A Sailor's Honour (15 page)

‘Why did my father go back?' Johann asked.

‘I asked him the same question,' Von Schauroth said. ‘The war was as good as over, and I told him he should stay with your mother and that I would take
U
-891 back. But he refused.'

‘Why couldn't he have stayed with us?' Johann asked. ‘He left us on a donkey cart!'

‘He was going to come back,' Von Schauroth said. ‘He told me so. After taking his crew back safely. He made me promise that I would look after you and your mother if anything should happen to him. And then he was killed.'

‘If he had stayed with my mother, he would be alive now.'

‘Once you were safe, his first duty was to his crew, he told me. It was a matter of honour to him,' Von Schauroth explained, ‘a sailor's honour.'

When Johann was in Matric, oom Daan passed away. While Annelise's birth was a happy event, the incident with Spokie had darkened those middle years of high school.

Then Spokie returned to school as a newly qualified teacher. He taught accounting, a subject Johann did not take, and they avoided each other for a term, but the opening week of the rugby season brought them into direct conflict again. Spokie was the rugby coach and Johann had been earmarked for the number ten position in the first fifteen. There can be no greater happiness for a rugby-playing schoolboy, but it was short-lived.

‘We need a bigger player at fly half,' Spokie said. ‘You'll have to move to fullback.'

After a listless training session at fullback, during which the ball never reached him and the second-team players never penetrated the defence to call upon Johann to make a tackle, he asked to be put back at fly half.

‘It's fullback or nothing,' Spokie said. ‘And that's final.'

The rebellious streak in Johann surfaced. ‘It's nothing then, sir. Thank you for the opportunity.' He turned to leave.

‘Are you being sarcastic, Weber?' Spokie demanded. ‘Are you giving me backchat?'

‘No, sir,' Johann replied and again turned to leave.

Spokie stood very still, rugby ball under his arm. ‘You're not indispensable. Don't bother to come to training on Thursday.'

Johann turned to his books. Algebra and trigonometry. Afrikaans and English. Biology and history. And Latin, for law.

When an officer from the Defence Headquarters came to the school to tell the school leavers about their national service, Johann saw an opportunity to escape to the navy. The form asked:
Has any member of your family served in the armed forces? If so, who? Yes
, he wrote.
My father. Which branch?
the form asked.
The navy
, he wrote. Since no further detail was required, he did not mention Hitler's Kriegsmarine or the fate of
U
-boat 891.

By midyear when his call-up papers arrived in the post, Johann had stopped attending school functions and stayed in his room when the other boys went out to train or fool around outside. In the late afternoons when the hostel's corridors were empty, he was in his room studying. He now occupied the room where Spokie had beaten him senseless four years earlier. The scars and memories had faded, but the sound of the coach's whistle, the line-out calls and the punt of the rugby ball on the field below his window were a distraction on the Tuesdays and Thursdays of rugby practice.

He was working his way through a translation of one of Ovid's poems when he heard raised voices from downstairs where Spokie resided with his wife. When he heard things being thrown around and the woman crying and begging her husband to stop, Johann quietly stepped out of his room and peeked down the stairs into the teacher's flatlet below. Spokie towered over his wife and held her by the hair. She crouched in the corner on the first landing, in her tennis outfit.

‘You're a slut,' Spokie berated her through clenched teeth. ‘Don't you see the way the boys look at you?'

‘I can't help the way they look at me,' she said. ‘It's not my fault they look at me.'

‘Of course you can help it,' he said. ‘Stop dressing like a tart and walking around like that with your tits hanging out and your panties showing.'

‘I have nothing to do,' she wailed as he twisted her hair. ‘I'm cooped up in our room all day with nothing to do while you're at school. You won't allow me to go anywhere. All I have is my tennis.'

‘You're my wife now,' Spokie hissed. ‘You will do as I say.'

