The Shouting in the Dark (16 page)

For nearly an hour that night the father swears and shouts, curses all the women he has ever known – the cold-hearted sluts and
loeders
the gods have inflicted on him, who have let him down all his life; the few warm-hearted women he has met who however abandoned him. Then he moves on to the weak-and-weasel West. ‘Yes, don't think I've forgotten you, so-called western world leaders, giving way to each new bully boy on the block, like OPEC now. OPEC has you by the balls . . .'

Ella concentrates on keeping her shoulders square. At some point the mother wordlessly serves the fried livers but takes her own plate back to the kitchen to eat. Faintly Ella hears her sobbing.

‘
Godverdomme
,' the father finally says, his voice softer, ‘What a cabal of rotters.' He checks his watch, walks over to the television and turns up the volume.

Ella sits on at table, the small grey mound of liver congealing on her plate. Her hands are tingling. She tries to hold them quiet between her legs. She recites
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi
under her breath but the images she has conjured to match the names fail to appear.

The thought comes from nowhere: she's not the only one. She's not the first to be confronted by him in a rage like this, on her own. She's not the first in her father's life to quail inside like she's doing right now, even though she's making sure to hold each one of her limbs and even her tingling fingers still. The other wife he sometimes mentions on the verandah, her aunt she thinks it must be, after what her mother said, or the woman he says abandoned him, she's not sure, the wife or wives before her aunt, back in Singapore, Edith, Nancy Leong – she, too, every one of them, must have sat like this, trying to keep her shoulders square even as the blowtorch of his anger burned white places in her heart.

The father doesn't refer to the letter to Mr Brezhnev again. A month or so later Uncle Jan in Holland sends a curt air letter saying he can't think what his brother was up to writing to the Kremlin. However, would he please not ever again involve him in such dangerous tomfoolery? Worried about throwing the airmail envelope in the bin, he's had to lock it away in his safe. A vigilant refuse man . . .

But Ella's thoughts don't let go of the letter. She thinks often of the neat look of the typed lines on the Croxley Cambric page. There was something about that weekend project – it wasn't mad, not between the two of them, her Dad and herself. Out on the verandah poring over the Croxley Cambric, it felt good to plan that conversation with Mr Brezhnev.

One day when the father is in the toilet reading, she takes the carbon copies meant for Prime Minister Vorster from his desk. She hides them between the
Anne of Green Gables
books on her bookshelf. He won't spot the disappearance, she suspects, and, if he does, let him come and search, he'll never find them.

At bedtime sometimes she takes out the draft and reads it under the blankets, the good bits especially, the thing about more uniting the two nations than dividing them, the line about surviving in mad Africa by outdoing it at its madness. She remembers how the father nodded at her ideas as if she were a man, a proper grown-up. How his finger jabbed at the Croxley Cambric page to prompt her to type faster, both his words and hers.

 

One weekend they take a drive to visit Transkei, an independent new nation recently created within the borders of South Africa though no other nation in the world recognizes it. Transkei is the father's fantasy of a country separated from the mainland come true, except that Transkei is a black nation, a nation belonging to the Xhosa people who live there, or so, he says, the Nat goons like everyone to believe.

On television the father and Ella watch the South African flag, this one too, descend its mast and the brown-white-green Transkei flag creep into the sky, as if B J Vorster wanted to make sure that their one-time colonial masters,
die
vervloekte Britten
, did not grab all the late imperial razzmatazz for themselves.

His eyes narrowed, the father says he'd like to see what's happening down there in their own local banana republic. They should take a trip. When do they ever take a family trip? For the Boers there must be something in this homeland farce, something clever and cunning, seeing as they're happy to court such negative omens and let their flag run down. Transkei is only three hours' drive away, perfect for a cheap weekend excursion, Saturday morning to Sunday evening. He turns to face Ella: ‘Let's have a look at this proof positive of the white goons trying to out-manoeuvre the blacks at their own political game.'

Early that Saturday they set out, the mother stonily silent in the passenger seat. Ella brings the draft of Mr Brezhnev's letter in the pocket of her yellow-check summer dress. At the shiny new border post hut on the Mtamvuna River, the father and Ella present the family's identity papers to the unsmiling official at the boom. The mother refuses to get out of the car.

They stay overnight in a one-star hotel in Umtata, Transkei's capital, and spend most of their time walking the two main streets: one runs north-south, the other east-west. They look at the Cut-Price shops plastered with sales notices for Dri-lon clothes and neon-coloured fruit-squash in multipacks. Hundreds of other window-shoppers, independent Transkeians, are doing just the same as they, ambling the streets with the same kind of aimlessness, kicking at the bloated grass tussocks that fill the cracks in the brick pavement.

