A Dry White Season Read online

  6 October. Today: Andries Lourens. One of the most pleasant people I’ve ever had dealings with. I went to him on Melanie’s advice, because of his paper’s outspoken progressiveness and his own reputation for fairness and clearheadedness. Not always popular with the establishment, but they pay attention to him. Even knowing all this in advance I was still pleasantly surprised by the man. Obviously up to his neck in work, a weekend edition on the point of going to press, but he instantly made time for me. Spent more than an hour together in the topsy-turvy office clearly meant for work, not comfort. Cigarette stubs all over the place. Bundles of cuttings and small typed or handwritten sheets hanging from metal clamps or washing-pegs on a board behind him.

  When I told him what I was working on, handing him the summary I’d compiled last night, he showed deep and immediate interest. Lines between the eyes; much older, seen from close by like that, than one had expected. Sallow complexion. Perspiration on his forehead. Candidate for a coronary?

  But just as I was beginning to feel hopeful he suddenly shook his head, moving his hand backwards through his black hair, looking up with his keen but tired eyes:

  “Mr Du Toit… I can’t say it really comes as a shock to me. Do you know how much similar information we’ve had these last few months? Sometimes it seems as if the whole country has gone berserk.”

  “It’s in your power to help put an end to it, Mr Lourens. You reach thousands of readers.”

  “Do you know how many readers we’ve been losing lately? Our circulation figures—” He reached out towards a crammed wire-basket on the corner of his desk, but allowed his arm to drop back almost hopelessly. “Let me put it this way,” he said. “I know exactly how much injustice is happening all around us. But to make a drastic move at the wrong moment will simply have the opposite effect from the one we want. Our readers are already accusing the Afrikaans press of turning against them. We’ve got to take them with us, Mr Du Toit, not estrange them.”

  “So –you’d rather not do anything about it?”

  “Mr Du Toit.” His hand resting on my small pile of papers. “If I publish this story tomorrow I may just as well shut up shop the next day.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Can’t you see what’s happening in the country?” he asked wearily. “The beginnings of urban terrorism. Russia and Cuba on our borders. Even the U.S. ready to stab us in the back.”

  “And so we must learn to live with this disgrace in our midst, just because it’s ours?”

  “Not living with it by condoning it. But by learning to have more understanding. By awaiting a more opportune moment. And then to start putting it right from the inside, step by step.”

  “And in the meantime the Gordon Ngubenes must go on dying one after the other?”

  “Don’t get me wrong, Mr Du Toit. But you must realise” – how many times have I heard those words before?-“you must realise it’s fatal to plunge in right now. I mean, try to think about it objectively. What other party in this country is in a position to lead us peacefully into the future? I’m not suggesting for a moment that everything is as it should be inside the National Party. But it’s the only vehicle we have for achieving something. We cannot afford to put any more ammunition into the hands of our enemies.”

  And much more in the same vein. All of it, I believe, with the sincerest of intentions. More and more I realise that my real problem is benevolence, Christianity, understanding, decency. Not open hostility: one can work out a strategy to counter that. But this thick, heavy porridge of good intentions on the part of people obstructing you ‘for your own good', trying to ‘protect you against yourself'.

  “Please, Mr Du Toit,” he said in the end. “Do me one favour: don’t take that file to the English press. That will be a sure way to thwart your own cause and destroy yourself. It’s a kiss of death. I promise you, it’s for your own good. And I give you my word: as soon as the climate improves I shall personally come back to you.”

  He didn’t go to Melanie’s paper. She herself was against it – in case anyone had seen Ben with her in the past. It would be too easy to put two and two together; and she desperately wanted to protect him.

  The Sunday paper was not only willing but eager to publish the story. Front page. And most obliging, promising not to give any hint of their source. It would be signed by one of their senior reporters, as the result of “the paper’s own private investigation".

  The report certainly caused a stir that Sunday. But not all the repercussions were predictable. Within days the Department of Justice instituted a claim for libel against the newspaper. An interdict was requested by the Commissioner of Police for the source of the information to be divulged; the reporter, Richard Harrison, received a summons, and when he refused to name his informant in court he was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment.

  Ben, too, did not escape the immediate consequences. It was obvious that no one close to him had much doubt about his hand in the story. Already on the Monday morning a cutting of the report was stuck to his blackboard. Suzette telephoned. Two of his co-elders in church visited him to drop a hint that the time had come for him to resign from the church council. And the Rev Bester did not offer much more than token resistance when, later in the week, he did just that.

  By the Wednesday his principal went so far as to summon him to his office: for once, it seemed, the matter was too serious to be dealt with in the common room. On his desk lay the front page of the previous Sunday’s paper. And without any preliminaries Cloete asked:

  “I assume you are familiar with this?”

  “Yes, I read it.”

  “I didn’t ask whether you’d read it, Mr Du Toit. I want to know whether you had anything to do with it.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  Mr Cloete was in no mood for evasiveness. “According to my information it was you who spilled the story in the English press.”

  “May I ask where you got your information?”

  “How much did they pay you, I wonder?” Cloete panted in his asthmatic way. “Thirty silver pieces, Mr Du Toit?”

