Ruby Red

by Linzi Glass

  ‘Brilliant idea.’ Father came up behind her and massaged the back of her neck.

  ‘I was planning on telling Julian tomorrow, but with all the uncertainty… Now I am sure. A midnight exhibit it will be!’

  ‘The detectives have to sleep sometime,’ Father chuckled.

  ∗

  I raced upstairs to call Loretta. I was usually home and answered the phone when Loretta called and we had spoken a few times since our meeting several weeks ago, always sliding into our half-English, half-Afrikaans jargon.

  I was getting to know her better and from our conversations I learned that her mother had died when Loretta was five from malaria that she had contracted when she swam in an Eastern Transvaal stream filled with infected mosquitoes. Loretta told me that she could not understand why only her mother was bitten when the whole family had been swimming in the water together. Her father said they bit into her because her blood was sweeter than anyone else’s. Loretta wished her mother had been less of a good person, then perhaps she would still be alive. She was raised by her father, who she said was very strict. She had an older brother but didn’t say much about him, only that they didn’t spend much time together.

  I lay back on my bed, dragging the long phone cord with me and dialled her number, which Mother had written down on a piece of paper. I didn’t need it – I had memorized Loretta’s number already.

  After five long bleating rings the phone was answered by a young man.

  ‘Gooie aand.’

  ‘Gooie nag. Um. Is Loretta tuis, asseblief?’

  The voice on the other end switched immediately to perfect English. ‘Yes, of course. She is home. And may I tell her who is calling?’

  Was my Afrikaans accent really all that bad, I thought, as I stumbled through an answer.

  ‘Um, it’s haar vriendin, I mean, um, her friend Ruby.’

  ‘Oh yes, I have heard about you. One moment. Yes?’

  As soon as Loretta came on the line I kicked my shoes off and lay back on my soft quilted bedspread and relaxed.

  ‘My broer. My brother. Sorry if he was rude.’ There was a clattering of dishes in the background as she spoke.

  ‘No, actually he was very polite. Werklik, his English is perfect.’

  ‘Hy wou overseas gaan for university,’ Loretta said, ‘Askies, but I’m washing the dishes. Servants’ day off.’ I could hear her turn on the kitchen tap.

  ‘Really, why does he want to go overseas?’ She paused, then seemed to turn the volume of the water up till it almost roared into my ear. She must have cupped her hand round the phone as she spoke because her words came out loud and clear against the torrent. ‘My pa and my brother, they don’t get along. They are very different. My pa, hy is baie kwaad, angry met Boetie.’

  I sat up suddenly. ‘Why is your father angry?’

  Loretta turned the water down and sighed, clattering dishes as she spoke. ‘My pa. He is a real Afrikaner. His grandfather, hulle fought die Engels in the Anglo-Boer War. My grandfather, how you say, he is one from Die Broederbond. You know who is they?’

  ‘No,’ I answered quietly. Here it was. The reason my parents feared bringing strangers into our lives.

  Loretta said the next sentence quickly and in one breath: ‘They show support for Hitler in World War Two. They want al die swart mense, the black people, to be kept down by fear.’

  ‘Does your father feel that way too?’ I asked, feeling the blood leave my face.

  Loretta closed a cupboard door. ‘Nee, no, but he wants them never to be equal with us white. My boetie, he don’t agree. He fight with my father a lot. They both make life hard for me…’

  ‘Ek is jammer.’

  ‘No, don’t be sorry for me.’

  A voice from another room called her name. She held the phone against something, but I could still hear the conversation.

  ‘Loretta, maak jou huiswerk klaar en kom doen jou tuiswerk,’ a harsh voice yelled.

  ‘Ja pa, ek kom!’ She held the phone to her mouth again and spoke quickly. ‘My father says time for homework.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, feeling disappointed that our conversation was already over.

  ‘Jy is my nuwe vriend, Ruby. Goodbye.’

  ‘Totsiens. You are my new friend too, Loretta.’

  As I hung up the phone I wondered if there were an Afrikaans word for ‘pal’ but, somehow, with Loretta the word ‘vriend’ sounded just right.