They have their lunch, chicken nuggets with ketchup, at a Wimpy bar on the main road out of town, leading back towards Braemar. It's Ella's first Wimpy meal ever and as delicious as she could have imagined. There are no other lunch venues in Umtata, only a second Wimpy, a takeaway on the road west towards Port Elizabeth, with grubbier windows.

‘So here you have it, the full farce of homeland independence,' the father says in glee, biting into his nuggets with his strong yellow teeth. ‘A vegetative reproduction of nations in our own backyard.'

‘The sooner we get home, the better,' the mother says.

In the Wimpy toilet Ella slides the carbon-copy Brezhnev letter out of her dress pocket. Yes, the message is all over the letter, the thing about whites playing at political buffoonery with blacks to outfox them with cunning. Dad knew this all along. So why's he acting so happy, as if his suppositions have only now been confirmed?

For Ella, the highpoint of the weekend, late that Saturday afternoon, is a visit to Umtata's municipal swimming pool. Down a dirt track near the centre of town she and the father and the mother follow the cicada screams of children. They come upon a blue-painted body of water where tens upon tens of young Transkeians are splashing. Ella stands at the entrance gate between her parents and watches the shiny dark bodies bouncing in the sapphire water, the sunlight shimmering green on the agorobo trees. The children all stand concentrated in the shallow end, Ella realizes, because most of them can't swim. They haven't yet had time to learn. When they were part of South Africa, till just yesterday, this municipal swimming pool was out of bounds to blacks.

She doesn't have her swimsuit with her, but the day is warm and the streets dusty. She wants to be in the water. She weighs the short distance between the gate and the pool, sees she can make it in quickly, cover with the moving water her great towering whiteness, this vast length that has now more or less overcome her girth.

‘Go,' says the father pushing her shoulder, ‘Try it, it's OK, go naked, they are all of them as naked as the day they were born.'

‘I button my lip, Har,' says the mother, ‘But please give a thought to the piss in that pool, the germs, I don't even want to imagine. The
schuld
'll be on you if . . .'

‘
Hou op.
Let her find out what it's like, Africa proper, being a white in Africa.'

‘If you once flew back with us to Nederland, across this terrible continent, you'd experience Africa proper— '

Ella walks away from them, across the wide concrete poolside, towards the blue water. The stark hot afternoon light seems to lighten her body, propel it forwards. She chooses a shady place beside the diving board, a good out-of-the-way spot, slides off her dress and places the folded carbon copies under it. In her striped pink knickers and bra she sits hunched on the pool edge for a moment, arms around her knees; then she drops down into the water.

She is the one and only white person swimming but everything's fine, as the father said it would be. No one takes the least notice of her. There are in fact very few people in the deep end and those who are there avoid her. The longer she bobs about treading water, the wider is the circle they leave. She backs into the shadow of the diving board. Here she shows up even less, the sun doesn't expose her luminous white skin. She kicks her legs, flings out her arms and sinks cross-legged to the bottom of the pool. If she could stay down here in this deep blue and silver world long enough, she wonders, for as long as her lungs allow, maybe by the time she comes to the surface her parents would have diffused away, vanished into the bright light.
When I was but fourteen or so . . .

Her swim over, she hangs onto the diving board and once again checks around her. The children are splashing in the shallow end. As if wishes could come true her parents are nowhere to be seen. They must be waiting in the street. It really is the case that no one's looking at her. She gets out and drags her dress over her wet body.

For the rest of the day she carries her damp bra and knickers balled in one fist, the Brezhnev carbon copies folded small in the other. Her soggy hem sticks to her legs.

‘Don't blame me, oh, don't blame me,' the mother mutters as they walk back to their hotel. ‘If meningitis strikes, or impetigo, or cholera, some bladder infection, you name it— '

On Sunday morning the father drives them out of Umtata. The Volkswagen Beetle strains to hold the tilted camber of the road that leads back to South Africa. Ella leans her head against the back-seat window, closes her eyes, sees again the shiny children jumping in the bright blue pool.

An hour or so later they are drawn up on the side of the road having juice and biscuits. They are not far from the Transkei border post, about halfway home.

‘
Zo, zo
,' the father says, ‘
Zo
– independent Africa, raw and simple, there you have it. Unadulterated Africa.' He rubs his hands together, rasp, rasp, in the way he does when he feels he's won an argument. The mother produces the weighty sigh with which she meets most mentions of Africa, then breaks her shortbread biscuit into pieces.

