The Classifier Read online

  THE CLASSIFIER

  ALSO BY WESSEL EBERSOHN:

  A Lonely Place to Die, 1979

  The Centurion, 1980

  Store up the Anger, 1980

  Divide the Night, 1981

  The Otter and Mr Ogilvie, 1987

  Klara’s Visitors, 1988

  Closed Circle, 1990

  In Touching Distance, 2004

  The October Killings, 2009

  Those Who Love Night, 2010

  WESSEL EBERSOHN

  The Classifier

  This story is a work of fiction. Apart from historical events like the 1974 revolution in Mozambique and public figures like the Progressive Federal Party’s Harry Pitman, the events and characters are all products of the writer’s imagination.

  Published in 2011 by Umuzi

  an imprint of Random House Struik (Pty) Ltd

  Company Reg No 1966/003153/07

  80 McKenzie Street, Cape Town 8001, South Africa

  PO Box 1144, Cape Town 8000, South Africa

  [email protected]

  www.randomstruik.co.za

  © 2011 Wessel Ebersohn

  www.wesselebersohn.com

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or be stored in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-4152-0151-0 (Print)

  ISBN 978-1-4152-0215-9 (e PUB)

  ISBN 978-1-4152-0216-6 (PDF)

  Cover design by publicide

  Author photograph by Michelle du Pisani

  Text design by William Dicey

  Set in Minion

  To Miriam

  For more than thirty years you have been asking me when I was going to write it. During all that time, everything that has eventually led to its writing was too close, too overwhelming. There was simply too much of it for me to deal with.

  Finally, there does seem to be the distance that makes it possible to write this story. I am at last able to accommodate some of it without drowning.

  Many books contain acknowledgements that the work could not have been completed without the help of this one or that one. This book could not even have been conceived without you. It is your story. In it, I have put everything that I have: such ability as I possess, my determination to tell the story at last, and my love. They are all I have to give. I give them to you.

  CONTENTS

  Part 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part 2

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Part 3

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  PART ONE

  sublime deceptions

  ‘And as freedom is counted among the most sublime feelings, so the corresponding deceptions are the most sublime.’

  – FRANZ KAFKA

  one

  I WAS ELEVEN YEARS OLD before I realised for the first time that there was something unusual about my father’s occupation. But it took all of another two years before I had a clear idea of what it was that he did to feed and clothe our family.

  I remember clearly the first time the matter arose. My cousin, Abraham, had told me, full of pride, that his father had been promoted and he was now second in command in the harbour master’s office. Abraham lived just a block from us and went to the same school as I did. If anyone ever asked, I told them he was my best friend in the world. Uncle Stefan, his father, was my father’s brother.

  Because our fathers rarely competed with each other, Abraham and I did on their behalf. His announcement about his father’s promotion had been said in the singularly smug, self-satisfied way that Abraham often had. I had no idea how elevated the rank of second in command in the harbour master’s office was, but I knew Uncle Stefan worked in a small brick building at the harbour, down among the warehouses. My father, on the other hand, worked in a big building in town. It did not seem to me that you could be that important if you worked in one of those old brick buildings down at the harbour. Important people, I thought, worked in more elegant buildings in town.

  Two other boys had been present and they both looked impressed by Uncle Stefan’s new position. You have to understand that I loved and admired Uncle Stefan almost as much as I loved my own father, but to let Abraham get away with his boast had been out of the question. I told him that my father’s work was much more important than second in command in the harbour master’s office.

  ‘What does Uncle Bernard do that’s more important?’ Abraham challenged me.

  The truth was that I did not know. ‘You’d be surprised. You’d be very surprised,’ I said and walked away.

  That night I asked my father what he did for a living and whether it was important.

  He was a tall man with a hollow-cheeked face, forty-eight years old and going grey. At home he said little and what he did say was usually to my mother. He rarely spoke either to me or to my sisters. He often did not even respond when one of us tried to engage him in conversation. This time was different. He had been reading the newspaper in our living room. He slowly lowered the paper to his lap and looked at me. ‘I am the head of the Natal race classification office,’ he said. ‘And it is very important work. It is the most important work in the country.’

  I was delighted to hear that, but I needed more if I was to deal with Abraham’s challenge. ‘What does Pa do actually?’ I asked.

  ‘What I do is the thing that keeps our people safe,’ he said. ‘I will explain it to you one of these days, when I feel that you are big enough.’

  The next day I told Abraham what my father did and how important it was and how he was the head of it, not the second in command. ‘But what does Uncle Bernard do actually?’ Abraham asked, using almost exactly the same words that I had.

