The Classifier

by Wessel Ebersohn

  My father said the police had been right to shoot some of them and they should open fire whenever the township pupils misbehaved. Everyone in our family – perhaps not André – spoke about communist agitators and conspiracies against the Afrikaner. We could hardly believe the way the liberal newspapers criticised everything our police did in the riots, seeking only to fan the flames of revolution. And there was overseas influence coming from people who had never even been to Africa and had no idea how difficult things were on our continent. My father said the government was right to refuse mass burial for the agitators killed by police gunfire. That was just another tactic to cause more trouble.

  I cannot say that, before the first news of the school riots, I was aware of the pressure building in our black citizens. Perhaps it was not something we could afford to notice. The Zulu garden boy who helped Mama, the workers you saw in road gangs or in the grounds of the brickworks, the cleaners at the Indian Council building where my father had his office: I cannot remember ever thinking that any of them looked as if they could be on the verge of revolution. Although I would not have known what someone on the verge of revolution would have looked like. They were part of the landscape, like the sea, the sugar cane and the sky. That they felt the pain of their situation, that they struggled every day through an endless maze of humiliations was something I only came to realise much later.

  I did not yet know that everything in our world was changing beyond all hope of recognition. I could not see that the growing pressure we had been unable to comprehend was about to destroy everything we held dear. Our country and our world were simply going to disappear, even our history was going to shrivel up and be forgotten. The way our Voortrekkers had slaughtered the far greater numbers of Zulus at Blood River and the heroic resistance of our commandoes against the might of the British empire: no one was even going to whisper these stories in future.

  Secretly, deep inside, I think we knew that we were shrinking away to becoming nothing more than a footnote to the history of our continent.

  That was also the year that Ouma died. Oupa had started bringing her to the city regularly to see a specialist. He was not satisfied with the treatment available in Empangeni and the other small towns of Zululand. She had cancer of the pancreas. I had to look in my biology textbook to see where the pancreas is located and what it is good for. On one of their visits, I heard her tell Mama, ‘What bothers me is not that this horrible thing is going to kill me, but that I’ll never feel altogether well again.’

  On her last visit, I was with her in the garden for a while. We sat in silence, she absorbed by her thoughts and I unable to find anything to say to my dying grandmother. ‘I’m seventy-six,’ she said eventually. ‘My mother was seventy-six when she died. I always thought it was a good age to die. I’m glad that I am going to die at this age.’

  I hardly remember her funeral, but I do remember the cemetery and the cars. All the farmers from the area, a lot of the townspeople and twenty or thirty of the Zulus who worked on the farms round about were there. Like Mama, Ouma had been popular with everyone.

  I also remember her face immediately after death. She had died in hospital on one of her visits to the city. Mama had sent me to take her flowers. My parents and the girls had all planned to visit her that evening. I arrived at the hospital only minutes after she had died. I never found out whether they were supposed to let me in to see her, but the way it happened, I just walked straight into her private ward. She was on her back, her mouth slightly open and her nose drawn narrower, looking like the beak of a large bird. I had no doubt whose body it was in the bed, but the figure there was not my grandmother. She could have been carved out of plaster or moulded from clay.

  I have never understood why, but Oupa seemed smaller after her death, his shoulders narrower and his arms less muscular. He was no longer the commanding presence he had always been. The farm had stopped feeling like home, so he visited us more often. ‘It’s not good to be eighty and alone,’ he told me. ‘Chrissie, you need to grow up and come and farm with me. Then when I die, you can take over the farm.’

  ‘I’ll come as soon as I finish school,’ I told him.

  I never did farm with my grandfather, but for a year or so it was a fantasy in both our minds. It was not much more than that.

  By the end of the month in which the police had killed Hector Pieterson, the fever that had started in Soweto spread to our city. Auntie Virginia was sent home early one afternoon because of rioting in Clermont, the Zulu township near the factory where she was the bookkeeper.