Ella walks a distance down the main road. A stiff breeze is blowing, flattening the wayside grass and the white and purple cosmos flowers. She opens her mouth to it like a dog. It's a good feeling, the rushing air drying her tongue. There are things about independent Africa she likes, she decides. Walking down the road like this, on her own, with the sun on her arms. The wind smelling of dry grasslands. The children in the swimming pool, them too, and not one of them staring.

The night they return from the Transkei trip, step back through their front door, face their pale reflections in the hallway mirror, Ella sees for the first time how little of Africa is allowed into their house.

To comfort her displaced Dutch heart, the mother has packed their home so full of Holland that, even if it tried, Africa could not get inside. As if the rooms were suitcases primed for departure, each and every one is stuffed full of Dutch things, including the toilet with its Rijksmuseum postcards on the door. In the main bedroom, blue and white Delft plates in wire brackets cover the walls. On table tops everywhere lie small Persian rugs just as you see in Dutch paintings. On armchair backs the mother has spread the embroidered doilies that she and
her
mother made during the War when the Nazis evacuated them from their happy home in the Hasselsestraat in Scheveningen to the dreary Pippelingstraat in town. The sharp light coming in from the door gives even the satin stitching a shadow. The pale gold colour of the lounge carpet the mother chose because, she says, it matched the velvet upholstery of the couch in the music room back home. That same couch from the Dutch house now stands beside the piano in the South African living room. The carpets, the plates and the furniture, the portrait of Aunt Ella placed like a seal on top, all of it travelled with her, Irene, to Durban when she came out to be married to her sister's widower, packed in slatted crates like rhinos ready for freighting to distant zoos. Her sister by contrast, the mother always says, didn't have the same sense of
ties
: she travelled light.

The mother and the father can no longer ignore the delicate question of hiring someone, a black person, to assist around the property. Hard-working Dutch people though they are, with each new summer Africa's heat, dirt and growth press upon them more closely. All day long the mother dusts her furniture yet the very next morning a new film has spread over the exact same pieces. As for the garden, with the summer rains the lawn grows like sugar cane. One day the grass is scythed flat by the father's diligent mower. The next the blades have stretched back into sharp points. Tough as it may be to admit, now that they are getting older they need help to deal with Africa's encroachment, proper African help, not the cut corners Ella produces when begged – and paid. Why not try for someone like tall Charley back in Durban, a decent boy for outside? The mother by now will have learned to keep her distance.

Ella takes to crossing her fingers behind her back whenever the mother and the father say the words
hulp
and
zwarte
in the same breath.
Black help. If only.
To have someone else around . . . She thinks of Charley standing guard outside her Durban den.

The father's body finally makes the decision for them. One blistering summer's day he mows the lawn without his truss and does something to his hernia. The mother sees him collapse over the lawnmower handle from her watching post at the kitchen door, and rushes to him, calls Ella to follow. ‘Don't you two touch me!' he groans.

‘I won't come near you,' the mother says, ‘But please, Har, agree now about the garden help. Every time you mow that lawn you go purple. Anyone would think you wanted to die in the attempt.'

They hire Phineas, a soft-spoken schoolboy gardener with a guarded expression, taller even than Charley. For some months he has worked next door at the Brickhills'. He comes with excellent references, says the father. Last winter he beautified the flowerbeds around the municipal picnic site: he turns in tip-top work; he gives of his level best. Next year he will sit his matriculation test, the same as Ella, though the Bantu version. This means he is about sixteen, two years older than she.

‘Such a nice boy, such a decent face!' The mother can hardly believe their luck. The father narrows his eyes at her.

‘Watch, Phineas.' The father drags the lawnmower's handlebar from the teenager's hands the first time the two men mow. He directs the machine vertically up the grassy bank that Phineas had been cutting at an angle. His grey comb-over collapses outwards, his face runs with sweat. ‘Watch how I put the effort in. See how close I make the cut.'

Phineas, frowning, folds his arms.

‘Har, please, let Phineas do it.' The mother emerges from the kitchen door with a glass of water. ‘He's here to help us.'

With the flat of his hand the father pushes the offered glass away. Ella watches from the verandah window. ‘No European,' the father mutters, ‘shirks good honest work.'

It is Ella's turn to take water out to the father. This afternoon he and Phineas are clearing out the dahlia bed. Now that he has proper help, the father wants to convert the bed and plant roses. Ella brings two glasses. The second one is for Phineas.