  Chapter Ten

  Julian was both terrified and elated by the news of his upcoming solo exhibition. The date had been set for the first Saturday in June, a mere three weeks away.

  Mother had told Julian the good news over dinner and I had heard him coughing and rolling back and forth in his bed down the hall all that night. In the early hours of the morning I slipped into my blue silk robe that hung on a hook behind my bedroom door and padded down the hallway in pink bunny slippers to his room and knocked quietly on the door. I too was having a hard time sleeping.

  Julian seemed relieved to see me and we made our way in the watery early morning light to the outdoor studio. The golden daffodils that grew in neat rows on the pathway towards the studio ducked their honeyed heads as we brushed by them. A glossy starling chirped a weak shivering note in the crisp cold air.

  Julian held the studio door open for me and bowed slightly. ‘After you, madam,’ he said with mock gallantry. Once inside, the comforting smell of paint and putty and the closed-in-all-night warm air of the studio relaxed me, but apparently not Julian. He paced the linoleum floor back and forth, worrying about every brush or pencil stroke on every one of his works. Was the sketch of the wide-eyed children in the rickety bed too muted in shades? Did the image of the washerwoman with the billowing mounds of clothing balancing precariously on her head evoke enough sense of the heaviness of her load? Did the spittle in the image of the drunken miner lying in the gutter look like vomit instead of drool? He mumbled and paced and I paced beside him just to keep him company.

  ‘They will hate it because there is no happiness in any of them!’ Julian shoved his hands into the pockets of his hooded sweatshirt.

  ‘No, they won’t. Your work is beautiful.’

  ‘Hah! Your mother’s words. That is what she says. But what do you say, Ruby?’ Julian stopped and turned me round to face him.

  I took one of his large calloused hands in mine and turned it over so that his open palm faced upwards. The pale light skimmed off the surface of his warm brown skin. I ran an index finger along one of the deep arched lines. ‘Ah, Mr Mambasa. I see that you will have twelve children in your future.’

  Julian smiled down at me and put his other hand on his hip. His teeth were straight and ever so white but I rarely saw his smile.

  ‘I am sorry,’ I retraced the line with my hand. ‘It is twelve chickens, not children. My mistake!’

  Julian laughed. I felt his fingers relax as they rested against my free palm.

  ‘Ah, but look…’ I traced my finger along a shorter line. ‘This is a line broken in some places but it remains unbroken after a point. Halfway through 1976 it is smooth until the very end.’

  ‘And what is its meaning, O gypsy girl?’ He was enjoying the game.

  I looked up at him straining my neck so that my eyes met his. ‘It means that after a very difficult journey you are now on an easier path,’ I said, without lowering my gaze. Then, as if tracing my finger on a letter in Braille, I felt for the deepest cut from the tsotsies’ blades, a sunken scar on the soft flesh of his index finger. I touched it lightly, then ran my finger deep into its crevice and held the length of my finger inside it. There was a pulse of life in the hollow of its deadened nerve endings. ‘This, Mr Mambasa, now this is a rare thing,’ I said softly, my eyes never leaving his face. ‘It is a sign that success will soon be yours. And your name will be on the lips of everyone in South Africa one day.’

  Outside the studio window the glossy starling, warmed by the fast-growing sunlight, shook off his earlier shivers a
nd let out a high-pitched chirp that was loud and strong and full of promise for a beautiful day. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

  Thandi reached Mother at home just before she was getting ready to leave for the gallery. I was standing beside her, packing my satchel for school.

  ‘Ousie! Ousie!’ Thandi wailed through the receiver so that even I could hear her desperate cries. ‘Baas is gone. The bleddy bliksem police… they handcuff him, they throw him in the van. They tear his nice black shirt…’

  ‘Thandi, wait. Slow down. Who is taken away?’ Mother held the cup of coffee that she was drinking over the sink and mindlessly began pouring it down the drain. Gone, gone, gone. The rich smell of French roast filled my nostrils and suddenly filled me with a sick, heavy feeling inside.