  “That’s a disgusting thing to say!”

  “To think that an Afrikaner should sell his soul like this!” Cloete went on, unable to restrain himself. “For a bit of money and some cheap publicity.”

  “Mr Cloete, I don’t know what publicity you’re talking about. My name isn’t mentioned anywhere in the report. And as far as money is concerned, you’re being libellous.”

  “You accuse me of being libellous?” For a moment Ben feared the principal would have an apoplexy. For several minutes Cloete sat wiping his perspiring face with a large white handkerchief. At last, in a smothered voice, he said: “I want you to regard this as a final warning, Mr Du Toit. The school cannot afford to keep political agitators on its staff.”

  The same afternoon he found the parcel in his mailbox. Intrigued, he looked at it from all sides, for he hadn’t ordered anything and there was no birthday in the family in the near future. The postmark was too indistinct for him to decipher. The stamp was from Lesotho. Fortunately, just as he started opening it, he noticed a small length of wire protruding from the paper. And immediately he knew. He took the parcel to the police station. The next day they confirmed that it had been a bomb. No one was ever arrested in connection with it.

  26 October. Stanley, late this afternoon, for the first time in weeks. Don’t know how he manages to come and go unseen. Probably approaches through the yard of the back neighbours, scaling the fence. Not, I suppose, that it really matters.

  Stanley’s news: the old cleaner who’d told him about Gordon’s clothes had disappeared. Just disappeared. A week ago already, and still no sign of him.

  I was forced to draw up a balance sheet in my mind. On the one side, all the bits and pieces we’d assembled so far. Not an unimpressive list by any means – at first glance. But then the debit side. Isn’t the price becoming too high? I’m not thinking of what I have to go through,
worried and harassed and hounded day by day. But the others. Especially the others. Because, at least partly, it is through my involvement that they have to suffer.

  The cleaner: “disappeared".

  Dr Hassiem: banished to Pietersburg.

  Julius Nqakula: in jail.

  The nurse: detained.

  Richard Harrison: sentenced to jail – even though he’s going to appeal.

  And who else? Who is next? Are all our names written on some secret list, ready to be ticked off as our time comes?

  I wanted to “clean up” Gordon’s name, as Emily had put it. But all I’ve done so far is to plunge other people into the abyss. Including Gordon? It’s like a nightmare, when I wake up at night, wondering in a sweat: Suppose I’d never tried to intercede for him after they’d detained him – would he have survived then? Am I the leper spreading disease to whoever comes close enough?

  And if I examine closely what we’ve gathered so laboriously over so many months: what does all our evidence really amount to? Much circumstantial evidence, oh certainly. Corroborating what we’d presumed or suspected in the beginning. But is there really anything quite indisputable? Let’s assume for a moment it all points towards a crime that was committed. Even more specifically: a crime committed by Captain Stolz. Even then there is nothing, nothing final, nothing incontrovertible,nothing “beyond all reasonable doubt". There is only one person in the whole world who can tell the truth about Gordon’s death, and that is Stolz himself. And he is untouchable, protected by the entire bulwark of his formidable system.

  There was a time when I thought: All right, Stolz, now it’s you and me. Now I know my enemy. Now we can fight hand to hand, man to man.

  How naive, how foolish of me.

  Today I realise that this is the worst of all: that I can no longer single out my enemy and give him a name. I can’t challenge him to a duel. What is set up against me is not a man, not even a group of people, but a thing, a something, a vague amorphous something, an invisible ubiquitous power that inspects my mail and taps my telephone and indoctrinates my colleagues and incites the pupils against me and cuts up the tyres of my car and paints signs on my door and fires shots into my home and send me bombs in the mail, a power that follows me wherever I go, day and night, day and night, frustrating me, intimidating me, playing with me according to rules devised and whimsically changed by itself.

  So there is nothing I can really do, no effective countermove to execute, since I do not even know where my dark, invisible enemy is lurking or from where he will pounce next time. And at any moment, if it pleases him, he can destroy me. It all depends solely on his fancy. He may decide that he wanted only to scare me and that he is now tired of playing with me and that in future he’ll leave me alone; or he may decide that this is only the beginning, and that he is going to push me until he can have his way with me. And where and when is that?

  “I can’t go on,” I said to Stanley. “There’s nothing I can do any more. I’m tired. I’m numb. All I want is some peace to regain my perspective and to find time for my family and my self again.”

  “Jeez, man, if you opt out now, it’s exactly what they wanted all along, don’t you see? Then you playing squarely into their hands.”

  “How do I know what they want? I know nothing any more. I don’t want to know.”

  “Shit, I thought you had more guts than this.” The shattering contempt in his deep voice. “Lanie, what you suffering now is what chaps like me suffer all our fucking lives, from the day we give our first shout to the day they dig us into the ground. Now you come and tell me you can’t go on? Come again.”

  “What can I do then? Tell me.”

  “How d’you mean what can you do? Just keep on, don’t quit. That’s enough. If you survive – you want to bet on it? – there’s a hell of a lot of others who going to survive with you. But if you sink now, it’s a plain mess. You got to, man. You got to prove it.”

