A Fork in the Road Page 15

  And then Sonja, my second child with Alta. In the summer of 1981, when the four of us travelled through Scandinavia, all the way up to Kakslauttanen in Finland to see the midnight sun, Danie was ten, and Sonja not yet eight. From the time they were still quite small, they loved travelling. For Sonja there was always one condition: in every new hotel we came to, she first chose one corner of the bedroom which she would cordon off with chairs and blankets, and where she would set out her dolls and teddies and the small, furry dog which still today, a quarter of a century later, has a place of honour in her home. Once she had staked out her territory, self-contained, inviolate, the Unknown exorcised, she would be completely secure and happy, content to accompany us anywhere.

  This became emblematic of the course of her life. Since long before my first marriage I’d always known that I wanted to have children, sons and daughters. But I had a very particular feeling about the bond between father and daughter. (Is there any other book in world literature which portrays this bond more devastatingly than Halldór Laxness’s Sjálfstaett Fólk (Independent People)? And I knew that I would not stop having children until I had a daughter born to me. Each of my sons has a special place in my life; and I cannot think of the world without any of them. But when Sonja was born in 1973, there was a feeling that my existence had been rounded off and fulfilled. And it was only natural that we should share a closeness that will always remain inviolate and inviolable. In the power of her will, in her beautiful pig-headedness, allied to her sympathie with others, in her spontaneous tuning-in to the world, her inner radiance, in her relationship with her family and her innumerable pets, in her many talents, including her amazing culinary skills and her sense of humour, she is one of the most affirmative individuals I know and love in this world.

  The practical genes I have transmitted, for better or for worse, to these four children, all reach back to my father. However quiet, and reserved, and placid, and imperturbable he might have appeared on the surface, I know he was also a planner of plans and a dreamer of dreams. And nothing he ever did testified to this as eloquently as the cupboard he built for my mother.

  This happened in the small town of Sabie, set in the mountains of what was then the Eastern Transvaal. He used to plan for months in advance whenever she had a birthday coming up. Usually he would order things from mail catalogues – silverware, crockery, jewellery, even items of clothing. Very often there would be some disappointment involved. The jewellery never looked exactly like the resplendent pictures in the catalogue. The clothes did not quite fit. The crockery did not match anything she had. The silver was suspect. But she always made a great show of it, and feigned surprise and delight. Only afterwards she might confide in me or Elbie that the gifts might not have been as much of a success as she had made him believe. And sometimes the surprise might be different from what he had expected, usually because he would have to hide the presents so well, knowing her incorrigible curiosity, that he himself might forget where he had stowed the gifts. Once, more than a year after a particular birthday, she discovered a box of chocolates he had hidden in a bin of chicken food, where it had melted in summer heat, and then congealed.

  But in the year I turned twenty, he decided to make my mother a cupboard. No mail order this time. No driving into town or to the next town to a furniture shop with specials on display. No. My mother needed a cupboard – as she had intimated with her special brand of ‘subtle’ hints for a long time – and this time he would make it himself. On a Wednesday afternoon when she was out to a meeting of the Women’s Auxiliary, or some church gathering, he came home from work earlier than usual, and took me to a hardware shop with him. He had with him several sheets of paper on which he had made indecipherable sketches and drawings and lists and lists of calculations.

  He refused to discuss the plan or any of its details with me. It was a secret. I merely had to help him transport everything in the back of the old grey ’38 Hudson before she came home.

  That was sometime during the June holidays; my mother’s birthday was on 16 October. For four months he spent every single afternoon except Sundays in the outroom where he had locked up his tools and materials. In front of the only window he had draped an old tablecloth. The key he carried in his pocket, even when he went to the office. He knew the extent and the unscrupulousness of my mother’s curiosity. This was to be the crowning glory of his carpentry skills. During the short vacation in September, I asked him about his progress. It was going well, he grunted. But he refused to divulge anything more. Still, the look of satisfaction on his face suggested that he was indeed pleased with what was happening in that locked outroom.

  I was not there for the grand finale in October, but Elbie brought me up to date. Early on the morning of 16 October my father got up and got dressed, very meticulously, and instructed my mother to do the same. Then he took her by the hand and led her round the house to the outroom, which he unlocked with great ceremony. He went in first, to draw the tablecloth curtain at the window and put on the light. From the threshold he invited her inside.

  ‘I know you wanted a cupboard,’ he said, unable to contain his glee. ‘Here it is.’

  My mother went inside. All my siblings, Elbie and Marita and our small brother, Johan, born just before the move to Sabie, followed on her heels.

  She stared. And gulped.

  ‘Well?’ he asked. For someone as calm and contained as my father usually was, his excitement was almost palpable. ‘What do you think?’

  She approached, stroked the somewhat unevenly varnished wood, then opened the two doors, one by one.

  ‘It’s – it’s – big,’ she said after a long time.

  And big it certainly was. Too big, it soon transpired, to get out through the door.

  And there in the outroom the cupboard stood, for the remaining years of our sojourn in Sabie. In the end, when the family moved to Bothaville, by which time I was in Paris, the cupboard stayed behind, and had to be sold to the new owners of the house as a permanent fixture.

