The Shouting in the Dark (29 page)

‘The evacuation the
Tjerk Hiddes
would have to undertake at East Timor would be entirely on her own,' Wim Vermeer continues, ‘Under the cover of darkness. In early December that year there was no moon. And our charts for the straits around Timor were incomplete. We'd be approaching an uncharted shore in utter darkness. To increase our speed and hence our efficiency we therefore relieved ourselves of our heaviest armaments, all our torpedos and our 14.7 inch anti-aircraft guns. It was with significantly reduced protection we'd encounter any Japanese bombers who came our way.

‘But who were we to reason why? as the saying goes. We were only two hours out of Darwin steering due north to throw the Japanese off the Timor scent when, as if to test the sincerity of our intentions, their bombers suddenly sought us out. Ten bombers at first, then what looked like another ten. Hell-fire broke out not just from the skies, but immediately overhead as the guns we still had on board did their best to blast back. And from that moment till sundown our good ship was attacked without let-up, in relays of bombers and dive-bombers, they just kept on coming. And from that moment till sundown our Captain had us on Emergency Full Ahead, taking the zigzag course for which he by then was famous, though that day he had to maintain his zigzag for longer than ever before, or than anyone thought possible. It saved the day though, how he grimly hung there, blackened by smoke, that and the rapid action of the guns. By a miracle we survived, more or less intact, with just a few nerves rattled and one man dead. An accident with our own guns.

‘Sometimes I get flashes from that nightmarish day, see it again as if it was yesterday. Klaas Sluijter up in the rigging. The dive-bombers swooping, looking like every next one might be a kamikaze. And Har your father there beside the X-installation guns, what a figure he cut, short, bow-legged, with his thick glasses. He was well known for drinking everyone under the table but he stood out because of the glasses. Obviously it wasn't an everyday occurrence to find a Navy officer manning the guns with poor eyesight like his. It certainly wasn't an everyday occurrence to find that same officer up with the 12.5 cannons whenever we met with enemy fire. Crommelin our chief artillery officer, see, he was often ill with something, nerves perhaps. So your Dad took over. He was always there, his glasses winking in the sunlight. During that attack on the Timor crossing, in fact, I remember it clearly, his glasses were cracked by the kickback during a salvo. Both lenses. Could hardly see a thing, poor fellow, but still he stayed up there, shouting
Fire!
long after the other officer on the job went hoarse.

‘It took three trips, each two days apart, all between the hours of midnight and four in the morning, when the night is blackest, to evacuate over a thousand people including women and children off Timor to Darwin. The
Tjerk Hiddes
made all three crossings without once stopping or refuelling. Throughout, she was entirely on her own, unassisted, almost without firepower, sliding like a ghost across a sea so black the stars overhead were reflected in it.

‘It was one of the unsung heroic actions of the war, that rescue, the first trip in particular when we were attacked. I'm surprised your father didn't tell you about it. You write yourself, the newspaper said. I'd say put down this story, get it about. Let others know.'

As if to prompt her he draws a pen from his shirt pocket and lays it on the table. The pen is not a Bic, she's almost surprised to see. Probably he just wants to take her telephone number, but still she shakes her head.

‘I don't think I can, Mr Vermeer.' Her hair flies about her face. ‘It's not possible. Seeing as he told me nothing himself. When he talked about the war, he talked to his friends and was mostly angry. He said he'd been done wrong by the war, the West. By the whole of history. He was going to rebuild the white republic. Every man he met he tried to recruit, I now think. Those stories were a heavy load for him to carry. For my part, I want to be rid of that load. I write poetry, not stories. I don't want to re-live his war or shoulder his burden.'

But in spite of what she has said she finds herself taking a napkin, picking up the pen. Wim Vermeer's eyes follow her writing hand. She writes the word
Verandah
along the napkin's red gingham border.

‘It's a funny thing,' he says, ‘That the story of the evacuation of East Timor is one you say you never heard. Whereas it's a story I never stop telling. It follows me like death. It was the point where the war and I parted company.

