The Redemption of Oscar Wolf

by James Bartleman

  One week later, the pieces of the puzzle were in place and Oscar remembered what had happened. Pallbearers carried coffins draped with the flags of the African National Congress onto the football grounds as massed choirs of women sang “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika.” There were hymns, prayers, and speeches, and the crowd roared. The drizzle became a downpour and the smell of coal smoke became overpowering. Pallbearers hoisted back onto their shoulders the coffins and raised their right arms in clenched salutes before exiting the grounds followed by the clerics, the members of the banned organizations, the people in their thousands, and Oscar Wolf. Policemen forced their way into the crowd to attack the pallbearers and force them to drop the coffins and spill the bodies onto the ground. Fighting broke out and Oscar went to the rescue of an old woman only to be chased back to his car where South African policemen were waiting for him. They punched and kicked him and he fought back, at first holding his own before being overpowered by superior numbers. He broke loose and ran through the streets until he found refuge in a shebeen, where, despite his decision never to touch liquor again, he had a drink, or two or three or four, with someone who reminded him of Anna while he waited for an opportune moment to flee Soweto. He fought with someone who said something bad about his mother and was thrown outside into the rain. The rest he did not remember; he did not want to remember.

  4

  Two weeks after the police dropped him off at the hospital in Pretoria, Oscar’s doctors removed the wires from his damaged jaw and told him to go home.

  “I’m giving you a week to pull yourself together,” Ambassador Henderson said when he went by to see him later in the day. “Then you got to pack up and leave for Ottawa where your family can take care of you.”

  But Oscar didn’t want to go back to Ottawa. He saw himself eating greasy grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch in some grungy restaurant in downtown Ottawa, sharing an office with someone who had just returned from Paris or London and who spent his time talking about all the important people he had met, going home in a crowded bus after work to a one-bedroom, sparsely furnished apartment, cooking dinners of wieners and beans and piling the dirty dishes one on top of the other in the sink, and spending his evenings alone watching NHL hockey matches and television game shows. And dashing from his bus stop through sleet and snow over slush-covered sidewalks to his overheated domicile in winter or lying in bed with the windows open in summer as Ottawa sweltered through yet another heat wave.

  If only he had challenging work to look forward to on his return, none of this would matter. But he would be sent once again, he was sure, to another dead-end job for the indefinite future. No, for all its problems, South Africa was where Oscar wanted to spend the next three years of his life.

  “But I don’t have family in Ottawa,” Oscar told the ambassador. “I’d rather stay here and finish my posting where I can continue to help fight apartheid.”

  “That’s quite out of the question,” the ambassador said. “You know how they are at headquarters. Once a decision has been taken, there’s no going back on it. I think they’ve found someone to replace you.”

  “It would look like I was a coward, running away after a beating. That wouldn’t be good for Canada’s image,” Oscar said. “I wouldn’t be able to attend any more funerals if I stayed, but there are lots of other things around here I could do. Maybe I could work in the consular section, helping Canadian tourists who land in jail or have lost their passports. Maybe I could find something to do in the administration or trade sections.”

  Ambassador Henderson did not welcome these suggestions.

  “When headquarters proposed that you come here to take on this delicate job, I warned it that something like this could happen if it posted someone with your background here, and I was right. You let alcohol get the better of you when you were in Colombia and it is no secret you drank too much in Australia. The Department seemed to think you had stopped drinking when it sent you here, but it was wrong and you’ve made a fool of yourself and your country again here in South Africa. I can’t trust you and you must leave.”

  “I admit I’m an alcoholic,” said Oscar. “But with the exception of the incident in Soweto, I’ve been on the wagon since I left Canberra. Surely an alcoholic is allowed to make a mistake from time to time. I’ve learned my lesson.”

  “I don’t believe you, Oscar. Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic, they say. And there’s more to it than that. You never got along with the people you were supposed to be helping. Although I’m sure you would never admit it, that’s because you think you’re better than everyone else around here when you’re really not. That’s why your contacts, including your diplomatic colleagues, laugh at you behind your back.”

  “But with respect, sir, those people sent me flowers and get well messages after the police assaulted me,” said Oscar.

  “Are you sure it was the police who assaulted you, Oscar?” the ambassador said. “I think there’s some truth to the allegations that you drank too much after the funeral and got into some sort of brawl. At least that’s what I’m hearing from my friends in BOSS.”

  “If you really think that’s what happened,” said Oscar, “why haven’t you told headquarters?”

  “I haven’t done so,” said the ambassador, “because I’m aware of some of the things you’ve been up to in the past and I don’t want to ruin your career any more than it has been already. So why don’t you just leave and make a fresh start elsewhere, out of my sight. I’ll give you a good report for your file if that will make you happy.”

