“You’re my family! I haven’t set foot in Belgium for ten years. I’ve never married anyone but you. I love you. That’s why I’m here.”
Petra gazed at Gat, her eyes moving up and down his body. Finally she said, “My father did that to you, didn’t he? He tried to break you.”
“You can hardly blame him. I kept lying.”
A smile played at the corners of her mouth.
“I don’t want to talk about your father,” Gat said. “He loves you very much. Too much, I think.” Petra looked at him and drank of her coffee. She pushed the pastry toward Gat. He leaned forward to her. “I love you. I came back for you.” She said nothing and did not look at him. “I told you about the African girl in the Equateur. About the secretaries at Union Minière. There is no wife in Belgium.”
Finally Petra said, “Why does my father want to hurt me so much?” After a moment she said, “I’ll be right back.”
Gat watched her move through the tables to a public phone. When she returned, she said, “I called for a taxi. We can go to my flat.”
“You’re in a flat?” Gat asked. “Who with? You have flatmates?”
“The flat’s on the second floor,” Petra said. “Can you manage that?”
“I think so. We’ll see.” He smiled at her, pulling himself upright on the crutches.
ENTERING THE second-floor flat Gat wondered if, in the tiny space, there would be room enough for both Petra and him to sit at the same time. The place included a miniscule living room with a couch, a chair, and a table on which other of Petra’s schoolbooks were piled, a kitchen carved out of a hall, and a tiny bedroom, filled by a double bed, a chair, and a vanity off which rose the smell of cosmetics. The living room gave onto a tiny balcony filled with potted plants and two sun chairs. When she saw Gat looking at the double bed, Petra told him, “I sleep out here.” She lightly kicked the couch with her foot.
“Who sleeps in there?” Gat asked.
“My mother.” Gat looked surprised. “She’s in Rhodesia just now,” she said. Gat nodded. “She and Father are living separately for a while,” Petra said. Gat watched her, but she offered no more explanation. “My mother has a secret son in Rhodesia. So you can understand why I thought you might have a secret wife.”
“Has your father had our marriage annulled?”
“Is that what you want?”
“What I want is to kiss you,” Gat said. “Would you hold my crutches while I do that?” Gat offered the crutches. She refused to take them. “You don’t feel sorry for me, do you? A man who can’t grab his wife and kiss her. Can’t chase her into the bedroom.”
Petra smiled and shook her head.
“Good,” Gat said. “I couldn’t stand you feeling sorry for me.” She nodded, but there were tears in her eyes. “None of that,” he said. He reached out for her wrist, seized it, and pulled her toward him. He put his arms around her and kissed her. “I kiss you and you cry!” he complained.
She brushed tears from her eyes, and pulled out of his grasp. “I’ll put on a kettle for tea.”
“We just had coffee,” Gat said. The girl shrugged and went into the kitchen. Gat sat down on the couch. He listened to her putting the kettle to boil. He heard the clinkings of her—his wife, amazing!—setting out cups. He shoved his crutches under the couch and sat back. He was tired, but for the first time in more than a month he was not conscious of pain in his feet. When she returned, she stood watching him.
“I want us to be married,” Gat said. “What do you want?”
“What do you want? What do I want? I hate this kind of talk,” Petra said. “Kobus came to see me. We talked this way the whole time.”
“Did he forgive you for me?”
“He said he wanted me.” She stood, her fists clenched, then paced back and forth across the narrow room. Gat smiled inside and made sure to keep the smile off his face.
“God forbid I should talk like Kobus!” he said.
“Yes!” she agreed. She stopped pacing and turned to him, her fists on her hips. “For God’s sake what happened to your virility when you fell off the cliff? Was it shaken out of you?”
“It’s in very good shape,” he assured her. “I’d like to prove that to you, but I’m trying hard not to force you—”
“We’re married. Didn’t you come here to claim what’s yours?”
“You’re a feisty woman!”
“You married me. Claim me!”
