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.