  ‘Baas Dashel, they catch him right as he walks into the gallery. He tried to push them off.’

  ‘But on what charges?’ Mother sat down slowly and put her head into her hands. ‘The Immorality Act! Oh God, but on what grounds…?’ Mother was quiet as Thandi spoke. ‘I see. I see.’ Her foot bobbed up and down in its soft leather mule.

  Keep things normal. Normal, I thought, so I finished preparing an egg-salad sandwich, then wrapped it in foil and put it into my satchel. I probably wouldn’t eat one bite of it at lunchtime. Janice or Clive would polish it off. My stomach squeezed in an accordion-like spasm. I knew what an ‘act of immorality’ meant. When I was fourteen, I had heard some of the boys at school talk about going to jail if they got naked with a black woman and got their ‘willy’ inside her dark ‘doos’. I had gone home and asked Father what they meant and he had told me about a law that was passed in 1950 by the South African government that was simply called the Immorality Act.

  ‘It means that nothing sexual can happen between a black person and a white person. It is, by their beliefs, considered wrong, against the law… illegal and both people will go to jail if they are caught.’ Father had seemed pained to share this information with me. ‘Ah, the joys of living in our country.’

  ‘But what if you fall in love with someone of a different colour, Father?’ I had asked.

  ‘Darling, Ruby. You cannot. Love is not allowed between a black person and a white person.’

  Now my head spun with new thoughts. Was it a black man or woman that Dashel was caught with? Everyone knew that Dashel was homosexual. A moffie as the boys at school would say, a sick-o man who liked men instead of women, but to me he was the ever-charming Uncle D.

  Mother repeated the phone number that Thandi was giving her over the phone and wrote it down. ‘Thank heavens he’s being held at the Rosebank police station and not downtown at the Fort.’ She paced the kitchen floor, absently wrapping the long phone cord round and round her arm until there was none left to wind.

  Father spoke often of the Fort. It was a place where prisoners wept when they knew they were going there. Many times they went in and never came out. Accidental death was usually the reason given.

  I went upstairs and put my school uniform on. White shirt. Blue pinafore. Normal. School tie. Normal.

  Then I went downstairs and told Mother that I wanted to go to the police station to see Dashel, but she insisted that I go to school. ‘There’s nothing you can do, Ruby, so go and learn something useful. And don’t worry. I reached your father and he is already on his way to the police station.’ She smiled weakly at me but I could see the concern etched in the lines around her mouth.

  I rode my bike faster and faster until my legs spun round in lightning fury. And as I whizzed past the green trees and the manicured lawns I saw the coils of the phone squeeze tighter and tighter round me and Father and Mother and Julian and Dashel and the gallery and Thandi. My breath seized and I gulped for air like I was suffocating in their coiled grip. I fought the urge to stop pedalling but the need to ride, ride, ride kept me in frenzied forward motion. Ride, my body commanded. Ride far away from a world as harsh and as cruel as this one.

  In record time I was at the school gates.

  Chapter Eleven

  It was hard to concentrate on Mejevrou de Jager’s lesson on Afrikaans expressions and idioms that would be important for us to use in the composition portion of our upcoming exam. Images of elegant Dashel with a torn shirt and behind bars kept flashing before me.

  ‘Smoor verlief – does anyone know what that means?’ Mejevrou tapped the word she had just written on the chalkboard with a majestic flourish from a long sharp stick as if the answer would magically appear in a puff of smoke and hang there in mid-air beside her elaborate scrawl. It was no surprise that thoughts of magic and spells came to mind in her class. She had ratty black hair and a long pointed nose. She always wore black.

  ‘Anyone?’ She scanned the silent room with her dark owl-like eyes. Her sharp stick stopped at the sight of one single raised hand.

  ‘Monica. Yes, what does it mean?’

  I felt my body tense at the sound of her name. She sat a few rows in front of me to my left and although I could not see her face I could hear the dreamy lilt in her voice. ‘Well, “lief” means love… and “smoor” means smeared or mushy.’ She giggled and flicked her long blonde hair back. ‘So I guess it means mushy in love.’ She turned her head sideways and stared directly at Desmond, who over the past few weeks had moved seats so he now sat directly to her right. She held his gaze and giggled again. Desmond grinned and blew her a kiss and the whole class tittered.

