The Classifier

by Wessel Ebersohn

  ‘No, I mean the children. How do we care for them?’

  ‘We look after them. We have a special place for them.’

  ‘A home?’

  ‘A school. They get a proper education, a decent education. And when they turn sixteen, they can choose between an Indian or a coloured identity. The choice is theirs. We don’t force them. In the case of that boy, he could choose to be Chinese, if that’s what he wants.’

  I remembered the document Snake Wilson had smuggled out for me and that there was a category called Other Asian. ‘Which school is that?’

  ‘Which school? Epsom Road. Epsom Road School.’ He had blurted out the name of the school in a sudden staccato burst. For once, perhaps the only time in my experience, the control that governed everything he said and did, had deserted him.

  ‘Epsom Road?’ I asked, as much to myself as to him. It was a short street, between the railway station and Greyville Race Course in the oldest part of town. I had travelled the length of Epsom Road on my bicycle on many occasions, but I did not recall a school.

  ‘It’s not big,’ he blurted out. ‘And there’s no sign. There’s no need to talk about this. No need. We don’t talk about this.’

  ‘So, the children there are all kinds, coloureds, Indians, some a bit white?’

  He misunderstood my curiosity for moral judgment. ‘We only do it because they are mixed. What choice do we have?’

  ‘Then when they turn sixteen, they decide for themselves?’ I was not sure that I had understood.

  ‘What could be fairer than that?’ With a sudden wrenching of the steering wheel he turned at the next intersection. When we reached Umgeni Road, he turned again, directing the car back towards town. A few minutes later, we had entered Epsom Road. My father brought the car to a halt at the gate in the high fence of a neat, freshly painted two-storey building set back from the road. The grounds were small by school standards. Only a few blue gums grew down one side. There were lights on in most of the building.

  ‘Now, look at that. There’s nothing wrong with that.’ My father’s determined self-righteousness was all that remained of the personality I knew. ‘Do you see anything wrong with that?’

  ‘No,’ I said and it was true, I saw nothing wrong with the building. ‘It looks fine.’

  ‘But, one day, when you have children, would you want them to be sent here?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t want that.’ When I looked at him, I realised that he had been staring at me, not at the building. The intensity in his eyes made me wonder whether he was thinking about Miss Raubenheimer or what he had been told about me. ‘No,’ I said. ‘The school looks nice, but I wouldn’t want to send my own child there when I have one.’

  ‘No decent person would,’ my father said.

  As my father drove on, calmness returned. ‘Nothing could be fairer,’ he murmured so softly that I was not sure I had heard it.

  Instead of going directly home, he drove to the parking at the bottom of the Beachwood Golf Course, where some weeks before he had invited me for a walk. He parked the car behind the dune that ran along the beach and got out. In the cool air of the late afternoon, he started along the path that leads to the beach and beckoned me to follow. We stopped at the crest of the dune where its sand spilled down a gentle slope towards the sea. The tide was in, washing high over the soft sand. The hard, flat stretch of sand on which I had often jogged at low tide was covered by the waves now.

  Walking on the soft sand at the top of the beach was hard work, so we just stood on the crest of the dune, looking down onto the breaking waves, a stiff breeze off the sea burning my eyes and rustling through our hair. By the time he spoke again, the panic of the last hour had subsided. ‘What every young Afrikaner has to understand is that we are a small people.’ It was a refrain I had heard too often before. It was the code by which he lived and that had recently been brought into doubt. ‘In this city, even among the white people, we are a minority. If we let children like those two boys we saw this week be registered as white, where will it end? We will soon be swamped. We have a responsibility. I have a responsibility to you. You have a responsibility to the children you will have one day. I want you to understand that I am an Afrikaner. And you are an Afrikaner. And that makes us something special in the eyes of the Lord. Do you understand that?’

  I did not know if this was a discourse on the politics of the country or a warning to me. ‘Yes, Pa,’ I said. ‘I understand.’

  When we got home, although it was still early, Mama had already gone to their bedroom and left our food in the oven. The girls were nowhere to be seen. My father and I ate in silence. Afterwards, he washed the dishes and I dried.

  In bed, I lay awake, looking up at the ceiling without seeing it. I thought about his purpose in wanting me to see the unmarried girls who would not name their babies’ fathers. And I thought about Epsom Road School and the boys about my own age, waiting there for their sixteenth birthdays. Each would make that decision, based on his own experience of the world gained in that unusual place. The decision he made would fix the path of his life thereafter. Then the sixteen-year-old would step out of Epsom Road School to face … who knew what? At birth my father and others like him had cut them away from the women who loved them and anyone else who may have loved them.

  For hours I relived the events of the late afternoon and early evening. Thought needs an anchor, a base on which it can be constructed, a system of belief to act as a compass. I had no anchor, nor any compass. I was adrift on a sea on which I knew the waves were rising, but I was too far from shore to expect help.

  Mama had stopped supervising my evening prayers when I was ten. She had said that I was now old enough to pray without her watching me do it. But my prayers had been discontinued when Abraham died. Since then I had never once knelt at my bedside as she had taught me to.

