The Classifier Read online

  Mama was also the one who saw to it that we went on plenty of family outings: picnics, visits to the beach or the movies, anything as long as the whole family went. I think without her we would have all gone our separate ways long before we eventually did.

  But while Mama was the centre of the family, for me my father was the single most important person in the world. Everything he said was wise and true, except that he seldom said anything to me. On the few occasions when I had asked him a question, he had answered in vague terms, seemingly losing interest before his explanation was complete.

  During the year in which I turned thirteen, The Magnificent Seven was shown at the sports club. In my mind, my father was Yul Brynner subduing the marauding bandits who were terrorising the poor villagers. They also showed The Great Escape and there he was Steve McQueen on his motorcycle, racing fearlessly across the German hillsides to avoid capture.

  That is the way I had always seen him. I saw nothing strange in the way he went into my parents’ bedroom every evening long before Mama and closed the door. On a few occasions when Mama was going in or coming out, I had caught a glance of him sitting in his favourite armchair, glass in hand, staring out of the window through eyes that, I was sure, saw nothing.

  To me, that was simply the way fathers behaved. I came to accept that the door that led to him was closed. It was only much later that I realised that I was never going to be allowed on the other side of that door.

  Uncle Stefan was quite different. So, presumably, uncles were not the same as fathers.

  My father did dine with us at the same table though. I once overheard him asking Mama to serve his food in the bedroom and was surprised to hear her refuse. She rarely refused him anything. ‘No,’ she had said. ‘You know that I do everything you want of me, but we are a family and we eat together.’

  On most evenings he ate his food in silence. He did not mind our talking and I saw no hostility in him, but I always had the feeling that, while the rest of us were in each other’s company, he was alone. It made no real difference that he sat down at the dinner table with us. Mama might as well have fed him in the bedroom as he had asked.

  It had been a rare occasion when, trying to counter Abraham’s claim of Uncle Stefan’s new importance, I asked my father what he did for a living and he seemed ready to answer. I had been satisfied, no, delighted, by his saying that he was head of Natal’s race classification office. I had no idea what race classification was, but he was the head of it.

  So it was with great interest that I listened to him telling my mother that he was going to be away for a few days. He had to go to Pretoria to attend a course on the scientific basis for race classification. ‘If our overseas critics are honest enough to look at the matter without prejudice, this will show them the truth,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t think we will get much sympathy from overseas people,’ Mama said. ‘They don’t understand Africa.’

  ‘Perhaps we will get more sympathy than we think. Head office has made an important decision. We are now going to call our office Population Registration, instead of Race Classification. It is, after all, not a racial thing. It is just a question of those who belong together being kept on their own registers, so that they can live together.’

  ‘What does Papa do, actually?’ I asked him. ‘Can Papa tell me?’

  He looked at me, as if he were surprised by the question. Then he leant towards me and spoke earnestly. ‘It is my work to see that other people who are not white don’t pretend to be white. We are not being cruel to them. We just keep them in their own communities, where they belong, for their sake and for ours.’

  It was the closest I had ever come to making genuine, personal contact with him and I wanted more. But before I could ask him to explain further, Michie spoke, ‘All the girls at school are getting boob tubes,’ she said. ‘Can I have one?’

  ‘What about me?’ Annie said.

  ‘You’re too small,’ Michie sneered. ‘You’ve got no boobs.’

  ‘You’ve only got cherries yourself.’

  ‘Well, you’ve only got cherry pits. Can I have a boob tube, Mama?’

  My sisters had distracted me. I looked back at my father, but the moment had passed and he had again retreated to the place that he normally occupied, well out of reach.

  ‘Why?’ I tried to ask. ‘Why do they pretend to be white when they aren’t?’

  His eyes flickered in my direction, but he was no longer listening. He finished his food and, without waiting for coffee, left the table and went to the bedroom.

  four

  In my early teenage years a tiny flea market was held every Saturday on the open ground between the Durban North public swimming pool and the road to Umhlanga Rocks. The flea market consisted of just one row of perhaps thirty or forty stalls. Anyone who had something to sell, could get a licence from the council to set up a stall. There were people who sold pottery they had made themselves, pictures they had painted, jerseys they had knitted, battered-looking second-hand items the original owners no longer had use for, or almost anything else.

  A man who lived a street away from us sold old radios he had repaired and a lady from our church sold decorative candles she made herself. The father of a boy from our street by the name of Cecil made wooden furniture in his garage. Cecil would man his father’s stand, selling camping chairs, coffee tables, magazine stands and so on. He always said that they did not need the money, that his father just did it as a hobby. But I doubted that. If they did not need the money, I wondered, why did Cecil need to be at the flea market every week?

  It was not only people from Red Hill who had stalls at the flea market. Cutting through the part of Durban north of the Umgeni River, was the Old North Coast Road that led to the Zulu township of KwaMashu, as well as a number of Indian townships like Phoenix, Tongaat and Verulam. Red Hill, where we lived, was one of the suburbs on the side of the Old North Coast Road closer to the sea. Directly opposite, on the other side of the road, was Greenwood Park, a coloured suburb. Among the people who had stalls at the flea market were a few from Greenwood Park, and others from the Indian townships.