When she started pacing again, Gat grabbed her by the skirt. He pulled her to him. She fell against him, jarred his legs. Pain surged from his feet, but he did not even wince. He kissed her and her response told him that everything was going to be all right. He pulled the pair of gold rings from his pocket, took her left hand, and slipped the smaller ring onto its third finger. He gave her the larger of the rings. She fitted it onto his left hand. They kissed. And continued to kiss until the teakettle whistled.
WHEN MARGARET walked out of baggage claim, returning from Rhodesia, and saw a waving hand shoot up from a radiant young woman who looked remarkably like Petra, she knew it was not studying that had put the bloom back in her daughter’s cheeks. “You don’t need to tell me a thing,” Margaret assured her as they embraced. “You exude it. Where is he?”
“He’s right over there,” Petra said, gesturing toward a man standing erect, but tentatively against a wall. He bowed slightly and smiled at Margaret. “I don’t want him carrying your bags,” Petra said, taking her mother’s suitcase. “He’s finally gotten off crutches.” Gat started toward the two women walking carefully.
“Off crutches?” Margaret asked.
“He won’t tell me what happened. When Father deported him to England, I take it, he was hardly able to stand. That business about the other wife? All lies.”
As Margaret reached Gat, she opened her arms to him and hailed him, “Hello again, son-in-law!” She grinned and embracing him felt him uncertain on his feet. She did not release him until Petra embraced them both and Margaret shifted his weight to her daughter.
“How was your son?” Petra asked as they started toward the parking lot. Margaret stopped, flummoxed by the words. “Mum, he’s my husband!” Petra reminded her. “He knows a couple of family secrets.”
“And who would I tell?” Gat asked. “You’re the only people I know here.”
Margaret shrugged. “He’s fine. Married now. The wife’s expecting a child. We went to his farm for an overnight.”
“Did you have time with him?”
“He drove me around the farm,” Margaret said. “I almost told him. But his mother’s not ready for that yet.”
As Petra drove away from the airport, she explained to her mother that they had moved her to a hotel. “I’m sure Father will be happy to pay for it.”
“It won’t be for long,” Gat assured her.
Petra broke the news. “We are off to Australia next week. It’s all arranged. Gat bought the tickets.”
Margaret sat in the rear seat of the car, feeling suddenly old. Her role as a mother had ended. JC was in England; Petra was headed for Australia. She wondered what would become of her now. She wondered if Piet knew about these plans. She did not ask.
“Gat? Do I call you Gat?” Margaret asked as they left her at her hotel.
“Please.”
“Is there some time when we could talk? I need to get to know you.”
They arranged to have a late breakfast together on a morning when Petra, who was still going to classes, would be at Wits.
THEY ATE in the hotel dining room overlooking a small garden at the rear of the place. Gat expressed his hope that he and Margaret could be friends. Margaret assured him that this was her hope too. Gat told her about his background. He declared that he had never been married before he married Petra. He had heard about a photo of a woman purported to be his wife. He had no wife but Petra. Margaret assured him that she believed him. She was not entirely sure she did, however, for believing him would entail her acknowledging
that her husband had lied to her and Petra. She asked if Gat was certain that he must take Petra as far away as Australia. Was there not some place closer where they could make a good life for themselves? Gat replied that Petra seemed really to want to go to America. “I’ve promised her a visit there once we’ve put aside some money.”
Having finished her scrambled eggs, leaving a portion of bacon untouched on her plate, the “polite bite” that her mother had always counseled her to leave, Margaret set her knife and fork tightly beside each other, pointed from the center of the plate toward six o’clock. Gat watched her. He detected in the precision of her orderliness a disquiet about the disorderliness with which he and Petra had found and committed themselves to one another. “You must be a little uneasy about the way Petra and I behaved,” he said. “I want you to be as happy for her as we are for ourselves.” Gat gazed at her a moment. “So let’s speak frankly to each other,” he said. “You must have things you want to say to me.”
