A Dry White Season (24 page)

“Humanity". Normally one uses it as a synonym for compassion; charity; decency; integrity. “He is such a human person.” Must one now go in search of an entirely different set of synonyms: cruelty; exploitation; unscrupulousness; or whatever?

Darkness descending.

Still, there is Melanie. Light in the gloom. (But why? Dare I even think about it?)

The problem is: once you’ve caught a glimpse of it, once you’ve merely started suspecting it, it is useless to pretend it’s different. She was right. Melanie. Melanie. The only question that matters is the one she asked:
What now?

It has begun. A pure, elemental motion: something happened – I reacted – something opposed me. A vast, clumsy, shapeless thing has stirred. Is that the reason of my dazed state? Let’s try to be reasonable, objective: am I not totally helpless, in fact irrelevant, in a movement so vast and intricate? Isn’t the mere thought of an individual trying to intervene preposterous?

Or am I putting the wrong questions now? Is there any sense in trying to be “reasonable", in finding “practical” arguments? Surely, if I were to consider what I might “achieve” in a practical sense I couldn’t even hope to begin. So it must be something else. But what? Perhaps simply to do what one has to do, because you’re
you,
because you’re
there.

I am Ben Du Toit. I’m here. There’s no one else but myselfright here, today. So there must be something no one but me can do: not because it is “important” or “effective", but because only I can do it. I have to do it
because
I happen to be Ben Du Toit; because no one else in the world is Ben Du Toit.

And so it is beside the point to ask: what will become of me? Or: how can I act against my own people?

Perhaps that is part of the very choice involved: the fact that I’ve always taken “my own people” so much for granted that I now have to start thinking from scratch. It has never been a problem to me before. “My own people” have always been around me and with me. On the hard farm where I grew up, in church on Sundays, at auctions, in school; on stations and in trains or in towns; in the slums of Krugersdorp; in my suburb. People speaking my language, taking the name of my God on their lips, sharing my history. That history which Gie calls “the History of European Civilisation in South Africa". My people who have survived for three centuries and who have now taken control – and who are now threatened with extinction.

“My people". And then there were the “others". The Jewish shopkeeper, the English chemist; those who found a natural habitat in the city. And the blacks. The boys who tended the sheep with me, and stole apricots with me, and scared the people at the huts with pumpkin ghosts, and who were punished with me, and.yet were different. We lived in a house, they in mud huts with rocks on the roof. They took over our discarded clothes. They had to knock on the kitchen door. They laid our table, brought up our children, emptied our chamber pots, called us
Baas
and
Mtestes.
We looked after them and valued their services, and taught them the Gospel, and helped them, knowing theirs was a hard life. But it remained a matter of “us” and “them". It was a good and comfortable division; it was right that people shouldn’t mix, that everyone should be allotted his own portion of land where he could act and live among his own. If it hadn’t been ordained explicitly in the Scriptures, then certainly it was implied by the variegated creation of an omniscient Father, and it didn’t behove us to interfere with His handiwork or to try and improve on His ways by bringing forth impossible hybrids. That was the way it had always been.

But suddenly it is no longer adequate, it no longer works. Something has changed irrevocably. I stood on my knees beside the coffin of a friend. I spoke to a woman mourning in a kitchen the way my own mother might have mourned. I saw a father in search of his son the way I might have tried to find my own. And that mourning and that search had been caused by “my people".

But who are “my people” today? To whom do I owe my loyalty? There must be someone, something. Or is one totally alone on that bare veld beside the name of a non-existent station?

The single memory that has been with me all day, infinitely more real than the solid school buildings, is that distant summer when Pa and I were left with the sheep. The drought that took everything from us, leaving us alone and scorched among the white skeletons.

What had happened before that drought has never been particularly vivid or significant to me: that was where I first discovered myself and the world. And it seems to me I’m finding myself on the edge of yet another dry white season, perhaps worse than the one I knew as a child.

What now?

THREE

1

In the dark it was a different city. The sun was down when they reached Uncle Charlie’s Roadhouse; by the time they left the main road near the bulky chimneys of the power station, the red glow was already darkening through smoke and dust, smudged like paint. A premonition of winter in the air. The network of narrow eroded paths and roads across the bare veld; then the railway-crossing and a sharp right turn into the streets running between the countless rows of low, squat houses. At last it was there, all around them, as overwhelming as the previous time, but in a different way. The dark seemed to soften the violence of the confrontation, hiding the details that had assaulted and insulted the eyes, denying the squalor. Everything was still there, stunning in its mere presence, alien, even threatening; and yet the night was reassuring too. There were no eyes conspicuously staring. And the light coming from the small square windows of the innumerable houses – the deadly pallor of gas, the warmer yellow of candles or paraffin lamps – had all the nostalgic intimacy of a train passing in the night. The place was still abundantly alive, but with a life reduced to sound: not the sort of sound one heard with one’s ears, but something subterranean and dark, appealing directly to bones and blood. The hundreds of thousands of separate lives one had been conscious of the first time – the children playing soccer, the barbers, the women on street corners, the young ones with clenched fists – had now blurred into a single omnipresent organism, murmuring and moving, devouring one like an enormous gullet that forced one further down, with peristaltic motions, to be digested and absorbed or excreted in the dark.

“What you looking at?” asked Stanley.

“I’m trying to memorise the way.”

