“Statistics show—”
“Statistics my bladdy arse. You go and live there if you really believe it’s so great. Even this Gorbachev says they have to change because it’s so bad, their own leader says it. He knows, why don’t you? You talking like a nutcase! Listen, girlie. I put my life—I fought in the war against the chazersa Nazis, you don’t know what I went through and I hope you never do cos you would not sleep at night anymore. And I seen and I know that the communist lot with Stalin and all the rest, they weren’t much different than Hitler’s bunch. So you can take all your commies and you can chuck them on the same rubbish pile as the Nats!”
“But if you’re so against the Natis—”
“Nats. Nats! You keep getting your basic facts wrong again, yankee doodle!”
“Nats, Mr. Helger, Nats, fine. The question is how could you be against letting people vote—”
“One’s nothing to do with the other. And it’s Isaac!”
“Okay, Isaac. How—”
“Listen,” Isaac says. “The fact is they are not ready to run a first-world country, that’s just the fact.”
“They being . . .”
“Blacks! Who else, who else are we talking, Chinese? You cannot just turn a modern country over to them. They have to be built up first and educated proper before they ready to run it. It takes years and years to develop a first-world country, man. To have the experience and the education and the understanding. Now if the stuffing Nats had spent the last fifty years bringing the African up, developing and educating them, then maybe it would be time already and I would be agreeing with you on a vote for blacks also. But the Nats did the opposite and tried to stamp them down. When the Nats came in, in ’forty-eight, there were already some blacks on the voters roll, you know that? And coloureds also—you know what a coloured is I hope, it means mixed—those ones with some education behind them. They could have kept building that up slowly. But no! Instead they stripped them off and started with the bulldozers and the townships, they went all-out for apartheid and baaskap—being the big baas, the big boss, dominating, with the white foot always on the black neck . . . Man, they never invested in the country, they only invested in themselves. But you can’t stamp down twenty-five million people forever. You can’t!”
“I don’t understand you,” says Annie. “You’re against the right and you’re against the left, so what are you?”
“We vote PFP, dear,” Arlene says.
Annie snorts, a rude sound that makes my eyebrows go up. “Progressive Party—right. They’re useless.”
“Who told you that?” Isaac snaps.
“I’ve read their platform. They wanna make a few cosmetic tweaks here and there, when it’s the whole system needs to be wiped out. They’re just a fig leaf.”
“Beg your pardon?” says Arlene, blinking like a hundred times.
“I’m sorry,” Annie says, “but maybe you feel good in the northern suburbs sending Helen Suzman or whoever to parliament there to get laughed at by all those Afrikaan men in dark suits, but . . . c’mon, it’s just like a Band-Aid on a melanoma, right. All it does is make white voters feel good, it doesn’t do a damn—”
“What’s a Band-Aid?” asks Arlene.
“It’s a plaster,” I tell her. She doesn’t watch as much American TV as I do. Magnum P.I. and The Cosby Show and that.
“What’s a melyonia?” Isaac is asking.
“Cancer,” Arlene says. “She means voting PFP is like putting a plaster on cancer.”
“Aw for Chrise sake!” Isaac shouts at Annie. “You such a bladdy exaggerator!”
“Why?” says Annie. “Because I’m asking you a straight question and you don’t have an answer? You can’t say if you are for or against. The basic—the only—question that there is in this country.”
“You ask me what am I?” Da says. “What am I? How about you? What about you?” He sticks his finger out and hammers it at her. “You’re same as me, if you like it or not. You are a Jew!”
Annie opens her mouth and leans back, both of her palms going to her chest. “Um,” she says. “I’m a human being?”
“Aw please!” shouts Isaac. “Do me a favour. You’re Jewish. You are born one. Your name is Goldberg. You are born a Jew and you’ll die a Jew. I take one look at you and I can see how so Jewish you are. So who you tryna kid that you not! Stop sitting there and pretending that you belong to the African people. You’re not an African. You’re not even a white South African. You just a Jewish girl from New York there or wherever. And you fly all the way over here to sit in my house and argue with me about African things after you have been here for about five minutes on top of it and you don’t have the first clue what it is you talking about. Is that not so?”
