Rumours of Rain Page 4

  And then there was the curious impression – perhaps this is what I’ve really been trying to say all along – that he’d never outgrown his boyhood. I don’t mean that he was childish in any sense. Only that he carried with him the suggestion of the directness, the simplicity, the “barefootedness” of a boy. Even in middle-age he remained something of the enfant terrible. I’m sure he really meant it when he said, as he often did: “All I ask of life is that I won’t ever grow too old to kick a sacred cow in the balls.” Then he would add with his radiant impish smile: “Because if one doesn’t do it sacred cows have a tendency to shit on your head.”

  It was meant as a very special gesture when, nineteen years ago, I invited Bernard to be Louis’s godfather. Since my first year as an LL.B. student, when he’d been my lecturer in Roman Dutch Law, Bernard had been my “hero”. It was he who encouraged me to write once he discovered that I had some talent in that direction. And it was to him, rather than to lecturers of literature like John Pienaar that I took my first romantic efforts for comment. He could be as devastating as he was sympathetic. Once he even flushed a short story of mine down the toilet and when upon learning of it I stared at him in horror he merely shrugged: “It was a load of crap, don’t you agree?” he asked. His attitude was that one either did something well or not at all. I was still learning my trade; but provided I was serious enough about it I would get my novel written sooner or later.

  I never have. The nearest I came to it, apart from a pile of short stories, was in the stacks of notebooks I filled after returning from our canoe trip. In that adventure I recognised something tremendous I tried to define. But something eluded me. After typing thirty-odd pages I tore it all up and started again. This time I reached fifty pages before I got tired of it all and gave up. Instead, I became a businessman. (And now, suddenly.)

  I’m still not sure that I can interpret that canoe venture. It happened so long ago and one grows so far away from one’s previous selves. If it hadn’t been for these nine days and the opportunity, or the urge, to sort things out and organise them and exorcise them once and for all, I would never have returned to the episode. But ever since the weekend on the farm things have become more complicated, less obvious, more elusive. I’ve already said that, haven’t I? (It’s very late; even the caressing hands of the Thai girl have faded into memory.)

  Even in my years at university we’d been talking about such a trip, but it never materialised. Then he left to join the Cape Bar while I went overseas after completing my LL.B. Neither of us proved a good correspondent. During the first year I continued to send him more or less “literary” letters (keeping carbon copies for “one day”); later it was reduced to cards or telegrams at Christmas or birthdays.

  But a few months after my return from England he arrived at our flat in Johannesburg without any warning. Through the years these sudden appearances became characteristic of him, usually when he had accepted briefs for the Transvaal Supreme Court. The remarkable thing was that every time he arrived we found we could carry on effortlessly from where we’d left off the previous time. The only lasting friendship of my life.

  Elise and I had just settled down when he arrived that first time and it wasn’t easy to persuade her. She was pregnant with our first child, the one she lost a year before Louis was born, and she felt a need to have me with her. What Bernard proposed was rather outrageous in the circumstances. I’ll try to reconstruct the conversation:

  “That canoe thing we always used to talk about – are you still interested?”

  “Of course,” I said, more from habit than true conviction. “We really must do it one day.”

  “Not ‘one day’. I’ve come to fetch you. You’re taking a fortnight’s holiday and we’re off to Aliwal tomorrow.”

  “You must be off your rocker.”

  “Right, so I’m off my rocker. What about you? Or have you become too respectable?”

  “No, I haven’t. But one can’t go off just like that.”

  “Why not? It’s the only way to get something done. You make up your mind and you do it. Once you start weighing it all up and trying to be reasonable, it’s useless.”

  “I’ll have to talk to Elise.”

  “I want to know what you think.”

  “If it depended on me.…”

  “Right, then it’s settled. We’re going.”

  “But, Bernard.…”

  “Wait.” He shook his blonde hair from his forehead, his eyes mocking and grave at the same time. “Listen to me, Martin. Next year I’ll be thirty. You’re turning into a thoroughly domesticated animal. Soon it’ll be too late for both of us. It’s now or never.”

  I knew he was right. We talked until the small hours; and then I had to confront Elise. She was so upset she didn’t even come out to say goodbye when we left the next afternoon. I nearly turned back. (What stopped me?)

  If I had to rationalise it now, so long after the event, I’d say that neither Bernard nor I had ever experienced anything truly extraordinary before. Admittedly, he had the faculty of turning anything into adventure, but seen objectively his life had been as predictable and unexciting as my own. Neither of us had lived through a war. To us the Second World War had been restricted to radio news and the talk of grown-ups: “Germany”, “the Russians”, “Churchill”, “a bomb”; and flags in the streets on V-day (I even got a hiding when I came home, for having been seen in public waving a Union Jack). Everything had been reduced to rumours instead of reality. And perhaps one does have a deep-seated need, even if it were for only once in one’s life, to pit one’s own nothingness, one’s whole existence, against something of true magnitude. Other men, other generations, seemed to be precipitated willy-nilly into such events. But our knowledge was second-hand; we had to actively set out in search of reality. In the notebooks I filled at the time I think I interpreted the whole affair as a quest for heroism, the need to discover for oneself something great and awe-inspiring. Today I tend to regard the opposite as much more important: not our attempts at heroism, not the ecstasy of greatness, but a shattering experience of our own insignificance.