  POLITICAL STIRRINGS

  MY MEMORIES OF the war centred mainly in the two paraffin boxes in our outroom where my parents had hoarded scarce items: candles, white flour, peanut butter, some tinned foods. Seen from one angle, I suppose, I had almost no political awareness at all as a youth. From others, everything in my life was steeped in politics from the outset.

  My father’s way of looking at the world was undoubtedly shaped by the fact that as a young man his father had joined the Boksburg Commando to fight the English in the Boer War. That is a story in its own right, and he wrote it all down afterwards, in High Dutch, in his beautiful copperplate. How they trekked this way and that, through the Transvaal, through Natal, and back to the Transvaal, following one report or rumour of decisive battles after the other, yet always managing just to miss the really important engagements – Spioenkop, Colenso, Dalmanutha, Elandslaagte – in what, to me, but not to him, became a dark comedy of errors. So I was brought up on a diet of Boer bravery and English cowardice and atrocities, resulting in a burning nationalism and the dream of restoring Afrikaner independence – a version of history from which blacks were largely absent, at most incidental.

  But as a magistrate, a civil servant, my father was not allowed openly to get involved in politics. His private opinions were no secret; but in the exercise of his duties he usually tried to be scrupulously correct. This was also a consequence of his chosen career. Finding himself passionately immersed in the legal profession, my father conditioned his mind, and shaped his whole view of the world, by considering, as objectively as possible, the right and wrong of every situation, every person, every human problem.

  One of the first demonstrations of this, an episode which still defines much of the image I have of him, came in 1948, when I turned thirteen, my first year in high school, and the watershed year when the National Party came to power and introduced apartheid as its official policy. For our family this was a cause for jubilation. As early as 1938 my p
arents had taken part in the countrywide festivities to mark the centenary of the Great Trek; my father even grew a beard for the occasion and my mother sported a full-length Voortrekker dress and kappie as, with other local dignitaries, they took a ride on one of the ox-wagons that trekked through the length and breadth of the country on the long road to Pretoria where the cornerstone of the Voortrekker Monument was to be laid. How well I remember the moment during the elections of 1948, when news came that the prime minister, Jan Smuts, had lost his seat in Standerton. I was already in bed, but the general commotion in the lounge, accompanied by a thundering crash, made me jump up and run to the scene to find my mother trapped up to her waist in a hole in the middle of the room, right in front of the radio. It turned out that the news had sent her jumping into the air with such energy that in coming down she had crashed right through the floor. And for years ‘Mother’s Election Hole’ was kept as a sacrosanct memento of that unforgettable night.

  Then, mere weeks after the elections, I was instructed at school to take part in what was to be my first attendance at a meeting of the debating society. The topic was, The government should go ahead with its segregation policies. And I had to oppose the motion.

  I did not even understand the word ‘segregation’, nor did I have any inkling of the rules and procedures of the debating society. Naturally, I went to my father for help. It was only years later that I realised how my request must have gone against the grain of everything that had shaped his convictions as a Nationalist Afrikaner, the son of a Boer War veteran, whose whole life had been steeped in distrust of anybody or anything that might threaten the political aspirations and the survival of his people.

  My father set aside his gardening for a precious hour to retrace with me the history of Afrikanerdom since the Anglo-Boer War and explain every bend and detour on that road where Afrikaners had thwarted or betrayed black aspirations and jeopardised the future of the country – all of which he understood and could explain rationally, even though, emotionally, he resented it with every fibre of his body: the Land Act of 1912, the disenfranchisement of blacks in the thirties and the way in which only Smuts’s holism could in the long run ensure a just and free and safe multiracial society. Intellectually, he could defend it. But in his guts he supported, with conviction and passion, the apartheid government and would continue to do so for the rest of his life – to the extent that even though it was, strictly speaking, unacceptable for him as a magistrate to do so, he joined in due course the secret Afrikaner organisation, the Broederbond or ‘Band of Brothers’.

  At that meeting of the debating society, I went out of my way to plead the cause of a non-segregated society and a non-racist future. But of course my heart wasn’t in it; and my side lost the debate by a large majority. Much to my own relief, and my father’s when he learned about the outcome. But I had learned something which in my later life I would cherish as a vital moment in my approach to the world, at all the future forks along my road – even if it took me many years fully to grasp the meaning, and the necessity, of it. The need to think, not just laterally, but cubistically. To approach subjects ‘in the round’. To try to understand why others think what they think and are what they are. To imagine someone else’s thoughts from the inside.

  I persisted for a long time on the right-hand side of the road to nationalistic salvation. I remember a conversation with my mother just before going to university, when I told her about my excitement at the prospect of meeting people of different political, moral or religious persuasions, and she responded with uncharacteristic vehemence, ‘You can do what you like and be what you like. You can even become a communist for all I care. But one thing you must know: if ever you become a Sap, we will no longer regard you as our child.’ A Sap was a member of Field Marshal Smuts’s erstwhile South African Party, later the United Party, that lost the 1948 election to the ponderous Nationalist ex-dominee, Dr Daniel Francois Malan. Yet I should add as a footnote that when I fell in love with the pretty almond-eyed Esther who steadfastly evaded all my approaches and whose parents were of the Sap persuasion, it was my mother who tirelessly negotiated with Esther’s to set up a tryst.