“I—” says Annie, but that’s all the space she gets. Isaac is just starting to roll.
“You should be ashamed, man! After all what the Soviets have done to our people! Look at how they suffering over there, and then you talk nice on communism? Get off it! Look at Sharansky and the refuseniks and all the rest, how they chuck Jews into labour camps in Siberia. And they don’t even let them even be Jewish properly behind that iron window that they have there. Ja, it’s true. Don’t look at me like—and what about all the commie Soviet money and weapons and soldiers they are sending to all the bladdy Arab countries? Hey? Backstopping them to invade little Israel and try to wipe her out, to do another Hitler on us! And you stand there on the communist side? As a Jew? It’s disgusting! Shame on you!”
Annie still seems calm, which impresses the hell out of me. “It doesn’t matter,” she says, “that I was born Jewish. I insist that I am firstly a fellow—”
“It matters everything! It matters everything! We are Jews here in this country and we are a tiny drop in the bucket here, and we do not belong to that side or to this side. My only responsibility is for us! For us! My family, and my people who I am born to. That’s enough! That is enough of a bladdy full-time job. What do you have to go running around like a headchop chicken for? Trying to do what exactly? Save this one and that one. Run off to Africa and help the little black children there. As if the little black children are your children, but I got news for you—they not! They got Sotho mothers who speak Sotho and they got Zulu mothers who speak Zulu and so far as I know they don’t have any mothers who speak Yiddish! If you were in trouble would those Zulus and Vendas and Tswanas come flying to America to help the Jews there? If anyone has to fight it out with chutis it is them”—I look at Annie to see if she understood what Isaac meant by chutis, our semirude word we have for Afrikaners, but the way he says it now he means the government, the Nats—“because it is their bladdy indaba, man!” he shouts. “That means in their language it is their problem, not ours. Our job as Jews is to take care of Jews! Just like every other people on this earth takes care of their own. Their own children and not someone else’s, their own people and not someone else’s! Listen, this here in South Africa is between the chutis and the ANC, this is not our fight. We live in the system that is here, full stop, finish and klaar. We vote PFP every election, we against the Nats, what more can you want from us? That we should all go sit in jail for the blacks? No. Let them hash it out between themselves, the terrorist communists and the bastard Nats. Zollen zey brechen zeyere kep!” This last bit was an old Yiddish saying—let em go and break their own heads—and again I wonder if Annie understood.
“Right,” says Annie. “Just keeping out of it, uh? And what about your son? Isn’t he in the army right now? Isn’t he fighting for those Natis you say you hate so much? Isn’t that the truth, Mr. Helger? Your own son.”
I feel myself ducking. When Arlene hisses I’m not surprised, the sound could have come from me. Arlene says to Annie, “That is enough, enough! You ganna cause a heart attack!” Isaac puts his hand on Arlene’s arm and says shhh and it gets all quiet. And I swear that’s more scary than anything so far. He talks softer now but very clear.
“My son Marcus is a grown ma
n and I have no control over him. You don’t have any idea how hard we tried to keep him out of that army. My whole life has been one big mission to keep my sons out that farshtunkene army. That is why I sent them to that school. That’s why we had to go cap in hand to them and grovel to the Solomon board and do what we had to, for the privilege of paying them an absolute fortune, for that one reason—because Solomon boys do not go to the army. Oright? But you pipe down and you listen now. I grew up here and remember well when the Greyshirts was chucking bricks through windows of Jewish houses in Doornfontein, oright? You don’t think those days could come back here? You don’t think if we made enough trouble the Nats might turn around and go for us next? Maybe they’ll steal all our property like Idi Amin did to the Indians up there in Uganda, and then kick us out like dogs. Or maybe, even worse, they’ll steal everything and stick us in the townships along with the coloureds and the blacks. You don’t think that could happen? You think chutis has any kind of a liking for Jews? Do me a bladdy favour.”
