A Dry White Season (5 page)

I put out my hand and folded my fingers round her wrist.

For a moment she froze, looking straight at me as I still clutched her. What I saw in her eyes was fear. Of me, of herself? An expression I would have no trouble in describing in one of my love passages but which I can define only with difficulty now that I must try to be true to what really happened. “Naked anguish"?

I let go of her arm, and she kissed me briefly, nervously on my forehead before she went out and closed the door.

The real shock came much later. Nine months later, to be exact, when she gave birth to their son Johan.

Within the framework of our three lives, jointly and severally, that fortnight’s visit is an insignificant episode. But there is so little I can rely on now that I have to write about Ben that I had no choice but to explore it at some length. I’m not sure I really found anything; but I had to try. For the rest, I am left with the jumbled papers he dumped on me. The press cuttings and letters and photocopies and journals and scribbled notes.
A passport photo of a girl with a sweet provocative face. The other photograph. Names. Gordon Ngubene. Jonathan Ngubene. Captain Stolz. Stanley Makhaya. Melanie Bruwer. And the possibilities suggested by my often misused imagination. I have to immerse myself in it, the way he entered into it on that first fatal day. Except that he did not know, and had no way of knowing, what was lying ahead; whereas I am held back by what I already know. What was unfinished to him is complete to me; what was life to him is a story to me; first-hand becomes second-hand. I must attempt to reconstruct intricate events looming behind cryptic notes; what is illegible or missing I must imagine. What he suggests I must expand:
He says-he thinks – he remembers – he supposes.
With my assortment of probabilities and memories and his disorganised evidence I must forge ahead against the dull obstacles of worry and confusion, trying to maintain at least a semblance of confidence or certainty. This is the burden I must take up, the risk I must run, the challenge I must accept. Trying to reconcile the calm and self-contained man I knew with the paranoic fugitive I met in town that day.

In a sense I owe it to him, or even to Susan. Report me and my cause aright! At the same time I have to grasp at him in an effort to write myself out of my own sterile patch. A complicating and aggravating factor.

Perhaps I would still have found it possible to accept that he deliberately walked into the passing car that night to lend suicide the more respectable appearance of an accident. But there was something amiss. I couldn’t put my finger on it, yet I knew something didn’t quite make sense. Now that final letter has arrived, a full week after his funeral, placing everything in the balance again. Now I have no choice. And it’s no use trying to blame him, for he is dead.

ONE

1

It all really began, as far as Ben was concerned, with the death of Gordon Ngubene. But from the notes he made subsequently, and from newspaper cuttings, it is obvious that the matter went back much further. At least as far as the death of Gordon’s son Jonathan at the height of the youth riots in Soweto. And even beyond that, to the day, two years earlier – represented in Ben’s papers by a receipt with a brief note scribbled on it – when he’d started contributing to the schooling of the then fifteen year old Jonathan.

Gordon was the black cleaner in the school where Ben taught History and Geography to the senior classes. In the older journals there are occasional references to “Gordon N.” or just “Gordon"; and from time to time one finds, in Ben’s fastidious financial statements, entries like “Gordon – R5.00"; or “Received from Gordon (repayment) – R5.00", etc. Sometimes Ben gave him special instructions about notes on his blackboard; on other occasions he approached him for small personal jobs. Once, when some money disappeared from the classrooms and one or two of the teachers immediately blamed Gordon for it, it was Ben who took the cleaner under his wing and instituted inquiries which revealed a group of matric boys to be the culprits. From that day Gordon took it upon himself to wash Ben’s car once a week. And when, after Linda’s difficult birth, Susan was out of action for some time, it was Gordon’s wife Emily who helped them out with housework.

As they came to know each other better Ben discovered more about Gordon’s background. As a young boy he had arrived from the Transkei with his parents when his father had found
employment in the City Deep Mine. And since he showed interest in reading and writing from an early age he was sent to school – no cheap or easy undertaking for a man in his father’s position. Gordon made steady progress until he’d passed Standard Two, but then his father died in a rockfall in the mine and Gordon had to leave school and start working to supplement his mother’s meagre income as a domestic servant. For some time he was houseboy for a rich Jewish family in Houghton; later he found a better paid job as messenger for a firm of attorneys in the city, and then as an assistant in a bookshop. Somehow he managed to keep up his reading and the manager of the bookshop, pleased by his interest, helped him to continue his studies. In this way he eventually passed Standard Four.

At that stage Gordon went back to the Transkei. A traumatic experience, as it turned out, since there was no work for him back home, apart from lending a hand with the paltry farming activities of a great-uncle: planting maize, scouring the veld with a lean dog in search of hares for meat, sitting in the sun in front of the hut. He’d left the city because he couldn’t stand life there any more; but it proved to be worse on the farm. There was something fretful and desultory in his blood after the years he’d been away. All the money he’d brought with him had gone into
lobola
– the dowry for a wife; and barely a year after his arrival in the Transkei he returned to the only place he really knew, Johannesburg, Gouthini. After a brief unsettled spell he landed at Ben’s school.

One after another his children were born: in Alexandra, then Moroka, then Orlando. The eldest was Jonathan, his favourite. From the outset Gordon had resolved to rear his son in the traditions of his tribe. And when Jonathan turned fourteen he was sent back to the Transkei to be circumcised and initiated.

