The Classifier

by Wessel Ebersohn

  My father gestured to a chair and she sat down. The clerk handed him her registration form, then closed the door and stood in front of it, as if on guard. ‘Miss—’ my father began, searching for her surname on the document.

  ‘Miss van der Spuy,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’ He seemed to be confirming it from the document. ‘Yes, Miss van der Spuy. I see you have not entered the name of your child’s father on the registration form.’

  I had not yet learnt that any white mother who would not name the child’s father was immediately suspect. The departmental view was that if the father of an unmarried girl’s child was a Van der Spuy, a Van Schalkwyk, a Snyman, even a Ponsonby-Smythe, the girl should have no hesitation in naming him. On the other hand, if the father was a Moonsamy, a Naidoo, a Murugan from one of the Indian townships, a Greenwood Park Peterson or, even worse, a Khumalo, a Tshabala, a Buthelezi or some other Zulu name, the girl had very good reason not to admit to the father’s identity. I also did not know that the same applied to women who were late with the registration of the births of their babies and to those who had their babies outside the borders of the country. All of them were suspect too. ‘You cannot be too watchful,’ my father always said.

  ‘I’m not married,’ she said softly.

  ‘Nevertheless, we need the father’s name.’ He spoke softly, but his voice was not that of a friend.

  ‘I don’t know who.’

  ‘My girl, this attitude is not going to help you. Was there more than one man who could be the father?’

  ‘No,’ she said, then seeming to consider, she changed her mind. ‘Yes, there was.’

  ‘I see.’ He slid a piece of paper across the desk. ‘Could you write down the names of all of them for me?’

  ‘I don’t know their names.’ Her voice shook and her lower lip quivered, but her eyes were fixed on her tormentor and she was determined not to give him what he wanted.

  ‘You are a foolish child,’ my father said. His attention had moved from mother to baby. ‘Place your baby on the table and remove his clothes.’

  ‘Why?’ The lip was still quivering.

  ‘If you want this child’s birth registered, then you’ll do as you’re told. Undress him please.’

  She did as my father instructed her, first unwrapping the blankets, then slipping the child out of his woollen clothing and vest. While she undressed him, the little boy’s eyes searched the room. He made sucking noises. ‘The nappy too.’ The child lay on his back, my father staring at him for some time before asking, ‘Turn him over please.’

  He studied the child’s back for only a moment before leaning closer. He spoke to me: ‘Do you see this darker patch?’

  He was indicating a slight darkening of the skin at the base of the spine. ‘That is called the Mongolian spot. It’s a sure indicator. Also the skin of the child is sallow, not pink.’ To the mother, he said, ‘Turn him onto his back again. Let me have another look at his face.’ The horror the mother felt was now clearly reflected on her face. Concealing it was not possible, but she did not dare disobey. Her mouth was hanging open. Her determination had disappeared. ‘Look at the nose,’ my father said to me. ‘No white baby has a nose like that. And the unusually thick black hair on such a small child. This child has an Indian father.’ He turned to the mother. ‘You are lucky not to be charged under the Immorality Act. I am not going to report you, so you will not go to jail. But your child will be issued with a mixed-birth certificate this morning. You must take that and apply for an identity document for him.’

  At that, whatever fight remained in the mother disappeared. It was clear by the look on the girl’s face that my father was right about the identity of the child’s other parent. She had broken society’s most sacred scriptures and this man knew it, just by looking at her baby.

  My father was speaking again. ‘For this child to live with you would be to contravene the Group Areas Act. It is out of the question. He will also not be allowed to attend a white school or later in life do work that is reserved for whites or marry a white person. That would be a contravention of the Job Reservation Act and the Mixed Marriages Act. In any event, no decent white people will want to associate with him. The Department of Social Welfare will visit you in the next few days to arrange for the child’s adoption.’