  In our province, black children set their schools alight in KwaMashu, Tugela Ferry, Babanango, Amanzimtoti and other places. In some schools teachers were attacked. Here and there the police fired on pupils, occasionally killing some. My father spent still more time alone in my parents’ bedroom. My mother looked worried most of the time. But for me, and the girls too, I believe the riots were something that did not seem to have much to do with us.

  That was true until rioting broke out on the KwaDlangezwa campus. We had been on the farm when the Zululand students became infected with the national malady. Cars and buses on the campus were stoned and set alight, as were the administration building, the library and the chapel. To Oupa all of it was serious, but when they showed pictures of the chapel burning, the rioting of black youth became personal for the first time.

  As soon as the news reached us, he fetched the keys of his truck. ‘And this?’ Mama said. ‘Where are you going?’ Since Ouma’s death she had started acting like Ouma in dealing with him. She seemed to feel that she had to take over Ouma’s womanly duties, keeping an eye on Oupa, nagging when necessary. ‘No, Oupa, nothing will be gained by Oupa’s going there.’

  ‘I’m going to see.’

  ‘No, Oupa. It might still be dangerous.’

  ‘I want to see.’ There was no reasoning with Oupa when he was determined about something. Or with me either. I was already standing next to him.

  ‘And you, Chrissie?’ Mama wanted to know.

  Oupa answered for me. ‘He’s coming with me. He’s not a child any more.’

  So I went with Oupa to the Zululand campus for the second time. As we drove through the gate, it was clear that Mama’s fears of danger were unfounded. The students had enjoyed their moment of fury, lit fires, smashed windows, roughed up a few staff members, shouted their slogans and then deserted the campus. At the entrance to one of the buildings, two labourers in overalls were carrying burnt bits of furniture onto the lawn.

  From a distance we could see how fiercely the chapel had burned. The walls were blackened on all sides, especially above the windows. Parts of the roof had caved in and the only side of a grand double door at the main entrance that remained was hanging on a single hinge.

  Oupa parked in front of the building and stayed seated for a while. Perhaps entering the building took special courage. When we finally went in, I thought I saw a slight limp in his normally confident stride. No part of the chapel had burnt more fiercely than Oupa’s beautiful wooden pews. By the time the fire had died, nothing was left of them but part of an occasional charred leg, still bolted to the ground. Most of the woodwork he had paid for so willingly had been reduced to charcoal.

  We walked through the chapel in silence. Oupa was frowning deeply, his jaw set so hard it could have been made of concrete. I did not dare say anything. He found a blackened metal plaque still attached to a section of partially burnt wood. With one foot he rubbed away enough of the soot to be able to read the engraving. ‘Donated by Christoffel Bernardus Vorster, to the glory of God. 1972.’

  We were in the truck on the way back to the farm before he spoke. ‘I can’t understand it. Why would they burn the chapel? What kind of people are they? Their parents are not like this. I’ve worked with farm outas all my life and they are not like that. They would not do that, never.’ He fell silent again until we had almost reached the farm gate. When he spoke, his voice held a bitterness that surprised me
. ‘Perhaps your father is right. Perhaps we do need to be vigilant. Perhaps we are alone in the world.’

  Oupa arrived at our home the week after he and I had visited what remained of the chapel and his pews. I had to give up my room for him, sleeping on the couch in the lounge. He stayed for a few days, roaming around the house restlessly and drawing my father into conversations that stopped if I came near. On other evenings, he sat with my father at a braaivleis fire in the backyard, neither of them saying anything.