  Early in my first year at university there was a momentous occasion when Dr Malan was re-elected as prime minister, this time with a sizeable majority, which enabled him to unfold the whole dire programme of apartheid: the Group Areas Act, the Separate Amenities Act, the Mixed Marriages Act, the Population Registration Act, the Immorality Act, you name it, each of which the staff and students of my university, including my enthusiastic self, welcomed with waves of almost near-religious fervour as milestones on the road towards the Afrikaner’s reclaiming of his identity and his ultimate republican destiny (‘his’, indeed, as it was a thoroughly male-chauvinistic concept and ideal). To anyone familiar with German history of the thirties these events must have appeared sickeningly familiar.

  From the Cape, Dr Malan travelled on a special victory train to the north, making a halt at every station and siding to ‘meet the volk’ and receive its homage. We learned in time – the news travelled swiftly – that the Man of God would be at the Potchefstroom railway station at eleven or twelve o’ clock on that weekday morning. We had classes to attend. One in particular. History. The professor was famous, not just as an historian but as a Party Man. So we did not foresee any problems. But we did take the precaution of sending a small delegation to request permission of absence in advance. To our utter amazement Professor Krüger, widely known, and with reason, as Daantjie Donder (Daantjie Thunder), turned down the request very curtly. As a professor at a university, he said, he had no right to give us permission to miss a lecture. I got the distinct impression that if we had simply bunked, he might have turned a blind eye; but in the circumstances we gave him no room to manoeuvre – even though I remember delivering an impassioned plea on behalf of the whole class, based on the argument that as students of history we might be said to have a duty not to miss an occasion to be witnesses to history in the making. There was a shadow of a smile on his stern face, but he refused to budge. In fact – and here I did feel that he went too far – any member of the class not present during the lecture in question, would be severely punished for it.

  We were all taken aback by the unexpected response. As fervent young Calvinists we had an unhealthy respect for the structures of power. In the context of a university, we dutifully acknowledged, a professor ultimately derived his authority from God. So what were we to do?

  We defied authority.

  Not all of us: about half of the delegation attended the lecture the following morning, as did a fair number of our classmates. But a good handful of us, having weighed the options and decided to respond to the call of history (which might, for all we knew, coincide with the will of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit), took to our bicycles and went to the station.

  It was a scene never to be forgotten. Hundreds of people were thronging on the platform. Outside, the streets were lined with vehicles of every description. Not only cars and trucks and tractors and trailers, but horse-carts, mule-carts, donkey-carts. Some of them, we learned, had come from faraway farms and outlying districts; many of the old people – all in their Sunday best, even though covered in dust, the women’s flowers wilted and ashen in their gnarled hands, the men’s pipes scuffed and chewed – had driven right through the night to be there on time. Most of them were clasping Bibles or hymn books to their bosoms. It was like attending the Second Coming.

  The train was at least an hour late, as every halt along the road had lengthened the delay. But no one cared. And at last it came. And the Anointed of the Lord made his prophet-like appearance, solemnly clad in black, on a balcony between two coaches, flanked by his sturdy wife in hat and tailored suit, and his small daughter, an adopted German orphan. He spoke for about a minute before some secretary or lackey ushered them back into the train. But his two paltry loaves and five smelly little fishes were enough for the hungry horde. And long after the train h
ad disappeared in a cloud much bigger than a man’s hand, which left most of us covered in soot, I distinctly remember coming past an old man with a long white beard marked by yellow streaks of tobacco juice, his wrinkled cheeks wet with tears, but in his eyes a light that seemed to come straight from heaven.

  At the next history lecture we were set an instant test on the work covered in the previous lecture. The true believers who had attended that class and had been duly warned about the test had no problems whatsoever; those heretics among us who had gone off to pay homage to the portly Prophet, floundered. We all felt that we had been most unjustly served, but no one complained. Some, we must have believed, have their reward on earth, while others receive it in heaven. It was only after many years had passed, when Professor Krüger asked me to check an English translation he had made of The Hound of God, a long dramatic monologue by the uncrowned king of Afrikaans poetry, N. P. van Wyk Louw, that he admitted, with a wry smile, that on the day of our truancy he had been conscious of only one burning desire in his mind: to be on that station platform with us. By that time I had long broken free from the bonds of Calvinism and Christian-Nationalism. But I could not help admitting to a perverse admiration for his unwavering loyalty to the dictates of his Calvinist conscience. And of course, by then I had heard him lecture on the parallels between the Ancien Régime in France and South Africa under the devastating rule of apartheid; and I could appreciate how he, like my father so many years earlier, could tragically adhere to the dictates of what they believed to be right while, deep down, knowing what it really was.

  For the rest of my university career, going for one of the first major forks in my road, I somehow managed to follow two paths simultaneously: on the surface I toed the official Calvinist line, often even enthusiastically and with the sense of a ‘calling’, while below that surface I did my best to subvert it.