  The girl had not moved to pick up her baby. But my father was finished with her and her child. He rose in a clear signal that it was time for her to leave. She was still seated. He looked directly at her, perhaps for the first time since she had entered his office. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘Social welfare will find a nice coloured family who will look after your child well.’

  The girl scooped up her baby, his clothes and blanket in one bundle and, without dressing him, left the office, hunched over her child, as if to protect him.

  The sound only started when she reached the corridor. It was a long, low sound, broken only by the need to breathe. I was not immediately sure that it was coming from the girl. To me, it was the sound of an animal in pain. I followed as far as the door. She was moving slowly towards the lifts, barely shuffling. When she reached them, she made no effort to press the button to summon a lift.

  The clerk who had brought her to my father’s office came hurrying past me and pressed the lift button. By the time she moved unsteadily into the lift, the girl had stopped making the sound.

  On the way home my father was in unusually high spirits. We even stopped at a café for a drink. He had a beer and ordered a lemonade for me, but he poured a little of his beer into my lemonade to make it a shandy. I expected that he would want to talk to me about the girl and her baby, probably extracting some lesson to share with me. But the only thing he said about his afternoon’s work was that he could not understand a white girl doing what she had done. ‘She has ruined her child’s life,’ was his last comment on the matter.

  I would like to recount that I had been angered by the afternoon’s work and that I challenged him on its necessity. But I did not. I cannot even say that I felt outraged. I was glad when he chose to talk about an unrelated matter though. ‘The farm is not yet sold. We should take the opportunity to go hunting there again before there is a new owner.’

  A year before, even a month before, I would have been delighted by the idea. This time I hated the thought. ‘That would be wonderful, Pa,’ I said.

  forty-five

  My father always rose early. He liked to be first in the office every morning and last to leave in the afternoon. In a government department, arriving in the office before everyone else did not require enormous sacrifice. Everyone else tried to get to work exactly on time and at closing time the lifts were so full that many workers took to the stairs.

  Coming early and leaving late gave him the reputation of being the department’s most dedicated local officer. As a result, problems were brought to him and his advice was sought. Mister Brown was the titular head, but everyone knew that my father was the real power in the Department of the Interior’s Durban office.

  During that week he and I ate our cereal in the kitchen, then made our sandwiches while it was still dark outside and the girls were busy in the bathroom. Mama waited till after we had left before venturing out. Both breakfast and the drive to work were conducted in silence. I hesitated to say anything for fear that he might talk about the matter of Ruthie and me in the La Lucia sand dunes, and he was just being himself. Even when we reached the office, he prepared for the day in his own office, silently with the door closed.

  It was on the Friday afternoon just before going-home time that another case of an unwed mother was brought before him. Auntie Marjorie had been doing something downstairs in Registration. She knocked on the door of my father’s office, then opened it just wide enough to see in. ‘They have a case downstairs,’ she told him.

  I heard his voice, but could not make out the words.

  ‘Her parents came with her, a Mr and Mrs Raubenheimer. A nice couple from Kloof.’

  E
ven I knew that Kloof was an up-market suburb in the hills inland from the city. It was a place of five-acre properties that were tended by teams of Zulu gardeners, mansions where the kids did not share rooms like my sisters had to, four-car garages to house his and hers Mercedeses, perhaps a classic MG and even a four-wheel drive for weekend trips to the family farm. Civil servants like my father could not aspire to anything like that sort of opulence. And with wealth came respectability. It was only years later that I was to discover that the money and attorneys of people who lived in places like Kloof usually insulated them against the activities of people like my father. This time they had not thought it necessary to be accompanied by their attorney. They were, after all, just registering their grandchild.

  The parents from Kloof were allowed only as far as Auntie Marjorie’s office. I was already waiting at my father’s desk. ‘What is this about?’ I heard a male voice ask in Afrikaans.

  My father went as far as the door. ‘It will take only a few minutes,’ he said. ‘I have to see your daughter alone—’ He paused a moment. ‘… with the baby please.’