  From the time Ouma had died, he had stopped being as assertive as he had once been. But the burning of the university chapel had an even bigger effect. Now he was confused, sometimes asking the same question again and again, regardless of his having heard the answer. Later I heard my father telling Mama that he was not sure that Oupa could manage the farming without Ouma to look after him. His thoughts proved to be almost prophetic. Oupa died within a year of Ouma’s death. Before he died, he told me that, if he could, there were just two things he would have changed in his life: ‘I would have liked to die before Ouma. And I would have liked you and me to farm together.’

  forty-one

  Despite the school rebellion and all it meant, the Greenwood Park half of my life continued as if nothing had changed. The Saturday after Oupa’s funeral, I told Ruthie about him and how he had a dream of us farming together. ‘He sounds wonderful,’ she said. ‘I wish I had known him.’

  That Saturday there was a letter from Uncle William waiting for me at the Peterson home. Ma Peterson, Auntie Pearl, Johnny, Ruthie and the small kids all gathered round for me to open it. Everyone seemed fascinated by the idea that Uncle William was corresponding with me. So was I.

  I tore open the letter with the Petersons crowding so close around me it was difficult to get a clear view of the single page inside. When I was able to read it, I saw that it was a list of twenty-three Umhlanga Rocks businessmen and their telephone numbers. The short paragraph at the top of the page explained that they were all members of the local chamber of commerce and Uncle William had taken the opportunity at their recent meeting to give them a little talk about a brilliant young teenage entrepreneur and now they were all willing to sign up as clients of Dog Box Flowers.

  ‘What’s Dog Box Flowers?’ Johnny asked.

  ‘My business,’ I said.

  ‘You got no business,’ Johnny said. ‘You bullshitting us.’

  Ma Peterson connected with a right cross to the ribs before he could dodge. ‘Don’t talk dirty in front of your mother,’ she told him.

  ‘I do have a business,’ I said.

  ‘He does,’ Ruthie said. ‘Chrissie’s so clever.’ So she told them about Dog Box Flowers.

  ‘That is clever, Chrissie,’ Ma Peterson said. She looked at me, nodding her approval, as if she had at last noticed my good qualities. ‘That’s very clever. You going make good money one day, boy.’ She glanced thoughtfully at Ruthie and for the first time, I believe, she began to think of me as a suitable candidate for her daughter’s hand.

  Business matters were not really of interest to Johnny. His concentration wandered almost immediately. ‘We going to play soccer?’ he asked.

  I had come to realise that life for Johnny was uncomplicated. If he could play soccer, find a girlfriend and somehow survive the tedium of school, then everything was all right. If I had more experience of the world, I would have known that nothing was ever going to be that simple for Ruthie. She would find more in life than Johnny or just about anyone else could, but she would pay for it through the many complications of life that she would not allow herself to avoid.

  Auntie Pearl’s little yellow car added to the complexities of our Saturday afternoons, Ma Peterson often persuading her sister to take the family for a drive. The car’s small size was a blessing. At most it could take four adults, plus Solly and Delicia. Ruthie could make a case about there not being room for her in the car. Of course Ma knew why she wanted to stay home and never failed to arrange a chaperone. Ma also knew that I would not be able to join them on a family outing.

  At home, Annie spent a fair amount of time helping me with Dog Box Flowers and trying to persuade me to give her a bigger share of the business. ‘Michie’ll be at university next year,’ she told me more than once, ‘and I’ll be there the year after. I need a bigger share of the business so I can buy a car. Then when I join Michie at university, we can come home on weekends.’ I did not yield though. On most occasions these discussions, if you can call them that, ended with a furious denunciation of my character along the lines of ‘You’re a heartless person, you know that.’

  If Michie minded that Annie and I were making money and she was not, she did not show it. She was nearly eighteen and very conscious that this was her last year at school. I once overheard Michie trying to persuade Mama to let her sleep over at her friend Sonja’s home. ‘I’m not a child any more. Everybody will laugh at me if I can’t even sleep over at a friend’s house at the age of seventeen.’

  Even at the time, I thought that perhaps it was precisely because she was not a child any more that Mama was against her sleeping out. The captain of our first rugby team was visiting Michie at that time, also under the watchful eyes of the family, much like Ruthie and me. I remember wondering if they ever found a place to be alone and if they did, how far they had gone. I suspected that they had gone further than I had with Ruthie. But at least he was not one of those boys who told stories of his sexual exploits at school, whether real or imaginary. For a rugby player, he was a gentle soul, like me I thought, and I really appreciated him.

