Whitethorn

by Bryce Courtenay

  I stopped the car by the side of the road, shifted the gears into neutral and pulled on the handbrake. Then I grabbed Mike and pulled him towards me so that his head rested on my chest, my left arm holding him about the shoulders, my right hand cupping his head. And then I too began to weep. Mike wept for his family and his beloved country, and I because Africa had killed the woman I loved more than my own life and it had left me so cruelly to live.

  After a while Mike moved away, and I pulled out the choke a fraction, pressed the starter button and we drove off. We were both silent for some time, recovering from our mutual blubbing session, when Mike said, ‘I’ll go into politics.’

  ‘Sure, I can see all of white Kenya bumping and pushing each other aside to be the first to vote for you! Suggested slogan: “Let’s give Kenya the Finger!” ’

  ‘Trade union official, black workers, that’s where I’ll start,’ he said. ‘In the meantime I’ll grow coffee and marry a Kikuyu or an Indian woman.’

  The sun was setting as we drove into the front gates of Makindi, the brilliant crimson flame tree blossoms blending into the scarlet and gold of the day’s end. ‘Well, I’m glad that’s settled,’ I replied dryly, then added somewhat sardonically, ‘Of course, you’ll be having the wedding reception at the Thika Club with all the usual crowd present.’

  Mike laughed. ‘Mark my words, Tom Fitzsaxby, Kenya will change.’

  ‘Yeah, but will Africa?’ I asked.

  I received a double first at Oxford, graduating in jurisprudence and African studies, and was encouraged to go further, with the university offering me a fellowship to Rhodes House. I thought about it, though not very seriously, as the wriggling word ‘Mattress’ simply refused to be scrubbed out of my psyche. I was going home to Africa where I had some unfinished business to attend to.

  Curiously, the sea trip home from Southampton on the Union-Castle Line’s Bloemfontein Castle proved to be the proverbial sea change I needed. The Suez Canal had reopened after the Suez crisis, but this one passenger vessel did the trip to Africa anticlockwise, my idea being to hitchhike from Cape Town back to Johannesburg and see my own country.

  I fulfilled yet another ambition on my list of things to do one day. I’d always promised myself that I’d take dancing lessons at Arthur Murray Studios, and I was now able to do the next best thing. The ship had a dancing instructor, a vivacious older woman, who seemed to take a liking to me. She taught me the waltz and the foxtrot as well as the rumba and the tango, while several of the young women on board taught me how to jive and jitterbug, and were kind enough to invite me to limber up in their bunks. You’d have thought, wouldn’t you, that I’d have learned to dance with Pirrou? But, as a professional dancer, she would never dance for recreation and so I’d missed out. With Sam my ineptness on the dance floor had never emerged; we’d both cherished the time we shared together and spent none of it at the Thika Club Saturday-night dance.

  With the exercise on the dance floor and the good food on board, by the time I arrived in Cape Town I was fit, had gained weight and was returned somewhat to the old optimistic Tom Fitzsaxby. Imagine my surprise to find Oom Jannie, of the Steinway Baby Grand fame, and Hester, his wife, waiting to meet me at the docks.

  I had written to him from England when the idea of hitchhiking from the Cape had occurred to me, mentioning the sailing date and day of arrival in Cape Town. I wrote to ask whether it would be convenient to call in on him. I’d received an airmail postcard with a picture of the BOAC Comet and one sentence in Afrikaans which when translated read: Come, please, Tom, you are always most welcome. Jan Odendaal.

  Oom Jannie greeted me with a great bear hug. ‘Ag, Tom, I said to Hester, no, man, this time he’s not going to get away, we going to fetch him, hey!’ Then holding me at arm’s length, he declared, ‘Now we not talking one night, you hear? We talking as long as you like and definitely more than one week!’

  Before I could thank him, Hester chipped in. ‘Ja, Jannie is always talking about you, ever since he came back from the Transvaal with the pianos in the Rio.’

  Oom Jannie released me and I turned towards her. ‘Goeie môre, Mevrou Odendaal,’ I said, extending my hand.

  She took my hand in both of hers. ‘You must call me Tante Hester. It’s really nice to meet you at long last, Tom.’

  Oom Jannie’s wife was a big, handsome woman with steel-grey hair pulled back from her face, culminating in a bun at the back of her head. ‘To have a piano in the house like that,’ she paused and smiled at her husband, ‘is to know somebody loves you a lot.’

