The Covenant (161 page)
Authors: James A. Michener
“Mr. van Doorn, sir,” the investigator whispered. “I don’t think you’d better let anyone see our report.”
“The other members are entitled …”
“It was the other members I was thinking of.”
Moving apart from Van Valck and Adams, Detleef read the document and became ashen. He was astonished that detectives could uncover so much and appalled at the possible consequences of what they had learned. The detective, seeing his dismay, whispered, “Shall I burn the report, sir? I made only one copy.”
It was the severest moral test Detleef would ever face. His whole being urged him to quash this report, but the dignity of his office and its obligation to purify the race took precedence. If at this first hearing he smothered evidence, all subsequent ones would be suspect, and the good that such procedures might otherwise accomplish would be aborted. Wiping the sweat from his forehead, he cleared his dry throat and said, “Gentlemen, I think we should hear a rather remarkable report. It bears directly on our case. Mr. Op t’Hooft here is an investigator from my department, and he’s been looking into the heritage of the Albertyns. You may proceed, Mr. Op t’Hooft.”
The detective squared his shoulders and read a concise account of the Albertyn record:
“The charge that Mrs. Albertyn is Coloured is completely false. There is no blemish of any kind on her family record. The possibility that she may have had sexual intercourse with a Bantu is remote, for not only does she have an impeccable reputation, but we can find no occasion when she could have been in contact with a Bantu. Also, since her other children all look like Petra, there would have to have been repeated acts of intercourse with the same black man, and that seems positively impossible.
“Mr. Albertyn, however, is another matter. He is contaminated doubly, and proof of the contamination is contained in a straight, unbroken, demonstrable line back to 1694 when the Coloured slave Bezel Muhammad married the Trianon spinster Petronella van Doorn.
“Bezel and Petronella had four children who carried no last name, and they might have been lost in the general Coloured population except that neighbors kept track of them, knowing them to be Van Doorns. We have found numerous families well regarded today containing the blood of Bezel and Petronella.
“In or about the year 1720 their daughter Fatima, named after Bezel’s mother, became the third wife of the notorious frontier outlaw Rooi van Valck, who had four wives, one yellow, one brown, one black and one white. Fatima was the brown one, and she became the progenitress of a large unruly breed.
“One of her daughters married an early Albertyn and was thus the direct ancestor of our Henricus Albertyn. Without question, he is doubly Coloured. Without question, his daughter Petra must be so classified.
“Our investigators could not avoid remarking upon the extraordinary fact that our Petra thus becomes a lineal descendant of the original Petronella, who broke the rules of her community. Could this be an example of Divine intervention?”
When Mr. Op t’Hooft finished reading the report, he waited in some confusion as to what he should do next. He looked in vain at Chairman van Doorn for instructions, but Detleef was too shaken to act intelligently, and as for Mr. van Valck, whose redoubtable ancestor Rooi had been dragged from his stormy grave, he was in a state of shock.
Dr. Adams reached for the report, but Mr. Op t’Hooft was not sure he should deliver it to a man known to be difficult where Afrikaner matters were concerned. Dr. Adams solved this by snatching the paper and holding it aloft. “Did you say this was the only copy?”
“Yes. Not even one carbon was made.”
“Good. I want you to watch what happens to your one copy.” Crumpling it in his left hand, Dr. Adams produced a match, scratched it across the top of the polished table, and set fire to the report. Holding it by one end, he watched the flames creep closer to his fingers, then dropped the burning paper on the table, where it vanished, leaving a scar.
“I think we should all forget this report,” Adams said. “It can do no one in this room any good, and it could do distinguished citizens outside a great deal of harm.” When Mr. Op t’Hooft, completely bewildered, left, Adams said, “It looks to me as if I’m the only one here who is not related to this little Coloured girl.”
Van Valck and Van Doorn glared at him, but he ignored them, saying brightly, “I propose we declare the child white and end this
farce.” He supposed that the shaken men, in order to hide their own involvement, would agree, but he underestimated Detleef’s moral tenacity.
In silence the Commissioner on Racial Affairs lowered his head and pondered what to do. In his anxiety he could hear the voices of his family orating savagely on the problem of the Coloureds:
Maria van Doorn: “They are the children of sin, and God must despise them.”
