Love in the Time of Apartheid

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Love in the Time of Apartheid Page 21

by Frederic Hunter


  “Are you going to betray me?” Garvey whispered.

  “No.”

  “Why are you helping me?”

  “I have private reasons for that. Let’s go.”

  Garvey opened the door. At the threshold stood an Indian woman in a sari. Her ear was pressed against the doorjamb. She stepped back. Seeing the knife in Gat’s hand she registered an instant of panic, then watched the men with both affronted apprehension and a sense of violation. When she saw that she was not in danger, she reached out her palm. Gat took rands from his wallet and laid them across the palm. “Thank you,” he said.

  When they returned to the Ford, Gat opened the trunk. He tossed the knife and holster behind Garvey’s suitcases. He closed the trunk and handed the car keys to Garvey. He said, “You drive.”

  THE FORD slowed as it approached the border post. Garvey drove, wearing his dark chauffeur’s jacket and the brimmed hat. Beside him Gat silently appraised the post. At midafternoon the sun glared off it and the two or three vehicles in the car park. In the rear seat Petra refreshed her lipstick, fluffed out her hair, and released a button on her blouse so that it revealed a hint of the swell of her breasts. Neither man paid the slightest attention to her as Garvey pulled into a parking space and stopped the car. The men hesitated before moving. Petra, however, left the car with a jaunty stride and hurried toward the post. Gat and Garvey looked after her, alarmed.

  Opening the door of the building, Petra swung it so wide that the three officials behind the counter all looked up. She grinned at each of them and leaned on the counter in such a way as to push down the fabric of her blouse. She greeted the men in Afrikaans. “That car is so hot!” she said. “What a relief to get out of it!” The three officials nodded and grinned. They glanced at the open button of her bodice and the loveliness behind it and hurriedly finished with the documents they were putting in order.

  “You wouldn’t have something cold I could drink, would you? I’m sure I shouldn’t ask,” Petra acknowledged, flirtatiously, “but I am parched!” The two younger officials, both in their twenties, stumbled over each other en route to the water cooler to pour the poor traveler a drink. The older official approached her. “How do you manage to stay looking so cool and refreshed?” Petra asked admiringly. “I wish I knew your secret.”

  The younger men brought cups of water. Petra downed them with a ravenousness that tweaked the men’s imaginations. She sighed, “My, but that’s welcome.” She smiled at the men. “How nice to see you blokes!” she enthused. “I’m guiding a European businessman who wants to locate a factory in the Union— Oops! I guess I mean the Republic, don’t I?” The men laughed with her. As Afrikaners they had likely supported the referendum which would in a few months remove the country from the British Commonwealth and transform it into a republic. “He is so boring! You would not believe it.” She looked toward the door to see Gat entering with Garvey trailing behind him, his face lowered.

  Petra went toward the two men and said, “These gentlemen need your papers.” She held out her hand for them to be delivered to her. Each man glanced at her with an expression of anxiety and handed over his papers. Petra took them to the officials at the counter, making faces to suggest that the European was the King of Boredom. The officials examined Gat, suppressing their smiles, and hardly glanced at Garvey. When Gat started toward her, Petra gestured out of sight of the officials that he should stay back. He retreated to the far wall, blocking the officials’ view of Garvey. The African stood in a pose of obsequiousness, hoping to be invisible.

  “I wonder if you could help me make a telephone call to Cape Town?” Petra asked. The officials looked uncertain about this. Allowing a traveler to use the official telephone was clearly against regulations. “I thought maybe you could dial the call for me,” Petra said. “It’s to Colonel Rousseau of the police there.”

  Gat glanced at Garvey and saw panic pass across his eyes.

  “He’s my father,” Petra explained. “He wants me to call in every day or so.” She gave the most senior official a flirtatious look of pleading and touched his arm.

  “It’s most irregular,” he told her, fearing his younger colleagues’ disapproval.

  “It is to the police,” one of them said.

  Petra took a pencil and wrote the number on a piece of paper. “Well, since it is the police,” said the senior man. “Come back here, Miss, if you like.”