  ‘Ag, no, it was Tom’s idea all the time,’ Oom Jannie protested in an embarrassed voice.

  I laughed, shaking my head in denial. ‘Tante Hester, let me give you Oom Jannie’s exact words.’ I pretended to think, although I had never forgotten them as they were quite the nicest expression of a man loving his wife I had ever been privileged to hear. ‘ “You know, Tom, forty-three years is a lot of years and a lot of loving. Hester only asked me for one thing in all that time. When we got the first big wool cheque, only last year, the one when we became all-of-a-sudden rich, she said to me, ‘Jannie, do you think now we can have an inside lavatory? I’m getting too old to go outside in the dark.’ You can’t pay enough for that kind of loving, Tom.” Then he said he was going to buy you the Steinway,’ I concluded.

  Tante Hester stood there smiling, her eyes filled with sudden tears. ‘Thank you for telling me, Tom,’ she said quietly.

  Oom Jannie was clearly embarrassed and, blustering somewhat, said quickly, ‘You see, I told you, ouvrou, this boy is a whole dictionary, he never forgets words! When he told me why the shape of the pianos was so funny you should have heard him tell how the special sound it makes is made in Germany and it’s called acoustics.’

  ‘Look who never forgets now!’ I laughed.

  I had only one suitcase, mostly filled with books, and I followed my unexpected hosts to the parking lot. Oom Jannie, it seemed, had finally run the old Rio into the scrap heap and now drove a large Mack truck with multiple gears. They were both big people and so the front seat, the only seat, was pretty snug with the three of us.

  ‘You know the floor polisher?’ Oom Jannie said, as we got on our way.

  ‘Ja, your bonsella from the pianos.’

  ‘Let me tell you, Tom, Hester loves that machine, she doesn’t let the kaffir women do the floor polishing, even old Martha, she won’t let her, will you, ouvrou? Whoever heard of a white person polishing a floor, hey?’

  ‘Ag, with a contraption like that a person doesn’t have to even bend down, but you can’t let modern machinery get into a servant’s hands, they break everything right in front of your eyes,’ Tante Hester declared.

  ‘We lucky now we got electricity, it happened only last year,’ Oom Jannie said.

  ‘But you’ve had the floor polisher five years, even longer,’ I said, not quite understanding. ‘You mean you didn’t have electricity until last year?’

  ‘Ag, Tom, that time in that shop in Johannesburg, with the pianos, it was such a nice pasella I didn’t have the heart to tell you.’

  ‘And you just kept it, until now?’

  ‘Ja, man, every week Hester polished the polisher,’ he laughed.

  Hester started to explain. ‘Tom, in life a person mustn’t get everything all at once, because then you can’t appreciate it. First the lavatory inside the house. I can tell you, that is a very big blessing in a person’s life. A person gets old and their inside doesn’t always work at the right time. Then you must go outside to the kleinhuisie in the middle of the night, or maybe use a chamber-pot if it’s only a number one. In the Karoo in winter it’s icy-cold and dark and you nearly die to go outside if it’s number two. So that’s the first big blessing, now you got a lavatory right next to the kitchen and you just pull a chain and everything’s gone, finish and klaar. It’s a miracle from God, you hear? Then the piano, God gives you that for happiness and to praise His precious name and when the family com
es to have a nice singsong, you can play all the old boere musiek. Now electricity all of a sudden comes right past the house, put in by the government for the abattoirs at Bakoondfontein. So now I have the floor polisher, and it’s a big show-off, and in no time flat we got shining floors so you can see your face. Martha, who has been with us thirty years, she’s getting old like me and now she doesn’t have to do the polishing on her poor swollen knees.’

  On the way to the Odendaal farm in the Karoo, a journey that took up most of the remainder of the day, the subject of Skattebol, Oom Jannie and Tante Hester’s youngest daughter, who he’d once earmarked for me, came up. In fact, I brought it up myself, wanting to stack the decks early in case he still harboured the ambition of having me as his son-in-law. ‘And what news of Skattebol?’ I asked.

  Oom Jannie turned to Tante Hester. ‘You see, this one never forgets!’ Then he glanced at me briefly before returning his eyes to the road. ‘Ag, Tom, it’s a sad story, but then again also a happy one, our Skattebol also did what Anna went and did. Remember?’

