The Covenant (172 page)

“Less than one-tenth of the total. Doesn’t it seem odd to you, Sannie, to have your major national monument restricted to one-tenth of the population?”

“It’s not restricted. On certain days, at certain times, blacks are allowed in.”

“Would they want to come? A monument dedicated to their defeat?”

She drew away from him for a moment, then said stiffly, “We’re a nation in laager and we cannot deny our past. It’s from the scenes in this building that we derive our strength.”

From this vast, awesome structure they went back to the residential areas of the city, and it was here that Philip received his major shock, because whole avenues and scores of broad streets, reaching as far as he could see, were lined with jacaranda trees bursting with purple, not hundreds of them but thousands upon thousands, until the entire city seemed a bed of flowers. He had never seen anything to compare with this explosion of purple elegance, and when they slipped into bed that night he whispered, “You’re a blend of monument and jacaranda—fierce durability and soft elegance.” When she said nothing, snuggling closer to be kissed, he asked, “Shall we be married?” but then she drew away, for she was not yet prepared to make such a commitment.

Wherever they went on their brief excursions she provided him with new revelations of her country. After they had visited some dozen little towns, each with its statue of some minor Boer War general, they returned to Pretoria, where she took him to the fine figure of General Louis Botha in front of the government buildings. Behind it stood a somber, handsome memorial to the 2,683 South African soldiers who had lost their lives in a single battle.

“Wasn’t Delville Wood, back in 1916, the most important battle your troops ever engaged in?” Philip asked.

“Perhaps,” she said grudgingly.

“All those men lost …”

“It was the wrong war, fought on the wrong continent, by the wrong troops.” After reflecting upon this curt dismissal, she added, “It was an English affair that played no part in our history, an incident well forgotten.”

He was struck by the exposed beauty of South Africa, the endless veld, the treeless reaches of landscape, the wonderful little flat-topped hills, the enclaves with elephants, and white rhinoceros, and eland, and the great blazing sky. “Your roads, you know, are much better than those in the United States,” he told her once as they were driving across a far stretch of veld on a roadway that contained not a ripple.

Most of all he liked the little towns with their public squares, their low white-walled buildings and their jacaranda trees. He became familiar with a dozen other blossoming trees whose names he did not know: “This is a land of flowers!” And of all those he saw, better even than the jacarandas, he liked the protea: “You must have a hundred varieties!”

“More, I think.”

They were able to take these excursions because of his schedule at the dig: three weeks of dawn to dusk, then a week off, and once when he was entitled to a break she said, “We have a remarkable village which you really must see,” and when he took out his map she said, “You will find it as Tulbagh, but we like to call it by its old name, Church-Street-in-the-Land-of-Waveren.”

“What a delightful name!” and they drove two days to an enclave among tall hills where in a closed valley stood this remarkable thoroughfare, as beautiful as any in the world. It had been founded as early as 1700, one long street with a church at one end, a parsonage about half a mile away, and some fifteen houses connecting the two. As the centuries passed, the low houses seemed to settle close to the ground, and the place might have been remembered only as a fading echo of past times, except that on 29 September 1969 an earthquake shattered the area, knocking down some of the dwellings and damaging all of them.

“What happened,” Sannie explained, “was that some energetic men and women, Father among them, got together and said, ‘This is a chance to rebuild the street as it was in 1750,’ and believe it or not, Philip, that’s just what they did.”

When they approached the village, Philip saw a church of stubborn beauty and in the distance a stately parsonage, but what captivated him was the row of stark-white houses, all cheap adornment erased, standing pristine as they had two centuries earlier. It was as if a magician had waved a wand and restored patterns of living long since vanished. They stayed that night in one of the houses, whose proper owners were distressed at the idea of Sannie’s traveling with a man to whom she was not married:

“What would your grandmother Maria Steyn have said?” The wife had clippings of Maria’s famous altercation over the nude statue in Pretoria, and Philip guffawed at some of the statements the old lady had made: “If the Israelites could destroy the statues of a golden ass, we women of South Africa can destroy this statue of a naked
woman.” She had also told one newspaper: “A naked man is not much better than a naked woman, but he’s easier to fix.”

“Times change,” Sannie said, but the woman would not allow the couple to share the same bedroom. Late at night, in the darkness, Philip tried to reach Sannie’s room, only to find that buckets had been placed across the hallway. He made a terrific clatter, at which the man of the house came out with a flashlight to be sure he returned to his own quarters.

