‘There was not much difference,’ I was told. I should remember colonialism, not to mention apartheid. Did I know what white farmers had done to their workers? Did I know how the coloured population had come into existence? Did I know about the massacres at Bulhoek and Sharpeville and Langa and all the other places? Did I know what the special branch had done to anyone who opposed them? Did I know about the activists that had died? Did I know about the children whose brains had been stunted by malnutrition? Had I even heard about the race classification system? Did I know what the race classification system was?
Yes, I told them, I knew about all these things.
‘Then you should know that we will only be buying back what should have been ours in the first place.’
‘I created this company and built it up,’ I said. ‘No one else.’
‘We were not given the chance,’ the members of the syndicate said.
‘Is that my fault? All my adult life, I was opposed to the system. I was at Sobukwe’s funeral. I marched with Tutu. Joan, my wife, was interrogated by the special branch. And I built my business after apartheid had ended.’
‘That counts for nothing now. No one knows that, just a few people.’
‘Many people know it.’ But, most of all, I knew it. I remembered every detail. That counts for nothing now, the man from the syndicate had said. It counted for me, especially the way Joan had been picked up off the street by the security police. Her interrogation had lasted for hours. And afterwards it was hours before she could stop shaking. ‘They stripped me,’ she had said. ‘I thought they were going to rape me, but they just stripped me to break me down.’ And the bastards had succeeded in that.
But it counted for nothing now, the man who represented the syndicate said. ‘It’s not just what you did,’ they said. ‘What about your family, your grandfather, his father, your own father?’ I was sure that they knew nothing about my father, but the attack had taken me by surprise and they saw it. ‘We’re talking about three hundred years, not just your life. Think about that.’
One who had said nothing so far, had seen more than I was comfortable with. ‘Your grandfather? Your father?’ he repeated, searching my face for further uncertainty. ‘Not just you.’
Another joined in. ‘You have to understand your position. In Africa today, you’re like a black man in China.’
‘Your business will die unless you have the right partner,’ they told me.
Government policy said that you needed an empowerment partner or you were going to be down the bottom of the pile when it came to handing out contracts. God knew, there had been no shortage of willing partners.
I told them that they were almost as racist as the apartheid government. I signed a few days later with another group of raiders, one that did have money. I held out for a better price than I thought I would get. It was not the price I should have got and would have got in a normal society, but it was better, much better, than what I expected. And I had no illusions about us being a normal society.
I reminded Annie of the sale of my business, how it had come about. She remembered it all without my prodding.
‘So why didn’t you just get a partner?’ she asked.
‘Why the hell should I have gotten a partner? I didn’t deserve that.’
‘It was a way to survive.’
‘I found another way. I told the bastards that if they wanted my company so badly, they would have to buy the whole thing, but at my price. I told them it was all or nothing. And that I was not going to manage it for them.’
‘To be fair, they paid close to what you asked.’
‘To be fair, they paid maybe seventy per cent of the real price. To be fairer still, I should have been able to keep my company.’
‘You could have anyway. They didn’t take it from you.’
‘I could have watched it shrivel up.’
‘Or maybe you could have toughed it out and you and the business may still have prospered. Maybe it wasn’t necessary to get out.’
‘Maybe not, but that business was all I had. If I hadn’t sold, I may have lost everything.’
‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘But ultimately you made the choice.’ I remembered the look in Annie’s eyes as she said it. She had a direct way about her, as if she was looking into your soul. After our childhood together, we had watched each other’s lives unfold. She was almost fifty by then, but still a good-looking woman. She had long since given up her fascination with religion and settled down to what she called ‘acceptance of the wonders of the universe, without the damned rules and regulations that the churches love so much’. We had observed each other’s marriages and our divorces, two of hers and one of mine. Each of her marriages had left her with a child. Her own career in homeopathy was doing well and she had brought up her daughters with minimal help from the fathers. My marriage had come later.
‘Maybe there’s another way to look at it,’ Annie said. ‘When one thinks of what Papa did, maybe we have no reason to complain.’
Up to that point, I had been congratulating myself on my restraint. But to hear Annie echoing that particular line was too much for me. ‘Christ, Annie, you never did it. I never did it. We were children.’ I was surprised by the anger in my voice. ‘Fuck them. It wasn’t us. There weren’t more than a handful of white people in the crowd at Sobukwe’s funeral, but Joan and I were there. Did you know that? We were raided by the special branch in those days. I produced literature for the movement. And you remember when Joan was taken in for interrogation. And what they did to her. We ran risks every day.’
‘I know,’ Annie said. ‘Perhaps it is better that you go.’
‘Do you know what that mob said to me when they signed the cheque for the second payment?’
‘No, you didn’t tell me.’
‘One of them said it’s for the best. He said all white men in Africa would have to do it sooner or later.’
‘I’m glad you’re going,’ Annie said. ‘You expected too much.’
forty-eight
One of Nathan’s less endearing qualities is how he comes up with questions you did not expect. About the time I was working on the second part of the book, he wanted to know about African women. ‘Do white men marry them?’ he asked. ‘Or is it like Bangkok and places like that, where the expats have local women that they discard and replace every so often?’
