Tandia

by Bryce Courtenay

  On her way out she stopped to see the night sister. 'Please, sister, you have got perhaps a favourite charity?' She opened her purse and took from it two five-pound notes. 'I want to show my very sincere appreciation. As you can see I am a very small person who is not possible to see in a place like this so early in the morning?'

  The sister smiled. 'You don't need to do this. Or Rabin already told us you weren't here this morning.'

  'No, take it, please!' Mama Tequila pressed the notes into the woman's hand.

  'Thank you! I will use this money for the African baby clinic I run in Clairwood every Saturday.'

  Mama Tequila laughed. 'Ag, babies! In my line of work, sister, that a dirty word!' She turned and walked slowly down the corridor and into the sunlight where Juicey Fruit Mambo, polishing the bonnet of the Packard, waited for her.

  'Edward King George Juicey Fruit Mambo, I think we going to be okay.' She paused and sank back into the soft leather of the Packard's rear seat, dosing her eyes. 'For the time being, anyway.'

  'I think you very, very clever madam, madam!' Juicey Fruit Mambo announced as he switched on the ignition and turned the big car into the hospital driveway. The Packard's tyres scrunched on the gravel as they drove past a long bed of scarlet canna under a blaze of flamboyant trees. Sitting opposite the road as they turned out of the gate were two grey rhesus monkeys. 'I think that policeman he got friends who come to visit,' Juicey Fruit Mambo giggled. But Mama Tequila didn't hear him, she was already asleep.

  Any half-decent police enquiry would have shot holes through the accident staged to explain Geldenhuis's injuries. After all, most arrangements contrived in a crisis fall apart on closer examination. But it wasn't in the interests of the SAT Squad to dig too deeply. Geldenhuis had corroborated the evidence Mama Tequila and Juicey Fruit Mambo had given the investigating sergeant, who wasn't trying to be Sherlock Holmes anyway, Old Coetzee, who was the magistrate appointed to preside at the routine enquiry, saw no reason to ask a whole bunch of awkward questions. He ruled that the accident was due to the driver's failure to correct his steering while attempting to avoid an animal crossing the road.

  Of course there were rumours, but these were dismissed by most solid burghers as too bizarre and silly to entertain. The 'cop in the boot' was a hero as well as a clean-cut. upright boxing type. Geldenhuis's 'broken pelvis' mended in about three months, which meant his return fight with Gideon Mandoma had to be cancelled. It wouldn't take place for twelve months or so now, the time it would take his bones to knit properly and for him to get back into fighting trim.

  In mid January, when Geldenhuis was only halfway through his recovery, the matriculation results came out. Tandia achieved a first-class matric with distinctions in four subjects and a high distinction in Latin.

  Tandia called Dr Louis Rabin and Sonny Vindoo when she obtained her results and, in her mind, there now remained only one more thing to do. After lunch that afternoon she persuaded Juicey Fruit Mambo to drive her in the Packard to the Christian Indian cemetery where Patel was buried. Going back was a difficult thing for her to do and for a while she simply sat in the car outside the little graveyard, trying to summon up enough courage to enter.

  From where she sat she could see over the wrought-iron fence; the tall marble cross to which she had been handcuffed still stood there. Strangely, she could barely remember the policeman who had raped her. It was the dark spectre of Geldenhuis who lurked in the shadows of her consciousness. This was where it had all started, where the nightmare had begun. Her fear of Geldenhuis had never really left her; it would come out of the blue like a punch in the belly, or lurk like a grey shadow at the edge of her mind. Sometimes it was the first thing to happen when she awakened. At other times it arrived suddenly, striking at her when she was reading a book. Then again, it came like a slap in the face when she was cooking or making a bed or warming a brandy glass for a client in the bar. It was always with her, a little bit or a lot. The only place it didn't seem to come was when she climbed out onto the branch of the old wild fig tree at night and sat in her silver cocoon. The fearful presence of Geldenhuis hadn't found her there, didn't seem to know about this place or couldn't come through her bedroom window.

