See No Evil

10

July 18, 1988

I had lunch with George today in Greenmarket Square. It was raining. On the way I saw a copy of the Financial Times on a newsstand: the front-page story was blacked out. This country is pathetic.

George is really down about the Mail closing. He has been trying to find a buyer without any luck, its losses are just too big. I suggested he approach Graham Pelling to see if he will take the Mail along with the other newspapers. George said he will try, but he doesn’t hold out much hope.

I asked George about Muldergate. It’s ten years since it happened and I’m a bit fuzzy about the details. The Mail was one of the papers that broke the scandal, and George remembered it well. I asked him whether he has heard of the Laagerbond. He hasn’t. He was clearly curious about my questions, and I promised I would tell him more when I could. But not yet. Not until I’ve figured out what’s going on with Neels.

July 20

I am crying as I write this. I have just had a huge fight with Neels. It wasn’t about his woman, I chickened out of talking to him about that. It was about the Laagerbond.

All I did was ask him who they were and he exploded. He demanded to know how I had found out about them. When I told him I had looked in Daniel’s briefcase he was furious. He said I was the lowest of the low, I was scum for spying on him. He said I had no right to pry into his business, he said I wouldn’t understand it anyway, he said I had betrayed him, and I had been disloyal. I fell apart. I burst into tears and ran out of the room into the bedroom.

It’s all so wrong, he’s the one whose being disloyal, he’s carrying on an affair, he’s dealing with these weirdo Boers.

For the first time in our marriage I couldn’t stand up to him, I ran away.

He actually called me “scum.” His own wife. I can’t forgive him for that. Never.

July 21

Neels slept in Todd’s room last night. He got up early to go to work, I heard him. At least he didn’t sneak off in the middle of the night.

Zan and Caroline were very quiet at breakfast. They must have heard the shouting and the tears last night. Poor Caroline! It’s her second day back at school and it’s obvious she’s pleased to be out of the house.

July 22

Spoke to Todd on the phone this evening. I suggested that he come out here for a week at the end of his summer vacation and bring Francesca with him. He seemed to like the idea, but he said he’d have to check with her. I hope he does come.

Neels is working so hard on the Herald deal I scarcely see him. Thank God. He’s going to London tomorrow and then Philadelphia. He says he might be away for three weeks. My feelings toward him are so confused. I’m angry, so angry, about the way he treats me these days and about what he’s done with the Mail. And I’m still sure he’s got another woman hidden away somewhere. I haven’t seen any more signs of it, but I just know it.

But I’m also afraid. The violence that I have always known exists in this country seems to be closing in on me, stealing into my own family. First there was Hennie, then the SACP list, then there are these Laagerbond people. Men that high up in the Afrikaner establishment can only be dangerous. And then there’s Neels. He hasn’t threatened me again directly, but he always looks angry, as if he’s about to explode at any second. I fear that he has changed, but more than that I fear that it is this creeping, all-pervasive violence that is changing him.

July 23

I drove into Cape Town to have lunch with Libby Wiseman. She lives in Tamboerskloof in a blue-painted little house on the slopes of Signal Hill opposite Table Mountain. She lectures in English literature at the University of Cape Town, and her husband Dennis is an attorney who specializes in political prisoners. He does a good job too. Although he fails to keep most of them out of jail, he inflicts maximum embarrassment on the authorities every time, which is what his clients really want. It’s Saturday and Dennis was out playing golf. Libby suggested we go to a restaurant in the Bo-Kaap.

We walked down the hill and then along toward Bo-Kaap. I love the area with its steep cobbled streets, its rows of old brightly painted houses, car-repair shops, mosques with dainty cream-colored minarets, and the smells of Africa mixing with the Orient. It’s segregated: only coloreds live there. “Colored” is a typical South African euphemism: it means people of mixed ancestry, people who don’t fit into neat racial categories. Bo-Kaap is a wonderful celebration of what that word can represent: the genes of Malays, Indians, Europeans, slaves from Guinea and the East Indies, even the original Hottentot inhabitants of the Cape are all jumbled together in a melange of brown skin, high cheekbones and broad smiles. And the food is delicious.