  ‘Became pregnant out of wedlock?’ I said, putting it as politely as I could.

  ‘Ja, but this time, even worse, it happened with a Rooinek, a student from Cape Town University. He’s a nice boy but he can’t even speak Afrikaans. He’s from London and is this architect out here studying Cape Dutch houses. Why does a man want to study old buildings, hey? They can’t build them like in the olden days, it’s just all this modern rubbish they going in for nowadays.’ He seemed to be thinking, then said, ‘The Odendaal family has been in this land a long time. Skattebol is the ninth generation and in the family Bible only one Engelsman.’ Oom Jannie then quoted the words in the family tree in High Dutch, which, roughly translated, were, ‘Samuel Thelonius Morris, Sea Captain, Cornwall, 1749, husband to Johanna Maria Odendaal, no issue’. ‘That time we were lucky, the good Lord cut off that branch so we wouldn’t suffer. We got an Engelsman who fired blanks! You’d think we should have learned our lesson the first time, hey? Now we gone and made the same mistake again.’

  ‘What?’ I asked, not understanding. ‘I thought you said Skattebol was pregnant?’

  ‘No, the baby is here already, a nice healthy child, thank the Lord,’ Tante Hester said calmly.

  ‘So what’s the unhappy part?’ I asked.

  ‘This time the Engelsman wasn’t firing blanks!’

  We all laughed and then I asked, ‘And the happy part?’

  ‘Three happy parts. It’s a boy child and they in love, two turtledoves and they married, so no disgrace. But the Dominee says, “No more shotgun weddings, Jannie. Two times is enough, God is not mocked, you hear!” ’ Oom Jannie chuckled. ‘I told him, “That’s orright, Dominee, all the bullets have been fired, I haven’t got any more daughters.” ’

  I spent two weeks with Oom Jannie and Tante Hester, and by the time I left these two dear and lovely people and met members of their family who came to visit, I felt thoroughly grounded. We’d spent the warm summer nights around the Steinway and I’d become re-acquainted with all the old boere musiek and songs. I was back home among a unique breed, Afrikaners, a people that were big-hearted, generous and loyal to a fault on the one hand, and narrow as a cut from a razorblade on the other.

  Oom Jannie and Tante Hester exemplified all that is kind, loving and good in their people, yet it was readily apparent from the way they talked and behaved that they shared the Afrikaner racial antipathy towards the black people. This was despite the fact that they were paternalistic and caring to such old family retainers as Martha and several of the older men who worked on the sprawling Karoo sheep farm.

  Three hundred years in Africa had turned them into the white tribe I had heard so often described from the pulpit by the Dominee in my childhood. Like all tribes, the Volk were more African in their ideas and attitudes than those they retained from distant European roots. The laager mentality and conquest that had won them their new tribal lands still existed. In their minds the ox wagons remained drawn in a tight circle against the black hordes and the God-given superiority and rights of the white man were to be defended at any cost. The concept of equal rights for all of the people of South Africa was anathema, as the doctrine of apartheid so stridently testified.

  Of course, I knew all of this instinctively and it was just that I’d been away from it for a while, and it was different in its blatancy and openness to the rancorous and secret racism I’d experienced in Kenya. Britain’s assumed right to expropriate the best land from the Kikuyu and give it to the whites, then to hold it at gunpoint and by murder, was disguised and explained by an elaborate exercise in obscurantism. They had devised a propaganda machine that pumped out high-quality mendacity to vindicate thousands of acts of institutional barbarism. The public hanging of over 1000 black men testified to this and was only one small example of it. They nevertheless continued to extol the virtues of decency, fair play, God, Queen and Empire, whereas the Afrikaner attitude, inexcusable as it was, was openly practised and vaingloriously defended.

  Racism, wherever and however it occurs, is a repulsive, endemic and deeply atavistic human characteristic that appears to be present in most of humankind. Whether racism is openly practised or hidden, it is inexcusable. I felt that I had a better chance of obtaining justice for Mattress, a Zulu pig boy in South Africa than I would ever have for a Kikuyu goatherd in Kenya.

