by Irma Joubert
On their way back Karin dozed off. Grietjie asked Francois, “Does your father vote for the United Party?”
“He does. He’s a Bloedsap, as they say.”
“My dad is a staunch Nationalist.”
He frowned. “That could be a problem.”
“Why?” Surely their fathers would never meet?
He smiled. “I’ll tell you one day,” he said.
Grietjie felt a lump in her throat. She couldn’t explain why, but she didn’t want to think about their parents meeting anytime soon.
In the early hours of the morning, the fighter planes thundered through her mind. St. Elmo’s fire was dragging from the wingtips, a spectacular display. But the blue flames backtracked to the wings and the entire plane exploded in a fireball. The plane plummeted, setting the entire city alight, the city where Jakób was. The blaze singed her hair. Someone groaned dreadfully.
She woke with a jolt.
Fortunately she had not woken Karin.
The final three weeks of term were taken up with assignments and tests. Everything had to be finished before the short April vacation. “Lecturers don’t know how to plan,” Karin complained on Thursday evening. “I’ll probably have to work all through the night on this assignment.”
“You’re not the only one, roomie,” Grietjie assured her. “I have a test on this book tomorrow and I’ve read all of three pages.”
“Let the studies begin!” Karin announced dramatically and sat down behind her desk.
Half an hour later there was a hesitant knock on the door. “Go away, we have work to do!” Karin shouted.
The first-year on front-door duty cautiously opened the door. “Good evening, Miss Karin. Good evening, Miss Grietjie.”
“Yes?” Karin asked brusquely.
“Miss Karin, I’m sorry to bother you. Miss Grietjie, you have a visitor.”
“Francois knows I have to study tonight,” Grietjie said, annoyed. “Tell him I’m on my way,” she told the first-year. “I’m just putting on my shoes.”
“He’s waiting in the sitting room, Miss Grietjie,” said the first-year, then rushed off.
I didn’t even comb my hair, thought Grietjie as she opened the door of the formal sitting room where they were supposed to receive their gentleman friends. Francois’ timing was really bad. He knew she was snowed under with work.
She pushed open the door.
He was standing at the far end of the room. Dark. Large as life.
Just as she had so often seen him in her dreams.
Impossible, yet true.
For a second or two she was frozen to the spot.
“Gretz?” he asked uncertainly.
12
Shock jolted Grietjie’s body. She retreated slowly until her back touched the wall. Her mouth was dry.
He was there. Tall figure, broad shoulders, black hair, smoldering pitch-black eyes. He looked exactly as she remembered him.
“Jakób?” she asked in a small voice. “Jakób Kowalski?”
She stood breathless, her heart in her mouth. Hot tears began pouring down her cheeks. She tasted their saltiness in her mouth.
Then her knees buckled and she slid to the floor, her back still pressed to the wall.
He knelt beside her, reached for her hand. “Gretchen?”
She laughed nervously, disbelievingly. Then she shook her head and wiped the tears from her cheeks. His other hand touched her arm. He was here. It wasn’t a dream.
“It’s really you, Jakób Kowalski.” She spoke Polish. It came naturally. Time had made a backward leap of nine years. She held out her hand to him. She couldn’t believe how little he had changed. Except for his eyes. His eyes were different, she just couldn’t pinpoint how.
Slowly life flowed back into her limbs, but her mouth remained dry, so that she found it hard to speak.
He should have phoned ahead and warned her. The people of the German Children’s Fund who gave him her details had suggested he should prepare her for his arrival.
And he should have prepared himself. Nothing about this girl reminded him of his little Gretchen.
The skinny little body now had soft curves, the frizzy blonde hair curled softly at her neck, the hands she had clapped to her cheeks were slender and delicate. It was a beautiful hand with manicured nails, not the bony little fingers that had clutched his as they walked together.
“You look different,” he said.
Time had leaped ahead, leaving him behind.
A strange feeling began to grow inside him. It felt almost like . . . loss.
She got to her feet. “We can’t sit on the floor like this,” she said. She reached out and took his hand. He followed her to the sofa.
“Jakób, what are you doing here? How did you get out of Poland? Are you here on business? Will you be here for a while? When—”
“Whoa.” He protested with a slight laugh. “Too many questions, Gretz.”
She smiled. “I’m Grietjie now.” The name was as strange to his ears as the sight of her was strange to his eyes.
“Grietjie.” His tongue couldn’t quite manage it.
Her familiar laughter bubbled up unexpectedly.
“Grietjie,” she stressed, “with a g and an r. Strange sounds, aren’t they?”
He nodded slowly. “Everything is strange.”
“Should I make some coffee?”
Make coffee. Just as she used to when she came back from school after he had spent the morning in bed, waiting for her. Or when he came back to Częstochowa from his work in Katowice. In those later years, she had always waited for him at the station.
