A Dry White Season (27 page)

To make things worse, Suzette and family also came over for the weekend.

Still, things were reasonably under control till Saturday morning. Took Suzette’s little Hennie for a walk. Stepped intoevery puddle, played in mud like a little pig, talked non-stop. “You know, Grandpa, the wind’s got a cold too. I heard it sniffing in the night.”

Then Suzette threw a tantrum because I’d allowed him to get so filthy. I’m an “undesirable influence", teaching the child bad manners etc. Lost my temper too. Told her
she
was the undesirable influence, going off on her trips, gallivanting and neglecting the poor boy. That made her furious. “Who are you to talk about going off all the time? Mum told me she hardly sees you at home any more.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Suzette.”

“Are you trying to deny it? What about all this hobnobbing with blacks in townships? You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“I refuse to discuss my affairs with you if you use that tone of voice.”

She was furious. A beautiful woman, the spitting image of her mother, especially when she’s angry. “Well, I’d like you to know that that’s what we’ve come for this weekend,” she said. “To have a proper heart-to-heart with you. Things just can’t go on like this. Chris is negotiating with the Provincial Council this very minute about a new project. Would you like to see them cancel it? These things are contagious, you know.”

“You make it sound like an illness.”

“Exactly. I’ve been wondering whether there’s something wrong with you. There’s never been such pally-pallying with blacks in our house before.”

Chris was, as usual, much more reasonable. He was at least prepared to listen. I think he accepts that Gordon’s case can’t just be left like that, even though he may not approve of what I’m doing: “I respect your reasons, Dad. But the Party is in the process of preparing people for major changes. And if this business causes a new furore, as it’s bound to, it will put a new brake on things. The whole world is ready to jump at our throats, we can’t play into their hands. We Afrikaners are going through tough times right now and we should all stand together.”

“You mean we should close our ranks round any sign of evil, the way a rugby team protects a man who’s lost his pants on the field?”

Chris laughed. He hasn’t lost his sense of humour yet. Butthen he said: “We must put it right from the inside, Dad. We can’t throw it open to the eyes of the world.”

“For how long have these things been going on now, Chris? And nothing has been put right yet.”

“You mustn’t expect to see results too soon.”

“I’m sorry, Chris. But these mills are grinding too slowly for me nowadays.”

“You yourself will be crushed in the mill if you don’t watch out.”

If Suzette hadn’t turned up at that moment and started interfering we might have come to some sort of understanding. I know he means well. But what with all the tension in the house since Thursday night, I couldn’t take it any more. And after lunch I drove off in the car.

Even then I didn’t deliberately head for Westdene. I was just driving to allow my feelings to settle. The quiet Saturday afternoon streets. For the first time it shook me. The men and women in white on tennis courts. The bowls greens. The black nannies in uniform, pushing prams across lawns. The men with bare torsos washing their cars. The women in curlers watering flowerbeds. The groups of blacks lying or sitting on street-corners, chatting and laughing. The lazy stillness of the sun just before the cold sets in.

And then I was back in the street running uphill; in front of the old house with the curved verandah over the red stoep. I drove past, turning at the top of the incline, and then down again. But a mile or so away I stopped to think it over. Why not? There was nothing wrong with it. Actually it was most desirable, if not imperative, to discuss the possibility of future action with her.

At first sight I took him for a Coloured gardener, squatting on his haunches beside a flower bed, pulling out weeds. Soiled corduroy trousers, black beret sporting a guinea-fowl feather, khaki shirt, pipe in his mouth, and the filthiest pair of mud-caked shoes – worn without socks or laces – I’d ever seen. It was her father, old Professor Phil Bruwer.

“No, sorry,” he grumbled when I spoke to him, “Melanie isn’t at home.”

His wild white mane couldn’t have been combed in months. Small goatee stained with tobacco juice. The skin of his face dark and tanned like old leather, like an old discarded shoe; and two twinkling dark brown eyes half-disappearing below the unkempt eyebrows.

“Then I suppose there’s no point in staying,” I said.

