A Dry White Season Read online

  As on all previous occasions the tall man with the Gable looks dominated, with spectacular self-confidence, the enormous desk covered with files, telephones, documents, empty coffee cups and ornamental ash-trays. His teeth flashed against the deep tan of his face.

  “Now this has gone too far,” he exclaimed. In an impressive and elaborate show of efficiency he telephoned police headquarters immediately and demanded to speak to the officer-in-charge. The officer promised to make enquiries.

  “You better start pulling out your fingers,” said Dan Levinson aggressively, winking at his attentive audience. “I give you exactly one hour. I’m not taking any more nonsense, right?” He turned his wrist to look at his large golden chronometer. “If I haven’t heard from you by half-past three I’ll be phoning Pretoria and every newspaper in the country.” He slammed down the instrument, flashing another grin at them. “You should have gone to the newspapers ages ago.”

  “We want Jonathan Ngubene, Mr Levinson,” said Ben, annoyed. “Not publicity.”

  “You won’t get far without publicity, Mr Coetzee. You ask me, I know all about it.”

  Much to Ben’s surprise the Special Branch did ring back at five past three. Levinson didn’t say much; he was listening, obviously flabbergasted by whatever the officer on the other side was telling him. After the conversation he remained sitting with the receiver in his hand, staring at it as if he were expecting it to do something.

  “Well I never!”

  “What did they say?”

  Levinson looked up, rubbing his cheek with one hand. “Jonathan has never been in detention at all. According to them he was shot dead on the day of those riots and as nobody came to claim the corpse he was buried over a month ago.”

  “But why did they tell us last week – ?”

  Levinson shrugged, scowling as if to blame them for the latest turn in the affair.

  “What about the nurse?” said Gordon. “And the cleaner at the Square? They both spoke about Jonathan.”

  “Listen.” Levinson pressed the tips of his strong fingers together. “I’ll write them an official letter demanding a copy of the medical report. That’ll do the trick.”

  But in the simple reply from the police, a week later, the matter was closed with the brief statement that, unfortunately, the medical report was “not available".

  It is easy to imagine the scene. Ben’s backyard at dusk. Johan and his friends splashing and cavorting in the neighbours’ pool. Susan preparing supper in the kitchen: they had to eat early, she was going to a meeting. Ben at the back door. Gordon standing with his old hat pressed flat against his lean chest with both hands. The grey second-hand suit Ben had given him last Christmas; the white collarless shirt.

  “That’s all I say, Baas. If it was me, all right. And if it was Emily, all right. We are not young. But he’s my child, Baas. Jonathan is my child. My time and your time, it’s passing, Baas. But the time of our children is still coming. And if they start killing our children, then what was it that we lived for?”

  Ben was depressed. He had a headache. And he could think of no ready answer.

  “What can we do, Gordon? There’s nothing you or I can change.”

  “Baas, that day when they whipped Jonathan you also said we can do nothing. We cannot heal his buttocks. But if we did something that day, if someone heard what we had to say, then perhaps Jonathan would not have got the sickness and the madness and the murder in his heart. I don’t say it is so, Baas. I say perhaps. How can we know?”

  “I know it’s a terrible thing that’s happened, Gordon. But now you have other children to live for. And I’ll help you if you want to send them to school too.”

  “How did Jonathan die, Baas?”

  “That’s what we don’t know.”

  “That’s what I got to know, Baas. How can I have peace again if I do not know how he died and where they buried him?”

  “What good can it do, Gordon?”

  “It can do nothing, Baas. But a man must know about his children.” He was silent for a long time. He wasn’t crying, yet the tears were running down his thin cheeks, into the frayed collar of his grey jacket. “A man must know, for if he does not know he stays blind.”

  “Please be careful, Gordon. Don’t do anything reckless. Think of your family.”

  Quietly, stubbornly, while the boys went on yodelling behind the neighbours’ high white wall, he repeated, as if the words had got stuck inside him: “If it was me, all right. But he is my child and I must know. God is my witness today: I cannot stop before I know what happened to him and where they buried him. His body belongs to me. It is my son’s body.”

