The Classifier

by Wessel Ebersohn

  We went to the movies and sat in an all-male audience, wondering why the Portuguese always seemed to leave their women and girls at home. In the movie the actors spoke Spanish and the subtitles were in Portuguese. We understood very little, but it was fun anyway.

  The pavement cafés were like nothing in our country. At home, all cafés and restaurants that served anything even slightly alcoholic had to be inside in case we behaved badly. At least, that was the explanation adults gave me. On the streets of Lourenço Marques, we more than once tried to speak to white-uniformed policemen to get directions, but they spoke only Portuguese and we learnt little from them. We saw prawns as big as small lobsters at the market next to the harbour and managed to persuade my father to let us taste the black Mozambique beer. It was a surprise when he agreed to a quarter glass of beer, the rest of the glass filled with lemonade. Being outside the borders of our country and in this Portuguese city seemed to be good for him. He was more genial than usual, laughing more and giving in to our pleading more often.

  We visited lonely beaches where the water was warm and you saw nobody in either direction as far as the horizon. In one place there was a broad sand bar some thirty metres from the beach where the water was only ankle deep. Once we saw whales out in the bay.

  One of the high points of the holiday was a visit to a farm not too far from the city. We had lunch under avocado pear trees where each fruit was covered by a little bag to protect it against insects or hail. A Portuguese lady, who was too dark for my father to feel comfortable treating as an equal, walked among the tables while black waiters served us delicious food soaked in olive oil. My mother and father drank almost a whole bottle of wine. The girls, Abraham and I each got a small glass that time. Afterwards we were taken up the river where we saw a crocodile that Abraham said was longer than the boat we were in. I thought so too, but had not wanted to say it out loud in case my father disagreed.

  When we got back, the lady who had served us at lunch was at the jetty to meet us. In perfect English she told us how good it had been to have us as guests and she hoped some day to see us again. I remember how good I had felt when we came home. To me, Mozambique was the most wonderful place on earth.

  My memories of the ten days we spent in Mozambique had the clarity that comes with being almost completely carefree. Even to a thirteen-year-old, it had all seemed so different, so voluptuous, compared to the narrow, formal world in which we lived.

  I could not believe that those placid streets and beaches were now occupied by soldiers and that gun battles had been fought for control of the city and, worst of all, that the terrorists had won. ‘It’s not a Portuguese city any more,’ my father had said. The way he said it made it clear what a terrible thing that was.

  As for me, with all my thirteen years of accumulated wisdom, I thought it was a terrible disgrace that the Portuguese had run away. They should have stood firm and fought back. They should have been prepared to die for their country. Abraham said that what they had done was a black mark against their honour and they would never be able to erase it. And I agreed. What about those white-uniformed policemen? What were they doing about it? After all, they had guns.

  Despite my strong feelings about Portuguese duty and honour, the events in Mozambique had not immediately been a pressing reality. Far more immediate in my life were two other events. First among these was my father bringing home a bicycle. ‘There, ride that,’ he had said. ‘This is what a boy of your age should be riding.’

  ‘Is it mine?’ It was not my motorbike, but it had wheels and it would get me around town. And, of course, now I could ride. ‘Thanks, Pa,’ I said. ‘Thanks very, very, very much.’

  ‘It’s a pleasure to give it to you, Chris,’ he replied. He even smiled.

  Later I heard him say to Mama that perhaps the motorbike was his fault. He should have got me a bicycle much sooner.

  The second important event had to do with how I was to spend the approaching school holiday. Clearly, he had been thinking about my delinquency because he had plans for me that did not include allowing me the time to conjure up new surprises for him and Mama. I was not going to have the opportunity to spring something like my motorbike on them again. One evening, during the last week of the school term, he called me into the lounge and told me to sit down. Then he explained to me that I was growing up and, with holidays approaching, he wanted me to spend my time usefully. It would be good for me, he said. He explained that I would be going to work with him during my holidays. I would help him around the office. Especially now, with all the Portuguese streaming into the country from the north, he could use all the help he could get. I could do filing and so on, maybe even filling in applications from Portuguese wanting to stay in the country. Also, I would learn valuable things that would stand me in good stead later in life.

  My reaction was spontaneous. I tried to stop it while it was coming out of my mouth, but I was too slow. ‘Am I getting paid?’ I asked.

  I could have slapped him through the face. It would not have had greater effect. His head jerked back and he took in a sharp breath. His eyes hardened, but, as was his way, he restrained himself, only answering after he had thought about it. ‘I’ll double your pocket money,’ he said, ‘for the period of the holidays.’

  Wow, a whole rand for a businessman like me, I thought. But this time I was on my guard and said nothing. After the motorbike episode, I had spent a few hours explaining to my father how I had generated the money for the motorbike, leaving out the part about the vases. He had listened carefully, but it was clear that he did not understand my need for funding and I had remained a fifty-cent-a-week receiver of pocket money in his mind.