“But what about everyone else?” Annie says, her voice going up for the first time. “What about all the ones who don’t happen to be Jews?”
“That’s not the point! I am born the way I am and so are you and that’s it! But I understand what I am. I know what we are. I understand the position we are in! But you. You don’t want to be who you are! You don’t have any clue what you are. That’s why you fly around the world stirring up crap for everyone else! Because if you care so much about politics, what you should be doing is doing the right thing and going to live in Israel, to fight and struggle for your people, for your tribe, like everyone else does for theirs, if that’s really what you want to do with your life instead of settling down and having a family like any normal girl—”
“But I am normal! That’s why I’m here.”
“Like bladdy hell! You can’t even make your own bed, you hypocrite! You don’t think we haven’t noticed! You the only one in this household who actually needs a maid! And don’t tell me you don’t stuff your face with meat like the rest of us, only you do it on the sly! You bladdy hypocrite! The only reason you here is so you can feel superior to all the rest of us when America’s got plenty of racialism of its own to deal with! Go back there and help the black Americans! Hypocrite! It’s easy for you here, if you get in trouble they’ll just send you home, but now you wanna get my other son involved? It’s bad enough that the army got Marcus now you want the bladdy security police to arrest my Martin? He’s the one who’ll get stuck in a cell like a dog—not you. He’s your cannon fodder just like Marcus is President Botha’s! You leave my son alone! Hypocrite! Bladdy hypocrite!”
And that, apparently, is quite enough for Annie Goldberg. She shoves herself away from the table and walks off. Arlene goes after her. Isaac is shaking his head and muttering to his plate. Zaydi carefully eats a forkful of roasted chicken.
24
A tapping on my window and I wake up knowing it’s her, I just do. Two eleven on Monday morning, almost the same time as when I saw her dancing alone that first night. Now she waves to me and I get dressed. She hasn’t been back since the Friday brouhaha. Outside she tells me she came to get her stuff, can I go in the Olden Room and fetch it? I say sure. We move quietly to the garden where she’ll wait for me, taking a seat on the busted old bench by the pomegranate tree that Zaydi planted years ago. Zaydi says pomegranates are moshiach fruit cos every fruit has its own little crown, and our moshiach will be king when he comes, the messiah-king, so we never eat from the tree, he wants us to wait for the Coming. Sitting next to Annie I ask where she’s staying, what she plans to do. She’s crashing at a friend’s place in Yeoville, she’ll move on to somewhere in Hillbrow, she thinks. “Things are changing there, blacks and whites mixing. The system’s collapsing.” I nod and she says, “Don’t worry about where I’m at. I’ll be moving around and you’re not gonna be able to find me—yeah, well, that brings us to it.”
“To what?”
“The tapes.”
I look at her in the moonlight, I’d dinkum forgotten, or more like blanked it out, that I still had her four master tapes there in the Sandy Hole. “Don’t worry, they’re fine,” I say. “I’ll get them also for you with the rest of your stuff.”
She says, “I’d rather you keep them here for me, for now.”
I don’t say anything, staring out into the garden.
“Look,” she says. “I know I can trust you. And I know they’re absolutely safe here. It’s a lot more dangerous for me to move around with them.”
“Don’t you need them?”
“We’re trying to figure out how we can up production to meaningful numbers. We need hundreds to start, thousands would be better. Distributing across the region is not the issue I thought it’d be. But finding a recording facility—this is tough. Can’t just walk into any video place off the street. It’s gonna take time to figure the right set-up. Until then I want you to keep the masters safe here for us and when the time comes—what’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Thing is, Martin, to keep in touch we’ll need to take precautions.” She pulls out a little paperback. There’s enough moonlight for me to read the title: A Light for the Abyss, by H. R. Koppel. She tells me to take a look at the first page where there’s a stamp for Viljoen’s Book Exchange, 125C Greenway Road.
“I know Viljoen’s,” I say. “I go there all the time.”