  Now, without thought or even intention, I found myself down on my knees. I was begging for guidance, a map to show me the way into the future. I asked for wisdom, for the knowledge of what was right and what was wrong. And if my father was wrong, how should I deal with that? He was the man I had admired all my life. He was the one who had immediately found in himself a love for the great music I had brought into our home. Could he really be this wrong? But what about Miss Raubenheimer? A racist bureaucrat, she had said. And, oh my God, what about Ruthie?

  I believe that I made no attempt to influence the future through my prayers that evening. I beseeched no deity to alter the course of events. I just wanted to know what was right and how I should pass through whatever lay ahead. It was only after I had finished praying and was still kneeling at the bedside, my head on my arms, that I realised how strange my prayer had been. No one I knew could ever have understood. I am not sure that I did. I had been praying to Abraham.

  I woke in the early hours of the next morning. I cannot remember even the sound of a light being switched on. I was aware of no more than an uneasiness that was nothing like the strange desperation that had seized me when I came to bed. Something was wrong in our house. Even now, all these years later, what exactly I felt is still not clear to me. I can only say that somehow I felt that a disturbance, a deep and powerful desolation, hung over our home and everyone in it.

  I rose slowly to the level of full consciousness and listened, but I heard nothing. My bedroom door was ajar, but I could see no sign of movement in the passage. Outside, the night was windless and silent. Even the Indian mynahs were quiet.

  I lay still, closed my eyes and tried to expel all thought from my mind. It was a method that had often helped me to get to sleep in the past. Now it had no effect. The sense that something in my world was wrong remained, driving away sleep or any possibility of it.

  I had been trying to go back to sleep for some time, perhaps half an hour, when I heard what sounded like a sob, but much shorter, the briefest possible intake of breath. It could only be one of my sisters. They must have left their bedroom door open and one of
them had boyfriend trouble. It would probably be Michie. She had more dealings with boys and therefore there was more that could go wrong.

  And yet it did not sound like one of the girls. Then suddenly I was certain of the source of the sound. Mama had been crying on and off for days now. I should go to her, I thought, and lie to her, tell her that there was no such thing as me being in the sand dunes with a coloured girl.

  Without switching on a light, I slipped my feet to the floor. Ours was not a big house and I had never lived anywhere else. I could find my way through it in almost total darkness. I walked slowly down the passage on my bare feet in the direction from which I thought the sob had come. The sound had not been repeated and the thought came to me that perhaps there had been no sob, that all of this was something my imagination had concocted.

  Just before I reached the living room, I heard it again. This time I had no doubt as to what it was. The sob had come from deep in the chest of the person who made it. Again it was brief and was not repeated.

  The living room too was in darkness. The light switch was on the nearer side of the room, but not against the wall where I had entered. I could make out a single, motionless figure on the sofa. I was suddenly afraid. I moved to the light switch and reached for it. In that instant, a new sound stopped me. I heard my father’s voice. He was mumbling in the slurred way I recognised as that of a drunken man. ‘My son, my son, my son.’ It sounded as if his tongue had swollen to twice its normal size. ‘My son, my son,’ he continued. I was sure that he was not aware of my presence in the room.

  Instinctively, I withdrew my hand from the switch and backed towards the door. The sob came again, almost identical to the sound I had heard before. Once in the passage, I moved as silently to my room as when I had left it. I got back into bed and again lay still. I thought that I heard my father’s voice again. ‘My son, my son.’

  forty-seven

  The only time Nathan and I have come close to anything resembling an argument took place some eight months into our association. My relationship with the desktop artist had emboldened her. It reached the stage that she had the nerve to criticise my writing. I have to admit that she did it in the gentlest possible way. ‘I think this client may find that the brochure’s text is a little too formal,’ she said. ‘I think he expects something that’s a bit more selling.’

  I was outraged. ‘What the hell do you know about writing?’ I snarled at her. ‘Since when do you make these decisions?’

  ‘I’m just suggesting—’ she tried to say.

  ‘Well, don’t,’ I told her. ‘You do your work and I’ll do mine.’

  Nathan had overheard the exchange and he called me into his office. ‘That wasn’t necessary, Chris,’ he said. He looked quite disturbed. ‘She was just saying what she thought.’

  ‘Christ, Nathan. She’s a junior.’ I was surprised by the outrage in my voice.

  ‘That doesn’t mean she shouldn’t think. I was also wondering if the text wasn’t a bit stiff.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you agree with her.’ Only a glass pane separated us from the rest of the office and I was struggling to keep my voice down.

  ‘Since when is it a crime to make a suggestion?’ Nathan asked. ‘And since when are you so touchy about your work? This is a small matter, Chris.’

  It was a small matter and I knew it. I turned to leave. ‘Would you like me to rewrite it?’

  ‘No, we’ll let the client decide.’

  The client called me the next day and said that he would like the text to be a bit more punchy. Could I stick a few more selling phrases into it, liven it up a bit?

  So I rewrote it at the client’s instruction. This time he was happy. I also apologised to my desktop artist. ‘I was just trying to help,’ she said. ‘I meant nothing by it.’