  Chapter 11

  REDEMPTION

  1

  Oscar was disappointed but not surprised when his direct appeal to the undersecretary to be allowed to stay in South Africa remained unanswered, and he returned to Canada to his old job in Information Division. His colleagues, however, who had not forgotten his behaviour during his previous postings, were outraged that he would defile a funeral by getting drunk afterward and tarnishing the name of the Department and would hardly speak to him. And it was not just the officers, clerks, and secretaries in Information Division who treated him this way. No one, not even the cleaners, parking-lot attendants, security guards, or commissionaires, people he used to look upon as friends, people who would drink coffee and gossip with him in the cafeteria, wanted to be seen with him. He was not invited to provide his views on the status of indigenous people around the world when United Nations Division organized a colloquium on the subject in the auditorium. No one asked him to spend weekends hiking and canoeing with them at their cottages in the Gatineau Hills. And perhaps it was just his imagination, but the waiters in the modest restaurants he frequented apparently knew who he was and took pleasure in seating him at tables located next to the toilets.

  The only person in Ottawa, it seemed, who was unaware of Oscar’s missteps and ostracism within the Department was Joseph McCaully, the minister of External Affairs. He came from an old moneyed family in Toronto that for generations had faithfully allocated ten percent of its income to good causes abroad and in Canada. Before the war, as patriarch of the family, McCaully had directed the bulk of the donations to supporting missionary work in China. After the expulsion of the missionaries by the communists in 1949, he began contributing to the fight against malaria and bilharziasis in Africa. At home, he helped fund soup kitchens, housing for the homeless, clubs for lonely men and women, as well as shelters for abandoned dogs and cats. Keenly interested in the latest intellectual developments affecting church doctrine, he attended workshops in the basement of his progressive church on the different approaches to existentialism by Sartre and Camus, on the nuances in the positions of Karl Barth and Rudolph Bultmann to Biblical criticism, and on the theological significance of the big bang theory.

  Although he was an active member of a charitable organization that donated used clothing and books to Indian children in the north, McCaully scoffed at the idea Canada’s Indians were as badly off as the people in Africa. The only Indian
s he had met were the people at the Indian Camp at Port Carling. They always smiled when they sold him the beaded moccasins and quill boxes decorated with sweetgrass that he liked to hand out to friends and family at Christmas. They laughed at the harmless little jokes he told as he made his purchases, and he assumed they liked him and were happy, and if they were happy, he supposed that all Indians liked white people and that all Indians were happy. Not that he gave the matter much thought.

  An incident occurred in the summer of 1935, however, involving an Indian teenager, which had bothered him for years. Like many of his Forest Hill friends, he had a summer home on Millionaires’ Row on Lake Muskoka where he was a neighbour of the Fitzgibbons. He was drinking a Bloody Mary on their front veranda at one of their popular Sunday brunches when their daughter, Claire, led a young man up the stone steps to introduce him to her parents. He had never forgiven himself for laughing when the hostess refused to shake the outstretched hand. He had never recovered from the shame of snickering when the unwelcome guest, his hand shaking from nervousness, spilled some freshly squeezed orange juice onto the floor. And to his everlasting dishonour, he had not protested afterward when the Fitzgibbons made ugly racist remarks about Indians and announced their intention to put a stop to the friendship between their daughter and the boy.

  In the years that followed, McCaully had tried to keep track of the young man whose name he found out was Oscar Wolf. The local Presbyterian minister said he had left for California in the fall of 1935 to become a famous actor playing Indian roles in movies, had later joined the army and won medals for bravery, and still later had joined the Department. The last he had heard of him was one summer day several years earlier when he had come into Port Carling in his motorboat from his place on Millionaires’ Row to do some shopping to find the village filled with visitors. He made enquiries at the general store and learned that Oscar had brought a delegation of Australians to the Indian Camp for some reason or another. And if he hadn’t had to get back to receive some guests, he would have found a way to speak to him privately and ask him to forgive him for his unacceptable behaviour at the Fitzgibbons’ brunch.

  After he was appointed minister of External Affairs following a by-election victory in the spring of 1961, McCaully asked about Oscar.

  “He joined the Department in 1948, served abroad in New York, Bogota, and Canberra, and is now a first secretary at our embassy in South Africa,” the undersecretary told him.

  “I remember him well,” the minister said. “He was just a delivery boy at the general store at Port Carling in the mid-thirties when I met him. He apparently had a lot of hardship in his life, losing his father in the Great War and his grandfather in a fire. I’m so pleased that he’s done so well, joining the Department and becoming one of its star officers.”

  “You’re absolutely right, minister. You’re absolutely right as always. And I used to think that way about him as well.”

  Then one day in the fall of the same year, the prime minister took McCaully aside after Question Period in the House of Commons to tell him that leaders at international summits no longer sought him out to shake his hand. “I think it’s because the world is forgetting the role I played in the fight to expel South Africa from the Commonwealth. People have short memories and we have to keep coming up with fresh initiatives if I’m to continue my fight to keep up Canada’s international standing.”

  When the minister told him that current Canadian efforts in South Africa were largely confined to sending a first secretary to funerals in Soweto to show solidarity with the opponents of apartheid, the prime minister shook his head in frustration.

  “Attending funerals is all very well and good, McCaully, but we need to do something more dramatic, something that will bring credit to Canada, something I can talk about at international summit meetings, something that will make the other leaders want to shake my hand.”