The two men are bent over their hoes, breaking up clayey clods of earth. Ella stands waiting for them to turn around and notice her holding the water. Phineas turns first, slowly straightening his back. The father is still bent down. Phineas sees the two glasses in her hands. Then his eyes rise to her face. He holds her gaze, his eyes soft but expressionless.

He is wearing a blue v-necked cotton shirt and grey Terylene trousers. She's close enough to him to smell the moist cut dahlia stems underfoot, the dried sweat on his shirt. They are smart clothes for gardening, she thinks. He must have a mother who looks after him, an elder sister.

His quiet eyes still hold her gaze. For a long while he doesn't blink and she doesn't blink. But then her eyes tear over; she blinks, takes a chance. Just as the father is straightening up, she throws Phineas a quick smile. The smile creases her lips before she can think about it.

At once he drops his eyes but at the same instant the corners of his mouth dent deeper in. He has let a something pass between them, like a furtive nod, a recognition that they're standing here together, two teenagers . . .

A band of heat collars her neck. It may be an airy thing that has passed between them but it's also a wrong thing. If the father spotted them smiling like this, it would be terrible what he'd say, call her out in Dutch for the
loeder
and
slet
he's always suspected she is. Fancy, he'd say, already she can hear him, you, a so-called decent girl, sharing secret smiles with the native garden boy, a servant—

‘You be proud,' he tells her later that day. Is he referring to the thing that passed with Phineas? They are sitting out on the verandah in the purple light that floods the hills just past sunset, drinking iced water. Phineas has long gone home. ‘Be proud of what you are,
meid
, strong, native-born, an African in effect, not a degenerate European like everyone else in your family . . .'

He surely has seen their smile? Ella looks at her father sideways: the corrugated brow, the bags under his eyes that his black-rimmed spectacles rest on. He gives nothing away. Then, as she leans across to begin clearing the table, he pulls back his glass, the melting ice cubes clunking. He says her name,
Ella. Ella
. When does he ever say her name?

‘Ella, wait a minute, I meant it just then. You, the accidental child of your father's old age, unanticipated, uncalled-for, you're a true original, always remember. You're a person for a new country, neither completely African nor completely European. Think about it, face up to it. Whereas I, I'm the last of my line, a European washed up in Africa, a lost cause, a eunuch of history.'

Ella's ice-filled stomach churns; suddenly she feels sick. He's about to declare something she's suspected all along. She's in fact an orphan, a parentless child like the girls in the books she loves, Anne, Heidi, Elnora of the Limberlost? She doesn't belong to the mother and the father. Not one sin of the Dutch fathers . . .

But, no, this isn't his meaning. What he means, he tells her, his eyes fixed on the fading horizon, is that his European line doesn't extend to her, and her mother's European line doesn't extend to her.

‘Being born in this new country has cut off the line,' he says. ‘Your mother hates the thought but – so what? Born here, Africa claims you. This isn't a bad situation. On the contrary.' He likes the expression
on the contrary
; he makes cutting motions with his hands when he uses it. ‘On the contrary, it's good to embrace a new world, a new homeland, this wide-open African world – excuse me,
South
African world. It's good to claim it just as it claims you. You're not a product of war like me, a daughter of war. Yours is a stronger claim, in fact, than a black African's claim, Phineas's say, he's purely African. Remember this. I saw it when we were standing together there in the garden. Phineas only knows the Africa that surrounds him. You, Ella, know the wider world but it's here that you're rooted.

‘So be wary of Mam.' Almost he looks straight at her, or anyway just past her left ear. ‘Be wary when she claims you back for corrupt Europe. Europe should have no hold on you. Unlike her, unlike me, you're not shackled to your fatherland by a historical ball and chain. God knows how I've wrestled with that ball and chain, all my life. But you, you don't need all that pointless yearning – the indelible taste of pea soup in the gullet, the Wilhelmus anthem, that ridiculous booming about Germanic blood, what a load of old tripe. That separate identity stuff is not for clever people like you, ready to claim a new republic, make it work.'

Ella looks past him. He may be trying to meet her eye, but she won't side with him. He's old, ugly, endlessly cross. Yes, she likes the idea of embracing a new world, she admits it. When she thinks of embracing Africa she remembers flying up and down the continent with her mother; the nights they spent in airport buildings; the sounds of singing and drumming that bore down from all sides. She remembers sucking deep into her lungs the smell of wet vegetation that came seeping through the doors.