  Juicey Fruit Mambo, sensing Tandia's melancholy, climbed from behind the wheel and went to sit in the back of the car. 'I am very tired today, Miss Tandy. Last night de frogs dey make many, many noise outside my house by the river!' Juicey Fruit Mambo had his own room in the outbuildings behind Bluey Jay but preferred to live in the kraal with his adoring gang of kids. Now he crossed his arms and with a deep sigh closed his eyes. In a matter of seconds he commenced to perform an exaggerated pantomime of feigned sleep, so much so that his pretend snores softened the edge of Tandia's anxiety and gave her the courage to leave the safety of the c,!r and enter the gates of the cemetery.

  In the fifteen months since Tandia had left him, Patel's grave had changed. The rounded mound had been flattened and a carpet of untidy grass and dandelion weed now covered the red clay. An ostentatious polished black basalt tombstone had replaced the wooden cross. To Tandia the makeshift wooden cross had seemed more appropriate to the business of death. There seemed to be something slightly obscene about a squared-off block of hard polished granite planted above the slow and natural decay of dust to dust.

  Tandia read the inscription on the black tombstone.

  Natkin Patel.

  Born 6th January 1898,

  died 14th October 1952.

  Boxing promoter and businessman,

  beloved daddy of Billy and Teddy,

  husband of Injira Patel.

  'And father of Tandia Patel, who just got a first-class matric, hooray!' Tandia was suddenly no longer afraid. 'We did it, Patel! Four distinctions and a high distinction in Latin! What do you think of that, Mr Boxing Promoter! Mr Well Known in White Circus!' She laughed happily. 'What do you think of that, hey, Dad, Daddy, Pa, Pop?' She used all the pronouns together and they fitted perfectly, natural as anything. Patel had come back to her, he loved her again, that was for sure!

  EIGHT

  Tandia had grown to understand a lot more about life and the way she fitted into it in the fifteen months she'd been at Bluey Jay. Her final year at school had shown a remarkable change in her. Though still a loner, she was now prepared to assert herself, and she discovered in the process that the other girls would defer to her if she pressed an issue or suggested an opinion. Her very separateness was the strength they now perceived in her. She was no longer seen as a lonely little girl, but as someone who seemed to fill the space around her, content with her own presence, independent and confident.

  In fact, Tandia's aloneness and independence had always been a part of her. Parted from her mother when she was no more than a toddler, being alone had become the state of mind in which she existed. She was skilled in the art of the camouflage, giving out only sufficient of herself to fulfil whatever role she was obliged to play.

  With Patel 'she had been expected to perform two roles, one as servant and the other as revenge on his two fatheaded sons. Maid and schoolgirl. Useful to him as a general factotum and reward for his ego. She had played both roles well. At home she had been eager to please and had never complained or shirked her work. At school she had been the quiet-as-a-mouse outsider, the little girl who didn't quite belong, but who worked well enough and hard enough not to be noticed. Tandia had performed these ordinary parts so well that she had become all but invisible, the role of servant to the Patel household and that of Patel's ego-boosting bastard schoolgirl daughter substituting for a life which, in her mind, she had postponed until she grew up.

  But at Bluey Jay it was different. Now she knew herself to be ready at last to grow up. The obligations of her childhood were over. She existed for herself alone. Sitting in her silver cocoon in the branches of the old wild fig tree, she would look through the canopy of leaves up at the night sky until she f
ound a single star which by a careful framing of leaf and branch she could isolate, so it appeared to shine alone in the firmament, a single pinpoint of light in an eternity of space. Tandia would imagine herself as the star, absolutely alone in the firmament, destined to be a sufficiency in herself.

  Because she was surrounded by girls who thought of little else but physical attraction, she began to see herself in these terms as well, and the constant claims of envy at her looks from the other girls led her to understand that she was beautiful. This was really the first thing she owned by herself, without an obligation to someone else. She began to understand the difference in the way men looked at her, began to sense the power which lay within her. If she was beautiful, that was power; if she was intelligent, that too was power. Both used together suggested ambitions which each on their own could not achieve. If she added to this the camouflage she was already skilled at employing, she had the key to surviving. But it was a key which also opened lonely, empty places in her personality.