‘How long did you live in Bangkok?’ I asked. ‘And how many women were there?’
It took him a moment to realise that I was joking. ‘Damn, Chris,’ he said. ‘I thought you were serious. I’ve never even been to Bangkok. I’ve heard about it and seen it in movies.’
‘It’s not really the same. For most of my life, it’s been against the law for white and black people to have sex.’
‘No shit?’
‘No shit. It may be getting a bit more like Bangkok these days.’
‘And you?’ He gave me an inquisitive little grin. ‘You ever had a black girl?’
‘You tell me about your Bangkok experiences and I’ll tell you about my Johannesburg ones,’ I said.
Officially Ruthie was not black. As a kid, she had found her identity in one of the other possibilities in the wondrous array of races on the Department of Interior list. By the time I came across my father sobbing into his drink in the living room, there was officially still no one in our family who believed the story about Ruthie and me. As protection for himself or perhaps for me, he had chosen to draw me into the sacred centre of the race classification system. Most Afrikaners and other white people, had they thought about it, must have known that something like race classification existed, but few ever asked and still fewer knew the details.
Mama had withdrawn from me almost completely. In the weeks after the concerned friend had told my parents what he or she had seen in the La Lucia sand dune, I saw very little of her. Dinner had been prepared by the time I came home and she had retired to her bedroom. She was now the one who was not taking her food with the rest
of the family. It was so unlike Mama that Annie said she must be sick. Whatever my father said to her and whatever she may have pretended in front of others, in some deep, intuitive way, Mama knew the truth. And so did Annie. And I knew that they knew.
By the Saturday, after my most recent stint in my father’s office had ended, nothing had changed and no one had suggested that I stay at home that afternoon. I set out for Greenwood Park, as always. I wheeled my bike into the Petersons’ front yard, but before I reached the door, I could see the envelope that was wedged between door and door frame. It carried my name on the outside. Inside, the message filled just a few lines. It said that they had to attend a funeral and could I come the next day, Sunday. It was signed by Ruthie and carried a PS that said, ‘Please try.’
The next afternoon my parents went up the road to visit Uncle Stefan and Auntie Virginia. The girls were busying themselves with girl matters. Without hindrance of any sort, I again set out for Greenwood Park.
As soon as Ruthie opened the door for me, I saw that something special had happened. Her eyes were filled with the eagerness I knew so well. She pulled me inside and we kissed while I looked over her shoulder, wondering who else was there. She answered my unspoken question. ‘We’re alone.’
I could hardly believe it. ‘What happened?’
‘It’s not Saturday. Ma doesn’t expect you to be here today.’
‘What about Johnny and the others?’ It was too wonderful for immediate belief.
‘Everyone is out.’
I think I took a step back to look at her. The question in my eyes must have been easy to read because I did not get to ask it.
‘We’re also going out,’ she said.
‘Can’t we just stay here?’ I wanted to know. This was an opportunity like no other. Going out seemed crazy.
‘No, someone might come back, Johnny or Auntie Pearl.’ she said. ‘And there’s something I want to show you. I made a picnic for us. It’s in my rucksack.’
The place she wanted to visit was a stretch of scrub called Burman Bush. It was a place where people went to picnic, a lovely green belt of perhaps a kilometre square. It still had a healthy band of vervet monkeys, playful little bandits, who would raid your picnic basket if you left it unattended. To get there you had to go down the Old North Coast Road for a few kilometres, cross the bridge over the Umgeni, travel a little way along Umgeni Road, then up the hill on the right. It took about fifteen minutes by bike, if you were not a very fast rider.
She had even worked out a travel plan. We left at the same time, but Ruthie went straight down the hill to the Old North Coast Road, while I went by my private route, her rucksack on my back.
By the time I got to the picnic place, Ruthie was getting off her bike and wheeling it into the shadow of a tree. As far as I could see, there was only one other picnic and they were on the other side of the road, a good two hundred metres away. There seemed to be a man, woman and a child. I saw the man, who was wearing a white Panama hat, rise from his camp stool and look in our direction, but I paid no further attention to him.
‘This way,’ Ruthie was saying. ‘I know a place no one visits.’
Ruthie’s place was a small hollow, surrounded by dense scrub, the branches of which brushed the ground. If you were safely hidden there and people were looking for you, they would probably not see you until they tripped over you. ‘Leave the bicycles and the rucksack here,’ she whispered, ‘and come.’ She took my hand and led me still further from the road, until suddenly it cleared in front of us and I could see the white painted walls of houses. ‘Now we have to crawl,’ she whispered.