Margaret reset the knife and fork although they had not moved since she placed them carefully on the plate. She wondered what exactly this young man meant. She looked up to watch him carefully.
He said, “Please, say them.”
A little shyly, glancing at him only occasionally, Margaret told him of her long-ago romance with the lad and of its outcome. She explained that her son was now farming, happily enough as far as she could tell, living the sort of life his father had offered her when he told her he would leave the university so that they could be married. “Of course, I wish we had not made our mistake,” she acknowledged. “But, given the situation, I’m sure I did the right thing. I would not have been happy living on a farm, even with a man I loved.”
Gat nodded, fairly certain that he understood the point she was trying to make. He wished she would relax. Margaret kept playing with her utensils, straightening them. Finally Gat said, “What are you trying to tell me?”
“I know that being young and in love can be wonderful.”
“I’m not quite that young,” Gat told her with a smile.
“It can be wonderful even when you’re not as young as Petra. I know being in bed together when you’re young and in love can be beautiful.” Gat watched her. “You and Petra had a lovely, wonder-filled week together. Is that enough for a marriage?”
“Yes.”
“Because if it’s not, do yourselves the favor of not staying married. It’s romantic flying off to Australia, but it will not be easy. You will know no one but each other. Neither of you will have jobs. You’ll have no family to fall back on and no network of friends. It may be that the best thing you two can do is to thank each other for the week you had together and move on in your separate lives.”
“I love her,” Gat said simply. “She rescued me from—” He shrugged. “We really have talked about this. The love is strong enough to last.”
Margaret smiled, a little ruefully. “I accept you at your word,” she said. After a moment she added, “I want to apologize for what my husband—”
“Don’t,” Gat interrupted her. “You had nothing to do with it.”
“He must have done to you what I try not to think about him doing to others. And he did it to his son-in-law.”
“I don’t feel any animosity toward him,” Gat said. “Really. I understand why he acted as he did. He loves his daughter and I stole her from him when he wasn’t looking. He had a right to be upset.”
“I won’t defend him to you.”
“He and I have something in common. We both love Petra. She loves him. I won’t do anything that damages that love. So I haven’t told her what happened when he interrogated me. I don’t want to do anything to make her feel that loving me means she can’t love him. She’ll love me less if she does.”
“He would not be so generous to you.”
“Why should he be?” asked Gat. “He loved her first.”
AS THEIR departure drew closer, Petra began curiously to feel a yearning for the homeland she had not yet left. One morning as they stood together in the small kitchen, she told Gat, “I don’t know what to do about my father.”
“Go see him,” Gat urged.
“But how?” she asked. “I don’t have the money to fly to Cape Town. And I can’t ask you for it.”
He nodded over his cereal bowl. “We’ll need all the money I’ve got to keep us afloat in Australia.” They stared separately into their cups of coffee. Finally Gat said, “Let me see what I can do.”
Once Petra left the apartment, Gat called his mother-in-law. He asked to see her. They had tea together and he put the proposition to her. “I can arrange that,” Margaret said. “Her father will buy her the ticket as well he should.”
When Petra went to thank her mother, Margaret gave her a check and asked that she telephone her father to set up the visit. Petra made the call from her mother’s hotel room. Colonel Rousseau’s secretary chatted in a friendly way and said she would put Petra right through. Then she returned to say that her father was in a meeting and could not be disturbed. Petra called twice more that day, but failed to reach her father. When she called that evening, knowing that he almost never went out at night, there was no answer at home. When she called his office the next day and again received evasive replies, she understood that he would not speak to her. She flew to Cape Town that afternoon.
Hazel picked her up at the airport and dropped her off at home. She embraced Elsie, told her about Gat and Joeys and Wits and implored her not to tell her father that she was in the house. Then in the gathering darkness she went to wait for her father in the small parlor where he always went through the day’s mail.