  Despite my reservations, I was delighted. For perhaps the second time in my life – the hunt in which he had killed the eland had been the first – he was taking a real interest in me. I would be going to work with him. To put it plainly, he and I would be going to work together, without Mama and the girls, or even Abraham.

  ‘What should I wear?’ I asked.

  ‘You must wear a tie and a white shirt. Your school pants, shirt and shoes will do. If your old jacket is too small I’ll get you a new one. If you dress right and you comb your hair carefully, you can look four or five years older than you are. You’re a big kêrel.’

  All of this surprised me. That he even noticed what I wore was unexpected. The part about combing my hair was a challenge. It had always been wild and spiky. I had to make it really wet and press it down while combing to bring it to some kind of order. ‘I’ll do my best,’ I said.

  ‘Good. I think your first day of the school holidays is Monday.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’ll also be your first day at work. We’ll go and get you a jacket on Saturday.’

  It was a fine jacket, made of a sort of corduroy material. It had inside pockets on both sides where I realised I could keep private stuff. My school blazer only had an inside pocket on one side. My jacket also had a smaller pocket inside one of the big inside pockets. When I asked Mama what it was for, she said, ‘Maybe for business cards.’

  Where do you get business cards? I wondered, but kept the thought to myself. I did not want Mama laughing at me again or ruffling my hair. I felt that I was beyond that sort of thing now. Having a business card that you could just whip out when someone wanted to contact you, that would be something. What would mine have said in the days when we were supplying the Petersons’ stalls? Stolen graveyard vases at reasonable prices!

  My father’s office was in the old Indian Council building, overlooking a road that was called Marine Drive in those days, but has a different name now. Beyond the road were the bristling masts of the small craft harbour. The location had been carefully chosen. On the seventh floor, you had a view over the small craft in the foreground, and most of the main harbour beyond. This uninterrupted view allowed passport control to keep an eye on all ship traffic coming in and going out.

  My father was second in command i
n the building. His senior, an old English-speaker by the name of Brown, was seen as a fellow traveller, not one really passionate about his work. I learnt later that all political decisions were made by my father and rubber-stamped by Mister Brown, who was only two years away from retirement.

  Port Health was on the third floor. Passport control, my father and Mister Brown were on the seventh with the best view of the harbour. The election office and the other Department of the Interior offices were on the sixth. Most of the building belonged to the Indian Council, an entity that had been created to represent the interests of people whose ancestors had come from that part of Asia. They could make representations to the government, if they had problems, my father told me, but we had the final say. The security policemen who were responsible for the traffic in and out of the harbour had their office round the corner in Fisher Street, but seemed to have business in our building on most days.

  That his department had to share a building with the Indians irritated my father intensely. Members of the Indian Council, always well dressed in suits that looked expensive and smiling warmly at the white employees of the department in their cheap clothing, would often be in the lifts with us and pass us in the corridors. There was nothing my father could do about that, but he did set aside one lift for the use of the Zulus and bar them from the others. ‘Blacks Use Lift 4,’ the sign read.

  The sign stayed up until the minister paid a visit during the week of my holiday and saw it. Whenever there was an opportunity, I tried to get close to the minister. I had never before been in the company of anyone so exalted. My father had told me that we could all learn from him because he was a great man. He stopped in front of my father’s sign. After studying it for a while, he cleared his throat. ‘Bernard,’ he said, ‘in an ideal world that would be fine, but our enemies will soon be saying that there are too many of them for just one lift and our policy of separate development is not fair.’

  ‘Mister Minister, we are surely not going to let our enemies decide our policies for us,’ my father replied.

  ‘Of course not, Bernard,’ the minister said gently, ‘but the lifts are, after all, a small matter.’

  Not to my father. To him, there were no small matters. Everything was a matter of principle. Life held no shades of grey. Something was either right or it was not right, and for us to be jostled in the lifts by the black majority was not right. ‘This sort of thing is the thin edge of the wedge,’ he told my mother that evening. A lot of things were the thin edge of the wedge to him. ‘I’m not against anyone. I just want everyone to have their own facilities. It is simply the most logical way to organise society. I’m shocked at the minister’s attitude. This has always been our policy. Since when has it changed? I haven’t heard the prime minister say it’s different.’ My father never accepted the minister’s decision, but he had no choice. The sign had to come down.

  I was given a desk in the antechamber outside the door to my father’s office. The only other person in the room was a motherly lady whom my father called Marjorie. I called her Auntie Marjorie, an arrangement of which my father clearly approved. I saw him nod thoughtfully the first time he heard me address her. She was short and plump and had the sort of well-cushioned body against which small children love to cuddle. Her hair was cut to just above her shoulders, uncontrollable grey wisps curling in every direction. Her desk was on one side of my father’s office door and mine on the other. There were chairs against the wall opposite us where people who were waiting to see my father could sit.

  Auntie Marjorie told me that she was very glad of my help. She had to fill in the documentation for everyone who came before my father. The Aliens Office downstairs did most of the paperwork, but now that there were more than a hundred Portuguese every day, they sent all the doubtful cases straight to us and we had to fill in the forms. At that stage, I did not yet understand what constituted a doubtful case, but I was soon to learn.

