I went back home.
On another weekend, I drove around Yeoville and Berea, looking for my old hang-outs down Minors and Yeo and Honey, wondering if any of them were still occupied by students. Everyone said Joburg was too expensive and unsafe for student communes now. More and more young people were living at home until they got married. A generation of Peter Pans. Their poor parents couldn’t get rid of them.
A few months after I came home, I bumped into Sabine at the Rosebank Mall. We met on the escalators — I was going down to the movie houses and she was coming up — and we fumbled a greeting as we passed. Then I looked back and saw her waiting for me at the top, so I went up again and we had coffee at that place next to the information kiosk.
She’d been to some festival of apartheid films. ‘Dry White Season,’ she said when I asked. ‘I watched it on video once when it was still banned, but it was amazing to see it on the big screen. Especially now when the past is becoming visible in a new way.’
‘You mean it’s coming back to haunt us.’
‘Well, not just that. It will heal us too, I hope.’
‘It’s a pity the past hasn’t mastered a South African accent,’ I said. ‘Sgt Oddball wasn’t up to it, as I recall.’
‘They should have sacked the voice coach.’ She gave the throaty, late-night laugh every man in her circle had found so seductive. ‘He sounded like a Dutchman who’s lived in Moscow for ten years.’ While I was imagining this combination and wondering whether she was sending me up, making a point about my own accent, she spread the festival programme out on the table and showed me the other films she wanted to see, documentaries about the struggle and the history of African jazz, a couple of dramas that had just been unbanned.
She looked good. I’d told her so as she kissed me on both cheeks like a European, and I meant it. Her features had sharpened with age, the baby fat had melted away, and it suited her. Although she still wore her hair long, the hippie style was gone too, the baggy dresses of the Honey Street days replaced by designer jeans and stiletto heels. How old was she? I’d read somewhere that women look their best at thirty-two. Or they think so, anyway.
‘What have you been up to?’ I asked while she was sprinkling a sachet of sugar substitute through the foam on her cappuccino. I wanted to get in first.
‘Where shall I start? … Name an era.’
The laugh was not as enticing as it had once been. Was she putting it on a bit? As I get older, I’m discovering how hard it is not to start playing yourself. ‘What did you do after varsity?’ I asked.
‘I taught for a while, at King David Victory Park, of all places. I wasn’t really qualified to do anything else with my BA.’
‘Sure, Dad was right, it stands for Bugger All.’
‘How are your parents?’
‘My dad passed away a while ago. My mom’s going strong.’
‘I’m sorry to hear it — the first part I mean.’
Before she could take this further, I prompted her: ‘And after the schoolteaching? I gather you moved on.’
‘Fast. I had to do something meaningful, politically speaking, so I got involved in ELP, you know, the English Language Project. We were teaching teachers in the Vaal Triangle. It was quite something. We went into the townships a lot. This was during the state of emergency, remember.’
Actually, I didn’t know and I didn’t remember. The grainy footage on the editing screens in production offices where my work sometimes took me, and the scraps of news on the BBC that I watched with one eye, scarcely qualified as memories. You could say the worst years of apartheid passed me by.
‘It must have been rough,’ I said.
‘It had its moments. The boere thought nothing of chasing kids into the classrooms. Some teachers kept a bucket of water in the corner in case teargas blew in through the windows. Ordinary people were so brave. To go on teaching in those circumstances — it was heroic.’
‘You must have been brave too.’
‘It’s always easier with a white skin, you know, it’s like a flak jacket. Of course, we weren’t supposed to be in the townships at all. Once they had to smuggle me out of Evaton on the floor of someone’s car, with a blanket over my head. Can you believe it? Me. Like a sack of potatoes. Playing hide-and-seek with the boere.’
She did it again: she gave the boo in boere a peculiar, ghostly inflection.
Later she’d worked for an NGO, researching and writing the new history that would be taught in the schools after liberation — ‘We knew it would come!’ — and still found time to get involved in worker education for the unions. I noticed that she used the word ‘worker’ mainly as an adjective — worker plays, worker poets, worker publications. Along the way she’d joined the UDF.
‘I became radicalized,’ she said with a snort. ‘Imagine, we called ourselves radicals without a blush. It was appropriate too. If things hadn’t changed when they did, I’d have gone underground. I was angry enough for armed struggle.’
‘Each one teach one’, ‘Liberation before education’, ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’. The catchphrases were familiar, but I was sure they didn’t mean the same thing to both of us. It felt like we were playing broken telephone.
‘And you, Nev?’ she said eventually. ‘Where have you been hiding?’
‘Well, you know I went to London to avoid the army.’ It was the only flag I could wave to show that I also had principles. I told her about my brief career as a waiter, my lucky break in advertising. Probably I made it sound more trivial than it was. My self-deprecation irritated me, but I couldn’t stop it. In those days (this is one of the lines I use too much) I was overly impressed by people like Sabine. I’ve learned to take their stories with a little paper sachet of salt. Now that it was safe to do so, every second person was joining the struggle, and backdating the membership form too. In retrospect, everyone had done their bit.
And who could blame them. Even the leading lights of apartheid, the men who had made and enforced the laws, were starting to come clean, not just recanting but voicing the doubts they claimed to have been harbouring all along. If the social engineers had never really believed, why should the fitters and turners keep the faith? Soon there would be no believers left.
People were not lying either: they were merely inventing. Perhaps the freight of the past had to be lightened if the flimsy walls of the new South Africa were not to buckle. How much past can the present bear? There was already talk of a Truth Commission. But people are constitutionally unmade for the truth. Good, reliable fictions, that’s what the doctor ordered.
We did not talk about this. We talked about mutual friends.
Had I heard about Penny Levine? She’d gone swimming on Mykonos and simply disappeared. They never found the body, just a towel and a pair of sunglasses at the water’s edge. Her mother thinks she’s in the witness protection programme. Don’t ask. And Geraldine, do you remember Geraldine de Gouveia with the motorbike? She bought a house in Coffee Bay. She was always a bit of a dropout. Benjy is still around, subbing on the Weekly Mail.
‘You should give him a call,’ she said, ‘he’ll be glad to hear from you.’
‘Sure.’
‘What are you doing now?’
‘I’m taking photographs.’
‘Really? I don’t remember that.’
‘A new interest. I sort of fell into it.’ I told her about my little stagings for Fairlady.