She whimpered and tried to speak, but he slapped her on the back of her head and stormed out of the flat. Johann watched from the upper window as Spokie fired up his Studebaker and drove off with the back wheels spinning and kicking up dust. When he looked down into the stairwell, he found her looking up at him.

‘Are you hurt?' he asked.

She nodded.

‘Do you need help?'

She nodded again.

‘Should I come down?' he asked. It was against the rules to enter a teacher's flat without an express invitation.

‘Yes, please,' she whispered.

He looked over his shoulder. The corridor was deserted: the younger boys were not allowed in their rooms between afternoon study and dinner, and the other Matrics were on the rugby field. He descended slowly. She lay where she had fallen. He went down on one knee and put his arms around her to help her up, but she made no effort to get up and clung to him.

‘Just hold me for a while,' she said.

She cried against his chest and he felt her tears wet his shirt. He listened for anyone approaching but the place was quiet. Outside he could hear cars passing on the main road to Naboomspruit.

‘Help me up,' she said, but kept her arms around him.

They struggled to an upright position, holding onto each other. They took the steps down together.

At the foot of the stairs, Johann saw a small entrance area with a two-seater couch and a coffee table and a bedroom behind it. He led her to the couch and turned her so that she could sit down, but she resisted and turned to face him. She put her arms around his neck and pulled him closer. He tried to pull away, but she wouldn't let him. She began to rock slowly from side to side, as if to music.

They danced to her music until she stopped crying and her body had relaxed and softened against his. She pulled him even closer. He was embarrassed to feel his erection pushing against her. He tried again to withdraw, but she spoke softly in his ear. ‘Don't worry. It's good like this.'

‘It's not right,' he said, and again tried to pull away.

‘It's not wrong either,' she said and pushed her hand down between them. She held him through his trousers and he felt powerless, unable to retreat. Unwilling to retreat.

‘No,' he said.

‘Yes,' she said and tugged at his zip. Her hand was inside before he could react.

‘I want to hold you,' she said. ‘There,' and she squeezed him hard.

With his arms still around her, he exploded immediately. His legs went lame and he fell back onto the couch.

‘Next time it will be better,' she said.

She sat down next to him and guided his hand between her legs.

‘I've got homework to do,' he pleaded, but she rubbed his hand against her until her breathing became shallow and strained.

His own breathing quickened in pace with hers and he sighed with her as it finally ended.

They sat next to each other on the small couch until their breathing had slowed down to normal again.

‘I needed that,' she said, but he had no idea what she meant.

She stood up suddenly and said, ‘Let me show you what to do.'

Before Johann could move, she straddled him and pinned him down. When she started opening his fly, he objected. He didn't know what to say, so he said, ‘I just want to hold you.'

She cupped his face in her hands. ‘I can't wait to show you how,' she said.

Her thigh muscles were taut and there were little white hairs on the top of her legs. Johann didn't know where to put his hands or where to look.

She stood up slowly and rearranged her clothes.

He knew her name was Alma, but he didn't know what to call her. Not after what had happened between them.

‘Next time it will be better,' she said.

It was, infinitely so.

They met regularly after that, every Tuesday and Thursday when the other boys were at rugby or cricket training and Spokie at his coaching duties. Johann tried to be more considerate on days when Alma had been given a hiding, but for some reason she was more vigorous in her demands on such occasions.

After a particularly violent beating, her father and brother came and took her away. Johann watched from the window at the end of the upstairs corridor as her brother loaded her belongings into the boot of the car. He knew that under her long-sleeved blouse she had bruises on her arms and under her breasts.

She looked up from the back seat of the car and she saw him at the window. She mouthed the words, ‘Thank you.'

Spokie caught him by surprise. Johann was still waving out of the window when he saw Spokie at the first landing of the staircase looking up at him.

‘You arsehole!' Spokie shouted. ‘It was you!
You
called her parents.'