Libby led me to an orange-and-yellow restaurant on the corner of Wale Street with a terrific view of the city and Table Mountain opposite. The morning fog had disappeared and the sun was out, illuminating the gray crenelated battlements of the mountain in a soft winter glow. We exchanged gossip about the other members of the Guguletu Project Committee and she told me a story about one of her first-year students who has somehow gotten George Eliot and Charles Dickens confused and is convinced that Dickens was a woman.

I mentioned the SACP hit list Zan told Neels about. Without giving any hint that she had links to the Communist Party, Libby did say it sounded unlikely to her. Apparently Joe Slovo proclaimed last year that change will come through negotiation, not revolution. But Libby admitted that not all party members would necessarily agree with their leader. Frankly, it still worries me.

I decided to tell her about my suspicions about Neels and another woman. She was sympathetic. She confided that she and Dennis are having their problems too. I told her Daniel Havenga’s description of Stellenbosch as hanky-panky town: it’s full of forty-something women washed up on the shores of failed marriages. What’s so strange about Libby and me joining them? It was good to talk to her, to feel that I have an ally in this goddamned country.

July 25

I went into Stellenbosch with Zan this afternoon. It was a clear sunny day, the old buildings gleamed white, and the few leaves remaining on the oak trees along the sidewalks sparkled gold. We went to Oom Samie’s like we used to when she was a girl. That place is still full of the same old junk, it hasn’t changed. She bought a couple of useless knickknacks and some sticky toffee, I bought some spices and we had a cup of coffee.

We talked about the End Conscription Campaign. Zan said that 150 men have refused the call up so far. I told Zan about the friends of mine who dodged the draft during the Vietnam war and the articles I wrote for Life magazine about the student protest movements in the sixties. She was clearly surprised, and interested. But when I started to ask her about the Black Sash, she clammed up. And when I suggested I could join her on one of her ECC demos, she just shook her head. It bugged me.

“Why didn’t you tell me about the SACP hit list?” I asked her.

Zan looked down into her cup. “I wondered when you’d get around to that.”

“Don’t you trust me?”

Zan shrugged, still avoiding my eyes.

She didn’t trust me. I could understand that, given our past, but I felt, or hoped, that since she had come to stay at Hondehoek we had rebuilt our relationship. I felt like she was my ally, and boy do I need allies. I took a deep breath. “I want to apologize for something.”

Zan’s eyes flicked up.

“What happened with that creep Bernie Tunstall. Perhaps I shouldn’t have told Neels. I know you asked me not to, but I was furious and I wanted him to stop it. You were only fourteen, for Christ’s sake!”

Zan stared back into her coffee.

“Can you forgive me?”

Zan mumbled something.

“Excuse me?”

“I said, I can forget. That’s all I can do. Not forgive. Forget. It’s forgotten.” She looked at me, her eyes angry, confused, sad. “Don’t bring it back. Please.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry I mentioned it. It’s just that you can trust me, you know.”

She smiled quickly, although I could see she wasn’t convinced.

“Can you at least tell me a little more about the list?”

“I told Pa all I know.”

“But does it really exist? I thought the SACP leadership is talking about peaceful revolution.”

“Oh, it exists, all right. The leaders say one thing for the international press and another for the comrades. There’s a list. Pa’s on it. So are you.”

“And you?”

Zan shook her head. “No.”

“Who told you?”

“Someone...” She hesitated. “Someone who is very fond of me.”

“A man?”

She nodded.

“That you met in London?”

She nodded again.

“And you trust him?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I trust him.” Her eyes met mine, warmer this time, more sympathetic. “It came as a shock to me too. A big shock. That, and Uncle Hennie’s death. I mean, in theory I know that the only way this regime is going to change is through violence, and that some people will die, people with the same color skin as me. I can accept that. But when it’s my father... That’s why I want to stay here for a bit. I need to sort all this out in my head.”

You mean you want to have a last visit with your father before your “comrades” assassinate him, I thought. But I didn’t say it. “When you get to London you’re not just going to study at the LSE are you?”

Zan shook her head.

We sat in silence for a while, watching the good burgers of Stellenbosch going about their errands. “Martha?”

