A Fork in the Road Read online

  When I tried to ask about getting Breyten’s permission to handle his appeal against the censors, I was told that this was out of the question. One of the men added, quite civilly, that I was there to answer questions, not to ask them. And then a new round began. I must have been a great disappointment to them, I think. In the end, which came quite unexpectedly, I was merely informed that they would ‘be in touch, if necessary’. And while that final phrase was still lingering in the suffocating whorl of smoke I was taken down the long corridor once again, back to the front door. The heavy gate clanged shut behind me again. And soon I was back with my friends.

  The appeal to the censors, as it turned out, was not allowed – the criminal trial first had to run its course. So that was that.

  There was an unexpected conclusion to my involvement, or noninvolvement, in Breyten’s trial. In Grahamstown I once again called on the lawyer who had acted for me in issuing a summons against the pathetic Professor Humphrey du Randt. With more chutzpah than most, Neville promptly telephoned the head of the security police in Pretoria, General Johan Coetzee, while I sat in his chaotic office on the very edge of my chair, chewing my nails.

  ‘General,’ said Neville, ‘R300 belonging to my client was confiscated by your security men and produced in the Supreme Court in Pretoria in evidence against Breyten Breytenbach. The trial ended a week ago and Breytenbach was found not guilty. You have ten days from today to deliver that money to my office, otherwise proceedings will be instituted against you. On or before the same deadline I also want here in my office all other material removed from my client’s home, including two typewriters, books and documents.’ Then he slammed the phone down.

  I was horrified. I expected the worst.

  Exactly nine days later Neville telephoned to say that I could go to the SB offices, hidden behind an innocent-looking brown door above OK Bazaars, to collect my possessions. He was prepared to go with me.

  At the iron grille behind the door Neville was refused entry and I had to go in alone. Perhaps they were going to have the last word after all. But although I was received with a chilling show of rudeness, unlike the civility shown me in Pretoria, all my possessions, including the typewriters, and – to my amazement – the R300 in cash, were shoved to me over a stained brown desk and I was told to sign a handwritten receipt and get out.

  Throughout that decade, the security police was woven into the fabric of the life of every day, every night. Many nights my daughter, Sonja, then about four, would wake up from nightmares in the dark, and I would go to sleep with her; and I held her in my arms wondering for how long that would still be possible. When would the dreaded knock in the night wake us up and I would find, once again, the front passage teeming with heavy men, and this time I’d be taken away …? I remember the knock, one night at exactly three, the most dreaded hour, when looking from Sonja’s window I saw a light flashing on the roof of a van parked at the front door. This is it, I thought, aware of a strange, unearthly calm settling inside me as I put on my old red gown and opened the front door. And, exactly as I had always visualised it, a number of large men burst into the passage, shoving me out of the way as they shouted, ‘Where’s the corpse? Where’s the corpse?’ It took a while before it dawned on me that they were paramedics from an ambulance dispatched to pick up a dead body from the wrong address.

  The security police inserted themselves into everything: strange sounds and voices over the telephone, anonymous death threats and obscene rantings in the small hours, letters arriving with envelopes torn or cut open or completely missing, since the point was not to intercept mail surreptitiously but always to make it very visible. My car, even though locked up in the garage, would be broken into and sabotaged in various clumsy ways. One night Alta and I were awakened by a strange whistling sound, in time to see an incendiary bomb describing a bright arc in the night sky and landing on the pitched roof, from where it harmlessly clattered down the steep side into the back garden.

  And wherever we went, we would be followed. It actually gave one a curious sense of security to be under constant surveillance like that. Into town, to lectures at the university, to Cape Town or Johannesburg, once to Durban where we spent a holiday with our good friends Braam and Hannie. Even when we took the children out for a day at the beach or at the aquarium, there would be someone tailing us. One morning the family set out again, this time for the Kruger National Park for the rest of our holiday. Our bloodhound had with him only the clothes he was wearing for a day on the beach: shorts, sandals, and a very bright and colourful shirt blazing with tropical trees and parrots. By the third day in the park he was near the end of his tether. At one of the wonderful picnic spots between camps we stopped to make a braai. Our man-of-paradise approached me like a crestfallen parrot that had barely survived a tropical storm.

  ‘Excuse me, Mr Brink,’ he said, studying his dusty toes in the brown sandals. ‘Look man, I know you know why I’m here, but I want you to understand, I’m just following orders. It was all a misunderstanding. But now I’m here and I’ve got no choice, I got to stay here. So if you will please just bear with me.’

  ‘Be my guest,’ I said. We offered him a piece of boerewors and a sandwich, which he had the decency to partake of at some distance from our family group. For the next few days we would regularly acknowledge each other’s presence with discreet little waves.

  In the meantime, my friend Braam had been summoned by the Durban SB for an ‘interview’ on my visit. It turned out that the SB had an amazing – and amusing – report on my stay in Durban, in which they had confused me with the Stellenbosch academic André du Toit. But the most hilarious aspect about Braam’s visit turned out to be his addiction to smoking: every few minutes he felt compelled to clean his pipe and light it again. And every time he knocked the bowl against the large ashtray in the centre of the table the officer would flinch and grow pale. This went on until the poor man could not take it any longer: leaning over in Braam’s direction he shouted in a voice trembling with emotion: ‘For God’s sake, man, stop doing that! You’re ruining my microphone.’