  Ben was still standing at the back door when the boys returned from the neighbours', bright towels draped over their smooth brown shoulders. Recognising Gordon, Johan gaily greeted him; but the black man didn’t seem to notice him.

  3

  In order to devote all his time to the enquiries which had become an obsession with him, Gordon resigned from his work at the school. Ben, of course, only found out about this investigation much later; too late.

  One of the first steps was to trace as many as possible of the crowd who had gathered on the day of the shooting. The problem was that so few people could remember anything specific about that chaotic day. Several, young and old, confirmed that they had seen Jonathan among the marching children; but they were much less sure about what had happened after the shooting.

  Gordon was not discouraged. The first breakthrough came when a boy who had been wounded on the fatal day was released from hospital. He’d been blinded by buckshot in the eyes; but he recalled how, just before it happened, he’d seen Jonathan bundled into a police van with several others.

  One by one they were tracked down by Gordon: some who’d seen Jonathan being arrested and taken away; others who had, in fact, been carted off to John Vorster Square with him. From that point, however, the accounts varied. Some of the arrested had been locked up for the night only; others had been transferred to Modder Bee, Pretoria and Krugersdorp; still others had been taken to court. And it wasn’t easy to find Jonathan’ stracks in that crowd. The only fact established beyond all possible doubt was that Jonathan had not been killed on the day of the riots.

  Painstakingly, laboriously, like an ant, Gordon toiled on his antheap of evidence, in hate and love. He couldn’t explain what he would do with it once he’d collected everything he needed. According to Emily, afterwards, she’d constantly prodded him about it, but he had been unable or unwilling to reply. Collecting evidence seemed to have become an end in itself.

  Then, in December, a whole bunch of detainees still awaiting trial were released by the Special Branch. Among them was a young man, Wellington Phetla, who had been detained with Jonathan for a considerable period; and even after they had been separated they’d continued to be interrogated together. According to Wellington the SB had tried to force admissions from them that they’d been ringleaders in the riots, that they’d been in touch with ANC agents, and that they’d received money from abroad.

  At first Wellington was reluctant to discuss anything with Gordon. According to Emily there was something wild in his manner. If one spoke to him he would be looking this way and that all the time as if scared of being attacked unawares. And he was famished, like an animal that had been kept in a cage for a long time. But slowly he grew more normal and less terrified, and at last he allowed Gordon to write down what he had to tell, notably the following:

  a) that from the second day of their detention, when their clothes had been taken away, they’d been naked all the time;

  b) that in this condition they had been taken to “a place outside the city” one afternoon, where they’d been forced to crawl through barbed wire fences, spurred on by black policemen wielding batons and sjamboks;

  c) that on one occasion he and Jonathan had been interrogated by relay teams for more than twenty hours without a break; and that for much of this period they’d been forced to
stand on blocks about a yard apart, with half-bricks tied to their sexual organs;

  d) that on various occasions both he and Jonathan had been forced on their knees, whereupon bicycle tubes had beenwrapped round their hands and inflated slowly, causing them to lose consciousness;

  e) that one day, while interrogated on his own in an office, he’d heard people shouting continuously at Jonathan in the room next door, accompanied by the sound of blows and by Jonathan’s screaming and sobbing; towards nightfall there had been a tremendous noise next door, like chairs or tables being knocked down. Jonathan’s crying had subsided into a low moaning sound followed by silence, and then he’d heard a voice calling out many times: “Jonathan! Jonathan! Jonathan!” the following day someone had told him that Jonathan had gone to hospital, but he’d never heard of him again.

  With much pleading and coaxing Gordon persuaded Wellington Phetla to repeat his statement under oath before a black lawyer; at the same time an affidavit was taken of the young nurse Stanley Makhaya had sent to them. But the cleaner who had discovered the blood on Jonathan’s cell floor was too scared to put anything in writing.