  When I told Nathan that I had apologised to her, he said, ‘Thanks, Chris. I hoped you would. I wonder why you were so angry though.’

  That night at home I asked myself the same question. It occurred to me that I had not been angry about anything at all since I had started working for Nathan. I had done my best for him, but there had been no real passion. The world and its activities had been washing past me and I had paid little attention. It seemed that emotionally I had been asleep. What had passed for mildness during the last year had in truth been a sort of spiritual anaesthesia. Perhaps now I was waking. I hoped Nathan and the real me would still get along.

  I admitted to myself that my awakening may not have been the only reason for my irritation. A niece of Rochelle, the child of an older sister, a divorced woman in her late thirties had taken to visiting Nathan and then spending time talking to me. Sharon liked to discuss more general topics than divorce settlements.

  By that time I had taken to dropping in on my desktop artist for part of an evening every fortnight or thereabouts in order to have intercourse with her, but the more often Sharon came round, the more she irritated me. I recognised that my present attitude to her was less than noble, but neither had any part of my relationship with her been a source of pride. The longer the visits had continued the shorter each one had become. And it was the time we spent out of bed that was shrinking.

  Things were different with Sharon. I was the one to invite her on our first date, but she chose the venue. It turned out to be a brightly lit restaurant and she insisted on coming in her own car. During the starter, she said that she really like me and hoped that we would get to know each other well. But something about the way she said it made it clear that getting to know each other was not a sexual matter, in fact that knowledge was a prerequisite to getting to know each other carnally. My desktop artist must have noticed my interest in Sharon, because she sidled up to me while I was working and grinned at me in a way that I thought was rather sneering. ‘So are you going to convert or is she?’

  I finally admitted to myself that my relationship with my desktop artist was not something to be proud of. So I invited her for coffee and tried to explain why whatever had been between us had ended. I did not get very far. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I was never sure that you were proud of me. I got the impression you thought I was a little ordinary for you.’

  ‘Oh Christ, if there’s anyone I have not been proud of, it’s myself,’ I told her. ‘I haven’t behaved well towards you.’

  But she was not one for analyses or postmortems. ‘Forget it. I never felt you were very close anyway. Never mind being not very close, most of the times we were together you could’ve been in another room – and the door between us was closed. If Sharon thinks she can reach you, she’s welcome to try.’

  I tried to think about Joan and the child, and whether I had locked them out too. But, like so often in the past, I retreated from it.

  It was about the time that Sharon started coming round to the office that I got a trans-Atlantic call from Annie. She phoned the company and Nathan let me take it in his office so that I could have privacy. That is Nathan. He is one of the most considerate people I have ever met.

  ‘I’m glad that we can keep contact through e-mails,’ she said, ‘but I wanted to hear your voice to satisfy myself that you sound all right.’

  ‘Do I?’ I asked.

  ‘Not too bad,’ she said. ‘Much better than the last time I saw you.’

  The last time that I had seen Annie had been on the premises of my business. It was a Sunday and I was alone in the office, competing my last management duties before the new team took over. She had gone to my house, looking for me, then tried the office on the off chance that I might be there.

  We had sat on either side of the elongated working surface that I used as a desk. As always, it was scattered with papers, magazines and other printed material. There had been a joke among our journalists that we should have started an archaeology title, the strata of the stuff that covered my desk being a natural source of inspiration.

  ‘You expected too much,’ she had said. ‘You idealists always do. If you expect less, you are less likely
to be disappointed.’ I had not wanted to discuss my expectations and disappointments and had tried to ask after her children, but that had not worked. ‘So you are going,’ she had said.

  ‘Yes. My visa has come through and I’m going.’

  ‘Will you be coming back?’

  ‘I can’t imagine it.’

  ‘Does it have to be this way?’

  ‘Christ, Annie. After what I’ve done, you’d think I would have been left alone. When everyone else was doing so-called empowerment deals, I couldn’t imagine that it would apply to me too. I thought my history in the movement would count for something.’

  My meeting with the first syndicate to which I came close to selling my company had been a long one. I had come into the meeting with no thought of selling. I needed their influence for a government contract I was trying to get signed. I had not planned on the relationship going beyond that.

  They would assist they said, but not on a once-off basis. They needed a share of the company, the controlling share.

  Under other circumstances, I would have left the meeting, but the contract was a big one and we were in a dry patch. ‘This is a matter of influence,’ their leader said, ‘and our influence goes right to the top, to the old man himself.’

  It was not especially surprising and the approach was nothing new. I had been through more than a few meetings of that sort. Influence with government, real or imagined, was being traded for shareholding in every boardroom across the country. It was the currency of the time. For three hours I listened to an explanation as to why I should sell my business to the syndicate for a tenth of its real price. And the sale would be vendor financed, they said. In other words, they would pay me back out of dividends from the shares I gave them. I could go on managing it. In fact, they would prefer it if I did. They would pay me a decent salary, no, an excellent one, they said, and cut me in for my share of the profits. And I would have their influence working for me. What did I have to lose? And it was the only just thing for me to do. I should think about the slavery white people had inflicted on Africa. ‘Not in this country,’ I had said.