Tandia

by Bryce Courtenay

  Tandia, for whom no man had been allocated, walked over to the pianola and, sitting down, started to pedal it. Most of the tunes were well-known boere musiek numbers, old favourites that caused the feet to tap and the blood to rise. In about five minutes flat the place was jumping.

  Juicey Fruit Mambo dispensed beer from bottles buried in tin tubs of crushed ice, and the two coloured women from Durban appeared from the kitchen carrying pies and sausage rolls and an assortment of good things men like to eat: sausages and chops and big, juicy steaks. The girls were swung and danced and picked up and fussed over until the shirts of the men clung to their massive chests. Sarah removed the shirt of her partner and the other girls soon followed suit. It was a sweating, laughing, dancing, hugging, swinging, lifting party and Marie told Hettie she thought she'd passed away and woken up in heaven.

  And then Johanna got the gramophone going and the lights dimmed and the night softened to Nat King Cole's 'Mona Lisa' and the couples drew closer, chest and breast and breathing heavier, as Frank Sinatra stroked them with 'Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered' and 'The Lady is a Tramp'. One by one, they danced off the floor and up the blackwood stairway, each girl with -a man in 'tow and a lot of loving mischief on her mind. The beautiful young man carrying Jasmine up the stairs stopped halfway and said, 'Man, if I die now, I'll kill myself!'

  As parties go, there have been bigger parties, louder and more colourful ones with live music and more spectacular entertainment, certainly more drunken parties or parties for more important people, but Frog Friday 1954 was, in its own small way, one of which the human race had a right to be proud. No one threw up or grew violent or felt left out or unrequited. At two a.m., Juicey Fruit Mambo knocked on the various doors to tell the boys their taxis were waiting. They appeared soon afterwards and each wore a smile and a stunned look in his eyes.

  As for the girls? The widow Clicquot could not have done a better job. Everything the French sailor had told Mama Tequila about her champagne proved to be true. Mama Tequila's eight working girls had been transil-meddle-tated right into heaven.

  But all this happened long after Tandia had been replaced at the piano pedal by one of the coloured ladies from Durban. Halfway through the evening, after the men had all eaten, Juicey Fruit Mambo handed over the task of serving drinks to the other one and left the party. Some twenty minutes later he returned to tell Tandia she was required in Mama Tequila's salon. 'What is it, Juicey Fruit Mambo?'

  He grinned, his gold incisors gleaming. 'I think you be very, very happy, Missy Tandy, big indaba for you!' he giggled, but would say no more.

  Tandia stopped in the girls' waiting room and patted her face with a towel and added a touch of lipstick. She couldn't imagine what Mama Tequila might want. Frog Friday had been the biggest day of her life, the day she matriculated with honours and, in her mind, started her life properly and truly. From now on she was beautiful and brand new, no longer the daughter of Natkin Patel, known in the best white circus, but Tandia Patel, a black slimmetjie who was her very own person. And for just a moment, as she opened the door to Mama Tequila's salon, she wasn't scared at all. She was surprised and delighted to see Dr Louis and Sonny Vindoo. Her surprise was even greater when she recognized the round, squat shape of Old Coetzee with his puffy eyes and whisky nose, his untidy suit jacket open as usual, showing his waistcoat with his gold watch chain looped across his big belly. With him stood a very tall, thin man in a dark suit with perfectly round glasses which sat halfway down his long, sharp nose. His steel-grey hair, plastered down with hair oil, was parted down the centre just the way Patel had worn his. His narrow face had a disappearing chin and it looked as though he didn't laugh a lot. In his dark grey serge suit and white shirt he needed only to stand on one leg and he would have been Icabod Crane.

  Sonny Vindoo rushed to welcome her. 'My dear, dear, Tandia, how very beautiful you are looking!' He giggled, 'I must be having the name of your dressmaker at once, my goodness, yes!'

  Old Coetzee pulled himself up to his full height which wasn't much bigger than five foot six inches. 'Magtig! You are a pretty girl, man!' he said, to Mama Tequila's surprise. He was an important, upstanding Afrikaner and she couldn't remember ever hearing a Boer paying a compliment such as this to a coloured person. What a waste, Mama Tequila sighed; she would be worth a king's ransom if she worked on her back.