  The minister spoke to the undersecretary, who spoke to his deputy, who was someone so brilliant that when confronted with an exceptionally difficult foreign policy problem, he could immediately think of a half-dozen mutually exclusive solutions to it. He in turn convened a working group of like-minded brilliant officers to meet with the minister to find an answer to his request. In the ensuing discussions, someone proposed cutting off the imports of South African diamonds, but someone else said newly engaged couples in Canada and around the world would protest. Someone proposed banning the import of titanium used in the manufacture of aircraft fuselages, but someone else said Canada’s aerospace industry would collapse. Someone proposed asking NATO to cancel its secret military alliance with South Africa, but someone else said Western security would be jeopardized if NATO warships couldn’t use the Walvis Bay and Simon’s Town naval bases in the event of a war. At that point, the meeting ended and the participants, pleased at showing off their knowledge of South African matters to the minister, left the room.

  Not knowing what to do, unaware that most policy discussions in External Affairs ended inconclusively, and anxious to come up with something to satisfy the prime minister, McCaully thought of Oscar.

  “Bring that young man back from Pretoria,” he told the undersecretary when he next saw him. “He’ll have the answer.”

  “It just so happens his posting to South Africa is over,” said the undersecretary. “He’s back at his old job in Information Division.”

  “The minister wants to see you right away,” a secretary told Oscar, poking her head around the door of his basement cubbyhole office. Since no minister had ever displayed the slightest interest in seeing him in all the years he had spent in the Department, Oscar thought he was about to receive bad news. Maybe the minister wanted to reprimand him in person for his errors of judgement in South Africa. Maybe he would tell him to clear out his desk and find another job elsewhere. On the elevator, the other passengers paid close attention when they saw him push the button for the third floor where the minister and his staff had their offices. Other than the undersecretary, it was highly unusual for career civil servants to visit that floor. “I guess they’re finally going to get rid of you,” a particularly unfriendly colleague told him.

  When the door opened, Oscar saw before him the austere reception area where for generations ministers of External Affairs had received visiting foreign dignitaries and ambassadors making their courtesy calls. To his right was a dim corridor lined with dusty black-and-white photographs of former ministers and colour prints of members of the royal family on tour in Canada. And standing directly in front of Oscar and smiling broadly was Minister McCaully himself.

  The minister reached in and pulled Oscar toward him, embraced him and pumped his hand forcefully, saying “Oscar, Oscar,” with such passion, Oscar was afraid he was going to kiss him. “Come with me,” he said as he led him into his office. “This is where I work,” he said, pointing at a battered pedestal desk and a swivel chair. Behind the desk was a table piled high with old newspapers and tattered files with red “secret” stickers on them. On the wall behind the table, the eyes of the Fathers of Confederation wearing top hats and swallow-tail coats followed visitors to the room unsmilingly from a faded black-and-white picture. To the right, a long-condemned and unused grey marble fireplace dating from the previous century held a bouquet of dried flowers as decoration in its grate.

  “Please take a seat,” the minister said, leading him to a hard-backed sofa along the left wall in front of a narrow opaque lead glass window overlooking a lawn and the Centre Block of Parliament. As a butler poured coffee, the minister said, “I don’t suppose you remember me.”

  Oscar did not remember him and instinctively didn’t like him. Why, he asked himself, was the minister being so nice to him when everyone else in the Department was convinced he was a menace to the conduct of Canada’s foreign relations? He listened distractedly as the minister added that he had a summer home on Lake Muskoka and did his shopping at the general store in Port Carling. “I know the Indian Camp well,” he said, g
etting Oscar’s attention. “I even used to know your grandfather before he died in that terrible fire back in 1930. I used to buy moccasins from your mother. You spent your summers there, didn’t you? That’s what the local people have told me.”

  Oscar nodded, not liking the fact the minister knew so much about his family and early life. It formed part of his background that he had kept hidden from the Department. “Yes indeed,” the minister said, “I have been visiting the Indian Camp to buy souvenirs and fresh fish for as long as I can remember. But I haven’t asked you here for old time’s sake. I wanted to discuss with you something terrible that happened in August 1935 that has bothered me since that time.”

  Oscar put down his coffee cup and looked at the minister who was wiping away tears from his eyes. Was the minister referring to his role in helping Clem blast a crater in the dump road? He thought that incident had been forgotten years ago.

  “You must wonder why I’ve waited twenty-six years for this moment,” the minister said. “I was at the summer home of the Fitzgibbons when Claire brought you to brunch. I was one of the guests who laughed when you spilled orange juice on the floor. I said nothing to defend you when Hilda and Dwight Fitzgibbon later said nasty things about your people. For twenty-six years I have lived with this guilt on my conscience. For twenty-six years, I have wanted to tell you I was sorry and to beg your forgiveness.”

  “I’ve altogether forgotten about that incident,” Oscar said, lying politely. “You did nothing wrong anyway. That’s the way people behaved in those days — today, as well, for that matter. But if it makes you feel any better, I’m happy to forgive you.”