  At the age of no more than six, I had approached Mama for clarity on all the different kinds of human beings that surrounded us. ‘The people who live in KwaMashu are Zulus,’ I asked, ‘like the ones we conquered at the Battle of Blood River?’

  At school I had been told about the Battle of Blood River on more than one occasion. I pictured in my mind many times how the hordes of Zulus had swooped down on the small band of boer men, women and children who had fought heroically and turned back the barbarians. By the time it was over, the river, that must have had a different name before, was running red with the blood of the savages. It served them right, I thought. They would know better than to attack Christians in future.

  ‘That’s right,’ Mama had said. She had been replanting orchids in bigger pots and stopped her work to answer. ‘The people in KwaMashu are Zulus, just like the ones our Voortrekkers fought.’

  ‘That’s why it’s our country now, not theirs?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘And the Indians, they came from India to live in our country?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did they ask our permission before they came?’

  ‘I don’t know, Chrissie. It happened before I was born.’

  ‘And the people in Greenwood Park, they are the coloureds. Where did they come from?’

  ‘They didn’t come from anywhere. They’ve always been here.’

  ‘Like us?’

  Mama reached out a dusty hand and ruffled my hair. ‘Something like that,’ she said.

  But I wanted to understand. ‘So Greenwood Park is their place and Red Hill is our place?’

  ‘Chrissie, don’t worry about this sort of thing now. When you’re bigger you’ll understand it all.’

  Well, I was thirteen and much bigger when I saw Ruthie at her family’s flea market stall for the first time. By now I
knew that our people had not always been there, but had come from Europe. I still understood little about the other inhabitants of our country and almost nothing about the people of Greenwood Park.

  When I first saw Ruthie, she was, I realise now, not a particularly striking girl. She was the same age as me, perhaps a little below average height, while I was tall. Her face tended towards leanness and she stooped a little as she hurried around the stall serving customers. She did have some characteristics that you could not help noticing though. Her eyes were big and very dark, as if there were no irises, just very large pupils. She had long black hair that hung down to below her shoulders, curling only slightly towards the tips. Her skin was smooth, almost translucent and without all the pimples and blemishes that mark the faces of many girls of that age. She was fair, but without the pinkish colour of the faces of my sisters. I would learn in time that my father’s department called that a sallow complexion. As for her figure, although she was thirteen, it was so boyish and lacking in curves that she might have been ten.

  The first time I noticed her, I was on my way to the swimming pool. I stopped five or six stands away and watched her, peeping out from behind a canvas awning. The stand where she was working displayed a small stock of kitchenware. Most of the items looked as if they had passed through many hands. She was busy with an old man who lived near us, showing him some aluminium pots. He was doing most of the talking, while Ruthie, whose name I did not yet know, was listening, nodding and smiling. As I watched, he took out his wallet and paid her. He went away carrying his pots. The girl’s right hand, the one carrying the money, slipped up the outside of her leg, under her skirt. When it came out the money was gone.

  Staying there and watching her, I ran the risk that she might turn and see me at any moment. And, at the age of thirteen, nothing was worse than being embarrassed.

  I slipped in behind the row of stalls, careful to ensure that I was not seen, turned and ran for the entrance to the swimming pool. In the pool, some of the boys from the neighbourhood were diving from the high board or throwing a water polo ball around. I also went in off the high board, hitting the water at too flat an angle and stinging my chest. I came up to a chorus of ‘Who taught you to dive, Vorster?’ Still, a burning chest and the jibes of my friends were nothing compared to the embarrassment I would have felt had I dived in off the poolside like a girl.

  Someone started organising a water polo game. I was to play in goal. But this was not where I wanted to spend the next hour. For all I knew, the girl and whoever she was helping may already be closing the stand. It was midafternoon and I could not remember if I had ever seen them packing up for the day. So I had no idea what time they did. I was not deluding myself that I would speak to her. I knew that I did not possess that sort of courage. All I wanted was to get a better look at her.

  When I told the others I had to go, there were shouts of ‘You only just got here.’

  ‘I don’t feel good,’ I told them.

  On the way back, I looked for her, but the stall was empty. The merchandise was still there, so I walked slowly past it. The stalls on either side, one selling soft toys and the other homewoven hammocks, were doing business as actively as ever.

  The route that would take me home led past the rest of the stalls. I had passed most of them and had still not seen her when she spoke right next to me. She was so close that, if I had leant towards her, our heads would have bumped. ‘Hey, boy, don’t you want a nice school pen?’ I stepped back quickly, stumbling, my face burning in my confusion.

  At that moment I saw the woman inside the stall. She was a broad matronly presence, much darker than the girl. Both she and the girl laughed as if this were the best thing that had happened all day. ‘How nicely he got a fright,’ the girl yelled with real delight.

  ‘No, I don’t want a pen,’ I mumbled and hurried on.

  ‘Hey, boy, I’m sorry I gave you a fright,’ she called after me.