  ‘Correct!’ Mejevrou de Jager rapped her desk with her stick in delight. ‘Mushy or completely in love. When we are head-over-heels over someone we do become completely like melted butter. Yes?’

  There was a general murmur and titters of agreement from the class.

  I tried to imagine who could possibly make witchy Mejevrou de Jager feel soft and giddy, but before I could entertain any further thoughts about her romantic life she rapped loudly on her table. ‘Pay attention, class.’ She spun round and aimed the point of her stick at no one in particular. ‘There is a very important change about to take place in this country. It has to do with the Afrikaans language. Does anyone know what it is?’

  There was a choked silence in the class.

  ‘Anyone?’ She opened her owl-like eyes wide and scanned the room. No volunteers were forthcoming. There was a long silence and then she pointed the stick at the one raised hand in the classroom.

  ‘Ruby, yes?’

  My words came out slow and tight, as if the poisonous idea could barely leave my lips. ‘There is talk that the government is going to pass a law that will make all the black schoolchildren in Soweto and in every township and at every school learn all their lessons in Afrikaans instead of English.’ I mumbled the next sentence under my breath. ‘Even though most of them don’t speak Afrikaans at all.’

  ‘Very good, Ruby, but the last part that you mumbled, about them not speaking the language, is exactly why they need to learn Afrikaans.’ She circled closer to my desk and I lowered my eyes so that I did not have to look into her hard stare.

  ‘Yes, class, Afrikaans is just as important as English and it is high time it was also the language used by the Bantu.’

  No one reacted to her use of a derogatory term, Bantu, for the blacks. But apparently no one in my class cared to know or understand anything about what black people wanted.

  I felt suddenly very alone in this school of perfect white teenagers who were so flawed by their ignorance. Surely there must be a teenager like me somewhere. But where?

  I had listened to Father and Julian’s concerned discussions about this horrendous law that the government was about to enforce.

  ‘What will they think of next?’ Father had slammed his fist on his desk when Julian had told him of this looming possibility. ‘Imagine, Ruby, one day you walk into your school and are told by your teachers that all your lessons and exams will be in Japanese – and you don’t speak a word of it!’

  ‘The talk in Soweto, I hear from everyone, is that the children, they will not do it. Eve
n the little ones, eight or nine years old. They say they will not learn in the language of the oppressors.’ Julian lowered his head, ‘The government, hai! They want Afrikaans to remind us every day that we belong to them. Even the language that we must read and think in.’

  ‘There will be bloodshed.’ Father shook his head. ‘I fear that blood will flow.’

  ‘I’d fight,’ I said, ‘if suddenly I had to be taught in a language I didn’t know.’

  ‘They will not,’ Julian said. ‘They are young and poor. They are the offspring of parents who are maids and miners who bow and scrape in the presence of a white man. They let themselves be called “boy” or “girl” even when they are grown men and women. These young children in the townships, their parents will put their fear into them.’ Julian had shaken his head and sighed.

  As we filed out of Afrikaans class and made our way to the biology lab Clive caught up to me. He was fast becoming my other good pal and he, Janice and I were definitely becoming a visible trio at school.

  ‘Hey, how’d you know about all that stuff?’ Clive carried his book bag in front of his chest with one arm and pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his prominent nose with the other.

  ‘I read the newspaper,’ I answered quickly.

  From behind came a voice from one of the Desmond followers. They were sauntering behind us with their leader in the middle. They sped up and closed the gap till I could almost feel the fast-paced clacking of their well-heeled shoes on the hollow corridor.

  ‘Hey, Ruby, how’s your family? Been hearing lotsa bad things about them lately. Like trouble with the law. Huh?’ one of the boys shouted.

  ‘Yeah, you know about all this political rubbish, ’cause they’re bleeding communists!’ another added.

  ‘A red commie, hey that’s why they named her Ruby… Ruby Red!’ Desmond suddenly whooped.