Does it Hurt to Die

by Anderson, Paul G

  ‘Who is that?’ she said to Jannie.

  ‘It’s one of my father’s favourite workers,’ replied Jannie, the look of anguish on his face obvious to Renata. ‘There have been rumours for years about a relationship between her and my father.’

  Renata looked up to see where Jannie’s father was and then saw him making his way towards the back of the kitchen. Renata watched as Jannie’s mother turned in disgust and headed out towards the stoep.

  The woman’s interruption had caused the band to stop playing. Embarrassed that all the attention was now on her and his father, Jannie left Renata’s side and walked up to the bandleader and instructed him to continue playing, glancing over his shoulder to see which direction his father had taken.

  Jannie returned to Renata and seeing her puzzled expression pre-empted her question. ‘It happens often on the wine farms,’ he said. ‘The workers get drunk, try to take someone’s girlfriend, and end up fighting!’

  They returned to the dance floor and resumed their dance as a degree of conviviality returned to the party. However, she could tell he was tense.

  ‘What is it Jannie?’ she whispered as they danced. ‘What’s worrying you?’

  ‘I hope my father controls his temper.’

  ‘I’m sure he will,’ replied Renata, annoyed at the shallowness of her reply and that she had been unable to offer anything more to encourage Jannie in her belief.

  They sat out the next dance, and she could tell that Jannie was wondering whether he should follow his father.

  ‘Jannie, if you’re going to have a relationship with someone, you need to communicate what’s happening inside!’

  ‘Renata,’ he said, without looking at her directly, ‘that’s the English way, not the Afrikaner’s. We deal with our problems differently. Rational thought, dissection of the problem, and finding a solution is our way!’

  She was astounded, frustrated and annoyed that he could talk to her like that.

  ‘Well, no wonder you’re so screwed-up as a culture,’ she said as she walked away from him.

  ‘I’ll go and see whether I can do anything,’ he said, without waiting for her to reply.

  As she sat and thought what to do next, Paul walked up to her.

  ‘Renata, where’s the birthday boy?’

  ‘Having a cultural crisis, I think,’ she replied, knowing that such a reply would invite no further questions.

  ‘Cabernet or chardonnay, Renata? If you like red, the Kanonkop is superb,’ said Georgina as she joined Etienne, trying to direct the conversation away from the developing personal contretemps.

  ‘No, thank you,’ Renata replied, noticing Jannie disappear through the open kitchen door and heading in the direction his father had taken.

  Jannie proceeded down the dirt path leading from the house. It was a path he had taken many times before, although mostly during the day when he had carried supplies down for the workers. The path was illuminated by the full moon, the well-worn track clearly outlined in front of him. As he quickened his pace to try to catch up with his father, he could hear the music from the house drifting across the vines beside him. The vines had a rippling and amplifying effect on the music, giving it an irenic quality. He hoped that on such a beautiful night there would not be an unhappy ending, as on so many previous evenings during his childhood.

  As he half ran, half walked along the pathway, he strained to try to make out his father ahead of him. He stopped to catch his breath. Initially, he could see no one. He could just hear voices whispering up ahead. Then, as the moon came out from behind a cloud, two figures were clearly defined. The first was the large frame of his father, the second the coloured worker whom he had seen at the house. He slowed to a walk and in the moonlight could see that his father was embracing her—not only embracing her but kissing her roughly, his hand on her breast.

  Jannie stopped, looking at the two entangled shapes and trying to deal with the revulsion that he was feeling. As the nausea gripped his gut, he briefly contemplated going to fetch one of the guns that were always kept in the house. Then he heard footsteps behind him. Turning from his father’s meretricious embrace, he could see Renata’s outline about ten metres away. She was walking briskly towards him. He quickly advanced to meet her on the track, not wanting her to see what was happening ahead of them.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded as he stood in front of her blocking her view ahead.

