I was late for lunch, but no one said anything. Mama, the girls and my father all looked at me as if I were the sick one who might die.
seventeen
On Monday morning when we got to the office, there were already two Portuguese ladies waiting for us outside the door. They turned out to be sisters. Auntie Marjorie sent them to my desk.
The sisters were forty or fifty, and they were doing their best to be friendly, even to me. I liked the idea that people had to be friendly to me, or at least that they thought they had to. They had been among the first to flee Lourenço Marques, driving through Swaziland. Somehow they had managed to slip past the camp at Jozini and come straight to Durban.
Although I had already spent a week in my father’s office, they were my real introduction to the revolution in Mozambique. Until they appeared, my time there had been a game of spot-the-suspect.
The taller woman supported her sister as they came into the office, but she also walked slowly and her voice had a quaver like Ouma’s. It was a characteristic I had come to associate with older ladies, but in my view she was not old enough for that. The shorter of the two was probably in her forties, although it was hard to tell because of the state she was in. Her wire-rimmed spectacles were pressed tight against her cheeks. The tears that poured continually from her eyes were damming at the lower rim, then spilling down the sides. She made no effort to wipe them away.
‘She’s like this all the time now,’ the older sister said. Only the slightest accent revealed her Portuguese origins. ‘Most of the people from our farm were massacred when Frelimo arrived. Her husband and one of her sons were among them. She stopped speaking then.’
It was the first time I had heard about the Mozambican atrocities. I knew the Portuguese were coming because they were afraid. But I had heard nothing about the many who had been killed.
‘We went to our family in the city, but it was no better there. Everything is being destroyed. The hotels are closed, the cafés are being smashed, people are chased out of their houses, some houses are burnt down. Why do they do such things?’ The older sister’s words were a sort of subtitle to the tears running down the other’s face.
I could hardly believe what I was hearing. I have since realised that the Africa of those years had its Arab cities and its European ones, like Lourenço Marques. Their existence bred the deep resentments that had erupted in a place we loved.
I asked her to write down her name and her sister’s so that I could copy it onto the registration form. She told me her name was Maria Rodrigues and her sister’s name was Alberta Parreira.
While, according to the birth dates she gave me, she was the older sister, there was something strangely smooth about the skin on Maria Rodrigues’s face. She looked at me as if through the eyeholes of an expressionless mask. It took a while before I realised that her face was covered by a smooth layer of something. When that night I asked Mama, she said that it was probably base. Ladies used it to cover blemishes in their skin, she told me.
Mama, who had a very fair skin, used it herself. She was always up earlier than everyone else to ‘put on her face’, as she described what she did then. Mama did not like to be seen by anyone before she had conducted her early morning ritual.
Maria Rodriques leant towards me. As she came closer, her collar moved and my eyes fell upon the skin of her neck. It was a rich brown, much darker than her face. She must have followed the direction of my eyes, because she immediately straightened her collar. Every bit of her face seemed to have been smoothed over with the cosmetic until she was an even colour from her hair to her collar. Her dress had long sleeves and she was wearing white gloves. ‘You are very young to be doing this work,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know that people started working so young in this country.’
‘I’m a schoolboy,’ I said. ‘I’m just helping during the holidays. My father’s in charge here.’
‘Your father?’
‘Yes, he’s the head here.’
Immediately her voice took on a more urgent note. By telling her about my father, I had suddenly become a figure of power. ‘Please, talk to your father for us. You tell him we are good people and we will not be a burden to your country. We have investments in Portugal. We will cost South Africa nothing. My sister’s other son is already living here. He came last year. He has a good job as a motor mechanic.’
I cannot say whether it was a moment in which a cloud moved away from the sun and the light changed. Or perhaps it was something to do with her way of speaking. Whatever it was, I was suddenly certain that I had seen her before. ‘On your farm,’ I asked, ‘did you serve meals to visitors?’
She smiled at me and I knew, or thought I knew, that she was the woman who had served us under the avocado trees in Mozambique. She had also met us on the little jetty when we came back after seeing the crocodile. ‘Always,’ she said, ‘always. We are hard-working people. We farmed and we served meals to tourists. We are very hard-working.’
She had missed the point and I decided not to belabour it. But speaking was more difficult for me now. The passage in my throat from which speech came seemed to have narrowed. ‘I know you are. I will talk to my father.’
‘Thank you. You are a good young man.’ The younger sister did not seem to be wearing base. Her skin colour was much fairer than that of Maria Rodrigues. It was just as well for her. All the crying would, I imagined, have left channels in the cosmetic, had she been using it. I reflected briefly that the younger sister’s chances may have been better had she come alone. Her crying went over to an audible sobbing and the older sister turned to her. The movement left a smear on her collar and now a strip of brown neck was visible. Again she must have seen my surprise because she rose suddenly, telling me that she had to take her sister to the toilet. When they came back the strip of brown neck had again been carefully covered.