“I know you do. So it won’t look out of place for you to visit every Wednesday. Way it’ll work for us is with a message in code that we leave inside an exchange book.”
“Code?”
“You want to reach me, you put a note in a book on page one hundred, okay, and take it down to Viljoen’s. There’s a guy there you can trust, he’s part of the Movement.”
“What are you talking about? Old man Viljoen? No ways.”
“Not the old guy, his son.”
“Dolf.”
“He’s there Wednesdays. Give him the message book, and he’ll give you an exchange, he’ll always have one for you. You go in every week, regardless of a message or not. It’s our secret post office, get it? Don’t look so fucking scared.”
I’m still thinking of Dolf Viljoen, a quiet young guy with glasses—him in the Movement? But he’s an Afrikaner. That means he’s fighting against his own. “What if Dolf isn’t there that day?”
“Then just ask has he left a book for you. He will have. Make the exchange. Now—code. We’re gonna use Hebrew for this, you know your aleph bet, right?” She leans over and pulls out a pencil stub and starts writing, showing me how to do a grid and convert any English word into this Hebrew code, based on the date. I can feel the brush of her hair next to me, her body heat. She tests me to make sure I have it, then tells me I need to burn every message every time, no exceptions. “It’s not a real sophisticated code,” she says, “but it’ll work for our usage.”
“Our usage,” I say. She looks at me. “What’s up with you?” she asks.
“I’m fine. Why?”
“You don’t sound fine.”
“How do I sound?”
“Like you’re about to puke.”
“Maybe I am.” My hands are between my knees, squeezing there, I’m looking at my lap. I keep falling back in my mind to that place in Jules where everyone was shouting amandla, I keep seeing the charred bodies on the hilltop with the melted rubber and Kefiya and Ski Mask making that bomb and then there’s the sick desperate feeling of being in the back of Oberholzer’s Ford. It feels unreal and too real at the same time. I realise I just do not want anything to do with it. At all. I want it to disappear. I want her to disappear. I want to be alone in my garden forever.
I can feel her looking closely at the side of my face. “What’s the problem?” she says.
“Annie, you’re like a full-on ANC person, aren’t you?”
“Why are you asking this now?”
I shake my head.
“Look, Martin,” she says, he
r voice hardening. “I’m not interested in trying to convince. You’re in or you are out. But if you don’t want to do it, you have to let me know right now. Bring the tapes out with my stuff so I can find another safe place to stash em.”
I put my forehead on my palms. “I dunno,” I say. “Just hang on . . . let me think.” Because, ja, I can see the bombs and the burnt people but I can also see the face of little Nosipho and I can see that can of cat food. And the whip coming down on that girl’s legs. And that’s all real too, that’s all happening. Annie says, “Commitment is real hard, I know. But it’s what grown-ups do, Martin. Make the decision and tell me now.” I stay frozen and she says my name and touches my back. I feel her shifting closer on the bench, and now her soft breasts are pressing against my shoulder. “I know you’re probably feeling overwhelmed, I can’t blame you for that. But I also know that inside you’re a good person. Do you know how I know that, Martin?” Her palm opens up like a hot flower against the back of my neck, I feel her breath on my ear. There’s like hardly any space between us. “Because you told me your nightmare, and I know what it’s about. What it really means. Why it keeps coming back. A message from deep inside you. It’ll keep on repeating until you receive it. A dream about Nazis invading this garden right here. Attacking your house. Martin, it’s so clear and obvious but you can’t see it.”
I swallow. “Can’t I?”
“The garden is you, Martin. The garden is the centre of who you are. But the Nazis. I got news for you, Martin. The dream Nazis are you too. The dream is a warning. It’s telling you the worst part of you is trying to take over everything else. You understand, Martin? The Nazis are still outside the walls, they represent all the stuff that this place South Africa wants to teach you to be, and make you into, and invade you with.”
“And the Zaydi part?”
“That’s easy.”
“Is it?”
“He’s your soul, Martin. The dream is you trying to save your soul.”
The Mandela Plot Page 12