  “Prove what to whom?”

  “Does it matter? To them. To yourself. To me. To every goddamn bloke who’s going to die of natural causes in their hands unless you carry on.” He was holding my two shoulders in his great hands, more furious than I’d ever seen him before, shaking me until my teeth were chattering. “You hear me? Lanie? You hear me? You got to, you bloody fucking bastard. You trying to tell me I been wasting all my time on you? I got a lot of money on you, lanie. And we sticking together, you and I. Okay? We gonna survive, man. I tell you.”

  8

  31 October. A weekend decisive in its own mysterious manner-even though it had nothing to do with Gordon or with whatever I have been involved in these months. Was that the reason? All I know is that I jumped at it when Melanie so unexpectedly suggested it in the midst of last week’s deep depression.

  In the past I often went off for a weekend like this; even a full week if it was holiday-time. On my own, or with a group ofschoolboys, or some good friends, occasionally with Johan. Susan never went with us. Doesn’t like the veld. Even openly contemptuous about such “backveld” urges.

  In the last few years I’ve never done so any more. Don’t know why. So perhaps understandably Susan was annoyed when I broached it. (“I’ve arranged to go to the Magaliesberg this weekend,” I said, as casually as possible. “With a friend, Professor Phil Bruwer. Hope you don’t mind.”)

  “I thought you’d outgrown this childish urge of yours at last.”

  “It’ll do me a world of good to get away for a while.”

  “Don’t you think I’d like to get away too?”

  “But you never cared for climbing or hiking or camping.”

  “I’m not talking about that either. We can go somewhere together.”

  “Why don’t you spend the weekend with Suzette?”

  She looked at me in silence. It shocked me to see how old her eyes had grown. And there was something slovenly about her appearance after all these years of fastidious grooming.

  We didn’t discuss it again. And two days ago, Saturday morning, when Susan was in town, they came round to pick me up. Prof Bruwer and Melanie and I squeezed into the front of the old Land Rover that had seen better days – a replica of its owner; and equally indestructible, it seemed. Melanie let the top down. Sun and wind. The cobweb pattern of a crack in the windscreen. Stuffing protruding from the seats.

  A white warm day, once we’d left the city behind. Not much rain so far this year and the grass hadn’t sprouted yet since winter. Brittle as straw. Scorched red earth. Here and there, in irrigation areas, patches of varying green. Then bare veld again. At last the rocky ridges of the foothills. A landscape older than men, burnt bare by the sun, blown empty by the wind, all secrets exposed to the sky. The more fertile narrow valleys among rows of hills made an almost anachronistic impression with their trees and fields and red-roofed houses. Man hasn’t really taken root here yet; it is still unclaimed territory. His existence is temporary and, if the earth should decide to shrug him off, which would happen quite effortlessly, he would leave no sign behind. The only permanence is that of rocks, the petrified bones of a vast skeleton. Ancient Africa.

  From time to time we passed someone or something. A broken windmill. A dam of rusty corrugated iron. The wreck of an old car. A cowherd in a tattered hat, a fluttering red rag tied to a stick in his hand, following his small herd of cattle. A man on a bicycle.

  Reminiscences of my childhood. Driving with Pa, in the spider or the little green Ford, Helena and I played the immemorial game of claiming for ourselves whatever was seen first. “My house.” “My sheep.” “My dam.” And, whenever we passed a black man or woman or child: “My servant.” How natural it had all seemed then. How imperceptibly had our patterns fossilised around us, inside us. Was that where it had all started, in such innocence? – You are black, and so you are my servant. I am white, which makes me your master. Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.

  The old Land Rover shook and shuddered on its way, especial
ly after Bruwer had turned off the tarred road to follow a maze of small dusty tracks deeper into the hills. Conversation was impossible in that din. Not that it was necessary, or even desirable. Almost fatalistically one resigned oneself to that process of stripping away whatever was redundant in order to be exposed to the essential. Even thoughts were luxuries to be shaken and blown out of one’s mind. And what returned to me from my childhood was not thoughts but immediate and elemental images, things, realities.

  Deep in the tumbled rocky mountains we stopped on a farm owned by friends of Bruwer’s. A deep and fertile valley, a poplar grove, a paved furrow in which water came rushing down from a dam on the slope behind the house of solid stone. A stoep fenced in with wire-mesh. A large cage filled with canaries and parakeets. Flower-beds. Chickens scratching and squealing and squawking in the yard. A single calf in a pen, lowing wretchedly at regular intervals. Two charming old people, Mr and Mrs Greyling. The old man’s hands covered with grease and soil; broken nails; a white segment on his forehead above the tanned leather of his face, where the hat had kept the sun away. The old woman large and shapeless, like a mattress stuffed with down; a broad-brimmed straw hat on her wispy hair, a large mole with a tuft of coarse black hair on her chin; badly fittingdentures pushed forward by her tongue whenever she wasn’t talking. As soon as we had stopped she came waddling towards us from the labourers’ houses several hundred yards away. One of the children had a fever, she said, and she’d been spending all night nursing it.