Tandia (21 page)

The professor followed with another passage from Aeneid IV. It was one of Dr Louis's favourites and she had no trouble completing it.

'Very good!
"Hunc ego Diti
sacrum iussa fero, teque isto corpore solvo,"
' Ryder quoted, his voice deep and overprojected; he seemed to be enjoying himself and Tandia was beginning to feel embarrassed. It was gobbledy-gook to Sonny Vindoo and Mama Tequila, and probably to Old Coetzee as well.

Tandia knew that these were the last lines of Book IV but she didn't know them nearly as well as the other two passages. Her mind went blank. It was a four-line stanza and the last lines had simply disappeared from her memory.

'Ah…ah…' She looked at Dr Louis, who seemed to be urging her on with his eyes, the fingers of both his hands spread wide.

'It is my favourite, man! Don't finish it, Tandia, let me please.
Omnis et una dilapsus calor, atque in ventos vita recessit;
"At once all the warmth fell away and the life passed into the moving air.'"

'My goodness me, that was very well done!' Sonny Vindoo said, clapping his hands in applause. 'Miss Tandy could perhaps complete it prettier, but I'm telling you, no better!'

Professor Ryder laughed. 'We shall never know! You have some very good friends, Tandia Patel. Did you know that?'

'No, sir…yes, sir! I mean, I don't know, sir.' Tandia looked up at Professor Ryder and he could see she was very close to tears, the strain of his examination clearly showing. 'Please, sir, I mean, Professor, please let me go to your university? I will work hard, I will do anything!'

'Ja, I can tell you that true, Professor. Tandy can cook and clean and you can ask her anything, she knows it right off, anything you want to know. The hardest stuff you can think, she knows it already,' Mama Tequila tapped her head, 'it right here inside her
kop!'

'Ja, she's very clever, the most clever you can find anywhere, but I think there are some other problems, hey, Professor?' Sonny Vindoo had sensed that Ryder was troubled and that he had hoped to gain a slight advantage by compromising Tandia with his impromptu examination. 'No problems! She will pay, we don't want no charity, you hear!' Mama Tequila's voice was indignant.

'That's not the question, Madam Tequila,' Professor Ryder said. 'The girl's marks are sufficient to get her a scholarship to our university college for non-whites, I'm sure I can help her there, though I regret there is no law faculty. Perhaps Fort Hare?' He paused and clasped his hands together in front of him. 'It's…well frankly, it's just damned awkward in my own faculty!'

'You mean because Tandia's a coloured?' Doctor Louis asked quietly.

Ryder looked uncomfortable and glanced at Tandia. 'Perhaps Tandia should leave the room?'

'No, Professor, she a big girl, leaving this room not going to change her colour!' Mama Tequila said.

'I wasn't simply referring to the student's colour. There are other complications. She's a female, and well, er…law for a woman?' Mama Tequila's outburst had added to his obvious discomfort. Tandia could sense he was beginning to wonder how he'd been persuaded to come to Bluey Jay in the first place.

'Okay, let me say something!' It was Old Coetzee who spoke. 'In this room is Mr Vindoo, he's an Indian and Mama Tequila who is a coloured person and Or Louis who is a Jew and you, Professor, who are a Britisher and me, I am a Boer, an Afrikaner, but, in the end, we are all South Africans, you hear.'

Just then Juicey Fruit Mambo entered carrying a tray with ice, water and two decanters, one of Scotch and the other brandy. He'd also opened a bottle of coca-cola and added it with a glass to the tray for Tandia. He placed the tray down on a small coffee table and, as quietly as he'd entered he turned and walked back towards the door, giving Tandia a quick, encouraging flash of the gold incisors as he left. Old Coetzee pointed to the departing black man, 'And the Bantu, we like to forget the Bantu, who are also South African, not just Zulu or N'debele, Sotho or Shangaan or Pondo, but just as much, maybe even more, South Africans than us.'

Tandia moved over to the tray and started to pour drinks for everyone. She knew all their preferences, except that of Professor Ryder. She placed her hand on the Scotch bottle and he nodded, then on the water jug and he shook his head and pointed to the ice tray. Hiding behind the bottle of coke she found the tiny glass containing green chartreuse which Juicey Fruit Mambo had poured ready for Sonny Vindoo.

