A Dry White Season (35 page)

Stanley’s news: the old cleaner who’d told him about Gordon’s clothes had disappeared. Just disappeared. A week ago already, and still no sign of him.

I was forced to draw up a balance sheet in my mind. On the one side, all the bits and pieces we’d assembled so far. Not an unimpressive list by any means – at first glance. But then the debit side. Isn’t the price becoming too high? I’m not thinking of what I have to go through, worried and harassed and hounded day by day. But the
others.
Especially the others. Because, at least partly, it is through my involvement that they have to suffer.

The cleaner: “disappeared".

Dr Hassiem: banished to Pietersburg.

Julius Nqakula: in jail.

The nurse: detained.

Richard Harrison: sentenced to jail – even though he’s going to appeal.

And who else? Who is next? Are all our names written on some secret list, ready to be ticked off as our time comes?

I wanted to “clean up” Gordon’s name, as Emily had put it. But all I’ve done so far is to plunge other people into the abyss. Including Gordon? It’s like a nightmare, when I wake up at night, wondering in a sweat: Suppose I’d never tried to intercede for him after they’d detained him – would he have survived then? Am I the leper spreading disease to whoever comes close enough?

And if I examine closely what we’ve gathered so laboriously over so many months: what does all our evidence
really
amount to? Much circumstantial evidence, oh certainly. Corroborating what we’d presumed or suspected in the beginning. But is there really anything quite indisputable? Let’s assume for a moment it all points towards a crime that was committed. Even more specifically: a crime committed by Captain Stolz. Even then there is nothing, nothing final, nothing incontrovertible,nothing “beyond all reasonable doubt". There is only one person in the whole world who can tell the truth about Gordon’s death, and that is Stolz himself. And he is untouchable, protected by the entire bulwark of his formidable system.

There was a time when I thought:
All right, Stolz, now it’s you and me. Now I know my enemy. Now we can fight hand to hand, man to man.

How naive, how foolish of me.

Today I realise that this is the worst of all: that I can no longer single out my enemy and give him a name. I can’t challenge him to a duel. What is set up against me is not a man, not even a group of people, but a thing, a something, a vague amorphous something, an invisible ubiquitous power that inspects my mail and taps my telephone and indoctrinates my colleagues and incites the pupils against me and cuts up the tyres of my car and paints signs on my door and fires shots into my home and send me bombs in the mail, a power that follows me wherever I go, day and night, day and night, frustrating me, intimidating me, playing with me according to rules devised and whimsically changed by itself.

So there is nothing I can really do, no effective countermove to execute, since I do not even know where my dark, invisible enemy is lurking or from where he will pounce next time. And at any moment, if it pleases him, he can destroy me. It all depends solely on his fancy. He may decide that he wanted only to scare me and that he is now tired of playing with me and that in future he’ll leave me alone; or he may decide that this is only the beginning, and that he is going to push me until he can have his way with me. And where and when is that?

“I can’t go on,” I said to Stanley. “There’s nothing I can do any more. I’m tired. I’m numb. All I want is some peace to regain my perspective and to find time for my family and my self again.”

“Jeez, man, if you opt out now, it’s exactly what they wanted all along, don’t you see? Then you playing squarely into their hands.”

“How do I know what they want? I know nothing any more. I don’t
want
to know.”

“Shit, I thought you had more guts than this.” The shattering contempt in his deep voice. “Lanie, what you suffering now is what chaps like me suffer all our fucking lives, from the day we give our first shout to the day they dig us into the ground. Now you come and tell me you can’t go on? Come again.”

“What can I do then? Tell me.”

“How d’you mean what can you do? Just keep on, don’t quit. That’s enough. If you survive – you want to bet on it? – there’s a hell of a lot of others who going to survive with you. But if you sink now, it’s a plain mess. You
got
to, man. You got to prove it.”

“Prove what to whom?”