  There was one stretch of rapids, about four days downstream from Aliwal, where within a matter of a hundred yards the river changed from a wide slow expanse into a narrow gorge between sheer red cliffs, a wild mass of water churning among black ridges, the white foam flying. We could hear the low booming of the river from far away but were too inexperienced to know what it meant. The first we saw of it was when, coming round the last bend, we found ourselves right inside the preliminary rapids. I knew immediately it was no adventure any longer but a matter of life and death. It was impossible to think coherently. All thoughts were suspended as we sped into that narrow funnel. Fear? Obviously. At the same time it was a sort of death ecstasy. There was nothing heroic about it at all. On the contrary. It seemed so bloody foolish and unnecessary to head for those white waters. There was still time to steer our canoes to the bank and carry them overland to the end of the rapids, but neither of us gave it a thought. I don’t know about Bernard, but I almost wanted an accident to happen so that people could say: “How on earth could they have been so stupid?”

  After about fifty yards there was a hairpin bend in the gorge. Bernard was right in front of me. All of a sudden I saw his canoe hurled forward as if it had been flung by a giant hand. The staggering waves rose seven, eight feet high. Then he disappeared in the muddy orange mess round the bend. And I think this will be the image of Bernard I’ll take with me to my grave, long after the scene in the courtroom has vanished: his tense, straight, bare back and wet blonde hair, and the movement of his shoulder muscles as he flailed his oar to keep his balance.

  The moment he disappeared I knew my turn had come.

  I was hurtled headlong into the rapids. I couldn’t see through the spray, and in the thundering of the waters it was impossible to hear a thing. Beyond the bend the current spewed us into a pool where everything was rotating dizzily among cliffs
so high that the sun couldn’t reach all the way down. Something shrieked – a fishing eagle, I thought afterwards – the eerie sound piercing one’s ears like a splinter.

  Bernard was still there, in front of me, his canoe spinning madly before he managed to get it under control again. A few yards ahead of him was a log, a huge willow torn, roots and all, from some distant bank. Both of us were watching it as it slowly turned and rolled inward towards the heart of the whirlpool where it went under. It didn’t come up again.

  I shouted at him; he called back. Frantically we tried to row in a futile, ridiculous effort to counter the suction of the undercurrent. In that cauldron we were less than two bobbing walnut shells. Incredibly, inexplicably, we skirted the fatal inner circle and were hurled right out of it, drifting downstream again into a new wide stretch of placid water. After a long time we steered to the bank and dragged the canoes out on the grass, kicked off our wet bathing costumes and lay down on the ground, shivering in the sun. Neither said anything. Later we made a fire to roast some sausages, and sat down to eat. Even then we found it impossible to talk about what had happened. The only way we could articulate was to sit there and chew our sausages.

  And now I’m caught here, in this blue and golden room, with a lifetime trapped in a whirlpool, faced with the narrow gorge of a single weekend in which everything was at stake. I’m still not sure how I’m going to handle it. All I know is that I have no choice.

  What I really want to know is this: Why can’t you let me be, Bernard Franken? I didn’t have anything to do with it, did I? No one can hold me responsible for what happened, damn it.

  Charlie Mofokeng: “Of course I hold you responsible. You and every other White in the country.”

  “Now you’re being unreasonable, Charlie. I inherited this situation exactly as you did. Neither of us can be blamed for what our forefathers did.”

  “That’s not what I’m blaming you for. What gets me is that history didn’t teach you anything at all.”

  “My history provided me with the means to survive in this land!”

  “That’s what you think. All your history taught you was to mistrust others. You never learned to share anything or to live with others. If things got difficult you loaded your wagon and trekked away. Otherwise you took aim over the Bible and killed whatever came your way. Out in the open you formed a laager. And when you wanted more land you took it. With or without the pretext of a ‘contract’.”

  Such fierce prejudice was characteristic of Charlie Mofokeng. I never took him altogether seriously – just as he, I believe, never took me without a pinch of salt. Between the two of us this type of argument became a form of intellectual exercise. Bright chap. Whatsome people would call, either with appreciation or with suspicion, a “clever Kaffir”. B.Comm. at Fort Hare; then another degree at Cambridge. A diminutive person, small of frame and delicate of bone-structure, chronically lean and hungry; not humpbacked or anything like that, yet with something crooked about him, something off-centre, like a small tree stunted by frost and never able to grow quite straight again. Wearing glasses much too large for him; and on his face a perennial smile like an open wound.

