A Dry White Season (2 page)

“No, I’m afraid I don’t understand you at all. You want me to write your biography?”

“I want you to keep my notes and journals. And to use them if necessary.”

“How will I know if it’s necessary or not?”

“You’ll know, don’t worry.” A pale smile twitched his tense mouth. He stopped once more, an unnatural glare in his grey eyes. “They’ve taken everything from me. Nearly everything. Not much left. But they won’t get that. You hear me? If they get that there would have been no sense in it at all.”

We drifted along with the crowd.

“That’s what they’re aiming for,” he proceeded after a while. “They want to wipe out every sign of me, as if I’d never been here. And I won’t let them.”

“What have you done, Ben?”

“Nothing. I assure you. Nothing at all. But I can’t go on for very much longer and I think they know it too. All I’m asking of you is to keep my papers.”

“But if the whole thing is really all that innocent—”

“Are you also turning against me now?”

There was something paranoic in his attitude, as if he’d lost his grasp on the world, as if we weren’t really in that street in that city at that moment, as if he weren’t really aware of my presence at all. As if, in fact, he himself were a stranger whose slight and superficial resemblance to the Ben du Toit I’d once known was pure coincidence.

“Of course I’ll keep your stuff for you,” I said, the way one would comfort or humour a child. “Why don’t you bring it round to my house tonight, then we can have a quiet chat over a glass of wine?”

He looked even more perturbed than before. “No, no, I can’t do that. I’ll make sure it gets to you. I don’t want to cause you any problems.”

“All right then.” I sighed with resignation. All the sob stories I’d seen in my time. “I’ll look through it and let you know.”

“I don’t want you to let me know. Just keep the stuff like I told you. And if something happens—”

“Nothing will happen, Ben,” I insisted, not without some irritation. “It’s just hypertension. All you need is a good holiday.”

Two weeks later he was dead.

By then I had already received the bulky parcel postmarked in Pretoria. And after our meeting that morning I was curious to find out more about the whole baffling affair. At the same time I couldn’t repress a feeling of resentment, almost of nausea. Not only at the impossible mess of the papers I’d received, but at the embarrassment of having to work through them. It was bad enough to get mixed up with the life stories of total strangers, but at least one remained objective, uninvolved, a more or less indifferent spectator. With an acquaintance it was different. Too private, too bewildering. I was expecting to have to tell him, as to so many others: “Sorry, old chap, but I really can’t find a worthwhile story in this.” Only, with him it would be so much more difficult. And even more so in view of the state of his nerves. Still, he’d assured me he wasn’t expecting anything beyond keeping them safely.

That night I stayed at home, trying to sort out the mess on my carpet. The black notebooks, the school exercise books, the
bits and pieces of card or paper torn from magazines, the typewritten pages, letters, newspaper cuttings. Aimlessly I started skimming and dipping into odd passages. Some names recurred regularly and a couple of them appeared vaguely familiar –Jonathan Ngubene, Gordon Ngubene – but it was only after I’d looked through the cuttings that my memories were clarified. Even then I couldn’t make out what Ben’s connection with them had been. Actually, it put me off. My novels deal with love and adventure, preferably in Old Cape settings or in distant romantic surroundings; politics isn’t my “line". And if Ben had chosen to get involved in that way I didn’t want to be drawn into it as well.

Glumly stowing away the piles of papers in the dilapidated box they had arrived in, I noticed a couple of photographs that had fallen from a large brown envelope I hadn’t examined yet. One was quite small, passport size. A girl. Long black hair tied up with a ribbon, large dark eyes, small nose, rather generous mouth. Not beautiful in the sense of the heroines ambling through my books. But there was something about her which struck me. The way she looked right into the camera. A fierce, unsettling, uncompromising stare, challenging one to a duel of the eyes. It was an intensity belied by the gentleness, the femininity of the small oval face:
Look at me if you wish, you won’t find anything I haven’t discovered for myself and come to terms with. I’ve probed my depths: you ‘re free to try too if you want to. Provided you do not expect it to give you any claim on me.
– It was something along these lines I found in the photograph, used as I was to constructing “characters". At the same time the face seemed disturbingly familiar. Had I come across it in a different context I might have recognised it more readily, but how was I to expect her among Ben’s papers? It wasn’t until the following day, working through the cuttings and notes again, that I recognised the same face on some of the newspaper photographs. Of course: Melanie Bruwer. The recent rumpus in the press.

The second photograph was an eight-by-ten on glossy paper. At first I took it for one of the pornographic pictures so readily available abroad; and it didn’t interest me much. If that was Ben’s way of getting a brief private kick it was none of my business and harmless enough. Not a very clear shot, as if the light
had been bad. A background of fuzzy out-of-focus wallpaper, a bedside table, a crumpled bed; a man and a girl naked in a position of intimate caressing, apparently preparing for coitus. I was on the point of restoring it to the brown envelope when something prompted me to take a closer look.

The girl, the dark-haired girl, recognisable in spite of the heavy grain, was the same Melanie Bruwer. The man with her was middle-aged. The man was Ben.

The Ben I’d known at university was different. Reserved without being secretive; rather quiet, at peace with the world and himself; and, yes, innocent. Not that he was a prude or that he scorned student pranks, but never a ringleader. I never saw him drunk; at the same time he didn’t try to avoid “the boys". A hard worker, above all, perhaps because he had to see his way through university on grants and loans and couldn’t afford to disappoint his parents. Once, I remember, I saw him with a history book at an intervarsity rugby match. During the game he joined in the singing and merriment; but in the interval he quietly went on studying, oblivious of the noise around him. Even in a room filled with talking or carousing students he could carry on working steadily when there was something he’d set his mind on finishing. Not much of a sportsman, but in tennis he sometimes surprised one with his speed and agility. Whenever teams had to be chosen, he would lose convincingly. One got the impression that he did so deliberately to avoid official matches, because in friendly games he often beat the regular team players; and on the few occasions when, as a reserve member, he was forced to step in for someone else, he amazed the lot of us. On these occasions, with something really important at stake for his team, he returned the most incredible shots. But when the time came to pick new teams for the following year, Ben du Toit would cheerfully lose hands down.

