “You going to a masquerade?” Gat could not help wondering if Michels had been sent to assassinate him. It was a crazy idea—Michels was a fuckup—but it was not crazy to be wary.
“You know what happens down here when I tell them what we did.”
“Don’t tell anyone,” Gat said.
“Come find out,” Michels invited. “I’m on my way to a bordel. White girls.”
“That’s a change for you.” Michels was a famous patron of brothels in the cités of Elisabethville so raunchy that no fellow officers would accompany him. Force Publique doctors had stippled his buttocks with hypodermic shots of penicillin.
Gat looked about for a way to escape.
“I get it free there,” Michels boasted. Gat regarded him skeptically. “No shit. I tell ’em what we did—”
“Don’t tell. Not anyone.” Gat pushed past Michels and started out of the alley.
“You look good in the suit,” Michels said. “Like a fucking junior mining magnate from E’ville.” They emerged from the alley onto the sidewalk where whites and blacks, Coloured and
Malays, hurried past each other with no flicker of recognition except for their own kind. “Let’s do something together,” Michels suggested. “Where you staying?” Gat mentioned his hotel because it might be useful to keep tabs on Michels.
“You passing on pussy?” Michels stuck out his hand. Gat shook it. The two men parted, moving in different directions. Gat turned at the corner, hesitated a moment, then followed Michels for two blocks, studying his movements, the folds of his clothes. Was he armed? Gat thought not. Michels liked women too much to serve as a reliable assassin.
BACK AT the hotel he showered, put on the new yellow shirt and a blue tie with a yellow design in it, and at 7:25 went down to the dining room. Tina Windsor appeared at five of eight.
“You look amazingly gorgeous,” Gat told her, partly because it was true and partly because he knew she would want to hear it. Her dress was basic black and displayed her figure well. It accentuated her vitality, her beauty.
They followed the maitre d’ to a table and ordered sanely for what was to come: light on food, medium heavy on wine. Gat encouraged Tina to talk about herself and she was only too happy to oblige. Raised in Kenya, she fled the colony for Britain at eighteen, headed for university, so her parents thought, but was mad for the theater. She landed a part in a play, bequeathed her virginity on an actor less impressed in receiving it than she was in bestowing it, and began to live a glamorous life of parties and lovers. She unfolded anecdotes from her life as if they were scenes in a play: married a stodgy but very handsome South African, had children, took lovers, fell for a theater director who offered to share her with her husband, divorced and married the director and found now that, terrified at becoming fifty, he was chasing the friends of her late-teenage daughter. “Embarrassing for her and very tiresome for me,” Tina complained. She gave Gat enough scenes from her romantic drama to assure him that he would be offered a role in it.
They had coffee in a parlor off the dining room. “Tell me more about the Congo,” Tina requested. “Were you in Léopoldville during the troubles?”
Love in the Time of Apartheid Page 1