  The scenes were not always so amusing, the men not always so inept. What never failed to amaze me was the extent to which bumbling clumsiness could go hand in hand with shrewdness and sophistication. If one could never really risk underestimating the intelligence in the ranks of the SB, it would also be easy to overestimate them. Only one thing was certain: their dogged persistence. Once they believed they were on to something, however misguided that might have been at the outset, they would never let go. And what always brought one down to earth was the basic, and terrifying, knowledge: that these men, even – and often especially – the most bumbling among them, were capable of killing for the cause they believed in and for the leaders they obeyed like loyal dogs. They might be very ordinary people, with wives and children, set patterns of going to church on Sundays, living in harmony with their neighbours, playing with their pets, enjoying a good joke at a braai fire. But there was one thing that set them apart from thousands of other ‘ordinary’ people: they were killers. They could stand around a fire with a glass of beer in one hand and an overdone lamb chop in the other, while a few metres away a black man was choking to death in his own blood.

  What I found particularly agonising was when other people were dragged into it unwittingly, innocently, and always unpredictably. There was a young schoolteacher in the town of George, in her twenties, a most talented and intelligent person, who started corresponding with me about her poetry. This is the bane of most writers’ lives: not merely the demands on one’s time and energy and patience, but the sense of entitlement that often goes with it. Once a middle-aged woman in Somerset East sent me a manuscript of well over 300 pages of poetry, with a blunt request for detailed comments on each individual poem. In due course I believe I’ve become less of a sucker, but in those days, remembering my own early struggles, I tried my best to bolster youthful – and not so youthful – aspirations; so I diligently
worked through those 300-odd poems, several of them running to five or six pages, and returned them with my extensive comments. And until this day, forty years later, not even a brief thank-you note has reached me. But the young teacher in George was different. Her writing was good, original, feisty, inventive. And her letters were a treat: her acute and humorous comments on her fellow teachers, her pupils, her lodgings, her dreary daily programme. Above all the unquenchable spirit that shone through it all, her dreams of the future, her ambitions to get published. And then it stopped. Abruptly. I continued to write, to express my concern, to try and probe her silence. But nothing. For several months. Until one day a letter was shoved through the slot in my front door: unstamped, unmarked, delivered by hand. By the time I’d retrieved it from the floor, I heard a car drive off in the street, but I was too late to identify it.

  The letter from my young correspondent in George was handwritten, with signs of haste and agitation. Just to tell me that, somehow, somebody had got wind of our correspondence. She had no idea of how or why or when – but to me there was no mystery at all. The first she found out about it was when she was called in by her school principal, who confronted her with one of her own letters to me. Containing some poems, remarks on personal and literary matters – and a number of rude, if witty, comments on her school and her colleagues. This correspondence had to stop immediately, she was told. The man was a communist and a danger to the state. And should it ever transpire that she had in any way tried to resume the correspondence, she would be fired from her job. I wish I could say that at some future date she wrote to say that she had not stopped writing, that she still had hopes for the future. But there was nothing. And I was left wondering how many of these young talents had been nipped in the bud, how much creative potential the country had lost, obscured by the more obvious and spectacular atrocities everybody knew about.

  In at least one other episode the SB used a woman to get at me. It concerns the lovely Lise who had made such an unexpected entry into my life when the arrival of my theatrical friend Francois during the production of my play in Grahamstown forced me to share a room with her. After that introduction we went our separate ways until, several years later, I had to go to Pretoria where we found ourselves eager to see each other again. We met in a hotel on the outskirts of the city, had a pleasant meal, got carried away by a torrent of conversation, and only realised what time it was when it was already too late.

  About a week later there came a phone call from Pretoria. It was Lise, in a state of consternation. She had just had a visit from a lieutenant in the security police who had shown her a photo which he’d peeled from a stack in a big envelope – but he’d declined to show her any of the others. There were two persons on the photo. She and I. In what is usually described as a ‘compromising position’. The officer had been very friendly, even apologetic, and he’d assured her that he had no wish to cause her any ‘discomfort’. All he wanted was an affidavit to the effect that we had in fact been involved in ‘sexual congress’.

  But suppose she wouldn’t?

  He felt very sure that she wouldn’t want photographs like that falling into the hands of somebody working for a newspaper. As a journalist she was convinced, as was I, that no newspaper could risk publishing photographs as explicit as that. The others in his buff envelope, he assured her, were even more ‘revealing’.

  Initially I tried to persuade her to call his bluff. But after another visit from the friendly officer, we began to realise that straightforward publication was not necessarily the only way open to them. Damage could be done on so many levels, and he was beginning to wear down Lise’s defences.

  In the end I agreed that the best – the only – way to get rid of the man, would be for her to sign the bloody affidavit, even though I couldn’t see any point of insisting on an affidavit if they already had the photos. But the event had cast a pall over both of our lives. Even if other similar opportunities would present themselves in future, we would not be interested in succumbing. There was a claustrophobic feeling of our living space shrinking almost tangibly around us.