His main diversion, a characteristically private one, was chess. It would be too much to call him a brilliant player, but he was stolid and meticulous and more often than not wore his opponents down by the sheer doggedness of his slowly unfolding strategies. In the more public area of student affairs he was seldom noticed, except for a certain unexpected flair which he
sometimes revealed at mass meetings. Not that he liked these public appearances – and he consistently refused to stand for the Student Representative Council – but when he did get up to say something there was such an air of conviction and sincerity about him that everybody paid attention. And in his senior years many students, including girls, used to come to him with their personal problems. I still remember thinking enviously: Jesus, pal, you don’t know your own strength with these chicks. The rest of us, experts at impressing the ladies with swaggering savoir-faire, don’t stand a chance against that slow apologetic smile of yours-yet you don’t seem to realise it yourself. Instead of making a grab you sit there like a clumsy young dog, allowing all the bright chances to slip past. In fact, you don’t even acknowledge them as “chances"!

Only once, as far as I can remember, I caught a glimpse of something else in him, something normally obscured by his attitude of placid withdrawal. It happened in our third year, in History, when for one semester during the sabbatical of our regular Senior Lecturer a temporary bloke took over. We couldn’t stand his schoolmasterly habits and discipline soon became a problem. On the day in question, catching me in the act of launching a paper missile, he promptly, in nearly apoplectic rage, ordered me out of the room. That would have been the end of it, had Ben not decided to emerge from his habitual lethargy and protest against my being singled out for punishment while the whole class had been equally guilty.

When the lecturer refused to budge Ben drew up a petition and spent a weekend collecting the signatures of all the class members, threatening a boycott of lectures unless an apology was offered. When the ultimatum was delivered, the lecturer read it, turned white, and summarily tore it up. Whereupon Ben led the threatened walk-out. In this era of demos and Student Power his action might appear ludicrously insignificant; but in those days, in the heart of the war years, it caused a sensation.

Before the end of the week Ben and the temporary lecturer were both called in by the Head of the department. What happened during the meeting leaked out to us much later, via some of the other academic staff, as Ben himself offered no more than
a very brief summary.

The prof, a benevolent old bod loved and respected by everybody, expressed his regrets over the whole unfortunate affair and announced that he was prepared to treat it as a mere misunderstanding, provided Ben would apologise for his impetuous action. Ben politely expressed his appreciation of the prof’s goodwill, but insisted on an apology from the lecturer who, he said, had offended the class with his unjust behaviour and ineffectual teaching methods.

This caused the lecturer to lose his temper once again and to start fulminating against students in general and Ben in particular. Ben quietly reacted by pointing out that this outburst was typical of the behaviour the students had been protesting against. Just when everything was becoming hopelessly complicated the lecturer offered his resignation and walked out. The prof punished the class by setting a test (in which Ben eventually obtained third or fourth highest marks); and the Administration solved their part of the problem by rusticating Ben for the rest of the semester.

It probably hit him harder than it would any of us, for his parents were poor and his grants were dependent on living in residence, so he had to find money for digs in town. I suppose we all felt a bit guilty about the outcome but the general attitude was that he had really brought it on himself. In any case no-one ever heard him complain. Neither did he embark, as far as I know, on any further rash ventures of that kind. Almost effortlessly he sank back below the unrippled surface of his sedate existence.

The evening paper carried a brief announcement on the funeral arrangements. I had planned to attend, but in the end it didn’t work out. That morning I had to come in to the city centre for a lunch date with a visiting woman writer and I’d hoped to use the funeral as a pretext for getting rid of her in reasonable time: one of those ladies addicted to cream cakes and the wearing of lilac hats, who write about blood, tears and unmarried mothers, and who guarantee tens of thousands of readers for our journal. Which explains why I wasn’t in the best of moods as I set out on foot from my parking spot towards the Carlton
Centre, more than fifteen minutes late to start with. Moodily withdrawn into my own thoughts, I wasn’t paying much attention to my surroundings, but in the vicinity of the Supreme Court I became aware of something unusual and stopped to look about. What was happening? It took a while before it struck me: the silence. The customary lunchtime din of the city had subsided around me. Everywhere people were standing still. Traffic had stopped. The very heart of the city appeared to have been seized in a cramp, as if an enormous invisible hand had reached into its chest to grasp the heart in a suffocating grip. And what sound there was resembled nothing so much as the dull thud of a heartbeat, a low rumble, almost too low for the ear to catch, so it had to be insinuated into the body through blood and bone. Like a subterranean shudder, but different from the mine shocks which one experiences in Johannesburg every day.

After some time we became aware of movement too. Down from the station a slow wall of people were approaching in the street pushing the silence ahead of them: a dull, irresistible phalanx of blacks. There was no shouting, no noise at all. But the front lines were marching with raised clenched fists, like branches protruding from an indolent tide.

From the streets where we were standing innumerable other blacks started drifting towards the oncoming crowd, as silent as the rest, as if drawn by a vast magnet. We whites – suddenly very isolated in the expanse among the stern concrete of the buildings – began to edge towards the reassurance of walls and pillars. No-one spoke or made a sudden gesture. All action was delayed like a playback on TV.

It was only later I realised that judgement had been set for that day in one of the numerous terrorism trials of these recent months; and this crowd was on its way from Soweto in order to be present at the verdict.