  'Please, everybody sit!' Mama Tequila indicated the comfortable high-backed Victorian armchairs which had been drawn into a semicircle round a low coffee table with ball-and-claw legs. 'Juicey Fruit Mambo will bring drinks.'

  'You must come and meet Professor Ryder, the head of the Law School at Natal University,' Sonny Vindoo said. 'And, of course already you are knowing Magistrate Coetzee.'

  'Howzit, Tandia,' Dr Louis called, using the casual slang expression to ease her nerves.

  'Good evening, Magistrate Coetzee, good evening, Dr Louis.' Tandia said politely, trying hard not to sound nervous. Her heart was thumping. The thin man, who looked like one of the marabou storks Juicey fruit Mambo had once identified for her on a walk along the river, was from the university.

  In her pink gymslip behind the bar it was easy to know the role she was required to play. She was Miss Tandy with the beautiful smile who kept the drinks coming, the shy, ingenuous part of a double act with Mama Tequila. But what was she here? What was expected of her? She knew instinctively that she was required to impress Professor Ryder, who didn't look like the sort of man who was going to be a pushover charmwise. There could only be one reason why Sonny Vindoo and Dr Louis were here, though how Old Coetzee fitted in she couldn't imagine. He'd paid her a compliment, which was a very strange thing for a man like him to do.

  In her mind she saw him standing to rigid attention, the top part of him fully dressed right down to his watch chain, but with his trousers around his ankles. Across his left shoulder was the old Boer Mauser that usually hung on the wall directly above the blackwood stairs. Sarah knelt on the floor in front of him.

  Sarah had accidentally come upon the solution to Old Coetzee's erectile problem when he'd taken down the old rifle and, with tears in his brandy-bright eyes, stroked it lovingly. 'Miss Sarah, this is a Mauser 8mm carbine, it's what nearly beat the verdoemde rooinekke in the Boer War! This is the rifle that defended the republiek! I worship this rifle! With five thousand more Boers on horseback and this carbine, I'm telling you man, Queen Victoria would be crying tears in her English teapot and Oom Paul would still be president of the republiek!'

  Sarah couldn't be sure about Queen Victoria but she knew for sure Oom Paul, the first president of the Transvaal Republic, had been dead for more than fifty years. 'That's very nice, Magistrate Coetzee, if you want you can bring it with you.' Sarah suggested, in an attempt to coax the old bugger into the pink room so that she could begin the arduous task of bringing him to gratification. Old Coetzee lumbered after Sarah, following her into the room like an excited schoolboy.

  Thinking only to amuse him Sarah had commanded, 'General Coetzee, Commander of the Boer Republican Army, friend of President Oom Paul Kruger himself, stand to attention!' To Sarah's surprise Coetzee had immediately shouldered the old German rifle and stood to rigid attention beside the bed. Sarah was not one to miss an opportunity and she'd quickly slipped her hands under his waistcoat and undone his belt and trousers, pulling them down to his ankles. 'Watch careful as anything, you hear? The British are everywhere, jong!' she commanded him. Old Coetzee's eyes darted around the room as Sarah went to work on him. Occasionally, he'd remove the Mauser from his shoulder and fire an imaginary shot. 'Got him, got the verdoemde rooinek right between the eyes!' he shouted quickly, working the bolt action of the old rifle to eject the imaginary cartridge case before placing it back over his shoulder. In a surprisingly short time, Old Coetzee had risen to the occasion and before you could say, 'God save the Boer Republic!', she'd finished him off with French.

  As Mama Tequila
and the other three men sat down, Tandia extended her hand to Professor Ryder. 'How do you do, sir.' It was a brave thing to do; coloured girls don't shake hands with important white people who might think they were cheeky or trying to be the same as a white or something. Immediately he'd released her hand she began to worry.

  But Professor Ryder didn't seem to mind. He sat down and crossed his long legs and looked at Tandia over the top of his glasses, which appeared to have slipped halfway down his long nose. 'Or Rabin tells me you know your Latin, Tandia. Certainly a high distinction in your matriculation exam is very commendable.' He cleared his throat, reached up and brought his glasses back to rest on the bridge of his nose. 'We'll begin with something simple, okay? I want you to conjugate a few curly irregular verbs.