‘You see, when we finally returned to Port Darwin after Timor I took my leave of the happy ship
Tjerk Hiddes
. For good. Had to. I was ashamed to seem to give up, but I'd had it. Shock. The doctor signed me off. War at sea is strictly for heroes, hell-bent heroes. Stuck on the face of the waters like a sitting duck, begging for the enemy's planes to seek you out, as we were during that Timor jaunt – it was too much for me. Eventually I found an office job in Fremantle, stayed there till the end of the war. Insurance – some of it to do with shipping. Dutch work in a way though no longer in the Navy proper. In '45 the company transferred me to Canada, Oakville, west of here on Lake Ontario.

‘Walking through Darwin the day I left our happy ship I bumped, as it happened, into your Dad Har B on his way to having his glasses fixed. I embraced him like a brother. It was my chance to say goodbye, ask the question that had been troubling my head since that terrible night. I looked into his eyes through those two cracked lenses and popped it out point-blank. How did you do it, Har? I said. How did you stick it out? I'm finished and I wasn't even on the guns.

‘Here's what he said in reply, “Shat myself, then carried on.” Excuse my language but he meant it literally. That was his way. “Looked up at Klaas Sluijter there in the mast shitting himself, and carried on. Thought of the ship.” He was braver than I, Har B. Braver or more foolhardy, I'm not sure. I couldn't have lasted till the end of the war as he did, in that tiny unsung rump of a Netherlands Navy, first in the East, then on the North Atlantic convoys, no less. Not under any circs. Impossible. I was a nervous wreck. The whole beautiful solidarity thing didn't impress me in the same way. But it did Har and he survived to tell the tale, it seems. Or not to tell the tale, as you say . . .'

 

From the doorway of the Red Gingham Ella watches Wim Vermeer's nest of white hair drift away through the late afternoon crowd flowing along Bloor Street. He is moving steadily though quite slowly. There's still time to call him back, she tells herself. When he turned from her just then he looked suddenly lost, uncertain. She and Wim, strange to think, spent less than an hour and a half together talking. Curt's still nowhere to be seen. But what's the point of continuing? He has given her after all his main story. Anything else is just detail. If she called him back, what would she ask him? On board ship, was her father always angry, or did that only happen after the war? Did he shout out to himself on deck as he did at home, spitting and swearing, even when there were no guns to fire? She suspects she knows what Wim would reply.

Once Wim turns and raises his hand and she raises her hand. But she doesn't call him back, she won't ask him her questions. She wonders whether she'll tell Curt Wim's story when he arrives, as she knows he hopes she will, or whether she'll make something up, as she thinks she might. She squints out across the crowd. Wim's quiff is still there in the distance, though smaller now, further away, steadily receding. The grey evening light makes of its whiteness a bright dot.

The nights she stood at her bedroom window in Braemar squinting into the darkness, looking for the invisible stranger who would step out of the shadows to decode her father's stories: the scene surges into memory. Has that stranger now at last appeared to her, she wonders, in the shape of Wim Vermeer? Is the secret now at last laid bare, the louring secret she has so long watched out for, the secret that there was in fact no secret, no hidden shame, there was in truth nothing to unravel? The secret that – unlike Wim Vermeer – her father was haunted by no spectre: he simply stayed with his ship. He was the solid but myopic officer in a tight spot. The secret that he had nothing to hide, no shame, no funk, nothing other than his war wounds, and those, at least till the war had ended, he kept under tight wraps. The secret that no matter the terrors he spat at the night sky, he always maintained his watch. Staring out from the verandah as if on board ship, he sat ready for whatever the horizon might throw at him.

She looks out across the crowd. The white dot that was Wim Vermeer has vanished. She walks back to her table in the café. At her place the napkin with the word
Verandah
written on it still lies. Beside it is Wim's pen, which she sees is engraved with his name. Did he mean to leave it behind? she wonders. Should she return it to him or keep it? She thinks she will keep it.

