The police showed no interest in those who had fallen. There were fewer than ten of them. All were struggling to their feet and starting to limp away in the direction their comrades had taken. The last one to rise was the girl in the green tunic. I could hear her crying softly as she struggled after her retreating friends.
It took only a few minutes for the police to get back into their armoured vehicles. A photographer in T-shirt and jeans had appeared. His long red hair was tied in a ponytail. He took a few pictures of the marchers who had been hit by the rubber bullets and of the shoes scattered across the street.
The only marchers still in my line of sight were the girl and a young man in ordinary clothing. He was holding his head in both hands. One of the personnel carriers passed the two of them without slowing. I fetched my bike and started back up the hill.
The gate of Currie’s Fountain was standing open. A group of five demonstrators, all in school uniform, were gathered close together as if for protection. One of the boys glanced at me. I had seen the look in his eyes on wild creatures that had come upon us unexpectedly when we went hunting on Oupa’s farm. Perhaps the five of them were the only ones who expected that there would be a regrouping, an attempt to muster some resistance.
I stopped next to them and asked, of the group in general, ‘Are any of you from Greenwood Park?’
None of them looked my way. They were determined not to show any awareness of me or the question I had asked. I tried again. ‘From Greenwood Park school? Do any come from there?’
This time there was an ostentatious element in the way they ignored me. Even startled eyes that had looked briefly at me a moment before were careful to look somewhere else. They did not want to be showing interest in what this white boy wanted, especially not one who spoke with an Afrikaans accent. They were not going to give him information about their comrades.
As I made the turn to go back the way I had come, a police vehicle came into view higher up the road, and started towards us. It was what the police called a Buffel. The Buffels were large yellow vehicles that looked like modified cattle trucks. They were used for transporting large groups of either policemen or prisoners. Barred windows and heavy steel doors at the back gave them a forbidding appearance.
At the sight of the Buffel, the members of the group at the gate all turned and ran across the sports grounds. As I watched, they reached the far side and slipped through a hole in the wire fence that would take them into the botanical gardens. In a few moments, they were lost in the shrubbery.
By this time the Buffel had stopped next to me. The driver and the other two policemen in front were looking at the place where the fugitives had disappeared. The driver said something and shook his head. All three laughed. Then they were moving again. None of them seemed to notice me.
It was only when the Buffel drove away that I saw the marchers in the back. The police must have cut off the fleeing marchers higher up the road and picked up some of them.
I rode away, turning towards Musgrave, the direction I imagined children from Greenwood Park may have taken. But now the streets were empty of anyone who looked as if they may have been among the demonstrators. I was still looking for Ruthie.
I knew the streets of that part of town well. I cut across Musgrave, picking up the Old North Coast Road just before the bridge where it crosses the Umgeni River. From the bridge there was the long uphill, two or three kilometres, towards Red Hill and Greenwood Park. The commuter traffic was just starting and streams of cars and buses were already grinding their way up the hill to the northern-most suburbs or the Zulu and Indian townships beyond.
It was a crazy time to enter Greenwood Park, especially just to ride up a busy road like the one that went straight to the Peterson home. But that is what I did. I struggled up the hill and stopped in front of the house. Johnny was in the street with a friend, kicking a tennis ball back and forth. ‘Hey, Chris, howzit?’ he called. The front door of the house was closed. Suddenly I was unsure of my welcome. And I had again attracted interest. A man who had been leaning on his front gate a few houses up the road, had turned his drowsy attention in our direction. Johnny came towards me, his friend following close behind.
‘Is Ruthie here?’ I asked.
Johnny frowned at me. Perhaps there was something different in the way I had asked it. ‘She’s up by Auntie Gertruida.’
‘You sure she’s there?’
‘She walked there two minutes ago. Ask Carl.’ The other boy was nodding. ‘What’s the problem?’ Johnny asked.
I had to be sure. ‘There was a march in town today. She wasn’t there, was she?’
‘What march?’ Johnny asked.
‘It’s okay,’ I said, starting to turn my bike around.
‘So you want to kick around with us?’ Johnny asked.
‘Not today. See you Saturday.’
I was about to go when Ruthie came out of a house a few doors up the street. She was wearing her school uniform. She came running when she saw me. This was the first time I had come visiting on a weekday. And here I was, and in my school uniform too. ‘Chrissie?’ She was smiling, obviously pleased to see me.
‘You weren’t at that march today?’
‘I told you.’ Johnny was still close by.
‘No-o.’ It was a long sound, as if she was thinking about the question while she answered. ‘We heard about it. They said we must come, but we never went.’ I must still have been looking at her expectantly, because she met my eyes a little quizzically before going on. ‘We can’t go to those things.’
‘So you didn’t go?’ Even to my own ears I was sounding foolish by now.
‘I swear he’s gone deaf,’ Johnny said. It was the second time that I had been accused of deafness on one day. He and Carl were already wandering away to go back to kicking the ball.