  My father did not want anyone to be kept waiting because we were slow. If a family came in – and almost all came as families – and Auntie Marjorie was occupied, I had to fill in the form for the newcomers.

  At tea time on my first day, I went down to the canteen, queued for coffee and a Danish pastry, then sat down alone at one of the vinyl-covered tables. There were girls in their early twenties at the next table chattering away enthusiastically. I wished I could sit with them, but none of them even noticed the admiring schoolboy at the next table.

  ‘My boyfriend took me to the Roma eventually,’ one of the girls was telling the others, amid much giggling, ‘but I had to bribe him.’

  I was wondering how much the bribe had been before the boyfriend took her to Durban’s only revolving restaurant. She was pretty. I would have taken her for nothing, except that I had no money since our business collapsed. While I was still wondering about it, a man by the name of Wilson entered the canteen carrying a newspaper. I had seen him at home once or twice when he came to see my father. He paused for a moment to look round the canteen. His eyes rested on me and he nodded, then waved me to join him at a table on the other side of the room. I would have preferred staying where I was and trying to hear more about what the girls were doing with their boyfriends, but I could hardly avoid him. To ignore him and stay close to the girls could have repercussions that might just reach my father.

  My new friend was generally known among his workmates as Snake Wilson. Even Mama called him that. I gathered that this had to do with his readiness to report to his superiors any of the misdemeanours, especially political misdemeanours, of other staff members. He was also the only person I knew whose home language was English and whom my father trusted politically. ‘Snake’s telling on others is his strategy for getting himself promoted,’ my father had told Mama, breaking his usual silence at dinner table. ‘I don’t like it much, but it’s useful for management to have someone on the staff who keeps his ears open for disloyal behaviour.’

  ‘Is it working?’ I had asked.

  He frowned at me. ‘Is what working?’

  ‘His strategy for getting promoted.’

  ‘You don’t need to worry about that sort of thing at your age,’ he said.

  Snake waved at me a second time before I got up to go to his table. ‘Chris,’ he said, holding out a hand for me to shake. ‘It is Chris, right?’

  ‘Yes. I’m here for the school holidays.’

  ‘Which section are you working in?’ His newspaper lay folded on the table. As I got to know him, it soon became clear that, for Snake, having someone to impress would always be preferable to whatever was in the day’s news.

  ‘I’m working with my father.’

  ‘That’s good. You’re going to learn a lot. Your father’s a very important man.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Let me tell you something.’ He leaned closer to me and lowered his voice, not quite to the whisper of the girl who had bribed her boyfriend, but low enough to avoid being heard at the other tables if they were not paying attention. ‘Without your father’s political leadership, this office would be in trouble. The other seniors—’ He shook his head without finishing his sentence.

  ‘I’m going to learn everything I can,’ I told him.

  ‘Good man,’ he said. ‘This country needs young men like you.’ With that, his eyes fixed on something on the other side of the room. ‘You’ll have to excuse me, I’m afraid.’ He rose, holding out his right hand to shake mine again. ‘I’ll see you around. You’re going to learn a lot in your dad’s office.’

  He hurried across the room to join Mister Brown, who had just come in, leaving his newspaper on the table. Thanks a lot, I thought. I could hardly now go back to my seat next to the girls to listen to more of their conversation.

  I glanced at the front page of the newspaper. It carried a photograph of a length of shark net that had become wrapped around its supporting cable during a storm. The newspaper commented that this should have been noticed earlier. All bathers were at risk when
the nets looked like that. The story ended on page two and next to its ending was a small item about a boy who had successfully divorced his parents. This had taken place in America. Only in America, I thought. Plenty of strange things happened there. And what sort of boy wanted to divorce his parents anyway? I was busy with a story about the activities of a local amateur theatrical club when I realised that tea was over and people were returning to their offices.

  That first day I did four families. Auntie Marjorie must have done about twenty, but she told me I had been very useful. On the way home my father also praised me. ‘You did good work today, Chrissie. My job is much easier if the front office works well.’

  On the next day I did the paperwork of ten Portuguese families, one man telling me that I must be very brilliant to do this work while so young. After he had left, Auntie Marjorie laughed at that, saying that the Portuguese always flattered you when they thought you had power over them.

  It was late on the second day that I started to understand about doubtful cases. Almost all the Portuguese Mozambicans were applying for a temporary permit to stay in the country while they waited for permanent residence. If the one they dealt with in passport control thought that an applicant or a member of the applicant’s family might be too dark to be registered as a white person, that person was sent to us in the race classification office.

  Throughout the week, the number of people sent to my father increased by the hour. By Wednesday I was doing almost as much documentation as Auntie Marjorie. I would hand her the quadruplicate forms from my book after I had dealt with each family. I paid no attention to what she did with them after that. At lunch that day, she sat with me in the canteen. She had brought her book of registration forms with her. ‘Chrissie, we are just getting too many people now. I will have to show you how to do the rest of the work.’