I was struck by the intimacy of his racial obsession. His prejudice was a passion. It caused him an exquisite sort of pain, like worrying a loose tooth with your tongue or scratching a mosquito bite until it bleeds.
In the mirror of his stories, however, the perspective was reversed. While he was always hurting someone, doing harm and causing trouble, he saw himself as the victim. All these people he didn’t like, these inferior creatures among whom he was forced to live, made him miserable. It was he who suffered. I understand this better now than I did then. At the time, I was trying to grasp my own part in the machinery of power and more often than not I misjudged the mechanism. Seid Sand, nicht das Öl im Getriebe der Welt, my friend Sabine had told me. Seid unbequem. Be troublesome. Be sand, not oil in the workings of the world. Sand? Must I be ground down to nothing? Should I let myself be milled? It was abject. Surely one could be a spanner in the works rather than a handful of dust? I’d rather be a hammer than a nail.
These thoughts were driven from my mind by Louis’s suffering face, the downturned lips, the wincing eyes. Even his crispy hair looked hurt. You could see it squirming as he combed it in the mornings, gazing mournfully at his face in the shaving mirror.
I could have shouted at him. ‘Look around you! See how privileged we are. We’ve all eaten ourselves sick, just look at the debris, paper plates full of bones and peels, crumpled serviettes and balls of foil, bloody juices. And yet we haven’t made a dent in the supply.’ The dish on the edge of the fire was full of meat, thick chops and coils of wors soldered to the stainless steel with grease. The fat of the land was still sizzling on the blackened bars of the grill. You would think the feast was about to begin.
I knew what had produced this excess. Through the leaves of the hedge, light gleamed on the bonnet of Louis’s new Corolla, sitting in his driveway like an enormous piece of evidence.
I should have challenged him to play the Beerhunter. We were drunk enough by then and he had the face for it. Instead, I decided to argue with him, as if we had just come out of a seminar with Professor Sherman and were debating some point in Marx on the library lawns. The details escape me now, they’re not important. Racialized capital, the means of production, the operation of the military-industrial complex, I was full of it. ‘Just imagine,’ I remember saying, ‘that you’ve worked all your life down a bloody gold mine and you still can’t afford to put food on the table for your family. Can you imagine? No you can’t. That’s the problem.’
‘The commies at Wits have spoken a hole in your head,’ was the gist of his reply. ‘What do you know about the world? When you’ve lived a bit, seen a few things, you’ll know better. If your black brothers ever get hold of this country, they’ll run it into the ground. It’s happened everywhere in Africa.’
My father cracked a few jokes and tried to change the subject. When that failed, he gave me a pointed look, a stare that seemed to stretch out his features and make his nose long and sharp. It was the look he used to give me as a boy when I wouldn’t listen. Go to your room, it said. Now. Before I lose my temper.
We went from calling each other names to pushing and shoving like schoolboys behind the bicycle sheds. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Netta getting to her feet and my mother turning in her chair to see what the commotion was about.
Louis had what Jaco liked to call a donner my gesig. His sorry mug was begging to be hit. I would have done it, I suppose. Apparently I raised the beer bottle like a club. But before I could go further, my father slapped me hard through the face. One blow was all it took to knock the world back into order. Louis straightened his shirt and his mouth. I was told to apologize, which I did. We shook hands.
Then, in fact, I went to my room.
On the way, I stopped in the bathroom to splash my face with cold water. There was a red mark on my jaw. My father was all talk when it came to discipline. He would unbuckle his belt and say, ‘Do you want me to give you a hiding?’ Don’t be ridiculous. He had never raised a hand to me. That he had hit me at all was as shocking as the blow itself. I found the shapes of his fingers on my cheek like the map of a new country.
The Van Huyssteens stayed for coffee, to avoid the implication that the whole day had been a catastrophe. Later, I heard them gathering up the sleeping children, Ag shame and Oh sweet, and going down the driveway. It was the last time they ever set foot in my parents’ house.
Voices rumbled in the kitchen. Then my father came into my room.
I was still a little drunk or perhaps I was drunk again. The room was drifting, and so I stayed where I was on my bed, with my hands behind my neck, insolent. I was ready to be furious, but the look on his face made it impossible.
‘I’m sorry, my boy,’ he said.
‘It’s okay.’
‘You understand that I had to do this? I couldn’t have you hitting a visitor in this house.’
‘Ja.’
‘You were spoiling for a fight.’
Spoiling. To spoil for a fight. What exactly does it mean?
‘I had to hit someone.’
‘Then you should have hit him,’ I said. ‘He was asking for it. Fucking fascist.’
I imagine the expletive was more surprising to my father than the political persuasion, which I had been bandying about lately.
‘Perhaps. But you don’t settle your differences with your fists. Not under this roof.’
We spoke a bit longer. My father made a joke about watching your step around Afrikaners with law degrees. Never klap a BJuris! Finally, he reached out to show me something in his palm. It was a moment before I understood the gesture. When I stood up to take his hand, I saw that there were tears in his eyes.
My father’s remorse lasted for a week. Then one evening he called me into his study, sat me down in the chair facing his desk as if I were a sales rep who’d pranged the company car, and read me the Riot Act.
My argument with Louis had given him the jitters. The family motto had always been: ‘Don’t rock the boat.’ He was worried, although he did not express it in so many words, that I would get involved in politics, that I would fall in with the wrong crowd. There was really little danger of that. Politics confounded me. The student politicians I had encountered were full of alarming certitudes. By comparison, my own position was always wavering. I was too easily drawn to the other person’s side. Half the time I was trying to convince myself, through my posturing, that I knew what I was talking about, that I got it.
I went to demonstrations against detention without trial, the pass laws, forced removals. I helped to scrawl slogans on sheets of cardboard and carry them over to Jan Smuts Avenue. But then I hung back, making sure there were two or three students to hide behind. My girlfriend Linda was always in front; her parents were proud of her for doing these things. I was not made for the front line. The police on the opposite kerb scared me, it’s true, but I was more afraid of the men with cameras and flashguns. I did not want to see my photograph in the security police files. More importantly, I did not want to see it, I did not want anyone else to see it, on the front page of the Rand Daily Mail.