A Dry White Season Read online

  Behind the formality of his tone and attitude Ben caught a glimpse, or imagined that he did, of a man in a locked office under a burning electric bulb, methodically going about his business, for days and nights if necessary: to the absolute end if necessary.

  After they had gone he remained inside the closed front door for a minute, still conscious of the distance he felt between himself and the world. Almost tranquillity; perhaps even satisfaction.

  Behind him he heard the sound of their bedroom door being closed. A key was turned. As if it were necessary! He was in no frame of mind to face Susan anyway.

  Thought and feeling were still suspended. He couldn’t – he wouldn’t – start probing what had happened. All reactions were mechanical.

  He went through the house to the garage and started planing a piece of wood – aimlessly, simply to keep himself occupied. Gradually his activity became more planned, more definite, even though there was no deliberate decision involved. He started making a false bottom for his tools cupboard, fitting it so neatly that no one would ever suspect its presence. In future, if ever he had anything he wanted to keep from their prying eyes, this was where he would hide it. For the moment the sheer physical action was sufficient in itself. Not an act of self-protection, but a counter move, something positive and decisive, a new beginning.

  9

  Wednesday 11 May. Strange day. Yesterday’s visit by the Special Branch. Difficult to explore on paper, but I must. Writing it out in full sentences is salutary, like breathing deeply. Will try. A frontier crossed. So definite that from now on I’ll be able to divide my life in Before and After. The way one talks about the Flood. Or the apple, the fruit of the Fall, that perilous knowledge. One can speculate about it beforehand, but you’re unprepared when it happens. A finality, like I suppose death, which one can only get to know by experiencing it. Even while it was happening I didn’t realise it as keenly as I do now. Too dazed, I imagine. But now: today.

  Everything wholly strange. Children who say “good morning” and whose faces you see without recognising them or knowing why they are addressing you. A bell that sends you from classroom to classroom and which you obey without knowing the reason. When you open your mouth it is without any foreknowledge of what will follow. It happens by itself. Your own words seem unfamiliar to you, your voice comes from far away. Every building, every room, the tables and benches, the blackboard, pieces of chalk, everything is strange. Nothing wholly dependable. You have to assume that, previously, you managed to pick your way through it all, that in some mysterious way you “belonged", but it is inexplicable now. Inside you is a manner of knowing which you cannot share with anyone else. Nothing as commonplace as a “secret” (“Guess what: they searched my house yesterday”). Something essentially different. As if you now exist in another time and another dimension. You can still see the other people, you exchange sounds, but it is all coincidence, and deceptive. You’re on the other side. And how can I explain it in the words of “this side"?

  Third period free. Wandered about outside among the rockeries. Was it the autumn air? The leaves falling, the clear anatomy of the trees. No disguise, no ambiguity. But more strange than ever. From time to time a voice from a classroom, a phrase called out, unconnected with anything else. From the far end of the building someone practising scales, the same ones over and over. As basic as the trees, equally terrifying and meaningless.

  In the hall the choir singing. The anthem. For the Administrator’s visit in a week or so. The music broken up in parts. First, second; boys, girls; then all together. At thy will to live or perish, O South Africa, dear land. Once more please. At thy will to live or perish. No, that’s not good enough. Come on. At thy will to live or perish. That’s better. Now right from the beginning. Ringing out from our blue heavens. Open your mouths. At thy will to live at thy will to live at thy will to live or perish or perish or perish. The whole lot of us will perish. All you sweet young children, innocent voices singing, girls blushing and peeping at the boys, hoping this morning’s acne ointment is covering up the blemishes; boys poking each other in the ribs with rulers or passing on cryptic notes in sweaty hands. At thy will to live or perish, O South Africa, dear land!