  At Bluey Jay Tandia now learned how to adapt to her environment so that she could not only survive it, but use it for her benefit. She could hide behind other people's perceptions of her while remaining true to. a personality which grew from her aloneness, her fears and, increasingly, from an aching need within her to be loved.

  Tandia had had no love experience. Love for her had always been a matter of seeking approbation. If you pleased someone enough they would love you in return. Now, she knew this to be naive. She sensed that love was something else, without knowing how to go about discovering what it was. Even her loving of Sarah, her first touching-with-the fingertips love, she now knew to have been a sisterly act and a physical gratification for Sarah - no more. Except for the very first time, Sarah had made no attempt to comfort her or to chase away the dark shadows. She had seemed unable to share in a secret intimacy of silences understood and of loving whispers sucked into the pores of her being like warm sunshine. Sarah was a working girl who had scraped herself off the pavement too often in life to venture beyond the emotional possibilities of simple sexual gratification.

  Not long after Mama Tequila had terminated Tandia's liaison with Sarah, Tandia came to see clearly that the act of becoming physically attached to someone at Bluey Jay would rob her of the power she had as a beautiful woman. Her expectation of sex with a man in the loving sense, the way she heard the girls talk about in a yearning, sighing way, was deeply, if not permanently, buried by her fear and guilt.

  Sex was a commodity which surrounded them all. It was the stock on the shelves of the shop in which they worked. Tandia saw that what was on sale to clients at Bluey Jay was not what she wanted or needed or expected to have. It was not a path along which she was likely to find the kind of love she needed. There was no morality involved in this decision; the luxury of a moral stand in a whorehouse was understandably not available to her. The love she hoped for, but never expected to find, had no physical aspect and so she didn't know if she'd even recognise it, should it ever come within her reach. And so Tandia put it aside. She would survive without whatever it was she knew to be missing in her personality. Someone who knew her well might simply conclude that she lacked an understanding of love, that it was an experience she had never felt, so that she was unable to love in the all-consuming and selfless sense. But then, of course, there was nobody who knew her remotely well enough to draw any such conclusion.

  Prior to her brutalisation by Geldenhuis, Tandia had accepted Mama Tequila's right to work her on her back after she had completed high school. She had even thought of it as a perfectly legitimate way to earn sufficient money to pay her way through university. But after her experience with Geldenhuis she knew that, come what may, she could not be turned into a working girl. Not by anyone, not for anything. Tandia knew that the instinct which had made her bite Geldenhuis would assert itself again. It was the first time she had tasted hate and she now knew she could live with it. She understood fear and she now understood hate. She could exercise charm and power over those around her; this would have to be enough to survive in the hostile grown-up world she found herself in.

  Dr Louis sought Tandia out whenever he visited Bluey Jay. He had become very attached to her and would encourage her by talking dreamily of her prospects. 'Tandia, you're the first of a new breed, the new Africa. The brain hasn't been called grey matter for nothing, you know! It has no colour bar. When your kind have shown the barbarians in Pretoria that you are intellectually just as sound, just as good as they are, they can no longer call you savages. One day we will have a new class system in South Africa, like the rest of the civilised world! A system based on a person's ability. You, my dear, will be one of the beautiful new South Africans.'

  But one of the barbarians in Pretoria, the Minister, among other things, of Bantu Education, Doctor Hendrik Verwoerd, was taking no such chances. Not too long after Dr Louis had his dream, Verwoerd invented a new little kink in the Bantu educational system.'

  'The Bantu is inferior! Science has proved his brain size is smaller than the whites.

  Therefore they cannot hope to compete with the white man!' To prove this, the all-white parliament passed the Bantu Education Act. It forbade the Bantu people from learning the same subjects at the same level as the white student and set up a separate curriculum which educated the blacks and the coloureds to virtual serfdom.

  'Nice one, Verwoerd!' the white part of the nation cried in appreciation and tucked him into their minds as a future prime minister.

  Girls were taught Domestic Science, a euphemism for washing and ironing, cooking and other domestic chores. They were taught arithmetic, but only sufficient to count the change when the missus sent them to the shops. Boys became carpenters and builders and all the other manual labour niceties which involve dirt, sweat and broken bones and which allow an overclass to be supported by an underclass of skilful hewers of wood and careful wielders of water.