Johanna Krause: “They are mongrels.”
But then he heard his own voice: “They’re … a reminder of our fathers’ transgressions.”
He was sorely tempted to follow Dr. Adams’ advice and terminate the investigation, for he knew that if the facts became public, the sins of his ancestors must surface; but to evade his responsibilities would be craven, so he decided to plow ahead.
He was about to voice his decision when he saw, shimmering in air, that decorated page of the ancient Bible on which the data of his family was inscribed, and on it in blazing letters stood that second entry, the one that was never discussed in his family:
Son Adam van Doorn born 1 November 1655
. Generations of Van Doorns had tried to ignore that cryptic passage, avoiding the question of who the boy’s mother could have been. And there was the later entry: “Petronella”—but with no statement as to whom she had married. Always the Van Doorns had suspected that they were related to Coloureds; always they had submerged this truth. Now the gossip-whispers were about to rampage, and Detleef was sick with shame.
But he
was
the Commissioner on Racial Affairs, he
was
the chairman of this Race Classification Board, with a duty to perform. In a voice scarcely more than a whisper he said, “Clearly the child Petra has contaminated blood from both the Van Valck and the Van Doorn lines. Clearly she must be classified as Coloured.”
Van Valck shuddered: “All along I thought it was Mrs. Albertyn who carried the fatal strain.”
“What in hell do you men mean?” Dr. Adams exploded. “Words like
contaminated
and
fatal strain
?”
“We mean the defilement of Afrikaner blood,” Detleef whispered. “We have all been defiled this day.”
From the moment the date 1694 was mentioned, Dr. Adams had started doing calculations and now produced his results: “At least
eight, and possibly more, generations separate the slave Bezel Muhammad from our little girl …”
“She’s not my little girl,” Mr. van Valck interrupted. “She’s a Coloured trying to penetrate our community.”
“Eight generations would mean that back in the 1694 period she would have had no fewer than two hundred and fifty-six potential ancestors in existence. And because two of them were Coloured—”
“More,” Detleef interrupted. “You’re forgetting Rooi van Valck.”
“I was just coming to Rooi. By the way, Van Valck, from which of his wives were you descended? Don’t bother to answer. Whichever it was, Petra’s your cousin.”
Leopold leaped from his chair, and would have assaulted the dentist had not Van Doorn intervened. “Gentlemen, sit down. We have a vote to take. The evidence against this girl is overwhelming. Do I hear a motion to declare her Coloured?”
“I so move,” Van Valck said firmly.
“Do I hear a second?”
Dr. Adams stared at his fingernails, trying to guess how he would be evaluated a decade from now when this movement for racial purity became a mania and some ill-spirited neighbor denounced him.
“Dr. Adams, do I hear a second?”
“Not from me.”
“Please, we must conduct this meeting in orderly fashion.”
“Then I move that you two men vote to declare your cousin Petra Albertyn white, for I am certain that she’s as white as any of the three of us.”
“I second the original motion,” Detleef said, his blood raging and his mind taking note of this man Adams. He would be dealt with later. The medical commission should look into that man’s credentials.
“Moved and seconded that this commission finds the girl Petra Albertyn Coloured.”
“No!” Adams called in a loud voice.
“The vote was not called for,” Detleef said, trying to control his anger. “Now I ask for the vote.”
“Ja,” Van Valck cried. Van Doorn did the same, then looked at Dr. Adams, who was again studying his fingernails. “And you, Adams?”
“Record it that I was ashamed in the sight of God to vote upon such a motion. That I refused to condemn your cousin Petra.” He rose and started to leave the room, but Detleef intercepted him.
“Please! It’s of major importance that we start this procedure correctly. You must be seen sitting with us when we deliver our decision.”
So, reluctantly, Dr. Adams resumed his chair and watched as the Albertyns and the spectators were brought back into the room. The family was ranged neatly along one wall, and little Petra, hands primly at her side, was again asked to stand facing her judges, who looked down upon her.
“Petra Albertyn, you are Coloured.”