While they were away, another family, a man, woman and two children, came in and sat down on the chairs against the wall. At a glance I could see that the fuzzy black hair of the wife and both her children, as well as her swarthy complexion would not pass my father’s examination.
The two sisters returned. Maria Rodrigues was careful to sit completely still now to avoid smudging her make-up a second time. Her sister had stopped her sobbing, but there seemed to be no end to her tears. ‘We were in the city when Frelimo came to our farm,’ Maria was saying. ‘An army officer who was still in the city at that time told us that everyone was dead on our farm and we were not allowed to go there. If we did, we would also be killed, he said, and he would not be able to help us. But we went anyway. Our family was there. We drove at night. It took us eight hours. At times we heard gunfire and twice we passed army convoys going in the opposite direction. They tried to order us to turn around, but we kept going.’
She had spoken very quickly, seemingly afraid that I might stop her before the whole story was told. To my surprise, she really seemed to think that the boy in front of her could do something to help. ‘But we should not have gone. The bodies were everywhere, Alberta’s husband, her son, the servants: Frelimo had shot them and just left them lying there. Alberta’s son was outside in front of the house. When we got there, two jackals were eating him. Her husband’s body was inside the front door. There was a bullet wound in his throat and others in his body. We should have buried the bodies, but there was more gunfire not far away so we left, leaving them to the jackals. That made it worse for her. That was when she stopped speaking and the tears started the way you see them now.’ She reached out to take one of my hands in hers. I saw a brief flash of brown arm between glove and sleeve. ‘I want you to speak of this to your father. He is a great man and he can help us.’
‘Mrs Rodrigues—’ I tried to speak, but the constriction in my throat was still present and my voice was not working well. According to all my upbringing I should have called her Auntie Rodrigues or Auntie Maria, but doing what I was, the more formal address seemed right.
‘Miss Rod
rigues,’ she corrected me. ‘I am Miss Rodrigues.’
‘Miss Rodrigues, you are going to speak to my father after this.’
‘Oh, thank you. Thank you very much.’ Now there were tears in her eyes too. She dabbed carefully at them with her handkerchief.
Soon they had left my desk and gone into my father’s office. On the pad that I kept in my desk drawer I made my own assessment, drawing little crosses next to both surnames, Rodrigues and Parreira. I knew that her make-up would not pass the scrutiny of my father’s sharp eyes and the dark skin of one sister would prohibit the other.
As they went in, the younger, fairer sister still clinging to the older, darker one, I was reminded of Ruthie’s fair skin and her much darker mother. The question of Ruthie being examined by my father rose unbidden in my mind. Her features were fine. He would agree to that. Her skin was sallow though, in the way that he would think was suspicious. And if he saw her mother once, there would be no doubt in his mind. I drove the thought away.
After the two sisters had left, still moving slowly, the younger clinging to the older, my father called me in and handed me their application forms. He must have seen my surprise at the tick he had made in the corner of each one. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I saw what the lady was doing with the gloves and the powder and paste. After what they’ve been through, they’ll both be dead within a year. It makes no difference now, if they stay here or go to Brazil. Neither of them is going to have children here and complicate our society further with more coloured people. Let them die close to their home.’
I had to ask him about my suspicions. ‘Pa, does Pa remember that farm in Mozambique where we had lunch. I wondered—’
He was nodding. ‘I also think Miss Rodrigues was there that day. I’m not sure though.’
‘They say their farm is gone?’
‘Yes.’
‘And the one auntie’s husband?’
‘Yes, I suppose it’s all true.’
‘And all those farms?’
‘Yes, all of them.’
The stream of people from Mozambique showed no sign of letting up during the remaining days before I had to return to school. But now my new skill at spotting African facial characteristics had stopped being a matter of pride. It was not something I discussed with Mama any more. As family after family passed my desk, I heard the stories of what had happened in Mozambique. The new government in Lisbon had withdrawn their army as soon as they came to power, allowing the Frelimo rebels to storm unhindered across the country. I heard about the shootings and rapes of Portuguese Mozambicans, about Russian soldiers who had suddenly appeared to guard their country’s interests, how food had run out almost immediately, how the hotels were empty now except for Frelimo bosses who did not see the necessity of paying their bills, how gangs of blacks were moving into the nice houses of the Portuguese and tearing up the floorboards for fire wood, and how tea girls and cleaners were being made heads of companies. I also heard about the seven roadblocks between Lourenço Marques and the closest South African border, a hundred kilometres away, and how you had to pay a bribe at each one to get through.
In the few days before school restarted, I saw families whose members tried to blame the sun for how brown they were. I saw others who left the darkest family members at home and tried to register them without my father seeing them, but no excuses worked. Every person, adult and child, had to pass my father’s watchful scrutiny.
There were those who only looked at us through dull eyes that said, after what we have been through, there is nothing you or anyone can do to us – just make your finding and let us go.