  ‘I could see how concerned you were and I felt bad about the way that I spoke to you. I thought that if we were going to go through life together, then I needed to be with you.’

  ‘You have to go back; this is not about you or your culture.’

  ‘If I go back then you’ll never see me again.’

  Jannie looked at her as she stood toe to toe with him, and realised there were too many things for him to deal with at one time.

  ‘Come with me, but don’t ask any questions.’

  He reached out and took her hand hurrying along the path to where he had last seen his father. His father had moved on, and, in the distance, he could see he had reached the workers’ huts, the female worker still by his side.

  The workers’ huts were small whitewashed buildings without running water or electricity. There were ten of them opening out on to a common square. In many, even from the distance they were at, Renata could see the glow of candles and kerosene lamps. The common square was lit with a single spotlight, which had been installed by his father. On the dimly lit square, Renata could see two of the workers facing each other. One of the workers had a long knife, which was being thrust at the other worker, each strike glinting menacingly in the moonlight.

  Renata felt Jannie’s hand urging her to stop. They watched as Hannes Marais made it to the edge of the square. He approached the two men out of the darkness, staying directly behind the man brandishing the knife. He then reached down and picked up a large rock from next to one of the workers’ buildings. With a single movement, he smashed the rock on to the head of the attacker. The knife flew out of his hand just before he dropped to the ground and lay there lifeless. Hannes de Villiers then turned and headed back the way that he had come, stopping briefly to replace the rock next to one of the workers’ huts for future use.

  A crowd of coloured workers quickly gathered around the lifeless man. Some were on the ground trying to shake some life into him, and several of the women were crying. Renata noticed someone trying to stem the bleeding from the smashed skull with his bare hands. They then all stood back as Jannie and Renata approached, the fearful look in their eyes suggesting they expected more violence. Jannie quickly knelt next to the man’s head. Renata watched while he looked at the wound more closely, with blood streaming from a head wound so deep that part of the brain extruded on to the ground. He felt the neck for a carotid pulse.

  ‘There’s no pulse,’ he said, towards Renata, but without looking at her.

  ‘I think hy is dood,’ he said, in a mixture of English and Afrikaans, looking at one of the workers who stood in a circle around the body.

  More women started to cry when they heard Jannie say that he thought the man was dead. Children also started to come out of some of the small houses, attracted by the decuman noise now coming from the square. One of the children, much fairer than the others, was now standing bare-foot next to the dead worker. Renata noticed the strange malformation of one of the toes and, remembering that Jannie had once said that his father had some kind of malformed foot, wondered if this was Jannie’s father’s rumoured love child. When she looked up from the ground to the child’s face, she noticed he also had unusual eyes. Most coloured children had brown or green eyes, but these boy’s were light blue. As she tried to process that information, one of the women started sobbing over the lifeless worker.

  ‘Why don’t you try heart massage, Jannie?’

  Jannie looked at her. His glance suggested that this was a question that he did not intend to answer; surely, she could see he was dead. />
  Renata ignored the warning implicit in Jannie’s look and stepped over the outstretched body and felt for a pulse herself. Not finding one she then went to strike the body with her fist over the heart, but Jannie grabbed her wrist.

  ‘Stay out of this, Renata,’ he threatened. The other workers stepped back concerned that there was going to be more violence.

  ‘Let go of my wrist. You’re hurting me, Jannie!’

  ‘Not until you’re rational!’

  ‘Don’t tell me to be rational when someone’s lying there who might be helped. I thought that’s why you wanted to be a doctor. Why don’t you start compressing his chest?’

  Still holding her wrist, Jannie pulled her sharply towards him, stepping back as he did so. Without his shadow obscuring the body, Renata could see the fractured skull, its cerebral contents haemorrhaging on to the dry, dusty path. In the moonlight, she could see his pupils, fixed and dilated. Resuscitation was useless in those who had died from a massive brain injury.