“Could we go out for coffee somewhere? At a café or something?” he asked.
She looked at her watch. “Too late,” she said. “The rules here are very strict.”
He gave a slight smile. “Stricter than the nuns?”
“Yes. But, Jakób, please tell me now, how long will you be here?”
“I don’t know.” It was hard to say it in words. “I’m not going back, Gretz. Grietjie.”
He saw the confusion in her face. “Not back to Poland?” she asked.
“I had to flee.”
Her hand flew to her mouth. “From the Communists?”
“Yes.”
In her eyes he saw that she had heard his words and was processing them, interpreting them, making sense of them.
Her eyes filled with tears again. She swallowed hard.
She knew what it was in his eyes. It was the flight, the finality of the journey. The country he had to leave behind. It was this strange country, the language that was not his own, the harsh, dry veld, the sun blazing down from the wrong direction, the unfamiliar stars.
She understood only too well.
“You’ve come to a good country.” She didn’t know what else to say.
“Are you happy here?”
Gradually her mind cleared. She didn’t quite know how she felt—astounded, overwhelmed, happy, impossibly . . . what? She grabbed at a straw to comfort him.
“Jakób, I’m so glad I can tell you tonight: sending me here was the best thing you ever did.”
“Did you find a good home?” he asked.
“I have the best parents any child could want.” She shook her head in disbelief again, reached for him, touched his arm. “And now you are also here, really here. You’ll stay, won’t you?”
“I don’t know. I’m considering it, yes. Maybe.”
A bell rang in the corridor. “Visiting hours are over,” she said.
He looked at her uncomprehendingly.
“It means you have to go.” She got to her feet. “Jakób, where do you work? Where do you live? Here in Pretoria?”
“Yes, here in Pretoria. I work for Iscor. I’m getting a flat in Sunnyside next month. Do you know where that is?”
They walked to the front door. “Yes, I know. Listen, the vacation starts next week. I’ll be going home on Wednesday. But I must see you again before I leave. You must tell me everything.”
The Dragon stood at the door and rattled her keys. A couple said a passionate farewell. It was a long time until tomorrow.
“Come on Sunday afternoon, please?” she pleaded. “Will you, Jakób?”
“I will,” he said.
Then the Dragon closed and locked the door.
Upstairs, Grietjie entered her room as quietly as possible. Karin didn’t look up. She was immersed in her reading. Grietjie sat down at her desk, opened the book to page three, and stared at the pages.
Everything felt unreal. Jakób belonged to the past, like someone who was dead.
But no man could be dead for nine years and then reappear, large as life.
She felt completely bewildered.
When she stood in the shower an hour later, her book was open at page five.
Water splashed on her face and body, streamed down her legs. She washed and washed her hair, but her mind simply wouldn’t clear.
Suddenly she wasn’t sure whether she wanted him here or not.
He knew about the nuns, the Catholic school, all the childhood dragons in her life. He knew about her Jewish blood.
He had slipped out of the bottom drawer of the big closet in her bedroom on the farm.
She had never imagined he could escape from there.
Jakób walked from the bus stop to his boarding house through the quiet streets. His little Gretz had grown up. He hadn’t foreseen that his skinny little duckling would turn into a graceful swan. Here, in a strange country, where there were no swans.
He felt dismayed, disillusioned.
He walked past his boarding house without realizing it.
His Gretchen was a big girl, he thought. All grown up.
But, he told himself, she had grown up beautifully; she had grown up well. She wasn’t working in a factory or a laundry; she was a student at a university. That was what he had wanted, after all.
It was just . . . she had grown up.
He should have realized she would no longer be the ten-year-old he had known.
He walked and walked. And step by step, street block after street block, his dismay receded. The emptiness inside him was filled with amazement at the miracle of the duckling who had turned into a swan and with immense gratitude to the Blessed Virgin for the undeserved grace.
Mother of God, he prayed silently, you showed me the right way.
Late that night, unable to fall asleep, he realized that, for the first time in the weeks he had spent in this strange, southern country, he did not feel so completely alone. For the first time he would have a reason to get up on Sunday morning.
Sunday afternoon was unexpectedly cold. Winter was on its way. They sat at a café table in front of the window. “You should have come in September,” Grietjie said. “You would have come from summer in Europe to summer in South Africa.”
“In September I was still in Poland,” said Jakób. He couldn’t stop looking at her. She was exquisite. Today he was prepared for the fact that she looked different, that somewhere inside she was still his little Gretz, but that, since he last saw her, she had become Grietjie.
“Do you want to tell me about it, Jakób?”
It was a raw, gaping hole. “Someday, maybe,” he replied. Not now, or it would stay in the room.