  At least it was a beginning. And one day, Gordon believed, he would know the full story of what had happened to Jonathan from the day of his arrest until that Wednesday morning when the news of his alleged death of natural causes had been conveyed to them. Then he would trace the grave of his son. Why? Perhaps he was planning to steal the corpse and bring it back for proper burial in Umzi wabalele, the City of the Dead, Doornkop Cemetery in Soweto, near his house.

  But it never went as far as that. The day after Gordon had obtained the two statements signed by Wellington Phetla and the nurse, he was taken away by the Special Branch. And with him, the affidavits disappeared without a trace.

  4

  The only person Emily could approach for help was Ben. Stanley Makhaya brought her in his large white Dodge. During the first four periods of the day, while Ben was teaching, she waited patiently on the stoep outside the secretary’s small office. It was barely a fortnight after the schools had reopened for the new year. When the bell rang for the tea interval the secretary, flustered and mildly disapproving, came to tell Ben of the visitor and while the other teachers gathered in the common room for tea he went outside to see her.

  “What’s the matter, Emily? What brought you here?”

  “It’s Gordon, my Baas.”

  The moment she said it, he knew. But almost perversely, he wanted to hear it from her before he would believe it.

  “What about him? Has something happened to him?”

  “The Special Branch has come for him.”

  “When?”

  “Last night. I don’t know the time. I was too scared to look at the alarm clock.” Fiddling with the black fringe of her shawl she looked up at him helplessly, a large shapeless woman with a face aged before its time; but very erect, and without tears.

  Ben stood motionless. There was nothing he could do either to encourage or restrain her.

  “We were asleep,” she continued after a while, still preoccupied with the fringe. “They knocked so loud we were stiff with fright. Before Gordon could open for them they kicked down the door. And then the whole house was filled with police.”

  “What did they say?”

  “They said: ‘Kaffir, you Gordon Ngubene?’ The children woke up from the noise and the little one began to cry. They mustn’t do that in front of the children, Baas,” she said in a smothered voice. “When they went away my son Richard was very bad. He’s my eldest now that Jonathan is dead. I tell him to be quiet, but he won’t listen to me. He’s too angry. Baas, a child who saw the police take away his father, he don’t forget it.”

  Ben was listening, numb, unable to respond.

  “They turn over the whole house, Baas,” Emily persisted. “The table, the chairs, the beds. They roll up the carpet, they tear open the mattress, they throw out the drawers of the cupboard. They look in the Bible. Everywhere, everywhere. And then they start to beat Gordon and to push him around and they ask him where he hide his things. But what can he hide, I ask you, my Baas? Then they push him outside and they say: ‘You come with us, kaffir!’”

  “Was that all they said?”

  “That was all, Baas. I went outside with them, with the two smallest children in my arms. And when we get to the car one man he say to me: ‘Ja, better say good-bye to him. You not going to see him again.’ It was a long thin man, with white hair. I remember his face too much. With a cut here, on his cheek.” She touched her own face. “So they took Gordon away. The neighbours they come to help me clean up in the house. I try to put the children to sleep again. But what will happen to him now?”

  Ben shook his head in disbelief. “It must be a mistake, Emily,” he said. “I know Gordon as well as you do. They’ll release him. I’m quite sure they will, and soon too.”

  “But it’s the papers.”

  “What papers?”

  It was the first Ben learned about Gordon’s investigation of the previous months, and of the affidavits about Jonathan’s death. Even then he refused to regard it as particularly serious: an administrative error, an unfortunate mistake, surely no more than that. It wouldn’t take them long to find out that Gordon was an honourable man. He tried to comfort Emily as best he could. She listened in silence and said nothing; but she didn’t seem to be convinced.

  The school bell rang; it was the end of the tea interval.

  Ben walked with her round the building to where Stanley Makhaya’s car was waiting. When he saw them coming Stanley got out. It was the first time Ben met him. A corpulent man, over six feet tall, with an enormous belly and the neck of a bull, and several double chins, resembling some of the traditional representations of the 19th century Zulu chief Dingane. Very black. With light palms. Ben noticed them as Stanley put out his hand, saying:

  “How’s it? Is this your Boer, Emily? This the lanie?”