She folds the napkin small, in half, in quarters, in eighths, till it makes a tiny pillow, and shoves it into her empty coffee cup. Then she takes a fresh napkin and with Wim's pen writes another word,
Solomon
. That second sign she received today, a secret she never expected to have decoded. As she writes a tension she did not know she harboured flows out through her hand. The final stroke of the
n
makes a black gash in the tissue paper.

So, she asks herself, has she faced him down, the unsung hero her father firing at the enemy through cracked spectacles? Has he gone from her now? She can't tell for sure. All she knows is – she can keep on. In spite of him, because of him, she will keep on. He kept on, during all those incidents at sea. Phineas did, too, after his own fashion, as she now strongly suspects. She remembers the loops within loops on the surface of Victory Dam. Keeping on. On the napkin she writes under
Solomon
the words
Bonfire
, Poort,
Canada
,
Zigzag
. . . Then she gets up, folds the napkin into her pocket and sets forth – out of the café door, up the street, one foot in front of the other, one word after another, tacking this way and that through the late afternoon crowd.

 

Ella waits at the University Union's side-door for Comrade M the ex-guerrilla speaker to finish. The door is open. She watches his woollen hat, the same as in the photo, encircled by jostling, clamouring students. She had to leave school at the normal time today but still caught the talk's closing. She heard Comrade M describe seeing a friend fall to police guns in a township. On a map he traced his escape route across the South African border through liberated Mozambique to Tanzania and freedom. Help me bring that same freedom to my country, he ended. Donate generously, we exiles need funds.

Ella steps out in front of him as he approaches the door. Hello, she says, goes straight to the point, I want to do more than give money. He smiles at her accent. You're from home. She wants to say she has no home, but she nods. Go back, he says without hesitating. Lie low but go back. We need people on the ground like you, to fight low-key but with energy, give support, provide safe houses. We need ordinary white householders with the courage to leave their back windows open at night, so that people on the run can gain access, find a place to rest. Become a maker of our new future. Stand and be counted.

Where has she heard words like that before?

He gives her his card, writes a number on the back, an office in Toronto, the date of a next meeting. It's the day before she and Emma-Leigh go to PEI. Don't tell anyone you're coming, he says. Take a route downtown you wouldn't normally take. We'll look forward to seeing you.

Just one more thing. Ella opens her mouth to speak. At your Freedom College, did you ever meet . . .? But he's already moving away from her.
Phin-e-as
, she begins to sound. His eyes fix on her lips, then flip away. ‘Call us,' he waves, ‘We'll be expecting you.'

Ella pulls herself upright in the armchair in the Dutch apartment and stretches. Her bones creak. The sky paling to grey behind the trees in the park picks out the two documents, the pale photocopy of the
Volksregister
's blank page, the grey official letter, still lying here on the window sill. With the growing light her reflection in the window has receded. A ghostly outline flickers against the green of the beeches opposite.

She moves to the kitchenette and lights the gas for coffee, watches the blue flame dance under the kettle. Wim Vermeer's naval adventure featuring her father the stalwart gunner, the good man in a tight spot – for years the story pointed to a new side of him, a different angle to think about. Now she's once again left puzzling. Is there something else again the story is saying?

She walks back to the window with her coffee cup, leans against the glass, gazes out across the park. A chain of puffy cloud is touched by a faint pink light from a still-invisible sun. Thinking back, she wonders if she has misconstrued, looked out for the wrong things? In her stories, after all, her father's always the antagonist, always shouting at the night. Wim Vermeer's adventure tale: that, too, fits the pattern: see her heroic but hell-bent father, peering through cracked glasses beside the X-installation guns.