“Forget it, you’re a foreigner.” But he didn’t say it unkindly, more in sympathy. “Anyway, I’m here to show you the way, aren’t I?”

“I know. But suppose I have to come on my own one day?”

Stanley laughed, swerving to avoid a scavenging dog. “Don’t try it,” he said.

“I can’t be a millstone round your neck, Stanley.”

“The hell with it. We’re in it together, man.”

It moved him, more than anything Stanley had said before. So Melanie had been right, after all: in some indefinable way he had been ‘accepted'.

He’d telephoned Stanley the previous evening, after his day of disconnected reflections, walking three blocks from his home to a public booth to make sure Susan wouldn’t know. They arranged to meet between four and half-past, but Stanley had been late. In fact it had been nearly half-past five before the big white Dodge had pulled up at the garage where they’d met before. No word of apology; actually, he’d seemed surprised at Ben’s annoyance.

He wasn’t wearing his dark glasses today: they protruded from the top pocket of his brown jacket. Striped shirt, wild floral tie, chunky cuff-links.

They drove off, wheels spinning, engine roaring, watched by a startled and grinning gardener in blue overalls on a lawn in a garden opposite the garage.

“I thought I should discuss things with Emily,” Ben explained once they were safely on their way. “And with you, of course.”

Stanley waited, whistling contentedly.

“The Special Branch came to search my house two days ago.”

The big man turned his head quickly. “You joking?”

“They did.”

He wasn’t sure about the reaction he’d expected: but it certainly wasn’t the reverberating guffaw from the depths of Stanley’s stomach, causing him to double up and nearly drive up a kerb.

“What’s so funny about it?”

“They actually raided your place?” Stanley started laughing again. He slammed one hand on Ben’s shoulder: “Well, shake, man.” It took some time for the laughter to subside. Wiping tears from his eyes, Stanley asked: “Why did they do it, you think?”

“I wish I knew. I think they were tipped off by Dr Herzog. The one who was in court. I went to see him, to find out what he really knew about Gordon.”

“Did he say anything?”

“We won’t get anything out of him. But I’m convinced he knows more than he’s prepared to say. He’s either scared of the police or working with them.”

“What else did you expect?” Stanley chuckled again: “So he put the cops on you? Did they grab anything?”

“Some old journals. A bit of correspondence. Nothing much. There wasn’t anything anyway. They probably just wanted to scare me.”

“Don’t be too sure.”

“What do you mean?”

“For all you know they may really think you’re into something serious.”

“They can’t be as stupid as that.”

“Lanie” – a smug grin – “don’t ever underestimate the sheer stupidity of the SB. Sure, they can be as quick as hell and they got a finger in every pie: but, man, you just let them believe they’re on to some sort of a conspiracy in the dark and I tell you nothing will get them off it again. Worse than leeches. For sheer stubbornness nothing can beat the
gattes.
I known them for years, man. If they decide it’s a bomb they looking for, you can shove their noses right into a turd and they’ll still swear to God it’s a bomb.”

In spite of himself Ben could feel his jaws tauten. But he refused to be convinced. “I tell you it was just to scare me, Stanley.”

“So why didn’t you get scared?”

“Precisely because they tried so hard. If they want to intimidate me, I want to find out why. There must be something there, and we’re going to find it. I can’t do a thing without you. But if you’re willing to help me, we can dig up whatever they’re trying to cover up. I know it won’t be easy and we can’t expect too much too soon. But you and I can work together, Stanley. It’s the least we owe to Gordon.”

“You quite sure about this, lanie? I mean, this is no time for show.”

“Do you remember the day I said we must be careful before it went too far? Then you were the one who laughed at me. You said it had only started. And you were right. I know it now. And now I’m going all the way. If you’ll help me.”

“What’s ‘all the way', lanie?” Stanley was deadly serious now.

“I can only find out by going on.”

“You think they going to allow you to go on?”

Inhaling deeply, Ben said: “It’s no use looking too far ahead, Stanley. We’ll have to handle every bit as it comes up.”

The only reaction from the big man behind the wheel was a relaxed chuckle. Through smoke and dust they drove on in silence for a long time until Stanley stopped in what might have been either a side street or a vacant lot, a black hole in the dark. As Ben touched the handle to open the door, Stanley restrained him:

“You wait here. It’s further on. I’ll check first.”

“Didn’t you warn Emily then?”

“I did. But I don’t want people to find out.” Noticing Ben’s questioning look, he said: “The joint is full of informers, lanie. And you got enough problems as it is. See you.” Slamming his door he disappeared in the dark.

Ben turned his window down a few inches. An oppressive smell of smoke drifted into the car. The awareness of disembodied sound grew overpowering. And once again, but more intensely than before, he had the feeling of being inside an enormous animal body with intestines rumbling, a dark heart beating, muscles contracting and relaxing, glands secreting their fluid. Only, in Stanley’s absence, it acquired a more ominous, malevolent aspect, an amorphous menacing presence. What forced him to remain there, every muscle tensed and in his mouth a bitter taste, wasn’t fear of a gang of tsotsis or a police patrol or the thought that he might suddenly be attackedin the dark, but something vague and vast, like the night itself. He didn’t even know where he was; and if for some reason Stanley did not come back, he would never be able to escape from there. He had no map or compass, no sense of direction in the dark, no memory to rely on, no intuition to help him, no facts or certainties. Exposed to pure anguish, he sat motionless, feeling the tiny cold pricks of perspiration on his face where the air touched him.