I saw Auntie Marjorie take one family into the passage outside our office and tell them to go away, stay inside out of the sun for two weeks, then come back. She told a man who had brought his very dark brother, who had already somehow procured South African residence, to leave the brother at home before he came again. I realised then that this sort of thing was the reason that Snake Wilson called her a puppet. I knew that what she was doing would not be right in my father’s eyes either and once I told her so.
‘I’m just helping people a little bit,’ Auntie Marjorie said with one hand on my shoulder, ‘only good people. You won’t tell your father, will you?’
I told her no, I would never tell him and I never did.
On the way home from the office one afternoon, I spoke to my father about what I had been hearing. I was surprised that he seemed relatively unconcerned. ‘I know that many of them have had terrible experiences,’ he said, ‘but remember that the Portuguese are not a very brave people. Nothing like that could happen here. We Afrikaners are a different breed. We will allow no black takeover here. Don’t worry about that, Chrissie.’
‘Miss Rodrigues said that everyone on their farm was killed,’ I said, wondering if he had not fully understood.
‘I know. She told me the whole story too. But remember this, we are not being protected by a European coloniser. We are being protected by our own men and boys. We will all take up arms if we have to.’
I thought of my father’s shooting and I pitied the Frelimo terrorist who ventured into his gunsights.
‘You will take up arms to defend us, won’t you, Chrissie?’
I felt swollen with pride that he should ask that of me. ‘Of course, Pa,’ I said. I still had four years of high school to go, but I was ready to take up arms any time, especially if he was the one to ask me.
eighteen
The refugee that interested me more than any of the others was Rocha, whom I had heard my father and Snake Wilson discussing in our back garden the day Mama refused to have Snake at our dinner table. One of the girls at work had told me that my father and Mister Brown had been discussing him in the passage, but had stopped as soon as they realised she could hear them.
I soon discovered that, while I was in my father’s office, all sorts of people trusted me. People who ordinarily would not have shared departmental secrets with any junior, let alone a boy my age, told me what they may have told my father if they had been talking to him. One lunch time in the canteen, I managed to sit next to Sergeant van der Vyfer, the older of the two security policemen who had their office in the building. I asked him about Rocha and he told me that Rocha had been a spy for us.
‘Spying on Frelimo?’
‘No, spying on the Portuguese.’
‘But they were our friends.’
The sergeant smiled, a humourless expression. ‘You spy on both friends and enemies. That’s how the world works.’
‘But why do you spy on your friends?’
‘Because you’re never sure how long they will stay your friends. And also because there are things you want to know, but they may not want to tell you.’
‘And Rocha, will he come to live here now?’
‘I don’t think so. He was DGS and we don’t want unnecessary trouble here.’
‘What’s DGS?’
He looked at me intently, as if weighing up my intentions with all these questions. ‘Listen, little man, you should really be asking your father these things.’
‘I will ask my father, but what is it – DGS?’
‘He did in Mozambique what I do here.’
I still could not understand why there was so much excitement about Rocha, but the sergeant only smiled when I asked more questions and repeated his earlier advice. ‘You ask your father,’ he said.
That afternoon, driving home, I did as he suggested. My father, as always, was silent and seemed to be deep in thought. I began the subject in a way that I thought was altogether casual. This was a matter of general interest, nothing of great significance. At least, I tried to make it sound that way. ‘This Rocha,’ I said, ‘it seems to me he’s important.’
‘Not important at all,’ my father said.
‘But people at work talk about him.’
‘What are they saying?’
‘I don’t know, but I heard his name when people are talking, and it sounded li
ke he’s important.’
My father shook his head. ‘People always make things out to be bigger than they are. Rocha has run away from Frelimo like the rest of them and he wants citizenship here. He is afraid to go to Brazil or Portugal.’
‘Why?’
‘When you’ve been torturing people, you don’t want to fall into their hands. Rocha thinks he will be safe here.’
‘Who did he torture?’
‘You don’t need to know all these things at your age, Chrissie.’ The faintest smile crossed his face though. ‘He tortured Frelimo people.’
‘So he tortured Frelimo people for the Portuguese and he spied on the Portuguese for us.’ I was having difficulty aligning what the sergeant had said with what my father was saying. If this was the way the world worked, it seemed a pretty strange way of arranging things.
‘Who told you all this?’ The amusement on my father’s face was fading.
‘Sergeant van der Vyfer,’ I said.
‘I’ll have a word with him.’
‘He said I should ask Pa.’
‘That was correct, but he could have left all your education to me, not fill your head with all these half-facts.’
‘But Pa doesn’t tell me things like that.’
My father laughed. It was rare to hear him laugh outright and I was glad to have been the cause of it. ‘No, I don’t. I tell you what is useful to you, not this sort of thing.’ He chuckled again.
I joined in the laughter, although I could see no reason for his amusement. ‘Does Sergeant van der Vyfer torture people?’
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