  And then so many other, smaller, less dramatic, but still slowly suffocating events happened. To arrive in Port Elizabeth for a plane to Cape Town, only to be told: But you already left for Cape Town an hour ago.

  I could not have left an hour ago. I am here now. Here is my booking slip from the travel agent. For the next plane.

  I am sorry sir, but there are no more seats available on the next plane.

  Or to arrive in Australia for literary festivals in Melbourne and Sydney, at a time when there was only one flight a week either way between South Africa and Australia, and to be told that one’s return booking has been cancelled. Complicated, roundabout enquiries brought to light that the cancellation was effected by the SB.

  All of this conspired, to put it mildly, to complicate my life throughout the seventies and eighties. The pressure never lifted. Not even when I travelled abroad.

  The first time this happened was in 1974, when a film company took me to London and Paris as an advisor and an interpreter. It was the first time since my year-long stay in Paris in 1968 that I found myself in Europe again; and after the unrelenting pressure of the years in between, particularly after the banning of Looking on Darkness which had first publicly branded me as a ‘danger to the security of the state’, it was bliss to feel all that weight shifted from my shoulders. I could breathe free air again. So I thought. Until, on the return flight to South Africa, the plane came in to land at Johannesburg and the nondescript, middle-aged man seated next to me started up a conversation. The usual bland questions: How did it feel to be back home? Where had I been? For how long had I been away? Halfway through the chat, just after I had mentioned London and Paris, he leaned back in his seat. Without looking at me, he said with quiet satisfaction:

  ‘Yes, yes, I know.’ And then, reciting in a low monotone, he said: ‘You left Johannesburg on 28 March, on flight number SA210. In London you stayed in the West-Two Hotel in Bayswater.’ That came as a surprise as I myself hadn’t known where the group would stay upon arrival: it had all been arranged by one of their contacts abroad. My neighbour persisted: ‘Then, on 3 April, you left for Paris on flight BA186, and you stayed in the Hôtel du Vaugirard.’ Another surprise, as something had gone wrong with the bookings the group leader had made and from the boulevard Saint-Michel we had simply set out in search of a hotel, which we found around the corner in the rue de Vaugirard.

  There were more surprises in store. My indefatigable companion took a small notebook from his pocket and proceeded to read the names of all the people I had met on the journey, most of whom had been unknown to me before. At the end of the recitation he restored the notebook to his pocket. Only then did he look at me. With the hint of a smile he said, ‘Welcome back to South Africa.’

  That was when I really knew I was back. And what it meant to be back.

  The accumulating weight of all of this was becoming a burden I could not bear any longer. Unless I found a way of writing about it, the situation in the country would threaten to submerge and paralyse me. A key event that opened up this possibility was the death in detention of an Eastern Cape man, Mapetla Mohapi. From about the middle sixties deaths in detention had become a feature of the deteriorating situation, exacerbated by new laws about detention without trial, first for ninety days, later 180 days. Turning ever more stringent and arbitrary as, forty years later, the Terrible Twins, Bush and Blair, the South African government became obsessed with ‘terrorism’. In 1969, the murder by the security police of a Cape Town imam, Abdullah Haron, made headlines around the world, particularly through the indefatigable efforts of an Opposition member of parliament, Catherine Taylor. The case ended inconclusively, but more and more people became perturbed about detainees dying after slipping on bars of soap, falling down stairwells, tumbling from tenth-floor windows, or hanging themselves on shoestrings or makeshift ropes from window bars.

  Moh
api’s death became another cause célèbre after Donald Woods, editor of the Daily Dispatch in East London, took it up. Woods could be a formidable investigator, as became clear some time later when he became involved in the life and death of Steve Biko. I must confess that, though I met Woods several times before and after Biko’s horrendous death, I was initially not enamoured of him. I applauded the causes he fought for, but not his ego. My impression, perhaps wrongly, was that he tended not to see the wood for the Woods. Much later, after his controversial escape from South Africa, he made a much more sympathetic impression when we spent some time together in London. Another person who played a crucial role in supplying me with many hundreds of pages of the court documents I needed for my book was the Durban attorney Griffiths Mxenge, who was most gruesomely murdered by the SB a few years later. It was only very recently that I learned, from the horse’s mouth, that the man physically responsible for duplicating and passing on to me the documents was his articled clerk, Bulelani Ngcuka, who in due course became the director of prosecutions and is married to the deputy president of South Africa, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka.

  In the end, there really was no incident ‘invented’ in A Dry White Season. The book became the repository of my life, the lives of numerous of my friends during the seventies, and information gleaned from a number of crucial trials, inquests and investigations from that period.

  It was never plain sailing: this was due, in part, to the harrowing nature of the raw material I worked with. The writing of only one other book in my life turned out to be more distressing to me, and that was The Other Side of Silence. But it was due, also, to an event that happened on 18 August, 1977, very soon after I’d started writing and which so disrupted the process that I came very close to abandoning the novel. This was the event that led, a few weeks later, to the death of Stephen Bantu Biko.