“What’s your name?” he asked, still hunched over the bed.

“Du Toit. Ben Du Toit. I met Melanie the other day.”

“Yes, she spoke about you. Well, why don’t you wait a while? She may not be long, she went to the newspaper office to finish off something. Of course, one never knows with her, does one? Why don’t you give me a hand with the weeding? I was off to the Magaliesberg for a while, now my whole garden is in a mess. Melanie doesn’t know the difference between a plant and a weed.”

“What plants are these?” I asked him, to keep the conversation going.

He looked up in mock reproach. “What’s the world coming to? It’s herbs, can’t you see?” He started pointing them out to me: “Thyme, oregano, fennel, sage. Rosemary’s over there.” He got up to stretch his back. “But somehow they don’t taste right.”

“They seem to be flourishing.”

“Flourishing isn’t enough.” He started cleaning his pipe. “Something to do with the soil. For thyme you should go into the mountains of Southern France. Or Greece. Mycenae. It’s like vines, you see. Depends on whether it’s a southern or a northern slope, how steep it is, how scaly, all sorts of things. Next time I want to bring me a small bag of soil from the mountain of Zeus. Perhaps the Old Man’s holiness will do the trick.” He grinned, exposing his uneven, yellow-stained teeth, many of them mere stumps. “One thing I seem to discover as I grow older is that the more one gets involved in philosophy and stuff, in transcendental things, the more surely you’re forced back to the earth. We’ll all go back to the old chtonic gods yet. That’s the problem of people running after Abstractions. Started with Plato. Mind you, he’s misunderstood in a shocking way. Still, give me Socrates any time. We’re all living in the spell of the Abstract. Hitler, Apartheid, the Great American Dream, the lot.”

“What about Jesus?” I asked, somewhat deliberately.

“Misunderstood,” he said.
“Et verbum caro facta est.
We’re running after the
verbum,
forgetting about the flesh. ‘Our bodies which us to us at first convey’d'. Those Metaphysicals really had it by the short hairs. One’s got to keep one’s feet or hands on the ground, preferably all four of them.”

I’m writing down haphazardly what I can recall of the running monologue he kept up as he pottered about in the garden, weeding and watering, raking leaves, digging for worms, straightening some plants and pruning dried-up leaves from others. An irrepressible warmth inspiring everything he said. “You know, those days when our people had to work like hell to gain a toehold on this land, it was a good life. But then this notion got into us that once we’d taken control we should start working out blueprints and systems for the future. Now look at the mess. It’s all System and no God. Sooner or later people start believing in their way of life as an absolute: immutable, fundamental, a precondition. Saw it with my own eyes in Germany in the Thirties. A whole nation running after the Idea, like Gadarene swine.
Sieg heil, sieg heil.
Keeps me awake at night. I mean, I left there in ‘thirty-eight because I couldn’t take it any longer. And now I see it happening in my own country, step by step. Terrifyingly predictable. This sickness of the Great Abstraction. We’ve got to come back to the physical, to flesh and bone and earth. Truth didn’t fall from Heaven in the shape of a word: it goes about bare-arsed. Or if we’ve got to talk in terms of words, then it’s the word of a bloody stammerer like Moses. Each one of us stuttering and stammering his bit of truth.”

An odd detail: not very seemly, I’m afraid, but it was as much part of Phil Bruwer as his stained teeth or his filthy shoes or his dry chuckle. I’m referring to his farting. He seemed to function in such a way that every change of thought, every new direction, every particular emphasis had to be punctuated by a fart. Improper as it may be, he is as much a virtuoso as any player of the trombone. It went something like this:

“The Government is handling the electorate as if it were a bloody donkey. Carrot in front and kick in the backside. The carrot is Apartheid, Dogma, the Great Abstraction. The kick is, quite simply, fear. Black Peril, Red Peril, whatever name youwant to give it.” A resounding fart. “Fear can be a wonderful ally. I remember once, years ago, on a trip to the Okavango, collecting plants; whole train of bearers following me. After the first week or so they became lazy, falling farther and farther behind. One thing I can’t stand is dawdling when you’re in the bush. Then a lion started following us. It was a dry year and most game had gone off, but this old male remained behind. Got our smell. Not that it could have been very difficult, for after a few weeks in the bush one stinks to high heaven. Anyway, the couple of days that lion followed us I had no trouble with people falling behind or dropping out. Those bearers were actually jogging to keep up. Jolly useful lion that.” Fart.