“Does it matter? To them. To yourself. To me. To every goddamn bloke who’s going to die of natural causes in their hands unless you carry on.” He was holding my two shoulders in his great hands, more furious than I’d ever seen him before, shaking me until my teeth were chattering. “You hear me? Lanie? You hear me? You got to, you bloody fucking bastard. You trying to tell me I been wasting all my time on you? I got a lot of money on you, lanie. And we sticking together, you and I. Okay? We gonna survive, man. I tell you.”

8

31 October.
A weekend decisive in its own mysterious manner-even though it had nothing to do with Gordon or with whatever I have been involved in these months. Was that the reason? All I know is that I jumped at it when Melanie so unexpectedly suggested it in the midst of last week’s deep depression.

In the past I often went off for a weekend like this; even a full week if it was holiday-time. On my own, or with a group ofschoolboys, or some good friends, occasionally with Johan. Susan never went with us. Doesn’t like the veld. Even openly contemptuous about such “backveld” urges.

In the last few years I’ve never done so any more. Don’t know why. So perhaps understandably Susan was annoyed when I broached it. (“I’ve arranged to go to the Magaliesberg this weekend,” I said, as casually as possible. “With a friend, Professor Phil Bruwer. Hope you don’t mind.”)

“I thought you’d outgrown this childish urge of yours at last.”

“It’ll do me a world of good to get away for a while.”

“Don’t you think I’d like to get away too?”

“But you never cared for climbing or hiking or camping.”

“I’m not talking about that either. We can go somewhere together.”

“Why don’t you spend the weekend with Suzette?”

She looked at me in silence. It shocked me to see how old her eyes had grown. And there was something slovenly about her appearance after all these years of fastidious grooming.

We didn’t discuss it again. And two days ago, Saturday morning, when Susan was in town, they came round to pick me up. Prof Bruwer and Melanie and I squeezed into the front of the old Land Rover that had seen better days – a replica of its owner; and equally indestructible, it seemed. Melanie let the top down. Sun and wind. The cobweb pattern of a crack in the windscreen. Stuffing protruding from the seats.

A white warm day, once we’d left the city behind. Not much rain so far this year and the grass hadn’t sprouted yet since winter. Brittle as straw. Scorched red earth. Here and there, in irrigation areas, patches of varying green. Then bare veld again. At last the rocky ridges of the foothills. A landscape older than men, burnt bare by the sun, blown empty by the wind, all secrets exposed to the sky. The more fertile narrow valleys among rows of hills made an almost anachronistic impression with their trees and fields and red-roofed houses. Man hasn’t really taken root here yet; it is still unclaimed territory. His existence is temporary and, if the earth should decide to shrug him off, which would happen quite effortlessly, he would leave no sign behind. The only permanence is that of rocks, the petrified bones of a vast skeleton. Ancient Africa.

From time to time we passed someone or something. A broken windmill. A dam of rusty corrugated iron. The wreck of an old car. A cowherd in a tattered hat, a fluttering red rag tied to a stick in his hand, following his small herd of cattle. A man on a bicycle.

Reminiscences of my childhood. Driving with Pa, in the spider or the little green Ford, Helena and I played the immemorial game of claiming for ourselves whatever was seen first. “My house.” “My sheep.” “My dam.” And, whenever we passed a black man or woman or child: “My servant.” How natural it had all seemed then. How imperceptibly had our patterns fossilised around us, inside us. Was that where it had all started, in such innocence? – You are black, and so you are my servant. I am white, which makes me your master.
Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.

The old Land Rover shook and shuddered on its way, especially after Bruwer had turned off the tarred road to follow a maze of small dusty tracks deeper into the hills. Conversation was impossible in that din. Not that it was necessary, or even desirable. Almost fatalistically one resigned oneself to that process of stripping away whatever was redundant in order to be exposed to the essential. Even thoughts were luxuries to be shaken and blown out of one’s mind. And what returned to me from my childhood was not thoughts but immediate and elemental images, things, realities.

