A Dry White Season (42 page)

The events and minor afflictions of every day hardly served as landmarks any more, having become part of that general blind motion. The telephone calls. The car following him into town. Even the more serious incidents: the crude bomb hurled through his study window one evening while he was with Phil Bruwer in hospital (thank God Susan had gone to spend a few days with Suzette; and Johan was able to put out the fire before much damage could be done). The shots fired through the windscreen of his car while he was returning from an aimless zigzagging trip through the streets on another night. Was it just his luck that he hadn’t been hit: or had they missed him deliberately?

In the beginning he was relieved by the Easter holidays, not having to worry about the tedious duties imposed by his school routine. But soon he came to regret it, missing the security of that very routine, infinitely preferable to this dizzy, unpredictable course from day to day. The pale autumn days growing ever more wintry. The leaves falling, the trees barer, drier. All sap invisible, unbelievable. All softness, all tenderness, all femininity, all gentle humanity, compassion, burnt away. Dry, dry, and colourless. An inhospitable autumn.

And all the time, in a steady, ceaseless flow, the people coming to him for help. Enough to drive him out of his mind. What was there he could really and effectively do? The widely divergent requests: heart-rending, serious, mendacious, banal.– The young black man from the Free State, illegally in search of work because his family was starving on the farm: four rand in cash and half a bag of mealie-meal a month. Twice before he’d tried to run away, only to be brought back and beaten to within an inch of his life by his master; but the third time he’d escaped and now the Baas must help him. – The woman whose wages were stolen in a supermarket. – The man who’d just spent eight months in jail and received six cuts with the cane because he had been impudent enough to tell his white master’s teenage daughter, “You’re a pretty girl.”

It was getting boring. He couldn’t go on with it. But he was overrun by their collective agony.
The Baas must help me. There is no one else.
Sometimes he lost his temper. “For God’s sake stop pestering me! Dan Levinson has fled the country. Melanie has gone. I hardly ever see Stanley any more. There’s no one I can send you to. Leave me alone. I can’t do it any longer.”

Stanley did come round again, late one night when Ben was in his study, unable to face another sleepless night in bed.

“I say, lanie! Why you looking like a bloody fish on dry ground?”

“Stanley! What brought you here?”

“Just blew in.” Large and bristling with life his virile presence flooded the little room. Like so many times in the past he seemed to act like a generator, charging all the inanimate objects around him – carpet, desk, lamp, books, everything – with secret uncontrollable energy.

“Got you another bit for your jigsaw. Not much, but so what?”

“What is it?”

“The driver of the police van that took Jonathan to hospital that time.”

Ben sighed. “You think it will be of any use?”

“I thought you wanted everything.”

“I know. But I’m tired.”

“What you need is a fling. Why don’t you find yourself a girl? Fuck the shit out of her. Trust me.”

“This is no time for joking, Stanley!”

“Sorry, man. Just thought it would help.”

They sat looking at one another, each waiting for the other to say something. At last Ben sighed. “All right, give me the driver’s name.”

After he had taken down the particulars he listlessly pushed away the paper, looking up.

“You think we may still win in the end, Stanley?” he asked wearily.

“Of course not.” Stanley seemed surprised at the very idea. “But that’s not the point, man.”

“Is there any point?”

“We can’t win, lanie. But we needn’t lose either. What matters is to stick around.”

“I wish I could be as sure of it as you seem to be.”

“I got children, lanie. I told you long ago. What happens to me don’t matter. But if I quit now it’s tickets with them too.” His bulky torso supported on his arms, he leaned over the desk. “Got to do
something,
man. Even if my own people will spit on me if they knew I was here with you tonight.”

“Why?” Ben asked, startled.

“Because I’m old-fashioned enough to sit here scheming with a white man. Make no mistake, lanie, my people are in a black mood. My children too. They speak a different language from you and me.” He got up. “It won’t be easy to come back here again. There’s informers all over the bloody place. It’s a hell of a time, lanie.”

“Are you also abandoning me now?”

“I won’t drop you lanie. But we got to be careful.” He put out his hand. “See you.”

“Where are you off to this time?”

“Just a trip.”

“Then you’ll be back sometime.”

“Sure.” He laughed, taking Ben’s hand in both of his. “We’ll be together again, sure’s tomorrow. You know something? The day will come when I won’t have to dodge your neighbours’ fucking dogs at night no more. We’ll walk out here in broad daylight together, man. Down the streets, left-right, all the way. Arm in arm, I tell you. Right through the world, lanie. No one to stop us. Just think of it.” He bent over, limp with glee. “You and me, man. And no bastard to stop us saying: ‘Hey, where’s that
domboek?”

He was still laughing, a great sad booming sound. And suddenly he was gone and it was very quiet in the room. It was the last time they saw each other.

Beside him, Susan went her own way, distant and aloof. They spoke very little, exchanging a few indispensable words at table, but no more. When he did make an attempt to start a conversation, asking a question or offering an explanation, she sat looking down, studying her nails in that absorbed way a woman has when she wants to convey to you that she finds you boring.

Actually, Linda was the only one he still spoke to, telephoning her from time to time; but it often happened that in the middle of a conversation he would become absent-minded, forgetting what he’d wanted to tell her.

And Phil Bruwer, of course, even though Melanie was an unspoken obstacle between them. The old man constantly spokeabout her, but Ben found it difficult to respond. Although the old man was her father – perhaps because of it? – she was too painfully private to discuss.