When there was nothing more left to do in the garden we went inside, to the kitchen. Just as disordered as the study. There were two stoves, one electric, the other an ancient, lugubrious black coal stove. He saw me looking at it.

“It’s Melanie who talked me into buying the white monster,” he said. “Says it’s more efficient. But I kept the old one for my own cooking. Not every day, but when the spirit moves me.” Fart. “Like some tea?” Without waiting for an answer he took a blue enamel kettle from the coal stove and poured us some bush-tea in old-fashioned, chipped Delft cups without saucers, then added a teaspoonful of honey to each cup. “Honey is God’s own sweetener. The only true elixir of life. Only one man died young after eating honey and that was Samson. But it was his own damned fault. Cherchez la femme.” Fart. “Poor soul might have become a good, saintly man if it hadn’t been for that little Philistine tart.” We sat at the kitchen table with its red checkered oilcloth, sipping the sweet, fragrant tea. “Not that I have any aspirations towards sanctity,” he went on, chuckling. “Too old for that I’m afraid. I’m preparing myself for a long peaceful sleep in the earth. One of the most satisfying things I can think of, you know. To turn slowly into compost, to become humus, to fatten worms and nourish plants, keeping the whole cycle of life going. It’s the only form of eternity I can hope for.” Fart. “Back to Pluto and his pomegranates.”

“You must be a very happy man.”

“And why shouldn’t I? I’ve had a bit of everything in my life,from heaven to hell. And now I still have Melanie, which is more than an old sinner like me should hope for.” Fart. “I’ve lived long enough to make peace with myself. Not with the world, mind you.” His dry chuckle, like before. “Never too down and out to give the world a run for its money. But with myself I’ve made peace all right. To thine own self bla bla, even though it was an old turd like Polonius who said it. Even in turds God plants his humble truths.” And then, with only the barest punctuation of a change in direction, he started talking about Melanie. “Pure accident that she ever saw the light of day,” he said. “I suppose I was so mad with Hitler after the war, what with spending three years in one of his camps, that I deliberately fell in love with the first Jewish girl I saw. Lovely girl, mind you. But it was chewing off a bit much, trying to save the whole world by marrying her. Bad mistake. Never aspire to save the world. Your own soul and one or two others are more than enough. So there I was left with Melanie after my wife had gone off. You see, the poor woman was so out of her depth among the Afrikaners, what could she do but run away? And to think I actually blamed her for leaving me with a year-old baby. One tends to underestimate the strange ways in which God shows us his mercy.” Once again he couldn’t resist emphasising his point with a neat, dry fart.

His story explained the quaintly Semitic, Shulamithic nature of her looks; her black hair and eyes.

“She told me she met you at the court inquest on this Ngubene’s death?” he said as if, having covered the whole field, he was now directing his assault in a more specific way. Except, of course, it wasn’t an assault.

“Yes. If it hadn’t been for her—”

He chuckled appreciatively, pushing one muddy hand through his wild white mane. “Look at me. Every single grey hair on this head of mine has been caused by her. And I wouldn’t have missed one of them. You also have a daughter?”

“Two.”

“Hm.” His penetrating, amused eyes were searching me. “You don’t show too much wear and tear.”

“It doesn’t always show on the outside,” I said playfully.

“So what’s the next move?” he asked, so suddenly it took me a moment to realise that he had returned to the inquest.

I told him about what had happened so far. Dr Herzog. Emily’s notes. The mysterious Johnson Seroke who’d delivered them to her. Stanley’s lawyer friend. It was such a relief, after the bickering at home, to talk freely and frankly.