  The future perfect tense of the verb "to use", if you please?'

  Ah!, thought Tandia, he's like Or Louis, always a puzzle, trying to trick me with a deponent verb, passive in form but active in meaning. She had learned from Mama Tequila the value of a little drama, and now she gave the lanky professor a dazzling smile where he might have expected a serious schoolgirl demeanour. 'Usus ero, usus eris, usus erit. Usi erimus, usi eritis, usi erunt,' she said, to Dr Louis's obvious relief.

  'Very good Tandia.' The professor appeared to be thinking. 'What about the perfect tense in the subjunctive?'

  Tandia completed this request as effortlessly as the first. 'Usus sim, usus sis, usus sit. Usi simus, Usi sitis, usi sint.'

  Professor Ryder grinned. 'That's the easy bit over. Now let's try you on Virgil's Aeneid, the fourth part.'

  Tandia could feel the blood rising into her face and her mouth was suddenly dry. She regretted her previous aplomb. Virgil's Aeneid IV was Dr Louis's territory and, to please him, she'd studied the Latin poet more diligently than she was required to do at school, even after a while getting to quite like him. But she wasn't sure what the professor would expect from her.

  'Dulces exuviae, dum fata deusque sinebant, accipite hanc animam, meque his exsolvite curis; "sweet relics, sweet so long as God and Destiny allowed, now receive my soul and free me from this suffering",' Professor Ryder recited, making each word sound as though it was delivered from a lectern. The relief Tandia felt was palpable. She knew this passage was part of the Queen of Carthage's death soliloquy. She knew the two lines that followed, and quoted them in a quiet but firm voice which belied the terror she felt. 'Vixi, et, quem dederat cursum fortuna, peregi; et nunc magna mei sub terras ibit imago. "I have lived the life and finished the course Fortune has allotted me. Now my wraith shall pass in state to the world below.'"

  The professor followed with another passage from Aeneid IV. It was one of Dr Louis's favourites and she had no trouble completing it.

  'Very good! "Hunc ego Diti sacrum iussa fero, teque isto corpore solvo,"' Ryder quoted, his voice deep and overprojected; he seemed to be enjoying himself and Tandia was beginning to feel embarrassed. It was gobbledy-gook to Sonny Vindoo and Mama Tequila, and probably to Old Coetzee as well.

  Tandia knew that these were the last lines of Book IV but she didn't know them nearly as well as the other two passages. Her mind went blank. It was a four-line stanza and the last lines had simply disappeared from her memory.

  'Ah…ah…' She looked at Dr Louis, who seemed to be urging her on with his eyes, the fingers of both his hands spread wide.

  'It is my favourite, man! Don't finish it, Tandia, let me please. Omnis et una dilapsus calor, atque in ventos vita recessit; "At once all the warmth fell away and the life passed into the moving air.'"

  'My goodness me, that was very well done!' Sonny Vindoo said, clapping his hands in applause. 'Miss Tandy could perhaps complete it prettier, but I'm telling you, no better!'

  Professor Ryder laughed. 'We shall never know! You have some very good friends, Tandia Patel. Did you know that?'

  'No, sir…yes, sir! I mean, I don't know, sir.' Tandia looked up at Professor Ryder and he could see she was very close to tears, the strain of his examination clearly showing. 'Please, sir, I mean, Professor, please let me go to your university? I will work hard, I will do anything!'

  'Ja, I can tell you that true, Professor. Tandy can cook and clean and you can ask her anything, she knows it right off, anything you want to know. The hardest stuff you can think, she knows it already,' Mama Tequila tapped her head, 'it right here inside her kop!'

  'Ja, she's very clever, the most clever you can find anywhere, but I think there are some other problems, hey, Professor?' Sonny Vindoo had sensed that Ryder was troubled and that he had hoped to gain a slight advantage by compromising Tandia with his impromptu examination. 'No problems! She will pay, we don't want no charity, you hear!' Mama Tequila's voice was indignant.

  'That's not the question, Madam Tequila,' Professor Ryder said. 'The girl's marks are sufficient to get her a scholarship to our university college for non-whites, I'm sure I can help her there, though I regret there is no law faculty. Perhaps Fort Hare?' He paused and clasped his hands together in front of him. 'It's…well frankly, it's just damned awkward in my own faculty!'