  Jannie looked at her and slowly released his grip. He said nothing further to her but continued in Afrikaans, addressing those who were gathered, asking who the worker was. It was a scene that was all too familiar to him from his childhood.

  As the other workers talked amongst themselves, apologies, she knew, would have no meaning in this setting. Jannie turned his back on the gathering crowd and took Renata by the hand to head back to the house. She pulled her hand from his and said, ‘Tell me what’s going on.’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Don’t be so bloody patronising. Despite the belief of many South African men, women are capable of forming opinions and making decisions.’

  Jannie turned and looked at her. ‘Like the decision to resuscitate someone who is brain dead?’

  ‘Jannie, if you want to have a relationship with me, then you can only do so if you’re willing to treat me as an equal. I had no idea that he was dead until I could see beyond your shadow.’

  ‘I’ll tell you on the way back to Cape Town,’ he replied.

  They walked the rest of the way back towards the house without talking. When they arrived, they entered through the back door, and Renata noticed immediately the party mood had returned, couples were dancing and the talk was animated again. Their return was hardly noticed, but she could detect a loathing in Jannie that she suspected partly for being perceived as a nebbish son, a feeling that she knew he needed to confront.

  ‘I need to see my father,’ he said, releasing her hand. ‘Please wait here for me.’

  Renata watched him go, confused as to whether again to follow him; but she decided that whatever was between Jannie and his father she would have to observe discreetly from a distance. At the far end of the room, Hannes de Villiers was engaged in laughter with several other neighbours as one of them poured him a stiff whisky. Renata could see that he was describing vividly how he had used the rock to smash the worker’s head, to the amusement of the other Afrikaner farmers. She watched as Jannie approached the circle and stood directly opposite his father. For a second his father continued talking and ignored Jannie’s presence.

  ‘You killed another one,’ said Jannie, half shouting in anger at his father.

  Hannes de Villiers turned slowly and glared at him, embarrassed by his son’s breach of protocol in front of their friends. He then broke away from the group taking Jannie forcefully by the arm and directing him towards the back door. Renata hurried to the back window to see where they had gone. Outside the back door, Hannes de Villiers stood inches from Jannie holding him by his shirt front.

  ‘There is no difference,’ he spat at Jannie. ‘One vermin from another. A Kaffir is the lowest form of life; they live like vermin, they eat like vermin, and they breed like vermin. When they fight, they don’t stop until one dies. I just stopped the one that was going to kill the other. That’s no crime—that’s protecting the interests of others, of which you were one when you lived here.’

  Renata watched as he folded his arms and threatened his son to reply. Jannie stepped back from his father, breaking his grip on his shirt as he did so.

  ‘People are not vermin. It’s circumstances that make people different. It’s inferior circumstances that we whites create and enforce.’

  ‘Don’t you blaspheme in my house, you ungrateful bastard. God has determined that there will be black and white, black because they have the stain of sin. They’re the sons and daughters of Cain, and the Bible says they have to serve as slaves to atone. Don’t you come with that liberal English propaganda that your English girlfriend lives and breathes, not in this house.’

  Renata could feel herself trembling. She felt certain that Hannes de Villiers was going to strike Jannie.

  ‘What do you think will happen to your precious country if these vermin take over? Do you think they will protect your precious rights?’

  Stabbing his finger in Jannie’s chest, he advanced a step closer, blocking out the light from the lounge and forcing Jannie into the corner of the small lean-to shed. His voice grew louder so that Renata could still hear every word of his rant.

  ‘You know what sickens me about you, you ungrateful bastard? It’s your holier-than-thou attitude. I control this place as we, the Afrikaner, control the country. You go to school and talk to your clever friends while I control the vermin so you can do what you want to do. And all that you and your clever friends do is plan to give it back to them. You think you have all the answers; the answers you have will destroy all the decent hard-working people in this country. You will inherit nothing, nothing.’

