The Classifier

by Wessel Ebersohn

  For a long time we sat on the leafy floor in the scrub, just looking at each other. Our absorption, each with the other, was as deep as it had been while we were making love. Again we were oblivious to the sounds and even the sights around us. Had it not been so, we may have heard the police vehicle stopping on the edge of the scrub. We may even have seen the two policemen and the man in the white Panama hat before they were only a few paces away. Not that seeing them from a distance would have helped. The bicycles were there, the rucksack was there and the blanket was still spread on the ground. And ours was a very suspicious society.

  forty-nine

  The lock-up in the back of the police van had a heavy wire mesh covering the windows. A thick layer of glass on the other side of the mesh reinforced the measures taken to keep us inside. From the back you could see the heads of the two policemen in the cab, but not speak to them.

  The events of the last ten minutes did not seem to have affected them in any noticeable way. They had come quickly through the scrub, their boots crushing the small saplings, directly to the place where Ruthie and I were still looking at each other. The man with the Panama hat had been a few steps behind them. ‘There they are. I saw what they were doing.’ Unlike the policemen, for whom this was just another item in their day, his face was red with the indignation of the self-righteous. There was something about the expression of his face that reminded me of Snake Wilson. It was not the face itself. Where Snake’s face was thin and narrow, his was plump and round. It was perhaps just the certainty both had that neither their beliefs, nor their actions, could ever be questioned.

  I had told Ruthie’s mother that, whatever happened, I would never hurt her daughter. But now she was shivering in the lock-up of a police van, in a state of shock so profound that there was nothing I could do to change it. I reached out to touch her, but she shrank away from me. ‘No, no, no.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Ruthie.’ It sounded pathetic. When there was no answer from her, I tried again. ‘I didn’t want this to happen.’ It was almost as bad as telling her how sorry I was.

  The drive to the police station took no more than ten minutes. I have little memory of it. I do remember the sight of Ruthie sitting across from me, her arms clasped around her knees. She was rocking back and forth, in time perhaps to the beating of her heart. At one point, through the small rear window, I noticed the car following close behind. It was being driven by the man in the Panama hat. With him was a woman of about Mama’s age. Two children in the back seat were crowding forward to get a better view of the criminals in the police van. At some point I had heard him say to the policemen, ‘I’ll follow you. I’m willing to testify. I saw everything.’ The scrub around Ruthie’s special place was so dense, that I did not think he could have seen anything, but he was going to testify to it, whether or not he had seen it.

  At the Point Road Police Station I was taken into one room, while Ruthie was ushered down a passage by a young white policeman, one of those who had arrested us. At the main desk in the charge office, a black constable looked up for only a moment from something he was writing.

  The older of the two policemen, a sunburnt man whose uniform seemed to fit him too tightly around the waist, followed me into an office and closed the door behind us. ‘Remove your underpants,’ he said in English, but with a heavy Afrikaans accent.

  ‘My underpants? Why?’ Without thinking, I had answered in Afrikaans.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re an Afrikaner.’ His eyes that had been half closed, opened wide. ‘What were you looking for with this Hotnotmeidjie? Have you thought about what your parents are going to say? How are they going to handle this disgrace?’

  Up to that moment I had been so absorbed by Ruthie’s misery that I had not thought about my parents. ‘No—’

  ‘Your underpants, your underpants.’ He held out a hand to take them from me. ‘The laboratory needs to check them.’ He turned his head away while I unzipped my pants to get rid of the suspect garment. ‘Giving your underpants is nothing,’ he said. ‘The meidjie gets examined inside.’ He must have seen my expression. ‘Not by us, thanks to our father. The district surgeon will come. He takes a sample of what you left behind.’

  ‘I didn’t leave anything behind.’

  ‘So where’s the condom then?’

  ‘There’s no condom.’

  The look on his face was of disbelief. ‘The district surgeon will see what he can find inside your meidjie.’

  ‘Can you tell me what happens now?’ I asked him. My voice was shaking and sounded younger than when I had last heard it.

  ‘You stay here until we come and get you. That’s only after the district surgeon has been.’

  The thought came to me that I could hardly do anything but stay there. ‘What happens when you come to get me?’

  ‘You’re in deep trouble, boytjie,’ he said. ‘We’ll come and get you when we want you.’

  ‘Where’s the girl now?’ I asked. Why had I called her that? Why had I not used her name?

  My underpants went into a clear plastic bag and he led me to an empty cell at the back of the police station. On my way there, I looked into those we passed, but they were all empty and Ruthie was nowhere to be seen. It was clear to me that these were the cells reserved for white prisoners. The cells for the blacks would contain far more prisoners at any time. He stopped in the doorway before locking it. ‘We’ve got the meidjie. She’s also in a cell. If you were going to fuck her, you should have done it somewhere no one could see.’ He shook his head. ‘You were fuckin’ stupid, you know that?’

  ‘Are there men in her cell?’

  He had started moving away, but now he turned back. This time he looked affronted. ‘Of course not. What do you take us for?’