“Yes?”

Zan gave me a nervous smile. “When I heard your name was on the list, it didn’t really bother me. But now it does: it bothers me a lot.”

I’ve enjoyed having Zan here, I’ll definitely miss her when she goes off to London. Perhaps she is right, it is best to forget. I still think it was the right thing to do to talk to Neels about Bernie Tunstall. I know she had told me about him in confidence, but how could I not have done something about it? He had, after all, seduced a fourteen-year-old girl. But it was that that marked the deterioration of our relationship. Bernie Tunstall was rich, well connected and smart enough to put up a convincing show of innocence. Penelope believed him rather than her daughter. Zan refused to make a statement to the police and then she was examined by a doctor who confirmed that she wasn’t a virgin. Penelope told the police that she thought Zan had been sleeping with boys, and Zan didn’t deny it. This made Neels even angrier. There was a custody battle for a year. Zan didn’t want to live with us, and Neels refused to let her go back to Penelope, so she spent the term-time at her boarding school and the vacations with her Uncle Hennie at his sheep farm in the Karoo. In the end she went back to Penelope. She still came to visit us occasionally, but she was always angry and surly, and her visits became increasingly awkward.

She swam fast, and I mean really fast. Then when she was seventeen and she beat the Olympic qualifying time, that was when she got really upset. Of course it wasn’t her fault she couldn’t go to the LA Olympics, it was just another consequence of apartheid and, as I told her, not the most important. She couldn’t swim in an international competition but at least she was treated like a human being in her own country, unlike 80 percent of the population. An obvious point, you would have thought, especially for a daughter of Cornelius van Zyl. But she didn’t accept it, she wouldn’t accept it. It was all the fault of the ignorant, narrow-minded Americans, of people like me. I was so angry. Of course I now realize that she was pushing me away, and this was the perfect way to do it. Well, she succeeded.

At about this time, no doubt egged on by Hennie and his family, she began to develop an interest in her Afrikaner heritage. Hennie always thought that Neels had betrayed his people, and he was anxious to take the opportunity to show Zan how a real God-fearing Afrikaner farming family lived. At first Neels was pleased. This country is split as much between English and Afrikaans speakers as between black and white. Zan was brought up entirely in the English-speaking education system. Neels is very proud of his Afrikaner ancestry, and I think what he regrets most about his skepticism about apartheid is the way it has forced him away from the language, the Church, the community and the rest of his family. He’s an outcast now among his own people. So when Zan started taking a serious interest in the language and reading van Wyk Louw and Malherbe for pleasure, he was thrilled. He was even more thrilled when she said she might go to an Afrikaans university. Of course he assumed she would try for a place at Stellenbosch, which is becoming more what the South Africans would call liberal, but I would call normal. But in the end Zan decided to apply to the new Rand Afrikaans University in Johannesburg to study history. Probably just to spite him.

We didn’t hear from her for nine months. Then she showed up at our door saying she had made a terrible mistake. She was shocked by the racists she had met at the university, and by the apartheid ideology that she was studying. The last straw was when she was out with a group of rugby-playing students who picked a fight one evening with an old black man, and left him broken and bleeding in the gutter. They all laughed about it. She wanted to get out.

Neels was relieved. She switched to the much more liberal English-speaking University of the Witwatersrand and became a changed woman, organizing demonstrations, writing articles in underground magazines, getting in trouble with the police. After university she stayed in Johannesburg, doing more or less the same thing, bumming around from temporary office job to temporary office job.

And now she’s going to London to do Christ-knows-what.

It occurred to me that there was a slight chance that the Laagerbond might be a secret anti-apartheid society. I told Zan about Havenga and Visser seeing Neels, but she has no idea what the Laagerbond is either. I think that was just wishful thinking on my part.

Neels has been in London for a couple of days now. It’s good to have him out of the house.

July 27

I’ve just had a visit from the security police. It hasn’t happened to me before. A polite young man came to the door in a coat and tie. When he saw Zan he said he wanted to talk to me in private. Doris made us cups of coffee and we sat and chatted about the garden. He likes the magnolias and the fynbos beds, and he wanted to know how old the oak tree by the front door is. Apparently Finneas and I are doing a good job.