Her newspaper had carried a prominent report about the confiscation of her South African passport, intimating that it might have some connection “with a private investigation she had been conducting in connection with the death in detention of Gordon Ngubene a year ago". Curiously enough, though, they never followed it up. The Sunday paper continued to refer to Gordon’s story at irregular intervals, owing mainly to the perseverence of one or two young reporters who kept in touch with Ben about it; but even that was losing momentum. A few readers’ letters specifically requested the newspaper to drop the ‘tedious affair'.

“You can’t blame them, really, “said Prof Bruwer. “People’s memories are short, you know. They mean well. But in a world that has seen Hitler and Biafra and Viet Nam and Bangladesh the life of a single man doesn’t mean much. People are moved only on the quantitative level. Bigger and better.”

It was the day Ben brought the old man home. The doctors still were not very happy with his progress but neither was he ill enough to be kept in hospital. And since Melanie’s departure he had become more short-tempered and restless. He would not be at ease again before he was back in his own home and pottering in his own garden. Ben had arranged for a full-time nurse to attend to him – much against the old man’s wishes – and with that care taken from his shoulders he stayed away until, a few days before the reopening of the schools, Bruwer telephoned him and asked him to come over.

There was a letter for him from Melanie. It came so unexpectedly that he could only stare at the unstamped envelope in disbelief.

“Came inside my own letter,” explained the old man, chuckling contentedly. “She sent it to an old friend of mine and he brought it round this morning. Take your time, I won’t interrupt.”

It was not a long letter, and strangely sober in tone. Almost feverishly he scanned it in search of some deeper meaning, some subtle intimate reference in the prosaic account of how she hadbeen stopped by Customs at Jan Smuts airport, escorted to a private office and put on a British Airways flight returning to London later the same evening. A brief, unemotional statement about her concern for him and her father. The assurance that there was nothing for them to worry about; she would be all right and had, in fact, already been officially transferred to her newspaper’s Fleet Street bureau. And then, at last:

What follows is for your eyes only. Please don’t let Dad find out. I started writing an article about Gordon, thinking it might be a good idea to spill all the beans over here. But before I could finish it I received an unexpected visit. Distinguished gentleman, very British in appearance, but betrayed by his accent. ( Unless I’m imagining things: one starts doubting one’s own judgement.) He said very suavely that he felt sure I wouldn’t be so rash as to publish anything about Gordon in Britain. “What can stop me?” I asked. “Common decency, “he said. “You wouldn’t like to cause your old father any trouble, would you?”

So here I am, stumped. But we must not lose heart, Ben. Please don’t let what has happened to me interfere with what you have to do. Despair is a waste of time. Dad will need your help. You must go on. You must endure. You’ve got to, for Gordon and Jonathan. But also for your own sake. For mine. For ours. Please. As far as I am concerned, I want you to know that I do not regret for one moment a single thing that has happened between us.

For a long time he sat looking at the letter on his lap before he folded it very meticulously and put it back in the envelope.

“Satisfied?” asked the old man, his eyes twinkling with amusement.

He made up his mind very quickly. It was hardly a conscious decision: simply the acceptance of what had become inevitable.

“Prof, there’s something I’ve got to tell you.”

“That you and Melanie are in love?”

“How do you know?”

“I’m not blind, Ben.”

“It’s more than being in love. I want you to know. One night, just before she left for Kenya—”

“Why do you tell it to me?”

“Because that is the reason they took away her citizenship. Not to punish her for anything. But to get at
me.
They took photographs of us and tried to blackmail me. And when Irefused, they took it out on her. Because they knew how it would hit me.”

Very calm, his head bowed, the old man sat opposite him.

“I don’t want you to go on receiving me in your house after I’ve been responsible for what has happened.”

“They’ve been eyeing her for a long time, Ben.”

“But I was the last straw.”

“Does it really matter what pretext they used?”

“How can I look you in the eyes again?”

“Blaming oneself can be a bloody sterile pastime.”

“How can I not blame myself?”

“We owe it to ourselves to look beyond this thing, Ben. I think we owe it to Melanie too.” He took the pipe the doctors had expressly forbidden him and started scratching out the dry ash. “You know, what amazes me is to wonder what sort of world this is, what sort of society, in which it is possible for the state to persecute and try to break a man with a thing like this. How does such a system come into being? Where does it start? And who allows it to have its way?”

“Isn’t it enough to know that it happens?”

“What will become of us if we ever stop asking questions?”

“But where do these questions lead to?”

“No matter where the hell they lead to. The important thing is to bloody well go on asking.” Breathing deeply, more upset than I had seen him in a long time, he struck match after match to light his pipe. “And we’d better keep asking until we’ve cleared up our own responsibility in the matter too.”

“How can we be responsible for what happened?” said Ben. “We’re rebelling against it!”

“There may not have been any specific thing we did.” He inhaled the smoke, savouring it, relaxing slowly. “Perhaps it’s something we
didn’t
do. Something we neglected when there was still time to stop the rot. When we turned a blind eye just because it was ‘our people’ who committed the crimes.”

For a long time they sat in silence.

“You don’t blame me for what happened to Melanie then?”

“You’re not children any more.” With an angry gesture he moved his hand across his face. In the twilight Ben hadn’t noticed the tears before. “Can you beat it?” the old man said. “After all these years this tobacco is getting too strong for me.”

Monday 24 April.
Brief phone-call from Cloete this morning. Wanted to see me urgently. I was surprised by his haste. Why couldn’t he wait until school started again tomorrow? Still, when it came I was very calm. Unless I’m simply getting punch-drunk. But really, there was relief in knowing that one more thing was being taken from me, another burden removed. One marvels at how humble one’s real needs can be. Acceptance of one’s own insignificance. A wholesome and sobering experience.