  And in a few minutes we’ll all be back in the classroom resuming our work as if nothing had happened. I’ll teach you about this land and its prevailing winds and its rainfall areas, ocean currents, mountain ranges and rivers and national products, of efforts to produce rain and to control the ravages of dry seasons. I’ll teach you where you come from: the three small ships that brought the first white men, and the first bartering with Harry’s Hottentots, and the first wine, and the first Free Burghers settling on the banks of the Liesbeek in 1657. The arrival of the Huguenots. The dynasty of the Van der Stel governors, and the options open to them: Simon aiming at a concentration of whites at the Cape, allowing natural class differences to develop; his son Willem Adriaan opting for expansion, encouraging the stock farmers to explore the interior and settle among the natives; racial friction, disputes, frontier wars. 1836: Boer emigrants in a mass exodus in search of liberty and independence elsewhere. Massacres, annexations of the newly conquered land; temporary victory for the Boer Republics. Followed by the discovery of diamonds at Kimberley and gold at the Witwatersrand; the influx of foreigners and the triumph of British imperialist interests. Anglo-Boer War, concentration camps, Lord Milner, anglicisation in the schools. 1910: Unification and a new beginning, “South Africa first". Boers rebelling against the decision of their own government to support Britainin 1914. Impoverished farmers flocking to the cities. The mine revolts of ‘22, Boers and Bolshevists against the Imperialists. Official recognition of the Afrikaans language. Translation of the Bible, 1933. Coalition government. War. Afrikaners moving underground in the Ossewa-Brandwag. The indestructible dream of a Republic. And at last, a Nationalist Government in power. So you can see for yourselves, boys and girls, we’ve come a long way. Remember the words of the young Bibault in the revolt against Van der Stel in 1706: “I shall not go I am an Afrikaner and even if the landdrost kills me or puts me in jail I refuse to hold my tongue.” Our entire history, children, can be interpreted as a persistent search for freedom, against the dictates of successive conquerors from Europe. Freedom expressed in terms of this new land, this continent. We Afrikaners were the first freedom fighters of Africa, showing the way to others. And now that we have finally come to power in our own land, we wish to grant the same right of selfdetermination to all the other nations around us. They must have their own separate territories. Peaceful coexistence. Plural development. It is an expression of our own sense of honour and dignity and altruism. After all, we have no choice. Outside this vast land we have nowhere to go. This is our fate. At thy will to live or perish, 0 South Africa, our land! No, I’m afraid it’s not good enough. Try again.

  This vast land. The train journeys of my boyhood. The last stage on the sideline to our station: seven hours for those thirty-five miles. Stopping at every siding, loading or unloading milk cans, taking in coals or water: stopping in the middle of nowhere, in the open veld, heat-waves rippling on the horison. A name painted on a white board, so many feet above sea-level, so many miles from Kimberley, so many from Cape Town. The pure senselessness of it all heightened by the fact that everything is recorded so fastidiously. What the hell does it matter that this is the name of the station, or that it is so many miles away from the next?

  From a very early age one accepts, or believes, or is told, that certain things exist in a certain manner. For example: that society is based on order, on reason, on justice. And that, whenever anything goes wrong, one can appeal to an innate decency, or commonsense, or a notion of legality in people to rectify the error and offer redress. Then, without warning, there occurs what Melanie said and what I refused to believe: you discover that what you accepted as premises and basic conditions – what you had no choice but to accept if you wanted to survive at all – simply does not exist. Where you exp
ected something solid there turns out to be just nothing. Behind the board stating a name and heights and distances there is a vacuum disguised, at most, by a little corrugated iron building, milk cans, a row of empty red fire-buckets. Nothing.

  Everything one used to take for granted, with so much certainty that one never even bothered to enquire about it, now turns out to be illusion. Your certainties are proven lies. And what happens if you start probing? Must you learn a wholly new language first?

  “Humanity". Normally one uses it as a synonym for compassion; charity; decency; integrity. “He is such a human person.” Must one now go in search of an entirely different set of synonyms: cruelty; exploitation; unscrupulousness; or whatever?

  Darkness descending.

  Still, there is Melanie. Light in the gloom. (But why? Dare I even think about it?)