  “You are so kind,” Petra said, again touching the man’s arm, while making a face that mocked his caution to his younger colleagues. The man led Petra to a phone and dialed the number. Waiting for the call to go through, Petra fluffed her hair and set her foot forward so that, as they arranged the papers of the three travelers, the younger men could admire her ankle.

  “Colonel Rousseau, please,” the senior official said to the telephone operator. When Rousseau’s assistant answered the phone, the man explained, “I have the colonel’s daughter here.” He handed the phone to Petra.

  “Colonel Rousseau.” The voice came quietly into Petra’s ear.

  “Father,” she said. “I thought I ought to check in.”

  “Where in God’s name are you?” the voice demanded in a vicious whisper. “Are you all right? Are you still with that Belgian?”

  “We’re outside Mafeking and everything’s going quite well.”

  “Mafeking!” The voice was now a frantic whisper. He did not want his office staff to overhear. “What the hell are you doing way up there?”

  “The visitor asked to see Victoria Falls so we’re headed up that way.”

  “Victoria Falls!” Her father still controlled his voice. “You’re supposed to be at Wits!”

  “We’re trying to get to Francistown tonight. That’s a bit of a stretch.”

  “Are you all right? Tell me that you’re all right!”

  “The driver you recommended is working out quite well. I’m fine. And since it’s a long way to Francistown, I better ring off.”

  “Petra! Petra!” her father called as she hung up the phone. She smiled at the officials, all three of whom were watching her with a kind of bemused enchantment on their faces. She took the paper on which she had written her father’s name and number, crumbled it, and stuck it demurely into her brassiere. The officials watched her.

  “I guess we better hurry if we’re to get to Francistown,” she said, grinning at the men. One of the young officials handed her the documents. She touched his arm and thanked him. “Thank you all,” she said to the trio of officials. “You’ve been so kind to me!”

  She left the post and walked to the car, Gat and Garvey trailing behind her. She slid into the rear seat and closed the door behind her. Gat and Garvey got into the car without speaking. Garvey started the motor and drove it slowly out of South Africa. Once beyond the sight of the border post, he stepped on the accelerator.

  No one spoke until they were five miles inside the protectorate. Then Gat started laughing. Garvey joined him, “Don’t thank me, gents!” Petra declared triumphantly. “I was just certain I could do it better than either of you!” They laughed and laughed and Gat watched Petra with the knowledge that she was much more of a woman than he had realized.

  LOBATSE PROVED to be a small, dusty place at the edge of the Kalahari Desert. The town’s sun-bleached buildings hugged a gulch; it served as the bed for a trickle of water which after a long journey joining other tributaries would eventually swell into the Limpopo River. As the Ford moved along the town’s main street, Gat and Garvey caught sight of a filling station adjoining a store. Beside it an acacia tree provided meager shade. Over the entrance a sign announced G. P. Patel, Proprietor. Garvey pulled into the station. Out of it came an attendant, a Motswana boy, not yet old enough to go work in the gold mines. Garvey told him to fill the car and, exhibiting a confidence he could not have displayed across the border, he moved into the store by the front entrance, hoping the place had a phone he could use.

  Gat and Petra left the car to stretch t
heir legs. Petra lifted her arms over her head and, raising herself to her tiptoes, grabbed for the sky. Gat watched her. “You were quite amazing,” he said. “Garvey was rather shaken when your father turned out to be a colonel in the police.”

  “So was my father when he heard we were going to Victoria Falls.” She strutted in a circle, then asked, “Where are we going?”

  An intense longing for her swept over him. He did not try to mask it, knowing that was impossible. “To a hotel—as soon as we get rid of Mister Garvey.”

  She blushed, pleased that his desires were the same as her own. “I meant after that.”

  Her blushing excited him. “We need to talk about that.”

  His obvious admiration, his admission of desire, made her self-conscious. She remembered that she had unfastened the top button of her blouse and turned her back on him to fasten it again. When she turned back, she asked, “What is it about breasts that so fascinates men?”