  ‘It keeps our people safe,’ I said.

  The day after that, at rugby practice, Abraham came up to me during a five-minute rest break. ‘I asked my father about what Uncle Bernard does and he said he wouldn’t do that no matter how much money you paid him.’

  ‘That’s because it’s hard,’ I said.

  We were interrupted when the whistle blew and Mister Baker, the un
der-twelve rugby coach, started us doing twenty-metre sprints down the length of the field. Neither of us ever raised the matter again. Perhaps we left it alone, because neither of us was sure of winning the argument.

  I have often wondered about childhood memories, asking myself if what we remember is what actually happened, or whether it is our nature to create stories that suit us better than reality does. And yet, revisiting my memories to write the notes on which to base this book, I wonder why I could not have rebuilt the past in a way that reflected more credit on myself. I would have preferred that. On the other hand, seeking only to remember, not to create, some portion of reality may just have slipped through.

  The argument about our fathers’ occupations returned to me just a few months ago, awoken, I think, by the visit of two kids collecting for some inner-city school’s sports programme. I had not expected a visit of that sort, living as I do on the edge of town. I had chosen the house because of the clear view of the bay from my study window. The problems of inner-city kids seemed something belonging to a distant planet. I had been content to leave them there.

  I did not even allow my young visitors to finish their pitch. I remember the girl saying, ‘We’re from around here, but our school has a special relationship with theirs. We collect for projects …’ The cheque was hurriedly written and they were sent on their way. I barely heard their thanks. ‘Great, mister. That’s generous.’

  Gratitude was not something I was looking for and generosity did not come into it. All I wanted was to get rid of them.

  The two of them, probably a brother and sister, were the colour of a glass of milk to which had been added coffee of perhaps a quarter of the total volume. The effect was of skin that glowed with a warm olive light. The girl had a boyish figure and a direct, uncomplicated way of looking at you that for many years have resided in my memories. Only the hair was wrong. Both children had neat, close-cropped black curls. One parent of European, the other of African extraction, I thought. Then I cleared my mind of the pair of them.

  I avoided watching them go down the path. After all this time my cowardice, if that is what it is, seems ridiculous. The fact is that I want no dealings with those children, not after my flight has brought me to this place. The writing that occupies my evenings is enough. Ever since I started work on this project, I have been visited by memories of things that should have been long forgotten. Now they are returning to me in such a flood that I would rather have avoided the stimulus these children provided.

  After they had left, I signed my name in the margin of the town newspaper a few times and looked at it, something I have done perhaps a thousand times in the last fifteen years. Christopher Foster. It still looks alien to me.

  I believe that many people would like to start life afresh, but that few have the opportunity, and still fewer the courage or the resources. I did not delude myself that I possessed unusual courage or even that I had seized an opportunity. It seemed, rather, that I had simply not resisted. I had allowed the current to carry me away and it had brought me to this place.

  In that respect, I am one of the lucky ones. Over the years in business I had built up the resources that made flight not just possible, but comfortable too. I was able to walk away from everything that had gone before. I tell myself every day that I am free to structure my life anew, employing the accumulated experience – I will not use the word wisdom – of the almost fifty years of my life.

  The woman is gone, and the boy with her. We no longer even live on the same continent. And I am free, I tell myself.

  I bought the house overlooking the bay because of the sense of peace that I feel in it. It should be a recipe for contentment.

  two

  Growing up where I did was wonderful. For any boy, the area surrounding our house was a never-ending source of adventure.

  We had neighbours on two sides, a graveyard that spread over perhaps a hundred acres out the back and a brickworks down the road. Those two establishments, a graveyard and a brickworks, may not sound very exciting, but if you knew them the way we got to know them, they were every boy’s dream.

  The posts of our fence that bordered the graveyard had long since rotted away and the barbed wire rusted until only the occasional strand remained. The result was that, if you ran down the path that led from our garage, between the banana palms, you did not even have to slow down at our fence line. You had to watch out for a possible strand of barbed wire that may get in the way, but a well-timed jump always took you clear.

  There were plenty of good things about the graveyard. In the day time there were wonderful places to hide. All you had to do was stay away from the hoboes. The boys at school said there was a case of them doing things to a girl from our school in the bamboo, then cutting her throat and delivering the body back to her parents’ doorstep. I told my father and he said he had lived in our house for nearly thirty years and that such a thing had not happened in those years and he had never heard of it happening before our family moved into the neighbourhood. ‘Your friends have too much imagination,’ he said.