But she doesn't want a bad word said about the Netherlands. The Netherlands isn't as he says it is. She remembers dove-grey Oegstgeest and the games on the sand heap; the visits to Oma, the raisins, the ventriloquist in the park . . .

It's true they haven't flown north for several years now, not since she turned twelve, when the trust fund that covered their travel ran out. The mother addresses her apple-green air letters to the nursing home where Oma has moved. Still, no matter how much time goes by, Ella will never forget the Netherlands, how connected-in she felt.

On Saturday and Sunday afternoons she takes to lying in the sun, her skin basted in cooking oil. Her aim is a proper dark brown
connected-in
African colour, but instead she turns bright red. By the end of the summer her freckles have doubled in size. Her freckle coverage has turned her body half-brown, she calculates, which is better than nothing. By this reckoning, she will every summer go a degree or so browner. She will also go a degree or so thinner. This, too, is her aim. ‘If you want to look like me,' says Linda in the school playground, ‘Live on flavoured ice-cubes and cucumber.' Linda has grown a metre in a year and is a skeleton in a skin coat. Ella does without the cucumber. Her stomach begins to curve in instead of out.

Yes, she refuses to side with the father, this angry old man in his truss. In her heart she knows where she sides. This is what African birth really means, she knows in her bones. African birth means choosing Africa
every time
, on
every
occasion, Africa over Europe, Africa over South Africa, nine times out of ten, ten times out of ten.

During the last maths period on a Friday afternoon at school, the Independent Learners group in the back row of the classroom is given exercises in formal logic to do as a treat. Since the beginning of this year, Standard 8, Ella has been an Independent Learner.

From their exercises in logic she learns about a pattern called a syllogism, a sum in words that she can play with, that she can manipulate so as to capture situations that at first glance go the other way about, like her relationship to Africa, say, or to the kids in the Transkei swimming pool. Her relationship also to Phineas.

The syllogism goes like this. The first postulate is that, she, Ella, is monstrous, as she has known a long time. She is shifty, late-developed, misshapen, all the way down to her core. ‘You, you, you waste-of-space!' the father fuelled by sherry bellows at dinner time whenever she answers him back, as if conjuring some spirit out of her breast.

The first postulate then is that she is a monster.

The second postulate is that blacks are monstrous – that is, if you take white people at their word. The Transkei kids, Charley, Phineas, even Arthur Ashe on television, in fact all black people – they are shifty, untrustworthy, warped. Just simple-minded buffoons, says her father, mere hewers of wood, drawers of water.

And so it follows, runs the syllogism, that as she and the Transkei children, and she and Phineas, plus all the weird toads and locusts in the surrounding hills – as all of them are as one, united in their monstrosity, she is completely and entirely an African too, a black African, her number of freckles regardless. She is flesh of the flesh of all the other African monsters and wild things.

Her syllogism works so well that she enlarges and bends the pattern to make other, equally smart ones. She enjoys the game. She likes how neatly her syllogisms run the world-as-it-is backwards, undo the things people like the father and Prime Minister B J Vorster and the other politicians on television say are right.

Take the way the father calls black people ignorant goons just for being black. This is in itself obviously goon-like because how could
all
black people be ignorant goons? The father knows not one black person, not well. So it's he who's shown up as ignorant as well as goon-like. And if black people are not all ignorant and dumb then she, too, so often called dumb, goggling, et cetera – she can't be just an
idioot
either.

 

Across the country black schoolchildren are up in arms. There are daily reports in the newspaper, tucked away on page two or six, in the News in Brief section. The children are not in fact armed, other than with bricks and stones, but they are angry. They say they want to choose the language they study in. They also demand huge abstract things Ella knows about mainly from the father's talking – things like freedom and justice. The schoolchildren refuse to go to school because of their lack of freedom and justice.

Ella can't think of a place more free than school; free of her father's voice, her mother's tears. But she remembers the broad-shouldered soldiers she saw all across independent Africa: how their fight for freedom puffed out their chests. She remembers the word
Viva!
chalked on the airport wall in red.
Viva
, she now knows from a dictionary in the school library, is a cry of freedom and also life.

During the school disturbances Phineas stays away from work. Ella misses seeing him around. There's something about their quick, snatched, bitten-back smiles she enjoys. She stands in the garden and stares out in the direction of the African township that lies across the valley, behind the feathery bank of eucalyptus trees. There's more smoke hanging over the township than usual, but it may just be winter mist. She tries to imagine what might be keeping Phineas, but the only picture that comes to her is of her Cuban soldier in his battle-fatigues loping through the township streets.