Petra heard him enter the house and call a greeting to Elsie. Soon the colonel entered the small parlor. Petra did not know what to do. She could not jump up and hug him. Nor would she make accusations against him. She sat without moving and observed him. He took a chair, turned on a lamp, and began to sort through letters and bills. After a moment he stopped. She watched him sense that something was amiss. He took control of himself, listened without moving, his policeman’s instincts all on alert. He glanced about the room, ready to confront whatever danger might await him. Then he saw her. Involuntarily he gasped. He peered at her. He raised a hand before his face, the palm outward, so that she could not look at him. He turned away.
Finally Petra said, “I didn’t want to leave South Africa without seeing you.”
Rousseau kept his hand before his face. In the silence between them Petra heard a flutter of breath escape from his throat. She wondered if he were crying. She had never seen him cry. She wondered: Should I go to him? When she sat forward in her chair, as if to rise, he stood abruptly. He hurried from the room. She sat back in her chair, wondering what to do. She rose and followed him, only to hear his Buick backing out of the driveway. She ran onto the front stoep and watched the car drive off down the street.
Petra waited in the small parlor for her father to return. Finally Elsie came in to inquire what she wished to do about dinner. Petra went to the kitchen and ate with Elsie at the small table covered with oilcloth as she and JC had sometimes done when they were children. Then, after thanking Elsie for the meal, she returned to the small parlor. She sat in the darkness, waiting for her father. She thought about the family’s life together, all the good things they had done over the years, the love they had shared.
When she realized that her father would not return that night, she walked through each room of the dark house. In the formal parlor she bid good-bye to the large portraits of burgher forebears who had come to the Cape from Europe three centuries before and to the piano on which JC had often played. In the dining room she swept her hand across the table at which she had dined her entire life. In the kitchen she touched the stove; she wished now that she had not spurned Elsie’s efforts to teach her to cook. Upstairs she sat for a moment on the bed in her parents’ room where she was conceived. Her mother’s perfume was still embedded in the pillows. In JC’s room she opened
the closet where he had stowed his cricket gear. It retained the odor of that gear, the scent of her brother. She had thought to spend her last night in the house in her own room. But when it came time to sleep she chose instead the bed where she and Gat had first been together.
MARGARET PICKED her up the next day at Jan Smuts airport. “You know how hard it is for your father to admit he’s wrong,” she remarked when Petra told her what happened. Petra remembered how strong her father had always seemed, how confident, a veritable rock. “You know who he is now,” her mother said. “That he’s lied to you for years. Your knowing that humiliates him. But because of the volk he will never change.”
As they drove through the streets of Johannesburg, Petra’s nostalgia for her homeland, for the Cape, for the comfortable childhood she and JC had shared: all that drained away.
THAT NIGHT as they lay together in bed, holding one another and not yet ready for sleep, Petra told Gat that she was ready now to depart. For a long moment he said nothing. Finally she asked, “Did you hear what I said?” Gat kissed her hair and made no reply. “What is it?”
Finally he said, “I’ve been as stupid as your friend Kobus might have been.”
“What?” she exclaimed with a laugh. “Impossible!”
Gat told her that he had had dinner with her mother the previous evening. They had talked about the things Petra would most like to do in her new life. “And I said, ‘She wants to find a job that makes enough money to support me.’ ”
“Of course!” Petra agreed. “That’s my top priority. What else?”
“You want to rent me a house where I can bring my mates—they’re called ‘mates,’ I believe, in Australia—for meals that you’ll make and beer you’ll provide.”
“Really. And what did she say?”
“She said, ‘Petra wants to ride an elevator to the top of the Empire State Building. And climb up inside the Statue of Liberty.’ ” Gat turned toward his wife and put his arms around her. “ ‘ She wants to bicycle across the Golden Gate bridge.’ ” Petra lay quiet in his arms. He pressed her closer to him. “ ‘ She wants to walk down Hollywood Boulevard and watch movie stars pass in golden convertibles on the street.’ ”
Love in the Time of Apartheid Page 27