  'You mean because Tandia's a coloured?' Doctor Louis asked quietly.

  Ryder looked uncomfortable and glanced at Tandia. 'Perhaps Tandia should leave the room?'

  'No, Professor, she a big girl, leaving this room not going to change her colour!' Mama Tequila said.

  'I wasn't simply referring to the student's colour. There are other complications. She's a female, and well, er…law for a woman?' Mama Tequila's outburst had added to his obvious discomfort. Tandia could sense he was beginning to wonder how he'd been persuaded to come to Bluey Jay in the first place.

  'Okay, let me say something!' It was Old Coetzee who spoke. 'In this room is Mr Vindoo, he's an Indian and Mama Tequila who is a coloured person and Or Louis who is a Jew and you, Professor, who are a Britisher and me, I am a Boer, an Afrikaner, but, in the end, we are all South Africans, you hear.'

  Just then Juicey Fruit Mambo entered carrying a tray with ice, water and two decanters, one of Scotch and the other brandy. He'd also opened a bottle of coca-cola and added it with a glass to the tray for Tandia. He placed the tray down on a small coffee table and, as quietly as he'd entered he turned and walked back towards the door, giving Tandia a quick, encouraging flash of the gold incisors as he left. Old Coetzee pointed to the departing black man, 'And the Bantu, we like to forget the Bantu, who are also South African, not just Zulu or N'debele, Sotho or Shangaan or Pondo, but just as much, maybe even more, South Africans than us.'

  Tandia moved over to the tray and started to pour drinks for everyone. She knew all their preferences, except that of Professor Ryder. She placed her hand on the Scotch bottle and he nodded, then on the water jug and he shook his head and pointed to the ice tray. Hiding behind the bottle of coke she found the tiny glass containing green chartreuse which Juicey Fruit Mambo had poured ready for Sonny Vindoo.

  Tandia had remained standing when Mama Tequila and the men sat down and, although it wasn't as bad, her mind recalled the time at Cato Manor police station after she'd been arrested and she had been made to stand while the policeman interrogated her. She didn't have the courage to sit down, thinking that she might look too forward, a cheeky bladdy kaffir should she do so, now the drink tray saved what was beginning to develop into an embarrassing situation for her.

  Old Coetzee continued. 'We all got one thing else in common.' He paused, accepting a brandy from Tandia. 'Hate! We all hate each other!'

  'Oh, I say, is that quite fair?' Professor Ryder exclaimed.

  'I think you're probably quite a nice chap for a magistrate and a Boer,' he laughed.

  Old Coetzee held up his hand. It was obvious he wanted to be taken seriously. 'No, please! Let me talk, man. This country is not built on understanding or compassion or the mutual co-operation of its people. It is stitched together with the needle of hate and the thread of fear. The Af
rikaner hates the Englishman, but both are also South Africans. The English South African calls the Afrikaner a "hairy back" and hates him back. The Indians, who came out here as indentured labour, they are hated by the blacks. This hate is encouraged by the white man, just like the white man encourages the various native tribes to hate each other. It creates a buffer zone of hate. A safety zone built on hate. If one kaffir tribe hates another one, the Zulu the Sotho and so on, and they all hate the Indian, then the white administration, people like me, we can control and direct the hate!' Old Coetzee held his brandy balloon up and moved it in a slow arc, taking them all in and stopping at Mama Tequila. 'Then there are the coloureds, the children of the white man's guilt! They remind us every day that we are not invincible and superior, but weak and human.' He paused. 'So they are hated by everyone the most of all!' Old Coetzee brought the glass to his lips, emptying almost half before he put it down again. 'Hate, fear and greed! These are the components on which South African society is based!'

  There was silence in the room. It was a startling admission, but hugely more so coming from the Afrikaner magistrate who was meant to uphold the sacred concept of apartheid.

  Finally, Sonny Vindoo spoke up. 'Tonight, Magistrate Coetzee, I will go home a very, very happy man! I'm telling you now, I'm not thinking I will ever in the whole of my life hear a Afrikaner say these things!'

  Old Coetzee smiled. 'I am a Boer, you must understand. What I think and what I say and what I do, they not always the same thing. You have just heard me thinking aloud; you must not judge me by my thoughts.'