Tandia had remained standing when Mama Tequila and the men sat down and, although it wasn't as bad, her mind recalled the time at Cato Manor police station after she'd been arrested and she had been made to stand while the policeman interrogated her. She didn't have the courage to sit down, thinking that she might look too forward, a cheeky bladdy kaffir should she do so, now the drink tray saved what was beginning to develop into an embarrassing situation for her.

Old Coetzee continued. 'We all got one thing else in common.' He paused, accepting a brandy from Tandia. 'Hate! We all hate each other!'

'Oh, I say, is that quite fair?' Professor Ryder exclaimed.

'I think you're probably quite a nice chap for a magistrate and a Boer,' he laughed.

Old Coetzee held up his hand. It was obvious he wanted to be taken seriously. 'No, please! Let me talk, man. This country is not built on understanding or compassion or the mutual co-operation of its people. It is stitched together with the needle of hate and the thread of fear. The Afrikaner hates the Englishman, but both are also South Africans. The English South African calls the Afrikaner a "hairy back" and hates him back. The Indians, who came out here as indentured labour, they are hated by the blacks. This hate is encouraged by the white man, just like the white man encourages the various native tribes to hate each other. It creates a buffer zone of hate. A safety zone built on hate. If one kaffir tribe hates another one, the Zulu the Sotho and so on, and they all hate the Indian, then the white administration, people like me, we can control and direct the hate!' Old Coetzee held his brandy balloon up and moved it in a slow arc, taking them all in and stopping at Mama Tequila. 'Then there are the coloureds, the children of the white man's guilt! They remind us every day that we are not invincible and superior, but weak and human.' He paused. 'So they are hated by everyone the most of all!' Old Coetzee brought the glass to his lips, emptying almost half before he put it down again. 'Hate, fear and greed! These are the components on which South African society is based!'

There was silence in the room. It was a startling admission, but hugely more so coming from the Afrikaner magistrate who was meant to uphold the sacred concept of apartheid.

Finally, Sonny Vindoo spoke up. 'Tonight, Magistrate Coetzee, I will go home a very, very happy man! I'm telling you now, I'm not thinking I will ever in the whole of my life hear a Afrikaner say these things!'

Old Coetzee smiled. 'I am a Boer, you must understand. What I think and what I say and what I do, they not always the same thing. You have just heard me thinking aloud; you must not judge me by my thoughts.'

Professor Ryder leaned forward. 'What are you saying, Magistrate Coetzee? That the Afrikaner is maintaining a position he doesn't feel?'

'Ag, there you go, you see! You English, you make everything seem like it's truth or lies. I didn't say what I feel, man. I said what I think! That is not the same thing.'

'Surely it is difficult, if we're thinking in terms of a lifestyle, a philosophy, to separate the two. We feel so we think?' Dr Louis said.

'For the Jew yes, in particular, the Jew! The Jew is firstly an intellectual and a rationalist. For a thousand years he is persecuted and still he looks for reason. Spinoza, Maimonides, Erasmus, Kant, Marx! In every humble shetl the rabbi and the elders are the seekers of truth and the law, the translators of hot grassroots" feelings into cool intellectual reasoning.

'But my people, the volk, they are not thinkers. They feel and they act. They have won the right to this land with their blood! First from the black man, then twice they fought the Englishman for it. They lost it to the verdoemde rooinekke; their women and children died like flies in the British concentration camps. These feeling, ignorant
boere,
who were very proud men, swore a sacred oath on the graves of their women and children. They made a covenant with God that they would remain true to themselves as a- people.
Heren volk!
God's people in the land God gave them! They swore they would win back this land and keep it forever.' Old Coetzee had become quite worked up. He removed a 'kerchief from his trouser pocket and wiped his brow. The room was silent, embarrassed by the Afrikaner's outburst. When Old Coetzee resumed, his voice was surprisingly calm. 'There was only one weapon left to this pathetic, defeated, ignorant bunch of farmers with their ragged, sweat-stained clothes and their half-starved bodies. These men knew they had not been defeated by the Lee Metfords of the English marksmen, who were a joke, but by the cruel scorched-earth policy of the British. Their fields were burned, their homes razed to the ground, their women and children herded into captivity, where twenty-seven thousand died of dysentery, blackwater fever and God knows what else. Their sad-faced, barefoot children and their calm, resourceful wives, the guerilla widows who had kept vigil on the lonely farms, had been destroyed. These women had stoically endured all, had waited in fear for the men they loved to come home, a fleeting shadow in the night, often after months away on commando, only a single night, from moon rise to break of cold dawn across the pale veld. Who saw him leave again, a memory of muffled hooves in the misty morning light. A man who had come and gone and in the haste of rumbled loving, fierce touching and urgent need, brought only more aching loneliness and despair. These women, clutching their ragged children, watched as the hated rooinek soldiers razed their homes and torched their fields. The British might just as well have gunned them down. in their farmhouses. It would have been a better way for them to die than in the mud and squalor of rat-infested, disease-ridden concentration camps.