  The problem is: once you’ve caught a glimpse of it, once you’ve merely started suspecting it, it is useless to pretend it’s different. She was right. Melanie. Melanie. The only question that matters is the one she asked: What now?

  It has begun. A pure, elemental motion: something happened – I reacted – something opposed me. A vast, clumsy, shapeless thing has stirred. Is that the reason of my dazed state? Let’s try to be reasonable, objective: am I not totally helpless, in fact irrelevant, in a movement so vast and intricate? Isn’t the mere thought of an individual trying to intervene preposterous?

  Or am I putting the wrong questions now? Is there any sense in trying to be “reasonable", in finding “practical” arguments? Surely, if I were to consider what I might “achieve” in a practical sense I couldn’t even hope to begin. So it must be something else. But what? Perhaps simply to do what one has to do, because you’re you, because you’re there.

  I am Ben Du Toit. I’m here. There’s no one else but myselfright here, today. So there must be something no one but me can do: not because it is “important” or “effective", but because only I can do it. I have to do it because I happen to be Ben Du Toit; because no one else in the world is Ben Du Toit.

  And so it is beside the point to ask: what will become of me? Or: how can I act against my own people?

  Perhaps that is part of the very choice involved: the fact that I’ve always taken “my own people” so much for granted that I now have to start thinking from scratch. It has never been a problem to me before. “My own people” have always been around me and with me. On the hard farm where I grew up, in church on Sundays, at auctions, in school; on stations and in trains or in towns; in the slums of Krugersdorp; in my suburb. People speaking my language, taking the name of my God on their lips, sharing my history. That history which Gie calls “the History of European Civilisation in South Africa". My people who have survived for three centuries and who have now taken control – and who are now threatened with extinction.

  “My people". And then there were the “others". The Jewish shopkeeper, the English chemist; those who found a natural habitat in the city. And the blacks. The boys who tended the sheep with me, and stole apricots with me, and scared the people at the huts with pumpkin ghosts, and who were punished with me, and.yet were different. We lived in a house, they in mud huts with rocks on the roof. They took over our discarded clothes. They had to knock on the kitchen door. They laid our table, brought up our children, emptied our chamber pots, called us Baas and Mtestes. We looked after them and valued their services, and taught them the Gospel, and helped them, knowing theirs was a hard life. But it remained a matter of “us” and “them". It was a good and comfortable division; it was right that people shouldn’t mix, that everyone should be allotted his own portion of land where he could act and live among his own. If it hadn’t been ordained explicitly in the Scriptures, then certainly it was implied by the variegated creation of an omniscient Father, and it didn’t behove us to interfere with His handiwork or to try and improve on His ways by bringing forth impossible hybrids. That was the way it had always been.

  But suddenly it is no longer adequate, it no longer works. Something has changed irrevocably. I stood on my knees beside the coffin of a friend. I spoke to a woman mourning in a kitchen the way my own mother might have mourned. I saw a father in search of his son the way I might have tried to find my own. And that mourning and that search had been caused by “my people".

  But who are “my people” today? To whom do I owe my loyalty? There must be someone, something. Or is one totally alone on that bare veld beside the name of a non-existent station?

  The single memory that has been with me all day, infinitely more real than the solid school buildings, is that distant summer when Pa and I were left with the sheep. The drought that took everything from us, leaving us alone and scorched among the white skeletons.

  What had happened before that drought has never been particularly vivid or significant to me: that was where I first discovered myself and the world. And it seems to me I’m finding myself on the edge of yet another dry white season, perhaps worse than the one I knew as a child.

  What now?