He asked me how well I knew Libby Wiseman. When I told him quite well, he asked me whether I knew she was a member of the Communist Party. I professed shocked disbelief. I asked him whether she was banned, and he answered that she wasn’t but they were keeping a watchful eye on her. Then he said it wouldn’t be wise for a woman in my position to become too close to her.

“My position?” I said. “By ‘my position’ do you mean as the wife of a newspaper proprietor or a citizen of the United States.”

“Both,” the policeman replied. “We believe in the rule of law in this country, and we treat all citizens equally, whatever their nationality or marital status.”

I choked on my coffee as he said this. But I knew what he meant. He meant “watch out.”

Zan was anxious when he had gone. Naturally, she had assumed the policeman was here to talk about her. When I told her he hadn’t mentioned her she was relieved. She thought a moment and then asked me what he did want to talk to me about. I just smiled.

I started writing this with the smile still on my face. How exciting for my activities to be taken seriously enough for the security police to pay attention! But the more I think about it, the more worried I am becoming. I have never been visited before. That’s mostly because of the pact I made with Neels just after we got married, one I’ve stuck to for the past twenty years. I won’t get involved with “the struggle,” or “the cause.”

Neels always knew I would make my opinions known, but that was one of the reasons he married me. It didn’t take me long to get into trouble. It was just after we had gotten married and bought Hondehoek. Doris had been our maid for only a week. I was unfamiliar with the whole concept of domestic servants, especially those that wore uniforms, but Neels was adamant that we needed them to manage the house and garden. It turned out Doris and I hit it off straight away. On her third day I found her crying. Her brother had gotten into some kind of trouble with the police; he’d been found with some beer, and blacks were not allowed to drink alcohol then. She needed twenty rand to bail him out. She wasn’t asking me for the money, but I gave it to her, and she was embarrassingly grateful.

I was explaining this at a dinner party Neels and I had been invited to the following Saturday. The host was one of the most important businessmen in Cape Town, a pillar of the English-speaking community and a big advertiser. The hostess, who was a real Kaffir-basher, was shocked by my action. She said I was stupid to trust a maid, especially one I didn’t know, and I would be lucky to see that money again. In fact, Doris would probably disappear that very weekend. She implied that it was people like me that were responsible for the ill discipline and licentiousness among black South Africans.

I said that Doris looked trustworthy, and that even if she wasn’t, she and her brother could probably use the twenty rand better than I could. The hostess turned red; she didn’t like the fact that I was American and criticizing her country. They get so defensive.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “Your blacks are not like ours.”

“I don’t have any blacks. Neither do you,” I said.

She scowled. “Are you some kind of communist?”

“I would be happy to admit to being a communist if you’ll admit to being a Nazi,” I replied. Not exactly subtle.

Her jaw dropped. Then she turned to her husband. “Geoffrey! I won’t have this woman in my house. Can you see her out, please?”

Our husbands broke us up and we stayed at the table under a frosty truce until the coffee was served. Afterwards Neels gave me a lecture. He said it was quite simple: he couldn’t run his newspapers if I talked to people like that. He also said that it would compromise his position if I were seen with known radicals, black or white. I understood what he was saying. I had come totally to believe in his strategy for changing things. The work of the Mail and his other papers was too important for me to jeopardize for the sake of gestures which had no benefit beyond salving my conscience. Since then, I’ve pretty much stuck to the pact. I’ve been tempted over the years to help the cause; I’ve received tentative approaches from people, but I’ve always rebuffed them, and I’ve always explained why. Most people seem to understand. I guess I’ve thrown my energies into charities over the years: the literacy projects, the scholarships for black and colored students, and the clinics. I have made some small difference that way.

But now trouble has come looking for me. Is it really a result of my visit to Libby Wiseman, or is it Zan’s presence in our house? Perhaps it’s something to do with the Laagerbond. I assumed that I had Neels’s protection, but has he removed that now? I’m an American citizen. Doesn’t that make me untouchable? Or does it make me a spy?

I used to think violence and injustice happened to other people in this country. Perhaps they might happen to me.

I must be careful what I write in here.