  Charlie and I might have become close friends had we met abroad; as, years ago, I’d known Welcome Nyaluza. That friendship had been made possible not only by the lack of social pressure but mainly by a spontaneous urge attracting us like iron filings in a magnetic field. We had in common a dislike of the English (now shared by Charlie). But it went further than that. If once again I may romanticise a bit, I’d say that in the cold northern hemisphere we managed to preserve, for and through each other, the warm reality of our southern world. So far away from home we were not only bound by the land we shared but also strangely freed from it. Inside us, like chromosomes, lay the memories of acrid shrubs in the Karoo, coarse heather in the mountains, bleeding sunsets and nights filled with stars, of orchards and vineyards and wind-blown mealie-lands, of rocks covered by the lichen of a thousand years, the steel and concrete of modern cities and the dust of villages, of blue lamps in front of police stations and the carefree tunes of pennywhistles, of guinea-fowl clicking in the early morning grass or the delicate tracks of the sandpiper, the smell of buchu and veld fires: together we missed it and recalled it, talking about it for hours on end, often at night as we sat on a kerb drinking cartons of milk from a slot-machine.

  Something of all this, I suppose, was transferred to Charlie. It is difficult to find a logical explanation for it. Perhaps his deep bass reminded me of Welcome’s voice; perhaps it happened simply because he was the only Black man I could more or less claim friendship with. Not that we ever really opened up completely to each other. For obvious reasons. We got along quite well at work. Sometimes there was occasion for discussion or heated arguments or banter. There was, of course, the visit to Soweto. And from time to time I invited him to a business lunch with foreign visitors. But we kept our distance.

  Still, we got along. I think I can claim that as an Afrikaner I know my Black man. To a large extent we have the same history, the same rural background; in the course of a few centuries we’ve had the opportunity of getting exposed to the land itself, unlike the English who arrived much later merely to administrate and control; and both of us, however urbanised we may have become, are conditioned by the same tribal consciousness. In a way we respect one another. That’s how I generally try to explain it to foreigners.

  Which of the large British-oriented mining houses in the country would have appointed a Black like Charlie in such a responsible position at the time I did it? (Admittedly, it was Bernard who’d brought him to me and twisted my arm: “I don’t care what your conservative associates may have to say about it, you’re going to create a job for Charlie Mofokeng. And I’m not talking about a messenger or something. I want to see him in a key liaison position between you White bosses on Olympus and the diggers of your holes down below. Before you get buried in your own holes.”) I did it because Bernard’s demand fitted in with my own views. I’m not in favour of Black trade unions. At this stage they’ve simply not developed far enough to handle such sophisticated forms of Western organisation. A matter of evolution. First of all they must learn to grasp the relationship between effort and reward. They need training and experience. In our economic system they’ve first got to become consumers in order to increase production. That, as I see it, is the only logical starting point for the proper exploitation of human resources in the country. And that is why I immediately realised the possibilities of a post for Charlie. A link in the chain; a step in the right direction.

  It soon proved successful, too. Through eighteen months of increasing industrial tension in the land my own complex of companies continued to develop surely and peacefully. That is, until May this year.

  The events are so well known from the papers that there is no need for me to review them extensively: in any case, what I am concerned with here is a more private and personal enquiry, in which public events are important only inasmuch as they influenced or determined a subjective reaction. (I’m beginning to sound more and more like a writer.)

  There was the wage unrest, settled very soon in most of my concerns but persisting at the Westonaria mine. I’d had this sort of trouble before, usually in the form of a conflict between migrant labourers and local shebeen keepers. Theoretically, these labourers come to the mines to earn money which they can take back home. Their concern is to buy wives or something; mine is the development of the economy by directing capital towards the homelands. But what happens as a matter of fact? The labourers spend all their money on liquor and whores, compromising the basic economics of the situation. For that reason I stipulated that in future half the earnings of the migrants would be sent directly to the recruiting offices in the homelands where they could collect it after their return. An administrative fee of a few cents in the rand had to be imposed, which meant that in the end the labourers received fractionally less cash than before, but in view of the fact that
in the past the money had been wasted anyway I couldn’t understand why such a trifle should have upset them so out of all proportion.

  Agitators, most likely. It happens all the time. Otherwise the mine manager at Westonaria had bungled the affair. I know from painful experience how much patience and circumlocution is required to negotiate with Blacks; it is quite likely that the Westonaria manager acted too hastily. And when the signs became ominous in early June I decided to take matters in hand myself. I drove to Westonaria, taking Charlie with me.

  It was deadly quiet when we got out of the car. One of those colourless, naked Transvaal winter days when the world is so silent that in a breath of wind you can hear each brittle blade of grass stirring separately. We were welcomed by the mine manager and his White staff, their faces drawn and tired as if they hadn’t slept for a long time. Beyond the corrugated iron offices the mine’s two or three hundred labourers stood waiting in a sullen mass. There was a low murmur as we appeared with a megaphone on the dusty patch between them and the buildings; like a swarm of bees in an antheap.

  In long-winded repetitions studded with every image I could think of I explained the whole matter of the new wage system to them and asked Charlie to translate. It took over an hour to convey to them that even with the loss of a few cents from their total wages they would still be left with more cash to spend at home. Only when I was quite sure that they accepted the situation did I adopt a sterner tone, knowing that Blacks despise hesitation and mildness. The language they respond to is that of strictness and authority, a hard but just hand. They derive it from their tribal tradition which is not all that different from our own Old Testament background.