  Renata moved from the window and walked through the back door where she could again see the confrontation continuing in the shed. Jannie had stepped back from his father, his fist by his side. She thought he was almost certainly going to hit his father, when he stepped back and said, ‘What kind of country is it that is controlled by those who murder? A good, holy, Christian one? Is that what you think you have created as a legacy for the Afrikaner?’

  ‘Ye is a Kaffirboetie. You are no son of mine; get your communist arse off my land.’

  Shocked that Hannes de Villiers had called Jannie a Kaffir lover, Renata hurried to try to get between them. A step away from them both she saw Jannie hit his father hard beneath the chin. Hannes de Villiers stumbled back into the hanging pots, grabbing drunkenly at them as he fell; missing all of them for support, he stumbled and then fell on the ground. The noise of the crashing pots brought his mother rushing from the kitchen. Jannie walked quickly past, not saying a word.

  ‘Come, Renata, we’re going,’ he said as he took her by the hand and walked back inside.

  ‘But what about everybody here, your friends, and your parents’ friends?’

  ‘We’ll round up those who came with us. My father has asked me to leave the house. I’m not coming back here, Renata.’

  ‘I’ll tell Paul and the others,’ she said, understanding the enormity of what he was telling her.

  On the way back to Cape Town, there was initially deadly silence; so different to the joy and happiness and vitality that had been the trip to the farm. Finally, Renata was unable to bear the silence any longer.

  ‘You were going to tell me something, Jannie.’

  Jannie could feel the five sets of eyes watching and waiting to see whether and how he would respond. He did not take his eyes off the road.

  ‘The coloured worker you saw dead. My father killed him. That’s the second one this year. He hit him on the head with a rock. That’s how he always does it. The rock is usually hidden along the pathway for just that purpose. It’s premeditated. Afterwards the workers are paid off with extra wine for a month to dispose of the body.’

  ‘But what about the police?’ said Renata.

  ‘We’re the police,’ answered Jannie. ‘The Afrikaner has needed power to survive, but now the survival is corrupted by the power. The basic driving instinct is segregation. The tenet is that the black man is inferior, born with an infe
riority that is supported with supposed biblical passages. Those who have power get there by ascribing to those principles. They enforce them in the belief that it is necessary for the survival of the Afrikaner. The whole system has become corrupt, and I no longer want to be a part of it, at least not a part that requires tacitly accepting the death of a coloured worker as a mercy killing!’

  No one responded and there was a surreal quietness in the car. After fifteen minutes, Jannie pulled over alongside a row of old pine trees. He wound the window down and allowed the cool night air to circulate around them all.

  Addressing no one in particular, he said, ‘I can no longer be a part of that. I can no longer condone our inhumanity if I’m to eventually take a pledge to treat those very people we mistreat.’

  Renata looked at everyone in the car; no one knew what to say. They all felt the same but knew that Jannie’s experience was one that they would not be able to fully understand. Jannie waited a few minutes, and when no one spoke, started the car and drove back to Cape Town in silence.

  Chapter 22

  Emotionally drained from retelling his mother’s story, Christian looked at Isabella and Marais and said, ‘That evidently was the last time my father saw his father.’

  ‘That’s so typical of those times, I believe,’ said Marais. ‘No wonder it was difficult for your father.’

  Isabella was also shocked but, regaining her composure, tried to lift the mood somewhat. ‘Well, the new owners look like they really care for the place, so maybe we can take away lots of happier memories for you.’

  They returned to the house, and Christian was about to knock when the door opened. Standing in the doorway was a woman much younger than he would have expected. She was probably in her early forties dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, and, to his surprise, greeted him in English. Christian quickly explained who he was and introduced Isabella and Marais.

  Gloria du Toit invited them all in for coffee. Christian sat and took in the kitchen, wondering how much it had changed since his father’s time. He could see the polished floor his mother had talked about and the back door leading out to the path where his father had followed his grandfather.