But is there a different way of seeing the story, another way of telling it? Even the gap in the
Volksregister
, thoughtless and mean as it looks, what else might it be showing? What was it her father used to say? Born here in Africa, Africa claims you. Watch out for rival claims. Be part of where you stand. Is this why he refused to acknowledge her as his own? To give her a new beginning, cut off from the past: not just a war veteran's daughter, the child of a eunuch of history? Ella can hear his voice in her memory. Beware those blank spaces in the
Volksregister
lying in wait for you like traps.

And hasn't she, in point of fact, fallen in with his logic these last many years? What has she done but lived out his instructions, on some levels, in certain ways. Defend where you belong. You'll have no more than this ever. Stand up for what you claim. Less than two years after she heard Comrade M speak in Toronto she was back teaching English in the townships around humid Durban – KwaMashu, Inanda, Umhlanga. She knew what it was to learn English from the outside. She set up her safe house for political fugitives on the run, building it contact by slow contact, one small node in a vast network that still blankets the country. For years now she's done this: smuggling people with hats pulled low over their faces into the space under her bed late at night. She spends the hours till dawn listening to a stranger's breathing beneath her head, watches the crack in the curtains for the creeping blue light of the police. The people she shelters are mostly young, mostly male and scared, but she's trained not to pick up on the individual details. She never hears their voices, never knows their names. Yet each time without fail, as the first light breaks and she prepares to wake them and set them on the road, buttered bread wrapped in foil already to hand, she cranes down to check their faces. One day, you see, you just never know, it might be him.

Lying awake in bed she remembers back sometimes to her Durban den, the iridescent sunflies winking between the hydrangea flowers, and it feels as if her whole life has pointed only in this direction. Except these days she is – or was – the cover not the cowerer. The fact that she's good at night watches, staying awake till first light – how lucky this has turned out to be.

In the corner of her left eye Ella's aware of a patch of white, the sheet she last night hung over the portrait on the wall, catching the brightening light. She walks across, steps up onto a chair, lifts the folds of the sheet off the frame, lets the sheet drop. Here again are the portrait's eyes. The tiny flakes of dry blue-white oil paint that make up the eye-whites glister in the sunshine. In spite of all her worry, the mother didn't get round to having the painting restored. When she returned to the Netherlands from South Africa, nothing of her old life, her life with her mother, father, sister, was restored to her.

Ella steps down from the chair but the eyes remain fixed on her eyes. The picture beside her father's desk all those years, she thinks, in Durban, in Braemar, his face bathed every day in her Aunt Ella's detached gaze. You, Ella, she says out loud, woman whom my father loved, whom did you see when you stared out of your gilded frame? Him, always him. There he is, sitting every day in your company, saying my name yet dreaming of another.

Life proceeds by number, said the Greeks, in patterns. What if her father's story fits into a different pattern than one of antagonism and hate: his hate, her own hate? She thinks of Captain Klaas Sluijter plotting a zigzag course across the blue ocean. Her father and Phineas in the boat on Victory Dam, laughing together like carefree boys. Different patterns: zigzags, circles, continuations; not warring opposites. The long line of fugitives sliding in under her bed. She remembers her father's stubby fingers gripping the white loop of the telephone wire, the day of the trunk call, when first he spoke to the other Ella in her hearing. How tightly he squeezed the wire so that Ella's sister Irene might have an uninterrupted line of connection to the old world he despised.

The lawyer's call at ten o'clock is expected, yet still it makes Ella jump. He does not waste time on greetings. ‘Ella, Chris here, it's as we expected. Your bid to remain this time has failed. You must prepare to leave the country, at least for a while. However, the story's not yet over, believe me. I plan to plead against the decision.'

Ella holds the telephone between her shoulder and her chin and picks up the sheet she just let drop. As the lawyer talks she gets back on the chair. With one hand she hooks the sheet over the right-hand corner of the portrait.

‘You yourself have given me the lead,' the lawyer is saying. ‘That thing you were telling me yesterday, about your work giving refuge, on that basis we can mount a case for asylum. Refuge granted for refuge given. A question now not of your father's oversight but your own hard work. Your fight, in short, is by no means over.'