  “The fact that the peek is more interesting than the full view.” With both hands Petra held the blouse closed at her neck. The power of his gaze made her blush more deeply.

  “You’re looking at me the way you first did in Cape Town.”

  “Oh, no!” Gat whispered. “That was wondering. This is knowing.”

  Garvey called from the station office. “You can drop me here. Someone will come for me.”

  They unloaded the African’s suitcases. Gat said, “Nice sharing the road with you, Mr. Garvey.” The two men shook hands.

  Petra offered her hand as well. “I’m glad to have met an American from Pondoland, Mr. Garvey.” The African wiped his hand on his trouser leg before taking the girl’s hand.

  Garvey thanked them and looked carefully at Petra. “Your father is truly a police colonel in Cape Town?” She nodded. Garvey shook his head, disbelieving, and regarded Gat. “Just when you think the game is up,” he said, “the most unexpected people help you.”

  “You might want to keep moving,” Gat advised. “The colonel may have called the border post to check on us.”

  “Yes,” Garvey said. “Someone will drive me to Gaborone tonight.”

  Gat paid the Motswana boy and drove Petra through Lobatse to see what it offered in terms of lodging. When they reached the northern edge of the town, Gat stopped the car. Petra fished the fake wedding rings out of her purse and the couple renewed their claim to respectability by putting them on.

  Returning through town they stopped at an establishment calling itself a hotel and boasting air-conditioned rondavels. A porter took them to their cottage. It stood, surrounded by red and orange aloes in full bloom, beyond a dining terrace at the back of what was trying to be a garden. It was given sparse shade by thorn trees with gray-green leaves and thorns as big as clothespins and sharp as sharks’ teeth. As soon as Gat tipped the porter and shut and bolted the door, he grabbed Petra’s arm, pulled her to him, and kissed her with a ferocity she was happy to reciprocate.

  “You were marvelous at the border post,” he told her, “and you are marvelous now.”

  They made love in the shower with shampoo in their hair and soap in their eyes, their skins suds-sliding against each other. Each toweled off the other, each examining the other’s body in detail. Feeling chilled in the air-cooled room, they sought refuge in the double bed, each curled about the other, kissing and caressing the other, their bodies becoming one. They grew hungry, but disregarded their hunger for food in preference for slaking their hunger for each other. They purred and slept and staggered to and from the toilet and washbasin and woke each other, making love in a state that was neither fully awake nor fully asleep, in a kind of dream of love.

  IN ANOTHER city, in another country, another man and woman shared a different kind of union in the small parlor of their Cape Dutch home. Piet Rousseau paced the room, his jaw set, an icy anger chilling the air as his footsteps broke the silence, thudding across the carpet five paces in one direction, then turning to step off five paces in the opposite one. Occasionally Rousseau halted before Margaret. Hardly aware of her presence, he took the cup she had refilled yet again with after-dinner coffee. He emptied it and returned it to the low table, and paced on. Margaret sat on a sofa with apparent composure, holding the pitcher because it warmed her hands, taking refuge in the coffee’s comforting aroma, and watching her husband’s feet so that she did not have to meet his eyes.

  At dinner Rousseau had reported to Margaret that, in their short, rather one-sided conversation, Petra had sounded well, even spirited. She was evidently about to cross into Bechuanaland, he had told his wife, and she claimed that she and the Belgian officer were heading to Victoria Falls. With Elsie moving in and out of the dining room serving, Margaret made no reply. But both women sensed the baas’s fury. In the face of it, Margaret knew better than to express her opinion that it could not be such a bad thing before she started varsity for a young woman to see Victoria Falls—even if she were accompanied by a lover.

  Now that Elsie was in the kitchen finishing up the dishes, and after that would disappear into her quarters, Rousseau explained that in crossing the border Petra and Gat were not alone. A Bantu had crossed with them. This fact seemed to deepen his anger. Margaret mildly replied, “There must be Bantus going across that border every day looking for rides.”

  “There are also terrorists trying to get across.”

  “You’re sure a Bantu was with them?”