  THREE

  1

  In the dark it was a different city. The sun was down when they reached Uncle Charlie’s Roadhouse; by the time they left the main road near the bulky chimneys of the power station, the red glow was already darkening through smoke and dust, smudged like paint. A premonition of winter in the air. The network of narrow eroded paths and roads across the bare veld; then the railway-crossing and a sharp right turn into the streets running between the countless rows of low, squat houses. At last it was there, all around them, as overwhelming as the previous time, but in a different way. The dark seemed to soften the violence of the confrontation, hiding the details that had assaulted and insulted the eyes, denying the squalor. Everything was still there, stunning in its mere presence, alien, even threatening; and yet the night was reassuring too. There were no eyes conspicuously staring. And the light coming from the small square windows of the innumerable houses – the deadly pallor of gas, the warmer yellow of candles or paraffin lamps – had all the nostalgic intimacy of a train passing in the night. The place was still abundantly alive, but with a life reduced to sound: not the sort of sound one heard with one’s ears, but something subterranean and dark, appealing directly to bones and blood. The hundreds of thousands of separate lives one had been conscious of the first time – the children playing soccer, the barbers, the women on street corners, the young ones with clenched fists – had now blurred into a single omnipresent organism, murmuring and moving, devouring one like an enormous gullet that forced one further down, with peristaltic motions, to be digested and absorbed or excreted in the dark.

  “What you looking at?” asked Stanley.

  “I’m trying to memorise the way.”

  “Forget it, you’re a foreigner.” But he didn’t say it unkindly, more in sympathy. “Anyway, I’m here to show you the way, aren’t I?”

  “I know. But suppose I have to come on my own one day?”

  Stanley laughed, swerving to avoid a scavenging dog. “Don’t try it,” he said.

  “I can’t be a millstone round your neck, Stanley.”

  “The hell with it. We’re in it together, man.”

  It moved him, more than anything Stanley had said before. So Melanie had been right, after all: in some indefinable way he had been ‘accepted'.

  He’d telephoned Stanley the previous evening, after his day of disconnected reflections, walking three blocks from his home to a public booth to make sure Susan wouldn’t know. They arranged to meet between four and half-past, but Stanley had been late. In fact it had been nearly half-past five before the big white Dodge had pulled up at the garage where they’d met before. No word of apology; actually, he’d seemed surprised at Ben’s annoyance.

  He wasn’t wearing his dark glasses today: they protruded from the top pocket of his brown jacket. Striped shirt, wild floral tie, chunky cuff-links.

  They drove off, wheels spinning, engine roaring, watched by a startled and grinning garden
er in blue overalls on a lawn in a garden opposite the garage.

  “I thought I should discuss things with Emily,” Ben explained once they were safely on their way. “And with you, of course.”

  Stanley waited, whistling contentedly.

  “The Special Branch came to search my house two days ago.”

  The big man turned his head quickly. “You joking?”

  “They did.”

  He wasn’t sure about the reaction he’d expected: but it certainly wasn’t the reverberating guffaw from the depths of Stanley’s stomach, causing him to double up and nearly drive up a kerb.

  “What’s so funny about it?”

  “They actually raided your place?” Stanley started laughing again. He slammed one hand on Ben’s shoulder: “Well, shake, man.” It took some time for the laughter to subside. Wiping tears from his eyes, Stanley asked: “Why did they do it, you think?”

  “I wish I knew. I think they were tipped off by Dr Herzog. The one who was in court. I went to see him, to find out what he really knew about Gordon.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “We won’t get anything out of him. But I’m convinced he knows more than he’s prepared to say. He’s either scared of the police or working with them.”

  “What else did you expect?” Stanley chuckled again: “So he put the cops on you? Did they grab anything?”

  “Some old journals. A bit of correspondence. Nothing much. There wasn’t anything anyway. They probably just wanted to scare me.”

  “Don’t be too sure.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “For all you know they may really think you’re into something serious.”

  “They can’t be as stupid as that.”

  “Lanie” – a smug grin – “don’t ever underestimate the sheer stupidity of the SB. Sure, they can be as quick as hell and they got a finger in every pie: but, man, you just let them believe they’re on to some sort of a conspiracy in the dark and I tell you nothing will get them off it again. Worse than leeches. For sheer stubbornness nothing can beat the gattes. I known them for years, man. If they decide it’s a bomb they looking for, you can shove their noses right into a turd and they’ll still swear to God it’s a bomb.”