Ruthie walked with me, out of range of the hearing of Johnny or anyone else. ‘We never go to things like that. We can’t.’ She was looking at my face, but it was clear to her that I still did not understand. ‘What will happen if the police get cross with us and find out about Auntie Pearl and Uncle William? What will they do to us? We are not allowed to do politics. Ma told us that from the time we were small. We are making a life, she always says. And we’re doing well. We can’t ruin it that way with politics and everything. The family comes first, Ma says.’
forty-three
The day after the Currie’s Fountain march, when I got home from school, Mama was not in the kitchen or the living room or the garden. On the way down the passage, I heard her in her bedroom. She was crying so loud that I was surprised I had not heard it before. When she heard my footsteps, she opened the bedroom door, but stayed in the doorway. Tears were flooding down her cheeks. ‘Chrissie, why?’ she sobbed. ‘Why?’
The girls had appeared in the doorway of their bedroom. They were looking at me with wide eyes and almost identical expressions of stunned panic.
‘What did I do?’ I asked, but I already knew the answer.
‘What did you do?’ Mama could barely get the words out. ‘You know what you did. Don’t tell me you don’t know.’ Before I could respond, she retreated into the room, closing the door firmly.
The girls came rushing out of their room, propelled me into my own and shut the door behind them. Annie was first to speak. ‘Somebody told Mama you were rolling in the sand at La Lucia with a coloured girl on Saturday – not last Saturday, the one before. They say they saw you. Mama won’t say who it is. She’s phoned Papa already and told him. He’s coming.’ Her voice held an anxiety that could not have been greater if she had been the accused.
There was no time to think and no time to consider moral options. ‘I never,’ I said. ‘They’re liars.’
‘Where were you last Saturday afternoon?’ Michie wanted to know. She sounded calmer than Annie, but her eyes reflected the same uncertainties.
‘I sold Dog Box Flowers membership to the manager of the Umhlanga Surf Hotel. You can phone him if you
like.’
‘Papa will say that couldn’t have taken all afternoon,’ Michie said.
I scratched in my bedside drawer and brought out the list of businessmen Uncle William had sent me. I had already taken the precaution of tearing off his note at the top of the page. ‘Is this enough for you and Papa?’
The girls stared at the list together, each holding a corner of the page. ‘I told you Chris would not do anything with a meidjie,’ Annie said. ‘I’m going to show this to Mama.’
Michie glanced at her with the superior look of an older sister. ‘I only said I know how strong the urge can be. There are times when anything can happen.’
‘Sies,’ Annie said. ‘That’s disgusting.’ She started towards the door of my parents’ bedroom. ‘I’m going to show this to Mama and Papa. Chrissie didn’t have time to be rolling in the sand with anybody – even if the urge was strong.’
‘Me too,’ Michie said. ‘I’m coming.’
Michie disappeared into Mama’s bedroom, but Annie stayed a moment longer, looking straight into my eyes with that direct, searching way she had. I knew then that, whatever she was prepared to say on my behalf, she knew the truth.
It took a long moment before she turned to follow Michie. The door of Mama’s bedroom closed behind her and I tried to imagine the scene inside. More than that, inadvertently I imagined my father’s reaction and what he might say. I could see him, in his stern, unsmiling way, asking for my assurance before the Lord, that this was not true. He would stand in front of me, his arms stiffly at his side as if he were on parade and swear me to the truth. He had done it before with all of us. And I would swear.
It did not happen that way. When he got home not long afterwards, the girls and Mama were still in my parents’ bedroom. He went straight to them. I had left the door of my room slightly ajar so that I could hear what they were saying.
My father almost never raised his voice. Even when he spoke harshly, his restraint was immaculate. I had only once heard him shout at someone. Uncle Pietertjie had told a dirty joke in front of Michie when she was only eleven. Now I heard his voice, rising like a thunderbolt. ‘I knew it,’ he was saying. ‘The stories they were telling can’t be true. Look at this list. See all the places Chrissie was working in his business. He had no time for nonsense. No one must come and tell me my son was disgracing this family with a Hotnotmeidjie. They say that to my face and we’ll see what happens.’ He paused and I could hear Mama’s stifled sobs. ‘I don’t care who it is who says these things,’ my father was saying. ‘Wife, you should know better. Now, I expect dinner. We are going to sit down to dinner as a family and I will hear no more talk about these lies.’
That then was the official family position on the matter. We did sit down to dinner as a family, but it was a quiet affair. Conversation was limited to asking someone to pass the salt or cut the bread. The girls’ anxious eyes met mine from time to time, but neither of my parents looked directly at me, even once. Mama still had to wipe away the occasional tear. I could, at least, see what she was thinking. My father’s expression, closed against all communication, was the one that troubled me. That he had stood up for me had been a relief, but I could not imagine what he was thinking. The only clue was a sign I had often seen in him, the involuntary twitching of a jaw muscle that revealed his inner tensions.