A little way further, wriggling on our bellies, brought us to a wire fence. From there we could see into the back garden of a house. This house was nothing like the houses in Red Hill. It had a broad, beautifully tended garden and a swimming pool that could have swallowed the Durban Aquarium. It was double-storeyed and bigger than our house, Uncle Stefan’s and Ma Peterson’s all lumped together. I was sure that it was the grandest house I had ever seen. I could see the back of what seemed to be a four-car garage, at the time my measure of extreme wealth. How could anyone need four cars? I had often wondered. The huge square windows that faced us had elegant wooden frames, unlike the mass-produced steel ones we had at home. Overlooking a terraced garden was a wide French window that was standing open. A tall blonde woman, probably in her thirties, was walking along the edge of a flower bed, trowel in hand. I could see two young children, a girl of pre-school age, as blonde as her mother, and a boy, perhaps a few years older. The girl was sitting on a step, talking to the woman, while the boy was winding the rubber band that drove the propeller of a model aircraft.
‘What do you think of this place?’ Ruthie whispered.
‘Of the house?’
‘Of everything.’ I could see in her grinning face a secret that she was anxious to share with me. ‘What do you think I’m showing you?’
Before I could answer, a thick-set man strolled slowly through the French windows, reading from a bound wad of papers as he walked. It took a few moments before I realised who I was looking at. ‘Uncle William?’ I asked in a whisper.
Ruthie nodded. ‘I told you he was rich.’
On the other side of the fence, the boy ran towards his father, carrying the model aircraft in both hands. Uncle William raised a hand, as if to ward him off. ‘Not now, Sean.’ I could just make out the words.
The boy said something, but he had his back to us and the sound barely reached us. ‘Not now,’ Uncle William said. ‘I’ll help you when I finish this.’
‘He’s married to a white lady?’ I asked.
Ruthie nodded. ‘They don’t know about Ma and Johnny and me.’
Uncle William had settled into a cane chair, still reading from the documents. The boy had returned to flying his plane without the help of his father. Uncle William’s wife was pulling off her plastic gardening gloves, while looking appreciatively at the plants she had been tending. The girl had risen to stand next to her mother.
Ruthie pulled at my arm. I followed her back to the hollow in the scrub. This singular view into Uncle William’s life was a surprise to me, but I was not reluctant to slip away. I wanted far rather to be with Ruthie.
I watched her spread the blanket carefully on the ground. It filled most of the little hollow. When she was done, she knelt in the centre of it, looking up at me. The rucksack had been left to one side, resting against her bicycle. I suppose there was food in it, but I never found out. The excitement of the moment was too great.
I knelt in front of her. I cannot say whether I took her into my arms or how she got there, but in a moment we were holding each other, pressed together, losing all sense of time and place, knowing only the presence, the insistent proximity of each other.
How long we were kneeling on the blanket, our bodies held together by the desire within us, how we started kissing or when and for how long, when we lay down and whether there was any conscious course of action, I cannot say. I remember her whispering, ‘I’ve got it here,’ then pressing the little, magical disc Auntie Pearl had offered us into my hand. ‘She gave it back to me that day, so I brought it.’
I cannot remember her saying any more than that. I held the condom tightly in one hand, both a licence and an invitation. Ruthie had given it to me like contraband that had to be kept from prying eyes. After that she seemed to forget about it. The moment of self-consciousness, or condom-consciousness, passed quickly. I have never been able to remember any conscious intention that afternoon. From the moment she handed me the condom, I do not believe there was one in Ruthie either.
So we made love in the Burman Bush scrub, oblivious to the sound of traffic on the road forty or fifty metres away, oblivious also to the soft scurrying sound of a breeze in the branches around us, oblivious even to Uncle William and the relaxed domestic scene in his garden. Everything I had been through in the two years I had known her was with us. What I felt had grown out of th
ree evenings at La Traviata, many visits to our place in the sugar cane, Saturday afternoons at the Petersons, and the suspicions in my own home. Somehow even the memory of being with Oupa at the farm and Abraham’s death were with us in the hollow.
Her face was close, closer than I ever remembered it, except perhaps that night in the lighting box of the city hall. At first her eyes were closed, then she opened them, looking at me with a sort of panic that said, ‘We’re doing it. Boy, we really are doing it. I can’t believe it, but we are.’
My hands had found the small of her back, the better to press her against me. Whatever movements we made were untutored and could not be recalled afterwards. As a study in lovemaking, it was probably an amateur attempt. It did not have to be done elegantly or even satisfactorily. It only had to be done immediately. And I loved her, not with a love that was discovered only at the moment of climax, but with a love that had been growing every day of the last two years. And I knew she loved me equally.
There was some pain for Ruthie, but she held me tightly throughout. Whatever disappointment came with the pain, it was overridden by something deeper, a need that went beyond pleasure and pain.
When it was over, we lay together, unmoving, for longer than we should have. ‘What are we going to do, boy?’ she whispered eventually.
‘More of this, I suppose.’
‘We will have to do something though.’
‘Yes.’
‘But what?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘We can’t go on like this. It’s not just my ma. It’s everything.’
‘I know.’
We had only removed the absolutely necessary garments, and now we slipped them back into place. I made a little hole with a stick, buried the condom in the sand and scattered leaves over the place. When I looked back at Ruthie, there was no sign of the joy she should have felt, no excitement at the step we had taken, not even a moment of wonder. All I saw in her face was the realisation that we had crossed some significant boundary, an invisible barrier that meant that we were now more than just a boy and girl in love.
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