  For months, excitement had come from my Saturday afternoons at the Petersons. During the week, I was either busy with rugby, target shooting or running Dog Box Flowers. My home had become almost a place of business. I visited it to attend to my clients’ needs, eat, sleep and do as little schoolwork as possible. Other than providing a place to meet those basic needs, the home telephone was also the connection that linked Dog Box Flowers to my growing band of clients.

  Mama was my biggest supporter in the new business, taking messages that came through when neither Annie nor I was at home. At least once a month she asked me how much money I had in the bank now. Most often, when I told her, she made a sound intended to signify amazement. ‘You’re a very strange boy, Chris,’ she told me once. ‘I’m not sure it’s good that you love money so much. I don’t think the Lord wants us to. We’re not Jews, you know.’

  ‘It’s not that I love money, Mama,’ I said, ‘but I have big plans and I need money for them.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s all right then. You have to have money to do your big plans.’

  During those months, the rest of our home life was as mundane as any other. We went to church on Sunday mornings as we always had. But now I put my own money into the collection plate. ‘You have to do that if you want the Lord to bless you,’ Mama said. My fifty cents a week seemed a reasonable insurance to get the Almighty on my side. I was not sure the Lord took a serious interest in my activities, but two rands a month seemed a small expense on the off chance that he was watching.

  On the Sunday after I received Uncle William’s list, we had gone to church as always. I had struggled to stay awake through the dominee’s sermon about how children should repay all the love their parents routinely heap on them. That afternoon, the girls had some of their friends around, including Greta, whose pimples seemed to be drying up, making her marginally less unattractive than before. Mama was busy in the kitchen and Papa had disappeared into their bedroom. As no one seemed interested in my whereabouts, I rode down to North Beach to body surf. The tide was in and the waves seemed to be double my head height, charging up the beach until hardly any space was left for the sunbathers. I had always loved the sheer force of the surf, but that day the experience was more exhilarating than usual. Whenever I managed to time a wave well, the exhilaration of being swept along by its power, for a few moments feeling yourself part of the wave, was more thrilling even than scoring a try in
rugby. Only my times in the cane with Ruthie were more exciting.

  The way to body surf is to catch the wave as it breaks, a few strong strokes carrying you into position at the front of the foaming mass as it rushes towards the beach. Your head is buried deep under the water, so if you catch one right, you have to hold your breath for the next twenty or thirty seconds.

  I timed some of them so perfectly that I rode the very front of the wave almost up to the beach, sometimes only losing it when my body scraped against the sand. It was glorious.

  That evening I lay in bed, looking up at the ceiling, my body pleasantly tired after struggling against the waves all afternoon, my skin tingling with sunburn. For a while I thought about Ruthie. That was the way I usually fell asleep. But on this night, there was an intrusion. My thoughts wandered. Unbidden, the body of Abraham on the river bank returned to me. I saw again his father and mine bent over him. It had been a long time since I had last thought about him. Now, I remembered everything about that evening: my father’s party, the happiness we all felt, Uncle Stefan’s speech, the way the car hit the water, but most clearly of all, I remembered his weight on my back and his arms clasped too tightly around my neck, and then the pressure of his arms gone, and being suddenly free of his weight, gasping for breath as I tried to tell my father that I had lost him.

  At what point I released him was not clear to me afterwards, or if I had let him go to save my own life. No one else ever suggested that, but no one else ever knew exactly what had taken place.

  forty-two

  Throughout my life, the significant and the mundane seem to have been hopelessly entwined. Perhaps that is true of all lives. My grandfather had died, my relationship with my father had deepened in at least one way and my love for a girl who was forbidden to me had grown. At the same time, the rugby season was drawing to a close.