After dinner we all went silently to our rooms. I tried to do my homework, but the algebra problems seemed to be in a code I had never seen before and the literature study about a book I had never heard of. In bed I thought about the lie that my father had accepted and to which Mama had somehow acquiesced. It was clear that she knew the truth. It was equally clear that Annie did. As for my father, he had made a firm decision on what he would believe. The only member of our family who may genuinely have believed me without reservation was Michie. Annie always said she was a sucker.
None of that was important. What was important was how far Greenwood Park had become in the last hour or two.
From their room I heard the mumbled sound of my parents discussing this new event. Their voices were held low deliberately and there was no possibility of my overhearing anything.
forty-four
School holidays started the next Monday. It was a relief that I did not have long to wait. The last few days of the previous week had been difficult. The possibility that my father had something special in store for me stayed with me. Every time I thought about it, the certainty grew.
I asked myself if his performance the night the news of Ruthie and me in the sand dunes reached them had been just that, a performance. I was almost certain that my father had just wanted to put a different face on the matter for the sake of what people thought of our family. As time passed, the thought grew that his intention was to deal with me in private, man to man. And if that was what he wanted, what could he possibly have to say to me? The report that had taken a week to come back to him about me and Ruthie was so far from what he perceived even to be possible, let alone the right way for an Afrikaner boy to behave, that no words would have been able to deal with the matter. What could he do? Kill me? I wondered about the Bible story of another Abraham almost sacrificing his son, Isaac. God stopped him just in time. The knife had already been raised to strike. I hoped that God would be on hand in my case too.
I stumbled through the final day of school and the weekend while these questions, and many others, chased through my mind. In history class I was asked by the teacher who I thought might have been the biggest influence on young Adolf Hitler and answered, ‘His father.’
The teacher had shaken his head and yelled, ‘Where have you been the last two weeks, Vorster? He disliked his father and he had little contact with him. How many times have I told you that? Why don’t you read your textbook?’
Ruthie’s family had taken her away to relatives in Kokstad for the weekend, so seeing her had not been possible. If I remember rightly, only she and her mother went with Auntie Pearl and Uncle Courtleigh, ‘to try out Auntie Pearl’s new car,’ they said.
In the two years since I had last worked in my father’s office, I had grown almost a head taller. This time I probably did not look out of place. I was still only fifteen, but I had started shaving and told myself that I could have passed for eighteen.
Now there had been no revolution in Mozambique to create a lot of extra work in my father’s office. In fact, he and Auntie Marjorie were managing easily without me. I had not seen her in the intervening two years and she acted thrilled to see me when she came in. ‘I always thought you were a nice-looking boy,’ she said. ‘But look at you now. You’ve become a young Adonis.’
I never could find an answer to that sort of thing. I did not think of myself as a young Adonis. In fact, I never knew what an Adonis was. So I let her hug me and said, ‘Hello, Auntie Marjorie, your hair looks nice today.’
That was a complete falsehood, but she stepped away from me, touching her feathery, greying hair lightly with one hand. ‘Really?’ She even blushed slightly.
I was saved the need for further hypocrisy by my father ushering me to the desk where I had sat on the previous occasion. During the week that followed, Auntie Marjorie struggled to find work for me. The office filing took me no more than half an hour a day. I started running messages, in the process rejuvenating my friendship with Snake Wilson, who was now in charge of the shipping office. It was a job that allowed him the opportunity to exercise his vigilance by looking for black sailors who may have gone for terrorist training while in Dar es Salaam, Mombasa and other African ports. The identification books for black sailors did not carry stamps like passports. The department had not considered it necessary to go to the expense of passports for lowly black sailors. The theory was that, without passports, their movements would be limited to port cities. The creators of this policy had underestimated the world’s disgust at apartheid. The result was that no one could tell how long a sailor had been in any port. In later years, while involved in the liberation strugg
le myself, I heard that manipulating the sailor’s identity book had been the centre of a major channel for members of the liberation forces going for training in the use of weapons and explosives. Perhaps Snake suspected something of the sort. It was obvious that he mistrusted all black sailors. The office gossip had it that every few months he sent a memo to head office, pointing out the weakness in the system and suggesting that the sailors be issued with passports. They never changed the system, so I doubt that even head office took Snake seriously. I cannot say if he was happy to see me, but he put up a sturdy pretence.
Running messages kept me busy, but it also kept me out of the office. My father soon stopped it. He said he needed me close by if certain important matters came up. It seemed that these certain important matters were the reason I was again working in his office. It was not only that he wanted to ensure that the devil did not find work for my idle hands. Some aspect of my education needed to be developed.
This new chapter in my education started on the Wednesday morning. My father called me into his office and told me to move a chair to the side of his desk, sit there and pay careful attention. I was to leave his office door open. A few minutes later a female clerk from the registration desk looked in at the open door, stepped inside and gestured to someone who was just out of my line of sight.
A plump young woman, carrying a baby no more than a few weeks old, came in. She was wearing a bargain basement outfit of T-shirt, skirt and flat shoes. Her white legs were bruised. I had seen other girls from poor families whose legs looked like that. I have never discovered how they got to be that way. Her baby was wrapped in a faded blanket.
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