  ‘I don’t understand this at all. Why can’t we accompany our daughter?’

  But this was my father’s territory. ‘Only a few minutes. I’m required by law to see her alone.’

  The mother looked to be in her late twenties, dark hair hanging down to her shoulders. I saw a haughtiness about her face and, biting down on her teeth, a strength in her jaw line. She was wearing cream-coloured trousers and a ruffled white blouse. Her elegant cream sandals had not been bought in a bargain basement. She had not come in looking for a fight, but she already believed that the people in the room, myself included, were not her friends or those of her child.

  The child was a boy. This one seemed to puzzle my father. He studied the rounded features of the boy’s face, then told the mother to undress him.

  ‘Why?’ It was said softly in Afrikaans, but it carried a demanding note.

  ‘The law requires that I examine the baby.’

  ‘What law is that?’

  ‘The Population Registration Act.’

  ‘Are you a doctor?’

  ‘No, but the law says—’

  ‘Show me this law, then I’ll undress my son.’

  All the time my father had been studying the little, round face. His skin colour, if not as pink as the little girl’s of the previous day, was fairer, almost truly white. ‘A pretty child,’ he said. There was a gentleness in his voice that I knew to be deceptive. The more deeply suspicious he was, the softer his voice became.

  ‘Show me this law,’ the mother repeated.

  My father did no more than incline his head in her direction. It was a gesture that even I could not interpret. The little boy’s eyes were closed. He looked, and obviously felt safe in his mother’s arms, resting on her lap, his head against her stomach. My father was looking at him in silence. His thoughts, whatever they were, were interrupted by the child’s mother again demanding to see the law that required her child to be undressed.

  Three-quarters of the people who visited my father’s office spoke English as their home language. That was the language my father used most often during the course of his work. Now, he had the opportunity to use our language. Usually this would have pleased him, but this time he looked both annoyed and troubled. ‘I am Bernard Vorster. I am the deputy director of the Department of the Interior in this province. It is my duty to point out to you, Miss Raubenheimer, that you failed to give the name of your child’s father on the hospital’s registration form.’

  ‘I know that.’ She was holding her child close. She changed position slightly, seeming to shield the child’s face from my father.

  ‘You cannot expect me to classify your child white if I don’t know who the father is,’ my father said. Miss Raubenheimer showed no interest in him, continuing to look down at her child. ‘Are you listening to me, miss?’ The little boy opened his eyes for an instant and blinked in the direction of his mother’s face. She still said nothing. My father pressed on. He was not accustomed to being ignored. ‘Do you understand the consequences of not having your child registered white?’

  Now she turned to face my father. Despite herself, her voice quivered as she spoke. ‘I am not interested in you or what you have to say. If I have to deal with you at all, I’ll do it in court and let the world see exactly what you are.’

  I had never heard anyone speak to my father like that. I doubt that he ever had. To him, this was an attack. It astonished me, but I was not as astonished as he was. ‘Young woman,’ he said through lips that barely moved. ‘I am a representative of an Afrikaner government and you are an Afrikaner. You need to bear that in mind.’

  Miss Raubenheimer lifted her son until he was pressed again her chest, his head resting on her shoulder. ‘Don’t flatter yourself, little man,’ she said. ‘You’re nothing to me.’

  As an exercise in recovering his position of authority, my father’s view of the relationship between himself and the girl had not helped. ‘Listen, girl—’

  ‘I’m not your girl,’ she said, looking at her child as she said it.

  ‘I have been trying to help you.’ Even to my ears it was a sad attempt to recover lost ground. There was nothing helpful in the tone of his voice. ‘I already know about the father of that child. That boy has Chinese eyes. Do you think I’m blind.’

  Miss Raubenheimer started to rise. ‘I’ll be going now,’ she said.