He came bounding up the stairs and grabbed Johann by his hair. ‘This time I won't leave any marks,' he said. ‘And there's no one here to see.' He punched Johann in the ribs and the stomach until he fell down. Then Spokie put his foot on Johann's throat and held him pinned to the floor. When Johann wrestled free and got up from the floor, Spokie grabbed him by the front of his shirt and pushed him into the corner. He hit Johann once, twice in the ribs with his fists and then rained more blows on him.

The attack stopped when a junior who shouldn't have been in his room opened the door to see what was happening. Spokie pounced on him and threw him down the stairs. ‘You know full well you're not allowed in your room between afternoon study and the 5.30 bell,' he shouted after the boy. He bounded after the boy and dragged him into the teacher's flatlet downstairs. Johann could hear the boy screaming with every stroke of the cane. He counted six. He lay where he was, against the wall in the corner.

Spokie followed the junior back upstairs and prodded Johann with his foot. ‘The day will come that I will hurt you more than you ever thought possible,' he said. ‘Mark my words. I
will
get even.'

Johann told no one, but the other boy told his mother. After an enquiry, Spokie was told to leave.

Spokie had the last word on the way out. ‘It's all your doing,' he hissed at Johann outside the headmaster's office. ‘And I
will
get even. You can bet your life on that.'

Johann finished the year and was called up for national service in the navy. After university, he started as a junior prosecutor in the Department of Justice. He became an advocate and soon found himself involved with other people's problematic lives, their unhappy marriages, their dysfunctional children, their broken contracts, their recalcitrant employees, their insurers who collected premiums with alacrity but dragged their heels when they had to pay claims. When he had had enough of the criminal cases which, as a junior, he had to do on the pro Deo system, effectively giving free defences to murderers, he took a sabbatical and went to Europe for six months.

That was where he had looked right instead of left and met Liesl in the emergency ward of the hospital. His broken leg took two months to heal, but he came back to South Africa with his German-speaking wife. His mother was delighted.

‘A proper German girl from my home town,' Anna Weber exulted. ‘I can't wait to see my grandchildren.'

It took time, but Johann eventually forgot all about Spokie.

In the western world the virus made its entry quietly. At first it had no name. It had been undetected in Africa for a long time before a hint of its existence appeared on 5 June 1981 in the weekly report of
Morbidity and Mortality.
The report stated that five previously healthy gay men had been diagnosed in Los Angeles with an infectious disease which was usually only seen in patients with severely impaired immune function. Within a month, a further twenty-six gay men from as far apart as Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York showed the same symptoms,
Morbidity and Mortality
reported. It was determined quickly that the disease spread through sexual intercourse, but the virus that was the engine for its distribution remained undetected. At first contained within the gay community, the virus soon spread to drug users sharing needles and haemophiliacs who received regular blood transfusions. And then it spread to the heterosexual community and to the world at large. The human im-munodeficiency virus,
HIV
for short, was identified as the culprit in 1984. It would take until 1987 for the first treatment to be licensed: zidovudine, known as
AZT
.

By then the virus had spread wildly and its cover was blown.

Alongside the spread of the virus, resistance against the apartheid system, so keenly supported by the Third Force, grew. Bombs exploding in front of government buildings. Police Casspirs in the streets. Young men in military uniforms facing young men in school uniforms. Assassinations of municipal officials. Work stay-aways. Product boycotts. Intimidation. Military vehicles at intersections. Fires in the townships. Necklaces made of burning rubber. Dissidents disappearing. A country going bankrupt. Talks with the enemy. A president in retreat. Changes in the offing for the short and medium term.

The Third Force had to devise a long-term plan.

When the Minister of Health called the meeting, the Third Force was well placed. The senior advisors to the Defence and Foreign Affairs ministers were both members of long-standing and impeccable anonymity. The advisors had risen to the high and influential positions they now held without anyone having any reason to suspect that they were members of the Third Force, dedicated to steering the country in the direction originally proposed by Robey Leibbrandt.