Old people had a tendency to remember things that happened thirty years ago whenever they saw Popi. And to think of people she knew nothing about. For no one had ever given her any history lessons on the events that had shaped the town of Excelsior. She knew vaguely that there had been a scandal. Snippets of gossip about her origins had drifted her way throughout her twenty-nine years of existence. She never asked Niki anything about it and Niki never volunteered anything. Popi did not want to know. She was Pule’s child.
THEY SAY our mothers no longer want to talk about these things. Our mothers have learnt to live with themselves. Niki lives with the bees. She is immersed in them. She is immersed in serenity.
29. AN OLD LOVE AFFAIR
SOMEONE’S PORTRAIT. A much more naturalistic head in a battered black hat. Perhaps the trinity wants to show that his range extends beyond distorted figures. That he can paint real people. People who look like those we see in our daily lives. This face, however, is not likely to be seen in our daily lives. It belongs to the days of ox-wagons and trekkers. Although the man does not look at you directly, his eyes are deep and penetrating. The face is as weather-beaten as the hat, with deep furrows of wisdom roaming fervently across it. A black pipe hangs loosely over the white beard. A blue neckerchief appears above the collar of a heavy brown coat.
When Viliki was not immersed in the Seller of Songs, he visited Adam de Vries at his office to engage in what de Vries quaintly called “chewing the fat”.
Viliki walked into the reception room and looked at the portrait of the lawyer’s bearded ancestor that hung on the wall next to a flag of the old South Africa. He was a regular visitor to this office, yet he always wondered why de Vries displayed this painful flag when he professed to be of the new South Africa. In fact, he actually claimed that he had brought about the new South Africa. He often told Viliki about a congress he had once attended in 1982 in Marquard, another eastern Free State town thirty-four kilometers north of Clocolan. He had been one of the 260 delegates of the National Party. He could see the waves of the right-wing, he said. He had bravely stood up and told the congress that the government had no option but to negotiate with the Movement and unban it.
“They nearly crucified me,” said de Vries, obviously enjoying the memory. “It was long before people like EW. de Klerk came onto the scene and released Mandela. In fact, in those days de Klerk was one of the right-wingers. I referred the delegates to the Bible and they could have eaten me alive. I told them that in the Bible the Lord often punished His people. He often used heathens to punish His people. ‘The Lord may punish us too,’ I said. ‘The Lord may use the Movement to punish us.’ ”
Viliki sat on a bench under a bold sign with the dictum: A customer is always right. Sometimes confused, misinformed, rude, stubborn, changeable and even downright stupid. But never wrong!!! And then a picture of a donkey sitting human-style on a stool.
Adam de Vries’s white-haired prim and proper secretary was typing something on a rickety typewriter at a small desk behind the long reception counter. After a while, she noticed him.
“You know that Mr de Vries is busy,” she said in her school-marmish voice. “You like to visit him during office hours. He is not idle like you town councillors, you know. He has clients to attend to.”
“I’ll wait until he’s free,” said Viliki, raising his voice so that it would sneak into Adam de Vries’s office.
“Is that Viliki?” shouted Adam de Vries from his office. “Tell him I’ll be with him just now.”
Viliki contemplated the portrait on the wall. The old codger was stern-faced. And pensive. Yet Viliki imagined him bursting into laughter. A long self-fulfilled laughter. Until tears ran down the furrows of his salty face. A laughter of sorrow. But the ancestor remained unmoved. And stared as he had been staring over the years.
A young Afrikaner woman in blue denim jeans and her son of about four, walked out of Adam de Vries’s office. She greeted Viliki in the polite singsong voice of Basotho women, “Dumelang.” Viliki responded, “Dumela le wena, mme.” Greetings to you too, mother.
In Sesotho, every woman is “mother”. Even when she is younger than your younger sister.
“You can come in now, Viliki,” shouted Adam de Vries.
Viliki looked at the schoolmarm and gave her a triumphant smirk. She frowned and went back to pounding the keys of the old Remington typewriter. He walked into the office. Adam de Vries pointed him to a chair.
“Divorce,” he said. “I don’t know what is happening with young people these days. They marry today, and the next day they part. I hate handling divorce cases, especially when the custody of children is involved.”
“I thought lawyers didn’t get their personal feelings mixed up with business,” said Viliki.
“Lawyers are human beings too.”
“Lawyers have no scruples, Meneer. They defend anyone who can pay.”
“A person is innocent until proven guilty by a court of law, Viliki,” explained Adam de Vries. “When a lawyer takes your case, at that stage you are innocent. Only a court of law can determine otherwise. And it does so only after the case.”
Viliki had no answer for this. Somehow it did not sound right. But Adam de Vries had a way of twisting things so that he did not know how to respond. He decided to be wicked. To provoke him about his professed role in the anti-apartheid struggle.
“Hey Meneer, at your congress in Marquard so many years ago, what made you suggest that your people should negotiate with the heathens?”
“I was merely quoting the Bible when I talked of heathens,” said Adam de Vries defensively. “You are not going to take me to the Human Rights Commission for racism, are you?”
“Well,” said Viliki light-heartedly, “I can call them heathens too as they kicked me out of my own Movement. But what I want to know is, what created your doubts about apartheid?”
“I think they had their genesis in the Immorality Act case of 1971,” said Adam de Vries. “I began to question some of our laws.”
Adam de Vries had boasted about his old cases to Viliki before. Including the case of the Excelsior 19. And Viliki did not mind when this case was discussed, even though his mother had been one of the accused. He even joked that had it not been for the capers of those days, he would not have had a sister as beautiful as Popi.
It was obvious to Viliki that Adam de Vries was a bored man. He looked back with nostalgia to the days when he handled some of the most exciting cases of Excelsior. Today most of his business involved what he called chamber work, drawing up wills and transfer deeds. A little bit of conveyancing here; a little bit of notarial work there. Once in a while, the odd divorce case, for which he normally briefed advocates in Bloemfontein. The days of courtroom drama were gone. He could only relive them in his stories to Viliki.
“Yes, that was the greatest case of all time,” said Adam de Vries. “But I tell you, Viliki, those women were bribed to frame the white men.”
“And I suppose their children made themselves,” said Viliki, without any enthusiasm. He had heard this version of the Excelsior 19 case so many times that he was prepared to let it pass.
“But I tell you, we were ready for them,” continued Adam de Vries, ignoring Viliki’s comment. “We were going to win that case. It was going to be very bad for the country. That was why John Vorster instructed Percy Yutar to withdraw the case.”