The crowd, to my amazement, complied with my instruction and five or six ladies of more advanced years boarded solemnly. None thanked me for my chivalry. Then, meaning to say, ‘Now the younger ladies’, I suddenly realised in a panic that my limited German vocabulary didn’t stretch that far. So I said, with all the authority and brevity that I could muster, ‘Nun, die jungen Frauen!’
To my astonishment, ten or so young ladies detached themselves from the stunned crowd and climbed the stairs onto the bus. The first nine didn’t even acknowledge me, but the tenth, whose derriere I was lecherously ogling as she boarded, did. As she reached the top of the stairs she turned around to me and said, ‘Thank you, kind sir. Thank you very much.’
For the second time in the past 72 hours, I was totally smitten. I was absolutely certain that this vision of perfection must be Jacqueline Bisset, the beautiful English actress whom I’d loved passionately for years since seeing her, five times, as the pregnant air hostess in Airport, or at least her identical twin sister.
Her name, however, was Atie Hofstra and she was from Rotterdam.
I was suddenly floating, dazed. I banged my shins only twice on the steel steps in the stairwell as I followed Atie at what I imagined to be a discreet distance as she looked for a vacant perch, until she stopped to sit down and I clattered into her. Her blonde-framed head snapped around, momentarily irked by the klutzical (but completely unintentional and barely discernible) collision of my head with the small of her back. But then, seeing it was me, her expression immediately softened and she gestured for me to share the seat with her.
Atie was in her late twenties and worked as an international exchange operator at the European Telephone Exchange in Rotterdam. She was also a recruiter for Amnesty International, which happened to be an organisation that didn’t much like what my employer, the SADF, was doing in southern Africa. Amnesty International was also actively and intensively involved in the burgeoning global anti-apartheid movement. Thus, the groundwork was laid for a brief and electrically charged relationship between a beautiful and unapologetic idealist on the one side and a transient and careless temporary combat escapee on the other.
From that first moment, Atie subjected me to a never-ending barrage of questions. Interested, intelligent and considered questions, which, for me to answer even at a surface level, required that I look below the veneer at who I was, and what I would continue to be involved with, when I returned home in just a few short weeks.
I instinctively sensed that this was an arena that I didn’t have the slightest interest in entering, but I also sensed that revealing my mindset honestly to Atie would have jeopardised our relationship, something to which I was even more averse. So, her unrelenting drive for answers and my determined dodging of her questions – a 24-hour-a-day game of cut and thrust, countered by parry and block – became the order of the day in the Stubaital for the next week.
Sleep became superfluous as we skied the days away. Atie was a real expert and a talented tutor and passed on to me a wealth of winter sport skills that largely prevented me from falling more than one or two thousand times a day.
Such was the intensity of our interaction that one moment we would be gliding along laughing uproariously at some antic or other and the next she’d be pelting me with snowballs from frustration at my eluding her latest probing inquiry. It would particularly infuriate her when she’d ask a penetrating question aimed at revealing some emotion I was suppressing, according to her, and I’d evade by ‘singing’ the Beatles’ ‘We all live in a mellow submarine!’ or ‘Eight ways a week!’ at the top of my voice.
I was sitting at a bar counter one evening, waiting for her to join me, when a complete stranger sat down next to me and engaged me in conversation. I noticed that he had a southern African accent. He said that he was the owner of a tour company in the area, was originally Rhodesian, and had moved to Innsbruck five years previously. He seemed to know quite a bit about me, which I found a little odd but put it down to the fact that I’d been in Neustift for about a week at that stage and hadn’t been shy in engaging with locals and tourists alike.
He quickly got to the point. He ‘strongly advised’ me to consider coming to work for his company in Austria and abandoning my life back home. He went on to say, correctly, that South Africa was becoming a pariah state, and that my personal involvement in the SADF would not stand me in good stead in the future.
He suggested that, if I looked at things carefully, I would see that my visit to Neustift could be viewed in the same light as St Paul’s epiphany on the road to Damascus. I knew who St Paul was, but I didn’t know what the true meaning of ‘epiphany’ was. I thought it meant ‘gift’. As a consequence, our conversation began to go downhill. As is my nature when I am nervous or unsettled, and to hide my ignorance, I told him a joke about St Paul meeting a drunk and driving him home. Irritated and exasperated by what he must have perceived as my disinterest and flippancy, he left. It was only many years later that I began to wonder if there was perhaps a connection between Atie and him…
The day after Atie left to go back home to Rotterdam, our tour leader invited all the members of the tour to attend an après-ski (after-ski) cocktail party for a visiting group of South African travel agents who were passing through Neustift.
The conditions in an Austrian ski resort in early 1980 were the absolute antithesis of those on the Border. As such, it would seem reasonable to assume that there could surely not be any possible connection between the two places, situated as they were many thousands of kilometres apart.
As I walked into the gathering, still suffering from a degree of separation-from-Atie anxiety, I was instantly drawn to, and locked eyes with, a beautiful woman standing across the room. Her long curly auburn hair caught the last beams of the setting sun filtering through the window. She was a vision of loveliness.
Trying desperately to regain my composure and not fluff my unrehearsed lines, I made my way across to her and introduced myself. Within seconds, the world and the people surrounding the two of us ceased to exist as we became engrossed in one another’s presence. How long we stood there, oblivious to the outside world, I do not know. Then, at the outer peripherals of both my vision and my hearing, I became vaguely aware that the tour leader had located a microphone and had begun to address the attendees. After welcoming the visitors, he introduced the members of our touring party to the travel agents.
‘Over there,’ he said pointing out the individuals one by one ‘is Deborah, an accountant from Toronto, Canada. And to her left with the red Heidi-hat is Willy, a farmer from Auckland, New Zealand.’
I was drowning in my newfound soul mate’s spectacular eyes, and was still only vaguely aware of the proceedings, when the tour leader said, ‘And there, with that moggy grin on his face is Steve, an Air Force helicopter pilot from Pretoria, South Africa!’
I vividly recall how she jumped back, as if I’d struck her, and stood glaring murderously at me. Then, finding her voice, she screamed, ‘You’re a what?’
All conversation in the room instantly ceased, and before I had the chance to answer, the stunned tour leader stammered, ‘He’s a… a S-S-S… South African Air Force chopper pilot.’
‘Do you know Gary Harper?’[1] screeched my rapidly retreating dream girl at me.