Deep in the tumbled rocky mountains we stopped on a farm owned by friends of Bruwer’s. A deep and fertile valley, a poplar grove, a paved furrow in which water came rushing down from a dam on the slope behind the house of solid stone. A stoep fenced in with wire-mesh. A large cage filled with canaries and parakeets. Flower-beds. Chickens scratching and squealing and squawking in the yard. A single calf in a pen, lowing wretchedly at regular intervals. Two charming old people, Mr and Mrs Greyling. The old man’s hands covered with grease and soil; broken nails; a white segment on his forehead above the tanned leather of his face, where the hat had kept the sun away. The old woman large and shapeless, like a mattress stuffed with down; a broad-brimmed straw hat on her wispy hair, a large mole with a tuft of coarse black hair on her chin; badly fittingdentures pushed forward by her tongue whenever she wasn’t talking. As soon as we had stopped she came waddling towards us from the labourers’ houses several hundred yards away. One of the children had a fever, she said, and she’d been spending all night nursing it.

We sat on the wide cool stoep, drinking tea and chatting effortlessly. Nothing of importance. The drought and the prospects of rain; the labourers becoming less dependable and more “cheeky"; the strawberry harvest; last night’s radio news. There was something wholesome about getting involved in trivialities again.

They wouldn’t let us go without dinner. Roast leg of lamb, rice and roast potatoes, peas and beans and carrots from the garden, homeground coffee. It was past three before we could shoulder our rucksacks and set out on the footpath up the steep slope behind the stone house, into Phil Bruwer’s mountain wilderness.

He led the way in his heavy climbing boots and grey stockings and wide khaki shorts flapping round his bony knees. Brown sinewy calves. Leaning forward under the weight of the rucksack stained and faded with age. The beret with its jaunty guinea-fowl feather. Well-worn beech stick. Perspiration on his weatherbeaten face, his beard stained by tobacco juice. Melanie on his heels, in an old shirt of her father’s, the tails tied in a knot on her bare belly; cut-off jeans with frayed edges; lithe brown legs; tennis shoes. And I beside her, sometimes falling behind.

The mountains aren’t particularly high in those parts, but steeper than one might suspect from below. A curious sensation: it isn’t you who go higher but the world that recedes from you, slipping away to leave you more desolate in that thin and translucent air. A mere hint of a breeze, just sufficient to suddenly sting your face with coolness when you stop in a sweat. The dry rustling of the grass. Occasionally a small bird or a lizard.

We stopped repeatedly to rest or look about. The old man tired more easily than I’d expected. It didn’t escape Melanie either; and it must have worried her for once I heard her asking him whether he was all right. It annoyed him. But I noticed thatafter that she would more frequently find some pretext for interrupting the climb, stopping to point out a rock-formation or a succulent or the shape of a tree-stump, or something in the valley far below us.

On a particularly rocky slope we passed a cluster of huts, a small flock of goats, naked black children playing among the brittle shrubs, a lonely old man squatting in the sun in front of his doorway smoking a long-stemmed pipe and raising a thin arm to salute us.

“Why don’t we build us a little hut up here too?” I said lightly, nostalgically “A vegetable garden, a few goats, a fire, a roof overhead, a clay wall to keep out wind and rain. Then we can all sit here peacefully watching the clouds drift by.”

“I can just see the two of you sitting there smoking your pipes while I have to do all the work,” said Melanie.

“Nothing wrong with a patriarchal system,” I replied, laughing.

“Don’t worry, I’ll give you more than enough to keep you busy,” she promised. “You can teach the children.”

I’m sure she meant it quite innocently. Still, when she said it
— the children
– there suddenly was a different kind of silence between us, a different awareness. In the candid light of the sun she was looking at me, and I looked back. The fineness of her features, the large dark eyes wide apart, the gentle swelling of her lips, her hair moving in the breeze, her narrow shoulders straining against the weight of the rucksack, the faded khaki shirt with its knotted tails, baring her belly, the navel an intricate little knot fitting tightly into its cavity. For a moment all that mattered was simply being there, relinquishing the world, isolated in that immense space.