  “This is Stanley Makhaya,” Emily said to Ben. “He is the man who help us all the time.”

  “Well, what do you say, man?” said Stanley, a smile on his broad jovial face, expressing some secret, perpetual enjoyment. Whenever he laughed, Ben soon discovered, it was like a volcanic eruption.

  Ben repeated what he’d already told Emily. They mustn’t worry too much, it was a terrible mistake, but no more. Gordon would be back with his family in a day or two. Of that he was absolutely convinced.

  Stanley paid no attention. “What do you say, man?” he repeated. “Gordon of all people. Never hurt a fly and look what they done to him now. He was a real family man, shame. And he always used to say—”

  “Why do you keep on talking about him in that way?” said Ben, annoyed. “I tell you he’ll be home in a few days.”

  The broad smile deepened: “Lanie, with us, when a man gets picked up by the Special Branch, you just start talking about him in the past tense, that’s all.”

  With a final wave of his big hand he drove off.

  When Ben came round the building he found the principal waiting for him.

  “Mr Du Toit, aren’t you supposed to be with the matrics this period?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry, sir. I just had to attend to some people.”

  The principal was a bulky man too, but more fleshy than Stanley Makhaya, more marshmallowy, with a thin cobweb of red and blue veins covering his nose and jowls. Thinning hair. A small muscle flickering in his cheek whenever he felt constrained to look one in the eyes.

  “Who was it?”

  “Emily Ngubene. Gordon’s wife. You remember Gordon who used to work here?” Ben came up the red steps to stand on a level with his principal. “Now he’s been arrested by the Security Police.”

  Mr Cloete’s face grew redder. “Just shows you, doesn’t it? You can’t trust one of them these days. Just as well we got rid of him in time.”

  “You know Gordon as well as I do, Mr Cloete. It must have been an error.”

  “The less we have to
do with such people the better. We don’t want to have the school’s name dragged into it, do we?”

  “But sir!” Ben stared at him in amazement. “I assure you they made a mistake.”

  “The Security Police won’t make a mistake like that. If they arrest a man you can rest assured that they have reason to.” He was breathing heavily. “I hope it won’t be necessary for me to reprimand you on this sort of behaviour again. Your class is waiting.”

  Within the four walls of his cramped study, that night. He hadn’t switched on the main light, contenting himself with the small stark circle of the reading lamp on his desk. Earlier in the evening there had been a summer storm over the city. Now the thunder had passed. A broken moon was shining through shredded clouds. From the gutters came the irregular drip-drip-dripping of water. But inside the room a hint of the pre-storm oppressiveness still lingered, huddled in the gloom, an almost physical dark presence.

  For a while Ben tried to concentrate on the marking of the Standard Nines’ scripts, his jacket flung across a chair, his blue shirt unbuttoned, the right sleeve clasped by a shirt-garter. But now the red ballpoint pen lay discarded on the top paper as he sat staring at the bookshelves on the opposite wall. The placid books whose titles he could recall even though it was too dark to see. A slight movement in the gauze curtain covering the open steelframed window: caressing almost imperceptibly the conventional pattern of the burglar-proofing.

  In this silence, in this defined small circle of white light, everything that had happened appeared unreal, if not wholly impossible. Stanley’s broad face shining with perspiration, the subterranean rumbling of his voice and his laughter, the eyes unmoved by the wide grin on his lips. His familiarity, the tone of mocking deprecation: Is this your Boer? This the lanie? Emily on the high stoep of the redbrick building. The blue headscarf, the full-length old-fashioned chintz dress, the black fringed shawl. A lifetime in the city hadn’t changed her. She still belonged among the hills of the Transkei. Would her eldest be sleeping more resignedly tonight? Or was he out with friends to smash windows, to set fire to schools, to blow up cars? All because of what had happened to his father. Gordon with his thin body, the deep furrows beside his mouth, the dark flickering of his eyes, the shy smile. Yes, Baas. The hat in both hands, pressed against his chest. I cannot stop before I know what happened to him and where they buried him. His body belongs to me. And then last night. You just start talking about him in the past tense.