  ‘You may leave now. We will not stop you, but that child will have to be adopted. You cannot keep him.’ I could see that my father’s desperation was not so much to impose the law, but to assert his authority. ‘That child has a Chinese father. He may not be registered as a white person. He may not live in a white group area and you may only live in a white area.’ His voice had developed the croaking sound of defeat. That he had been treated that way was more than I could believe, but that he was unable to do anything about it was the biggest shock of all.

  ‘Who’s going to take him from me? You?’ The contempt in her voice made it clear that she did not see that as a serious possibility. As for the young Raubenheimer, he looked altogether at peace, safe in his mother’s arms. She turned towards the door.

  My father had not yet finished. He took a step towards her and reached out a hand, as if to say something or even to stop her. She only paused long enough to glance at him one last time. ‘Get away from me, you pathetic racist bureaucrat.’

  Through the open door to Auntie Marjorie’s office, I saw her for only a moment, joined by her parents. Then she was gone, moving into the passage with what seemed to be unhurried confidence.

  Again I followed as far as the passage. The lift doors opened and she and her parents stepped inside.

  At the end of the passage a large window gave you a clear view of the pavement in front of the building. I hurried to it. Miss Raubenheimer and her parents appeared a moment later. To my surprise, I found both my father and Auntie Marjorie standing next to me at the window. We watched her cross the pavement with her mother in the afternoon’s bright sunshine. Her father, a grey-haired man dressed as if for a day of golf, had gone ahead, walking quickly. Just seconds later he was back, driving a gleaming, maroon Bentley. He got out to open the door for his daughter and her mother. I could see Miss Raubenheimer looking down at her son. She did not dignify the offices of our department with even a backward glance. With her father holding open the door, she slid onto the back seat. A moment later the Bentley moved away, joining the late afternoon stream of traffic that flowed past the front of the building. I had a clear view of it for five or six blocks.

  I only left the window when I heard my father’s irritable complaint. ‘Come, Chris. We can’t stand here all day.’

  forty-six

  Sitting next to my father in our car, it seemed to me that he felt a humiliation too deep for him to deal with. ‘I was trying to help her,’ he said more than once. His voice had the defeated quality it had acquired
when Miss Raubenheimer had dismissed him from her life.

  Driving up the ramp from the building’s parking into the city’s twilight streets, I could not decide whether he was trying to regain his lost prestige for my sake or for his own. His unexpected defeat at the hands of a young unmarried mother, in his eyes just a girl, no, more than that, had embarrassed both of us. He went on in the same ghastly croaking voice. ‘Where is she going with that child? What is she going to do with him? I will see to it that her name is circulated to all our offices. We would have looked for a Chinese family for that boy. That would have been in his best interest.’

  It seemed to me that at least a part of him was delighting in what he imagined would be the child’s hopeless future. His mother had ignored the very foundation of our existence. She had poured scorn upon his dignity. Now her child was going to pay for it. At least, my father was telling himself that.

  I never discovered what did happen to Miss Raubenheimer and her child. Perhaps she found a way to get the boy onto her passport and was granted asylum somewhere across our borders. Or perhaps some more pliable official eventually registered the boy as white. Of one thing I had no doubt, though, no one was going to take him away from her, whether or not he had Chinese eyes.

  ‘That young woman’s first mistake was to disgrace her people by getting into bed with a Chinaman. An Afrikaner girl like her, who can understand it? You have to wonder how she was brought up. This is where the children of liberals end up.’ We were stopped by a traffic light and he turned to look at me. I had been watching every expression on his face, but was surprised by this sudden directing of his attention towards me. ‘But we are a Christian people. We do not throw away these children. We care for them.’

  He had provided the opening and I had to know. ‘What do we do to them?’

  ‘These girls?’ The traffic light had changed, allowing us to move forward again, but he glanced at me quickly. A wildness in his eyes seemed to suggest that he saw an accusation in my question. ‘We do nothing to them, Chris. Of course we do nothing to them.’