  After he had left, I reflected that it had not been necessary to tell me that I was stupid. I knew how stupid I had been. She was going to be examined inside, he had said. They were going to take a sample of what I had left behind. I knew I could not have left anything inside her, but examining her inside would be the worst of all possible punishments for Ruthie. Oh God, I prayed. Please forgive me. Let Ruthie forgive me. Above everything, let Ruthie forgive me.

  After only a few minutes, another uniformed officer, wearing the three stripes of a sergeant, came to the door of my cell. He was carrying a clipboard and a pen. ‘Name?’ he asked in Afrikaans. After I told him, he went over to other questions. My address? My age?

  ‘Fifteen.’

  He shook his head. ‘What are your parents going to say, son?’ It seemed to me that the police were more interested in my parents’ reaction than any other aspect of the matter. ‘Did you think about your parents when you were doing this?’

  It was a strange question. Was I thinking of my parents while lying down on the blanket with Ruthie? No, nor had I been thinking about the rugby season, spearing fish on Oupa’s farm, the success of Dog Box Flowers or anything else. When I remained silent, he went on to ask the names of my parents. Did I stay with them? What was their telephone number? What was my father’s occupation. ‘Department of Interior?’ He shook his head again. Eventually he got to: ‘Did you have intercourse with this coloured girl?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘She says you did.’

  I was fifteen and inexperienced in even the simpler tricks that policemen use. ‘Did she say that?’

  ‘That’s what she said. Now, did you have intercourse with her?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I mumbled. I could not let Ruthie go down that road alone.

  ‘Are you saying yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He smiled and slipped his pen into his pocket. ‘I’ll be back to take your confession.’ With a last appraising look he went back to the charge office.

  The police station was not a quiet place. I could hear male and female voices from somewhere else in the building. Outside, someone was shouting what sounded like commands. A motor vehicle started reluctantly somewhere towards the back of the buil
ding. Only the sounds reached me. The cell had no window, just the barred door through which I had entered.

  There was a moment when I thought I heard Ruthie crying, plaintive and far away, as if she were on the far side of the building. But then it was gone and I was left wondering if I had heard anything at all.

  Hours seemed to pass, but they had not come for my statement. If Ruthie had confessed, would they still call for the district surgeon to examine her? Surely not. They would not need to. And they had the contact details for my parents. Had they phoned them? Probably. And would they let them into the cell to visit me? I hoped not.

  Perhaps an hour after I had been placed in the cell, a drunken hobo was brought in and pushed into the cell next to mine. Almost immediately I heard him snoring. Ten minutes later my cell door opened and a man of perhaps thirty shuffled inside. He was wearing jeans and a sports coat. Both looked as if they had been slept in. Under the sports coat, a T-shirt that had once been white, but was now an uneven grey, was buttoned up to the neck. He was clearly one of those who lived in the inner, less sought-after parts of the city. Not the kind of person I had many dealings with so far in life. He sat down on the bunk opposite mine. ‘What you doing here, kid?’ he wanted to know, clearly surprised at my presence.

  ‘Immorality Act,’ I said. I could hear my voice shaking.

  ‘No shit? You fucked a kaffir girl?’

  ‘A coloured girl.’

  He grinned at me, then winked. ‘They picked me up buying a little dagga. At least we were both having fun.’

  It no longer seemed like fun to me, but I tried to smile at him. At least he was a fellow offender.

  ‘You been screwing her a long time?’

  ‘It was my first time.’

  ‘Shit. That’s a bummer. She a whore, like a prostitute?’

  ‘No,’ I said. Then suddenly I was defiant. ‘She’s my girlfriend.’

  He looked surprised at that, but clearly did not see it as his business. ‘You under age?’

  ‘I’m fifteen.’

  ‘They can’t do nothing to you. The worst you’ll get is cuts – with a police cane. They soak the cane in salt water to make it break the skin. It hurts like hell but it’s better than chookie.’

  It did not sound too good, but at least here was someone who knew what to expect. ‘You’ve been arrested before?’ I asked.

  ‘Five, six times.’

  ‘For dagga?’

  ‘Every time.’

  ‘What do they do to you?’

  ‘It depends on the magistrate. Coupl’a months maybe.’ He must have seen something in my face because he hurried on. ‘It’s okay. If you under age, you just get cuts.’

  Eventually, the policeman who had tricked me into confessing returned and unlocked the cell. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Your father’s here. You got to come and make your statement.’

  ‘Good luck, kid,’ my new friend said.

  The policeman led the way, down the connecting passages to the charge office. He did not once look back to see if I was following. He obviously saw me as neither a threat to him nor a flight risk. From somewhere ahead I heard a male voice raised in anger. It took a moment before I recognised it as my father’s. In just a few days I had caused him such anger that twice he had lost his unshakable self-control. Under these circumstances, his voice sounded alien to me. The policeman glanced back at me with a little grin. ‘Your pa seems a little upset.’

  I had come into the police station in a state of shock and had taken in very little of its geography. Now the passage ended unexpectedly and I was in the charge office. My father had his back to me. He was pointing an accusing finger at the black policeman behind the desk. ‘You need to be careful.’ His voice was loud enough to be heard throughout the police station. Two policemen had appeared from another passage, drawn by the commotion. Another had appeared behind the counter. ‘My son—’ He was waving his finger for emphasis. ‘My son would never do anything like that and the man who says so will have me to deal with.’ Looking at his back, I was in a state of terror such as I had never experienced.