  I glanced back at the grinning faces of the woman and the girl. It was the briefest glance. The only course of action I could manage was to keep moving, so that was what I did. My heroic boyhood feats, like diving off the high board at the public pool and climbing the clay sides of the quarry had shaped in me a certain view of myself. I was not a child any more. I was thirteen years old and not supposed to be startled by a skinny girl, who was trying to sell me a pen. I took my fragile, teenage dignity away as quickly as I could without actually breaking into a run.

  That night in bed I thought about her. This was the first time in my life that a girl had occupied my thoughts for more than a few seconds. I lay in bed, looking up at the ceiling, and remembered every moment of my first brief view of her. Reluctantly, I even revisited the brief contact that sent me scurrying away. My face glowed hot again when I thought of how she had startled me.

  She had spoken English to me. So that was the language they spoke in Greenwood Park, I thought. I had heard my father say that most coloureds spoke Afrikaans. Perhaps her family was an exception, or perhaps she thought I would be English-speaking like most of the local kids. Either way, it did not seem important. After school, my father preferred us to spend time with Afrikaans kids. The idea of any of us showing interest in someone from Greenwood Park would not have entered his mind.

  My first meeting with her is the one I remember most clearly, not because there was a shortage of memories after that, but perhaps because it was the first. Everything that happened over the next two years remains clear in my mind. I remember the house we lived in as it was then. I also remember the visits we had to my grandfather’s farm in those years with greatest clarity. The movies that showed at the sports club, despite sound that made the dialogue all but impossible to decipher, are those I remember best. The music I discovered then is also the music that I still love most. But I am coming to the music.

  Although I only saw her once, I also remember another woman from Greenwood Park. She came to our house that evening. She was doing her best to appear respectable in an old and fraying cotton dress that she had ironed carefully. She looked about fifty, but was probably younger. I discovered in later years that some of our country’s poorer people look much older than they are.

  Instead of ringing the front door bell, she came down the drive to the back of the house and knocked softly on the kitchen door. Although Mama was in the kitchen, she had to knock more than once. I heard Mama’s voice after she opened the door. ‘Yes, ousie, what can I do for you?’ There was a mumbled reply as she asked to speak to my father, then Mama’s voice again. ‘What’s this about? Mister Vorster’s lying down at the moment.’ Again I heard the mumbling, followed by Mama’s voice. ‘All right, then. I’ll see if he’s awake.’

  I heard Mama coming down the passage towards my parents’ bedroom. Experience had taught me exactly what my father would do if he decided to speak to the woman. He would walk with her to the front of the garden, stopping at the gate, so that when the conversation was over she could be on her way and not hang around the yard. If I slipped out of my window and down the side of the house and hid among the ferns in the little sunken summer seat in the front garden, I might be able to hear the conversation. Only seconds later I was there, kneeling on the damp, mossy earth, my chin resting on the stone seat.

  I did not have long to wait before I heard the sound of my father’s voice. He and the woman were speaking Afrikaans. ‘Mrs Muller,’ he was saying, ‘you know you should not be coming to my home. You can talk to me at my office.’ He was always polite, no matter who he was speaking to. Very few Afrikaners of the time would have called her Mrs.

  ‘Mister is always very busy at his office.’

  ‘I am never too busy to do my work,’ my father said. ‘I suppose this is about your brother.’

  ‘Mister must understand—’

  ‘No,’ he interrupted her. ‘You must understand that your brother did not tell the truth in his letter or when I questioned him afterwards.’

  ‘But Mister,’ sh
e said as they stopped at our front gate. ‘It is true. He’s only my half-brother.’

  ‘No. He can’t have what he wants. I can’t allow it.’ I could just see him through the ferns and he was shaking his head in a way that I knew well. It meant that he was sure that he was right and that nothing she or anyone else did or said would change his mind.

  ‘Mister, see, my mother was coloured and my father was white. That’s why I’m coloured. But Wesley’s mother was a white woman. She was on’y Wesley’s mother, not my mother. Please, Mister must understand. If he gets his white citizenship he can get a postman job.’

  From my vantage point among the ferns, I knew that she was wasting her time. She was talking to a man who could not do what she was asking of him, not because of a rule book, but because of the way he saw his duty. ‘Do you remember your brother’s court case?’ my father asked suddenly.

  ‘Mister knows about that?’

  My father released a brief, humourless chuckle. ‘Yes, I know about that. I was in the courtroom that day.’

  ‘Mister must know Wesley was wrong to do that.’

  ‘Or he is wrong now.’

  ‘No, he was wrong that time. He should not have done that.’

  The woman was small and thin. Her dress hung on her shoulders as if it were being held by clothes pegs on a washing line. My father was leaning forward and pointing a finger at her. I saw her take a step backward. ‘Your brother can’t come and tell me now that he’s white after he told the court then that he was coloured.’

  ‘But Mister must understand he was in love with that girl and they were sleeping together. The police wanted to lock him up for a white man laying down with a coloured girl. So he had to say he’s coloured. Or, Mister must know, they would have locked him up.’