'And so the
volk
bent down and picked up the only weapon left to them. They picked up hate and they sharpened it and kept it bright and waited for Jehovah, the God of vengeance, to give them their day of reckoning. In 1948 when the Nationalists came to power, God had been merciful, the day of vengeance had arrived.'

Professor Ryder cleared his throat. 'Surely, Magistrate Coetzee, all this is a little simplistic? After all we're a complex, modem society in a very sophisticated world. For God's sake, man! We are halfway through the twentieth century!'

'That's where you're wrong, Professor!' Old Coetzee replied. 'Hate and fear doesn't work like that. It doesn't die out just because you're in a sophisticated, or so-called sophisticated society. Hitler came to power in the most sophisticated society in Europe and the weapon he used was hate! He slaughtered six million of Dr Rabin's people with hate!' He turned to Dr Louis. 'Dr Rabin, you mark my words, now the Jews are in Palestine, their time for hate has come.' Coetzee took a sip of brandy and leaned back in his chair. 'Is the Jew going to hold Israel with reason and intelligence or with feeling? The Jew has come home to the promised land. How is the Jew going to hold his land? Let me tell you, man. He will hold it with feeling. He will die for it. He will learn to hate for it!'

Dr Louis had heard enough. 'Magistrate Coetzee, the Jews have been put in an impossible position. They believe they have come home. They believe Israel is the birthright of every Jew. "Next year in Israel", these have been the last words spoken in prayer every Friday at Shabbas for nearly two thousand years. Now the Jew has come home to a small piece of barren earth surrounded by his enemies!'

'And South Africa? Is this not the same? Inside are a black people who believe their land has been taken. Outside we are also surrounded by black nations who are our enemies. Are we not a minority, a small white minority, who have nowhere else to go? For the Jew it is a new thing to be a nation, a thing of ten years only; for us it is three hundred years. Like you Jews, we Afrikaners believe this is the promised land, this is our birthright. If we share our power we will lose it. So we hold it with the gun and we hold it with hate and finally, we hold it with fear! Hate and fear for those who would rise up to destroy us.'

'And greed? Before, you said greed, Magistrate Coetzee.' Sonny Vindoo added softly.

Tandia was exhilarated by the conversation. She had never heard anything like it. Never heard the position of the white man and, in particular, the Boer put so perfectly. For the first time in her life she could see where she fitted. To her surprise she wasn't angry or embittered. Both these reactions now seemed to her to be self-destructive, almost naive. She could feel the hate she knew she carried in her heart grow sharper. It had a point. A direction. Old Coetzee had explained to her what a powerful weapon it could become.

'Ah, greed! Let me tell you about greed, meneer Vindoo. Greed is the gift of the British to South Africa.' Old Coetzee was enjoying himself. 'When gold was discovered in the Transvaal Republic greed, not hate or fear, greed took over.

I'm not saying the Boer wasn't greedy also, when he fought and took the black man's land; in today's terms that is also greed. But it was also the way of Africa. Shaka and Cetewayo, the great Zulu conquerors, did the same to the tribes they destroyed. But gold! The discovery of gold, that was a different kind of greed. Gold built a new lifestyle based on greed: of having more than you need, of having more than the seasons brought a man or the droughts denied him, of having power. It brought migration, people from Britain and Europe. The Afrikaner watched as the Britisher and the Jew got the gold and he saw how the European mind cared no more for the black man's welfare than the Boer did. In fact, you may say less. With the old system of paternalism there was some understanding between the white man and the black. Then the men of gold brought the black man into his mines, put a pickaxe in his hands, broke his black back with work and paid him a pittance in wages. He turned the rural economy into a city-based one where the black man was totally dependent for his very existence on the white capitalist mines. The men of gold shared nothing and gave nothing back. It was a system based entirely on white greed and black labour. He learned that he who pays, says. Money is power. So he learned the ways of capitalist greed also and he added them to his hate and his fear.