  We knew the cemetery well. One of the best things about it was walking through it at night, especially on a windy night. Sometimes Michie, Annie and I would walk through it on the way home from the Friday-night movie at the sports club, and then come up our yard through the banana palms.

  An avenue of cypresses led from the main gate of the cemetery in the direction of our back fence. On a windy night, when the moon was shining, the trees twisted and danced, throwing terrifying shadows across the graves. Our private test of bravery on such a night was to walk slowly through the avenue of cypresses without looking back. The first to run was a coward and the last was the winner. Neither Michie nor I ever managed more than about one-tenth of the way from the gate to the back door of our house. The furthest any of us ever got, was when Annie made it halfway down the cypress avenue before she started running. At least, she told us, she had got that far. Michie and I were already safe from the graveyard’s spirits at home in our mother’s kitchen by then.

  It was only after I left Durban that I discovered that winter was cold in other places. My home town has no real winters. Summers are hot and so humid that on some nights you can be covered in sweat while doing nothing more than playing cards. On winter days you rarely needed a cardigan. On the coldest nights you sleep under just one blanket.

  From the bottom of our backyard you could see the first line of the cane that ran almost all the way to our border with Mozambique, some four hundred kilometres away. In the dense cane plantations the cane rats grew to the size of cats, the boys at school said. It was common knowledge among my schoolmates that they would start eating you if you fell asleep in the cane. The pythons that fed off them also lived in the cane. They grew thicker than the body of a junior-school child, and would squeeze you to death and eat you if they caught you.

  And then there was the brickworks. Never let anyone tell you that a brickworks is not a suitable place for adventure. The first thing about it was the monkey man whose job it was to guard it. He was a tribal Zulu who could speak only his own language. He carried a club nearly two metres long and thick at one end. The boys at school said he cracked open the skulls of monkeys with it and ate them. If he caught you, he would do the same with you. No one I knew had ever actually seen him kill or eat a monkey, but we all knew it to be true.

  His presence in the brickworks made going there all the more exciting. If you came round a corner and he was approaching, perhaps no more than twenty or thirty paces away, you had to turn and dash into the works where you could hide among the machinery, into the graveyard bush where you could easily lose him, or up the side of the brickworks quarry where he never followed.

  On most days he was not around though, at least not where we could see him. On reflection, I doubt that he tried very hard to catch us. Seeing us running was enough to assert his authority and he probably had instructions not to hurt any of the neighbourhood kids.

 
; The quarry was better than any part of the brickworks itself. By the time I was big enough to be interested in it, maybe six or seven, the work in the quarry had long been discontinued. Moss, grass and straggling bushes were growing up its red clay sides. Down in the bottom it had filled with water. On one side a cluster of avocado trees provided nesting for dozens of ibises. In the late afternoon they would come gliding in, their wild cries echoing over the surrounding rooftops.

  A raft, that Abraham and I often swam out to, had been moored in the centre of the little lake that had formed at the bottom of the quarry. He told me the water was one hundred metres deep, the deepest lake in Africa. I never considered that the raft was moored to the bottom and that it was unlikely that whoever moored it had used a one-hundred-metre rope or that there must certainly be lakes in Africa that were deeper.

  Although the quarry was the most wonderful place at that age, if you climbed up its steep sides, you were covered in red clay from head to toe by the time you got to the top. ‘I don’t mind,’ my father told me. ‘I like to see Afrikaner boys behave like boys. Just see that you always wear old clothes.’

  Uncle Stefan also did not seem to mind. Our mothers sometimes shouted at us because they had to wash a special load of clothes we wore at the quarry. If they put anything else in the machine with our quarry clothes, it came out the same red as the clay.

  Not everyone agreed that climbing the clay sides of the quarry was harmless though. Abraham’s Auntie Fleur, who had years before been married to his mother’s brother, was a case in point. When Abraham and I were about nine or ten, she came to visit from Pietermaritzburg and brought her two sons. She was the only adult I met in the first fifteen years of my life who was divorced. ‘It’s not surprising,’ Uncle Stefan said. ‘It can’t be easy being married to a fashion mannequin.’ She and the boys were always carefully dressed, as if they were on their way to church. I never once saw either of the boys without a tie, even after school and on weekends.

  She was older than Mama – much older, Mama said – but she always walked as if everyone was watching her and admiring her style. And she was thin, like a fashion model is supposed to be, very thin. Uncle Stefan said that she was like a rock lobster – you would have to break the bone to get to the meat.