  The policeman who had brought me from the cell had again turned his back on me and was advancing on the front desk to assist in calming my father. For the moment, no one seemed interested in my presence. To my right the front door stood open. I saw a car pass in the street. The pavement, as far as I could see, was empty.

  What happened in the next second can perhaps not be classified as a decision. I did not run or even try to avoid being noticed. I simply kept walking. It came as a surprise that, without my hurrying or anyone even questioning me, I reached the pavement. There was still no sign or sound of alarm from inside. My father’s voice, raised in indignation, was enough of a diversion to hold the attention of everyone in the charge office. No one seemed to have noticed that the cause of the trouble was no longer with them.

  I turned towards the beach and ran. At the first corner, I swerved hard right, then left at the next. I broke clear of the line of buildings and found myself sprinting across Marine Parade. I heard a car brake and then the sound of its hooter within a few metres of me. I crossed the pavement on the far side of the road in one stride and leapt over the low wall designed to keep the beach sand off the road. Immediately, I rolled back into the shadow of the wall and lay still.

  For at least two hours I did not move. I heard no sound that might indicate pursuit. The only people on Addington Beach were the late-afternoon strollers you found there almost every day. The tide was out and the damp sand along the water’s edge reflected the pearl colour of the sky. People going for walks were silhouettes against sand and sea. It was a peaceful scene. But they had Ruthie.

  fifty

  A gentle wind blowing up from the south had turned the evening cold by the time I ventured out of my hiding place. I walked down the beach in the direction of the harbour, where I was less likely to be seen by a patrolling police car. There were few strollers now, so I left the beach for the low dunes that skirted the Point area on that side.

  I found a hollow in a dune and lay there until the darkness was as complete as the city lights allowed it to be. The wind was cold. My earlier terror had solidified into something denser that seemed to be reinforced by the temperature, as if my fear and the cold were parts of the same thing. Never, at any time in my life, had I thought of running away from home. Whatever I do from here on, I told myself, I can’t go home, not now, not ever.

  I had committed the one unpardonable sin. I had built an impenetrable barrier between myself and Mama, who knew it to be true, and my father, who could not admit that it was. All my life, they had been the yardstick by which morality was measured. Now they knew how deeply I had sinned. When I thought of Ruthie, I could feel no guilt, except the guilt that came with deserting her in the hands of the police.

  From the harbour I could hear the sound of cranes loading and off-loading cargo. Once or twice during the night the horn of a ship sounded as it entered the harbour. Up on the Bluff, on the far side of the harbour, the beam of the lighthouse flashed through the misty air every few minutes.

  On sand that had lost the day’s heat and in the cold sea breeze blowing over the dunes, I could not sleep. All night I begged to be shown the way. Abraham, I prayed, wherever you are, you must be able to see which path I should take. Please help me. Just tell me what to do and I will do it. Please, Abraham, please.

  By the time the first grey of dawn touched the clouds above the sea, Abraham had answered and I had a plan of action. I was sure that it was not something I had devised. Sometime during the night the components of the plan had appeared in my mind, unbidden but welcome. I stayed a while longer on the dune to thank Abraham.

  All my life, since that day, when confronted by a problem, I have felt a sense of relief as soon as I took action, even if the action was fairly ineffective. I have found that it is not the relieving of a burden that eases the pain, it is the act of dealing with it.

  I took off my shirt and
shoes and rolled up my jeans to below the knee. I wanted to look as much like a jogger as I could. Then I set off at a steady trot, up the beach, towards the north end of town. The sun was rising over the sea as I drew level with the Beachwood Golf Course. It was just before seven. I slipped my shirt and shoes back on and rolled down my jeans again before leaving the beach and strolling up Broadway into the little commercial district.

  I had enough change in my pocket to use the public telephone in front of the Post Office. ‘Vorster home,’ Annie said. I had been hoping for her. There was a quickness and urgency in the way she spoke.

  ‘Annie,’ I said. ‘I need you to do something for me.’

  ‘Chrissie?’ She sounded as if she had heard a voice from the grave. ‘Where are you? Mama’s been crying all night. Papa has even got the police searching for you.’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘But where are you? You’ve got to come home.’

  ‘Listen, tell Mama—’

  ‘But you’ve got to come home.’

  ‘Listen to me. I’m not coming home. I’m never coming home again.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Listen, Annie, please listen.’

  Something in my voice finally seized her attention. ‘I’m listening,’ she said. ‘Talk. I’m listening.’

  ‘You go and tell Mama that I’m all right.’

  ‘I’ll tell her.’

  ‘And tell her I’m not coming home. I’ll see her again later. But in the mean time I’ll be fine.’

  ‘But Chrissie, you’re only fifteen.’

  ‘Listen, Annie. Just listen. I want you to look in the bottom drawer of my desk. You’ll find my savings book there. Take it with you to school.’