A year later Jonathan – or Sipho, which Gordon said was his “real” name – was back, no longer a
kwedini
but a man. Gordon had always spoken about this day. From now on he and his son would be allies, two men in the house. There was no lack of friction, since Jonathan obviously had a mind of his own; but on the main issue they agreed: Jonathan would go to school for as long as possible. And it was just after he’d passed Standard Six and secondary school was becoming an expensive business,
that they turned to Ben for help.

Ben made enquiries at Jonathan’s school and the family’s church and, finding everybody in agreement on the boy’s intelligence and perseverance and promise, offered to pay for Jonathan’s school fees and books for as long as he continued to do well. He was quite impressed by the youngster: a thin, shy, polite boy, always neatly dressed, his shirt as starkly white as his teeth. In exchange for the financial support, Gordon saw to it that Jonathan agreed to help out in Ben’s garden over weekends.

At the end of the first year there were smiles all round when Jonathan produced his school report, showing an average of over sixty per cent. As a reward for his achievement Ben gave him an old suit that belonged to his own son Johan – the two boys were roughly the same age – as well as an almost new pair of shoes and two rand in cash.

But in the course of the second year Jonathan began to change. Although he was still doing reasonably well he seemed to have lost interest and often played truant;/he no longer turned up over weekends for his stint of gardening; his attitude became sullen and truculent and a couple of times he was openly cheeky with Ben. According to Gordon he was spending more time on the streets than at home. Surely no good could come of it.

His fears were soon realised. One day there was trouble at a beer-hall. A gang of
tsotsis
– hooligans – attacked a group of older men, and when the owner tried to throw them out they ran amok in the place, smashing everything in their way. The police arrived in two vans and carted off whatever youngsters they could lay hands on in the vicinity of the beer-hall, Jonathan among them.

The boy insisted that he’d had nothing to do with the commotion, that he’d been on the scene purely by accident when the fighting broke out; but the police witnesses testified that they’d seen him with the gang. The trial was very brief. Owing to a misunderstanding Gordon didn’t attend: he had been told it would take place in the afternoon but when he arrived at the courtroom it was all over. He tried to protest against Jonathan’s sentence of six cuts, but by that time the flogging had already been administered.

The following day he brought the boy to Ben’s home; Jonathan had difficulty walking.

“Pull down your pants and show the Baas,” ordered Gordon.

Jonathan tried to protest, but Gordon promptly undid the belt and slid the soiled and blood-stained shorts from his son’s body, exposing the six cuts incised on his buttocks like six gashes with a knife.

“That’s not what I’m complaining about, Baas,” said Gordon. “If I know he did wrong I will give him a beating on top of this. But he says he is innocent and they didn’t believe him.”

“Didn’t they give him time to state his case in court?”

“What does he understand of the court? Before he knew what was going on it was all over.”

“I don’t think there’s anything we can do about it now, Gordon,” said Ben unhappily. “I can get you a lawyer to appeal, but that won’t heal Jonathan’s buttocks.”

“I know.” While Jonathan was fumbling fiercely with his shorts, Gordon stood watching him. After a while he looked up and said almost apologetically: “Those buttocks will heal in time, Baas. I’m not worried about them. But those marks are right
here.
“ With barely repressed indignation he put a hand on his chest. “And I don’t think they will ever heal.”

He was proved right. Jonathan no longer showed much interest in school. According to Gordon he’d become resentful against the “Boere” and refused to learn Afrikaans. He started talking about things like Black Power and the African National Congress, which scared and depressed his father. At the end of the year Jonathan failed. He didn’t seem to care in the least: for days on end, Gordon reported, he would simply disappear from home and refuse to answer any questions about his whereabouts. Ben was in no mood to continue what he now regarded as wasting money on his studies. But Gordon pleaded very strongly.

“Baas, if you stop now it’ll be the end of Jonathan. And he will infect the other children in my house too. Because this is a bad sickness and it can only be cured by the school.”

Ben reluctantly agreed. And, somewhat to his surprise, the
next year started in a more promising way than the previous one had ended. Jonathan continued to be secretive at home, given to moodiness and sudden outbursts; but he did go back to school. Until June,the sixteenth to be exact, that Wednesday, when Soweto erupted. The children massing in the school playgrounds like swarms of bees preparing to leave their hives. The marches. The police. The gunshots. The dead and wounded carted off. From that day Jonathan hardly showed his face at home any more. Dazed with fear and worry Emily kept the little ones indoors, listening to the explosions, the sirens, the rumbling of the armour-plated vehicles; at night there were bonfires of bottlestores, beerhalls, administration buildings, schools. And in the streets the charred skeletons of Putco buses.

It happened in July, in one of the demonstrations which by then had become an almost daily ritual: children and youths assembling for a march to Johannesburg, police converging in armoured trucks, long rattling bursts of automatic gunfire, a hail of stones and bricks and bottles. One police van was overturned and set alight. Shots, shouts, dogs. And from the clouds of dust and smoke some children ran to the Ngubenes’ home to report, breathless with excitement, that they’d seen Jonathan in the crowd surrounded and stormed by the police. But what happened afterwards, they couldn’t tell.

By late evening he hadn’t come home yet.

Gordon went to see a friend, a black taxi-driver, Stanley Makhaya, a man who knew everything about everything in the townships, and begged him to sound out his contacts for news of Jonathan. For Stanley had contacts on both sides of the fence, among the blackjacks as well as in the deeper recesses of the underworld. Whatever you needed to find out in Soweto, said Gordon, Stanley Makhaya was the one man who could help you.