“You must talk about these things, you know, Jakób, when you’re ready. At least tell me how you ended up in South Africa,” she said.
“In June last year I attended the International Fair in Poznań,” he said. His eyes were neutral, his voice even. “I met an Englishman there, a Mr. Wilson, from the steelworks in Liverpool. When I left Poland, I first went to Germany and from there to Liverpool.”
“We got off the train at the Liverpool Station in London when I came to South Africa,” she told him.
“This Liverpool is a bit farther north,” he said with a straight face.
“Yes, I know. I know my geography! I’m just saying, that’s all.
That’s all . . . his little Gretz.
“For a few months I worked in Liverpool,” he continued, “but when a South African delegation came to recruit professional people for Iscor, I decided to come.”
“Because I’m here?”
She was truly lovely!
“Yes, Gretz . . . Grietjie. It was one of the reasons. I always wondered how you were. Actually, I was sick with worry. I always regretted sending you away.”
He had never told this to anyone else.
“But now you know I was fine, right from the start.” She smiled at him.
“Yes, I’m so glad. I also came because I knew South Africa is a country with a strong anti-Communist policy. It was a very strong consideration.”
“And there are good opportunities here, especially for graduates,” she added.
“You’re smart, aren’t you?”
“Jakób!” she said indignantly. “I’m nearly twenty! I’ll be graduating at the end of the year. Then I’ll start working as a fully qualified professional!”
He still couldn’t believe it. He knew so little about her. “What do you want to do?” he asked.
“Write. Translate. My majors are Afrikaans, English, German, and French, and I’ve had private lessons in Polish and Russian.” She didn’t mention Mr. Ulyanov, who was no longer her teacher because he was a Communist.
“Impressive,” he said, slightly disconcerted. “You’ve always been very clever.”
“It’s a lot of work,” she said. “I read at the speed of lightning. My first choice would be to work for a newspaper, translate articles from abroad or something, I don’t really know how it works. But next term I want to go to Johannesburg, to the head office of Voortrekker Press, they publish Die Transvaler. It’s an Afrikaans newspaper. I want to take a look at how things work. And I’m going to write a book, as soon as possible.”
She was much too young to make such important decisions.
“On Wednesday I’m going home for the vacation,” she chattered on. “I’m going with my grandfather. I call him Grandpa John. He’s very old and very rich, and he has a big black car and a chauffeur who wears a uniform and the most beautiful home you’ve ever seen. Grandpa John, I mean, not the chauffeur. And he’s the best person in the entire world. He reads the papers every day and he reads his company’s financial reports and he can talk about absolutely everything under the sun. But he’s English, completely English.”
The in-between years fell away. Jakób could forever listen to her stories, so uncomplicated, so animated.
At five o’clock she said, “I’ll have to go back to my res, Jakób.”
“Won’t you have dinner with me?” he asked. He didn’t want to let her go.
“I can’t. I promised Francois I’d go to church with him tonight.”
A cold hand closed around his heart. “Francois? Who’s he?”
“Francois? Oh, he’s kind of my boyfriend.”
Jakób couldn’t sleep. She was much too young for a boyfriend, even a
kind-of boyfriend.
He rolled onto his other side and pulled the blankets up to his chin.
Loneliness closed in around him like a murky blanket of fog waiting to smother him.
If that so-called boyfriend lays a finger on her . . .
She’s no more than a child: young, innocent . . .
He got up and drank a glass of water.
If that youngster dares . . .
Outside the city traffic died down. The streetlight lit up his room through the thin curtain.
Loneliness had become part of his fiber.
If that Francois, or any other . . .
On Monday he went to work with a splitting headache.
They left Johannesburg early. At first they talked, but as they made their way across the Springbok Flats, Grandpa John fell asleep.
Grietjie gazed through the window. For the first time she had a chance to think, to surrender to her thoughts without feeling guilty about her studies.
Last night with Francois was another fiasco. She didn’t want to get serious just yet. All her friends were getting engaged, but she had no inclination to follow suit. Not that Francois had ever mentioned marriage—not at all. It was just—she didn’t want to get serious.
“But why not, Grietjie?” he’d asked dejectedly. “All I’m asking is that we go steady. We’re good together, I love you, and I believe you love me too. What more do you want?”
“I just don’t feel . . . ready.” She didn’t know why she felt that way.
He was quiet for a while, then said earnestly, “Grietjie, I want you to realize one thing—if you don’t extinguish those smoldering coals inside you, you’ll never be a healthy person. You must talk to me. You can trust me. What you tell me will stay between us.”
“Why do you keep nagging? I’ve told you everything; what more do you want me to say?”
“It’s for your own good. Some things lie deep. You may have forgotten them because you were taught to think about other things. It’s been your means of survival.”