  In one hit, Doctor Verwoerd, one day to be the chief white honcho, the Prime Minister of South Africa, had smashed the Aristotelian concept that the mind shall decide the priorities for mankind and be the arena in which equality is decided.

  The black people, trying to reach for the stars, were being educated with their faces pushed into the dirt. Skin tone was winning over grey matter. Or Louis's barbarians were in full cry.

  Or Louis would hold Tandia's hand, as though she was a person he liked a lot. He was so genuine in his enthusiasm for his lovely dream that Tandia began to believe it too, if only for the hour he would spend with her going over her essays and cluck-clucking over her Latin tenses.

  He was a Latin nut and was probably responsible for Tandia's high distinction in the subject. Over the months of her final year at high school he had often visited Tandia to work with her on her Latin and maths, and over the cramming weeks before her matriculation he would come almost every day. He was the first person she had called after receiving her matriculation results. Sonny Vindoo was second. 'Jolly, very good show, Miss Tandy, we are having a very big celebration and I am awarding you a new dress, any colour, any style, any material your very superior mind desires!'

  Tandia's relationship with Mama Tequila was a curious one. She admired the fat woman greatly and saw in her some of the things she was beginning to understand about herself. Tandia instinctively knew that Mama Tequila had hidden her own feelings so deeply and so long ago that she would not know where to find them even if she ever did need to use them again. The apparent dichotomy in her persona was perfectly predicated so she could function with the very minimum of emotional energy. She was a clown to her clients and a business person who saw her working girls as a commodity she referred to as whore, in the same way as a draper might refer to cloth or a sheep farmer to wool.

  On the flip side of the Mama Tequila coin was a woman who ran a stable of whores for profit. The only emotional energy she spent with them was in order to make them better at making mon
ey. The working girls gave her credit for kindness and personal attention to their needs which Tandia could see was seldom justified. They praised her frequently and boosted the old woman's ego so that they could feel themselves needed and loved. Tandia, at sixteen, was perhaps too harsh a judge, but you grow up pretty quickly in a brothel, and she soon learned to look for the motive when Mama Tequila appeared to show someone a kindness or took the trouble to talk one of the girls out of a misery. It was rare that she couldn't find one. Mama Tequila was as much a part of Tandia's education into grown-up life as Dr Louis or Sonny Vindoo. The only difference was that she trusted the two men but not, for a single moment, the old woman.

  And so goodness and badness arrived together in Tandia's life. By watching Mama Tequila cover her every move with deception and blackmail, Tandia learned a great deal about the principles of fighting and surviving the unjust systems of the white man. Tandia's beautiful green eyes were becoming less and less wide-eyed as she grew to understand the price of freedom for the underclass in South Africa.

  Sonny Vindoo would often speak to her of Mahatma Gandhi, how he had come to South Africa to challenge the precepts of apartheid with the absolute logiC of a fine legal mind; how, with ruthless authority and undeniable credentials, he presented to his opponents in the South African government under Jan Christiaan Smuts the absurdity of the concept of racial inferiority based on colour or creed. 'Miss Tandy, evil can withstand truth for a very, very long time. Evil is a very clever bugger, but in the end, truth, you can be sure, will prevail.' He would look directly at her through his pebble glasses: 'British Justice, my dear, it will win the day.' He said this in such a way that Tandia imagined British Justice as a troop of cavalry, a cloud of dust on the horizon, riding to the rescue of the coloureds and blacks of Africa. The fact that British Justice had hitherto shown very little truth and almost no equality for the black man, nor had it shown any inclination to lead the race relations of South Africa from darkness into the light, didn't seem to concern Sonny Vindoo in the least. He and Dr Louis were on the same side against the overwhelming forces of evil. They were both soft men in the hard fight which lay ahead. Tandia loved them dearly, but she knew, in the end, South Africa would need the hard-as-diamonds Juicey Fruit Mambos to rise up and crush the oppressor more than it would need the strawberry mousse of white liberalism. Truth and justice had failed to appear when needed and so had no further part to play in the settlement of the scores. She had felt the cold, remorseless steel and the ripping, cutting, sliding of a gun barrel inside her. She knew what it was going to take to win.