  “She called me to help him get across,” Rousseau said. “I telephoned the border post as soon as I got my wits about me. The officer I spoke with confirmed that it was Petra and the Belgian. A Bantu driver was with them.”

  “You think the Bantu was a terrorist? Where would Petra and the Belgian meet someone like that?”

  “We really know nothing about the Belgian. He could be a Communist, a terrorist himself.”

  Margaret said nothing. Her husband tended to regard as a Communist anyone who disrupted his life. Any man who awakened his daughter to passion, who turned her from a decent, rather intelligent girl into a debauchee given over to lust, certainly fit that category. As far as Margaret was concerned, the important thing was that Petra was well. And if she were having a fling, Margaret was pleased that she was enjoying it. Why shouldn’t she? What was a fling for?

  Rousseau stopped pacing and turned to face his wife. “Do you think Pet might run off with this Belgian?” he asked.

  “Pietie,” Margaret replied carefully, “she has run off with him.”

  “If I catch her, I’ll beat her backside so she won’t want to be in bed with a man for a very long time. And if I catch him, he’ll be minus some of his anatomy.” Rousseau continued to pace, back and forth. Finally, almost gently, he said, “I’ve been hoping she’s just cutting up a bit before varsity. Now I wonder: Is it possible he’ll take her somewhere outside Africa?”

  This was a new idea to Margaret. She did not know how to reply.

  “If they plan to leave Africa,” Rousseau declared, “they’ll fly out of Johannesburg. I’m going there tomorrow to see that they don’t!”

  IN THE rondavel in Lobatse Gat lay holding Petra, his right leg stretched across both of hers, his left arm under her neck, his right hand lightly caressing her cheek. He told her, “I don’t think I can send you off to university.”

  “I hope not!” She turned her head toward his.

  “I don’t want you to leave me.”

  “Me leave you! I thought we were going together to the far corners of the earth.”

  He murmured contentedly and bit the lobe of her ear. He held her close. Maybe, he thought, they should go take a look at Victoria Falls together.

  CHAPTER TEN

  LOBATSE, BECHUANALAND PROTECTORATE

  SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1961

  Gat woke in the night, wrapped a blanket over Petra and himself, and nestled beside her. A slight scent of night-blooming jasmine filled the air. Despite her warmth, he felt oddly alone. The night before he had resolved to demonstrate his rega
rd for her by getting out of her life. Now he could hardly bear to think of leaving her.

  Questions about Australia buzzed in his head. To risk emigrating wouldn’t they need to love each other? Right now they were dancing through a golden buzz of infatuation, but headed where? Had he ever known love? Not really. It was undiscovered country. Could he find it with Petra?

  Could he find a job out there? Petra would need to work too. Had she ever held a job? What skills could she offer? What skills could he? He could dig ditches if he had to, but he could not keep Petra happy for long on what a ditchdigger earned.

  He stared into the night. Would Petra be happy in the kind of place he could afford? She might enjoy a tiny love nest. But for how long? He could survive alone. But could he do the surviving for both of them?

  Did he love her? Whatever love was, this must be getting close. It was time he settled down. If he did love her, would he not insist she go to university? He had seen movies where lovers battled with such questions. Bullshit, he’d always thought. Now he was not so sure.

  Far off he heard a radio playing a love song. He strained to listen, nestling against this warm and marvelous companion. He wondered where they would be at the end of the coming day. The love song faded into silence. He drifted back to sleep.

  When he woke again, he was alone in the bed. Petra stood, naked, at the table in the middle of the room, pouring their tea. “You’re very beautiful,” he greeted her.

  “Too skinny for local tastes,” she informed him. “Bantu men like their women to carry some weight.”

  “Lucky I’m not local.”

  She set a plate of biscuits beside him on the bed and handed him his tea. Then she returned with her own and slithered under the sheet. “I’m famished,” she declared. “When was the last time we ate?” After a moment she asked, “Last night— Did we decide anything?” She yawned. “To go—? Where exactly?”

  “Wherever you fancy.”

 

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