She made no response, but did turn slightly to see what the noise was to her left. Her mother had fainted.
The fateful decision in Petra’s case launched a time of terror for the Albertyns. She was immediately dismissed from school, and when her family appealed to the courts they were turned down: “Clearly Coloured.” In a few months the board declared Henricus Albertyn Coloured, too, so he could no longer work at the garage, since his foreman position was classified “whites only.” Nor could he find work elsewhere; he was unemployed and would remain so for more than a year.
It was absolutely forbidden for the Albertyns to continue living where they had for the past forty years; as Coloureds they must move into some township reserved for their race, but no such group area existed in Venloo, so they decided to uproot their entire family and move down to Cape Town, where the vast majority of Coloureds lived. Because they were forced to sell their house under crisis conditions, they received £2,000 for a £4,500 investment.
When they reached Cape Town the only accommodation they could find was in a collection of three-story hovels originally designed as a transit camp for the military. It was now one of the shames of South Africa, with multiple families crammed into each flimsy-walled apartment.
When the shattered Albertyns moved into Orchard Flats they contemplated suicide. The cleanliness of Blinkfontein was gone, the neatness of their home, the warmth of their relationships in the tiny community—all lost. In their place was filth, criminality and social hatred. That anyone should have to live in such surroundings was disgraceful, but that proven good citizens could be forced into them by a government acting in the name of God and racial purity was criminal.
Henricus Albertyn discovered how criminal one evening when he came home from his job as grease-monkey in a distant Cape Town garage. As he climbed the stairs to his third-floor room, assailed by the smell of cheap wine and urine, he racked his brain trying to devise some tactic whereby he could organize a decent life for Petra, for upon her he now fastened all his dreams.
But when he reached his door he heard sobbing, not Petra’s but his wife’s, and he burst into the room—to find her quivering in a corner, with a pair of long scissors, covered with blood, in her hand. For one terrible moment he suspected that something beyond words had happened to his daughter, but when he looked about in frenzy, he saw Petra seated by the lone window, reading a book. Whatever foul thing had happened, she had remained untouched.
Quickly embracing her, he asked, “What’s happened?”
“Just the skollies,” Petra said, apparently unconcerned. “Mama stabbed them, and they ran away.”
From her corner Mrs. Albertyn said softly, “No skollies will rape my child. We’ll never surrender to this dreadful place.”
And Petra, putting aside her book, showed her father the long knitting needle she had for some days kept secreted in her dress: “I stabbed them too. Shamilah downstairs told me how to jab at their eyes.” And without any sign of agitation she returned to her homework.
She was in school again, at a much bigger institution in nearby Athlone, staffed by a group of dedicated Coloured men and women. When her father attended a parent-teacher meeting, the chairman of the school committee, a prosperous builder named Simon Botha, sought him out: “Albertyn, our teachers tell me that your little Petra is a near-genius. You must give thought to her future.”
“In this country what can a Coloured do?”
“You mustn’t limit your horizon to this country. My daughter in Canada tells me the universities there have many bursaries. They’re hungry for children like Petra. Australia, too, or even London.”
Such thoughts were beyond Albertyn’s ken, but he realized that he must learn to grapple with them, for as Botha said, “To leave a girl like Petra in this country is to commit her to death.”
Even though Venloo had been cleansed of the Albertyns, the Van Valcks could not feel victorious, for they were assailed by haunting
questions. One night Leopold asked bluntly, “Do you think that English atheist would dare to start rumors about us? I mean, about Rooi van Valck and his three dark wives?” Later he asked plaintively, “Could I possibly be carrying contaminated blood?”
They spent much time inspecting the half-moons on his fingernails, and although these were inconclusive, Mrs. van Valck did find comfort in his many freckles. After convincing themselves that he was safely white, they relaxed and invited Principal Sterk to dinner and listened as he reported on the final outcome of their crusade to purify the community. When they heard of the area in which the Albertyns were forced to live, Mrs. van Valck said without rancor, and even with a sense of forgiving them for the trouble they had caused, “It’s only what they deserved, trying to be something better than they were.” Then she added brightly, “Yesterday I had a letter from Pretoria. They sent me back my deposit.”