  If, on the one hand, I found myself returning to my roots and the comfortable presence of Oom Jannie and Tante Hester, on the other my old ambivalence for the Volk returned. I had been with my host a week when late one afternoon, while enjoying a beer with him on the stoep of the homestead, the conversation inevitably turned to politics. What followed was not very different to all the other discussions I’d been involved in over the years. The blacks needed to be kept in their place, as they were growing much too cheeky for their own good. The African National Congress was a terrorist organisation and communist-inspired and should be hunted down and eliminated to the last member. The Nationalist Government policies were the right ones and the new Bantustans planned were a testament to this correct thinking and exemplified the principles of baasskap, leadership and the correctness of apartheid. The concept that the majority of the land rightly belonged to the white man as only he could keep it productive, and that sharing it equally with the kaffirs was as good as destroying it forever, was a notion I’d heard since the cradle. ‘If you give baboons good land all you get back is soil erosion.’ And so on, ad infinitum.

  South African political views held by the majority of white people at that time, with a few notable and brave exceptions, were predictable and seldom polarised, even among the new Liberal Party that had opened its membership to all races and demanded equal rights for non-whites. But as usual there were qualifications and the old paternalism reared its ugly head. These so-called ‘equal rights’ would only be given to ‘all civilised people’, a neat cop-out that allowed the Liberals to have a bet each way. It was just that the Afrikaners were less subtle and more strident about expressing their racist views, while many so-called liberal whites sat wobbling on the political fence ready to fly off in whatever direction the wind blew.

  Although, I don’t suppose I could talk. I was back in my own country, which was on the verge of becoming a police state. I knew that I would soon be called on to make a stand. But I also knew that if I was to bring the Van Schalkwyk brothers and Mevrou to trial, a difficult enough task, I must steer well clear of the immediate taint of politics. I must be seen to be demanding justice for a humble farm worker and, at the same time, to be squeaky clean on the political front. In any other society my actions would not be questioned, but in South Africa, my ulterior and, in particular, political motive would be the cause of immediate speculation.

  Listening to my host extolling the usual line of political cant, I decided that I couldn’t continue to lend credence to Oom Jannie’s blustering and bombastic jingoism, although I knew that I would achieve absolutely nothing by
attempting to contradict the dogma Oom Jannie so vehemently proselytised. A Boer is by nature a stubborn creature but in politics he becomes intractable. I knew if I could bring the Mattress case to the High Court it would probably get national newspaper coverage, specifically in the Afrikaner press. So I decided to test the reaction to such a trial on my host. He was, after all, a salt-of-the-earth type, an Afrikaner to his bootstraps. Oom Jannie was, politically speaking, the Afrikaner equivalent of the English settler, of Jack Devine and Gladys the Man-eater of the Thika Club.

  I waited for an appropriate time when the talk of politics seemed to have wound down. Oom Jannie sat quietly puffing on his meerschaum, looking out into the rapidly concluding sunset. ‘Oom Jannie, I would like to ask your advice on a matter.’

  The old man looked surprised. ‘Jinne, man, if it’s about a woman don’t bother, hey? No man understands what’s going on in a woman’s head. If it’s about sheep, that I know. Also I know there’s nothing going on in a sheep’s head.’

  I laughed. ‘No, it’s about being an Afrikaner, about the Volk. It’s about bringing an attitude to peculiar subject matter.’

  ‘Tom, I don’t know about attitude to peculiar subject matter. You the educated one around here. I’m just a sheep farmer.’

  ‘Oom Jannie, I want to tell you a long story. I’ll try and make it as short as possible, but I’m warning you, it could go on for a while.’

  ‘Then I better go get some more beer, hey?’ He rose heavily, and with a sigh from his riempie chair, went into the house, returning with two large bottles of lager. ‘Now we got electricity the beer is nice and cold for a change,’ he said, smiling as he handed me one of the quart-sized bottles.

  For the next hour I told him the story of The Boys Farm, of Mattress and Tinker, Pissy Vermaak, Fonnie du Preez, Mevrou, Frikkie Botha, Meneer Prinsloo, Sergeant Van Niekerk, and finally the murder of Mattress and how it had all occurred. I left out such details as the canned-fruit jar containing Mevrou’s grisly brandy-pickled exhibit and Meneer Prinsloo’s role as a paedophile. Then I told him about the sabotage attempt by Frikkie and the six Van Schalkwyk brothers in the Stormjaers, and the fact that they’d admitted to him that they’d murdered Mattress. I outlined how they’d planned to derail the train from Rhodesia and the subsequent explosion that had left Frikkie without a face and with a twisted and permanently broken body, and how the six brothers had left him to die under the railway culvert.