As soon as breakfast was over and they were driving north, he said, “Sannie, we’ve got to get married. I can find a good job almost anywhere in the world, and I need you.” But again she held him off.

He supposed that this was because she loved her own country too much to leave it, and he had to admit that it was magnificent in a great, brutal way, unlike any he had previously seen, but an observant traveler had to spot three grievous problems which warranted attention: “Sannie, as a geologist I see one hell of a lot of your country is desert, and according to old maps, it seems to be spreading eastward.”

“You’re right,” she conceded.

And whether in the countryside or in the small towns, he became increasingly aware that whites and blacks occupied two radically different worlds. The separation was constant, universal and severely enforced. Philip was by no means a liberal; as a practical engineer, he knew that separation was sometimes advisable: “I was never much for interracial dating. I observed that the men in my class at college who dated girls of other races—Chicanos or blacks or Orientals—they were all alike. Aloof, bad complexions, and wrote letters to the editor advocating the abolishment of fraternities.”

“Here it would be intolerable,” she agreed.

“But I’ve also noticed that countries which support a cheap supply of labor always impoverish themselves.”

“We’re certainly not impoverished,” she protested.

“In many ways you are. You ought to pay your blacks high wages, then tax them like hell to provide public services. That’s the path to civilization.”

“Philip! They’d not be worth a penny more than they’re paid.”

“Wrong.” He became quite excited on this point. “I’ve worked in three different black nations. With all kinds of black workers. And whenever we had in our cadre a black from South Africa, especially a Zulu or a Xhosa, he was invariably the best in the work force. If
blacks with much less experience can rule Moçambique and Vwarda and Zambia, yours could certainly run this country.” It was a startling statement, which she did not wish to discuss.

The third sad discovery came always at night. They would have had a fine dinner with friends she knew from one past experience or other; the conversation would have been lively, ranging over politics and economics; the food would have been superb and the local wines even better; and then, as they were about to depart, Philip would see on the mantel over the fireplace three handsome photographs of young people Sannie’s age.

“I didn’t know you had children.”

“Yes!” And if the family was of English derivation, or Jewish, or enlightened Afrikaner, either the mother or father would say, “That’s Victor, he’s in Australia. Helen is married to a fine young man in Canada. And that’s Freddie, he’s at the London School of Economics.”

They were gone. They were gone to the far continents. They would never return to South Africa, for the pressures were too great, the possibilities too forbidding.

When the young lovers returned from one such trip Mrs. van Doorn asked unobtrusively if she could speak with Philip, and when she had him alone she said forthrightly, “You must not lose your heart to Sannie. The Troxel boys will soon be back from the frontier, and then things will be different.”

“Who are the Troxel boys?”

“Their families own the old De Groot farm. Their parents, that is.”

“Those people who live on the far side of the lake?”

“Yes. Marius’ father brought them here from Johannesburg over fifty years ago. Wonderfully sturdy people.”

“And they have two young men, Sannie’s age?”

“Yes. They’re cousins. On military service just now, but they’ll be back, and things will be different.”

“Sannie’s said nothing.”

“I think she has, Philip. Didn’t you ask to marry her?”

“Twice.”

“Why do you think she hesitated?”

“Had she some arrangement with one of the boys?”

“With both, I think. Point is, when they left she hadn’t made up her mind between them. But she will, Philip. She’s Afrikaner to the core and will marry an Afrikaner. Of that I’m convinced.”

“I’m not,” he said with laughter that softened the disagreement.

“Nor should you be. But remember my warning. Don’t take this too seriously, because, I assure you, Sannie doesn’t.”

He was prevented from brooding about his courtship when his obligations at Swartstroom suddenly intensified. His men had come upon a reach where the stream took a pronounced turn to the left, producing a bend where diamonds ought to have been deposited had any ever existed in this territory.

The crew found what it was looking for, two tiny bits of diamond, glistening so pure in sunlight they seemed to create a radiance all the way to Pretoria, Antwerp and New York, where word circulated that “Amalgamated Mines may have something at Swartstroom.” The two tiny fragments were worth about four rand, enough to pay one black worker for one day’s effort, but they had the power to inflame men’s imaginations, for when taken in conjunction with Pik Prinsloo’s earlier find, they confirmed that at some time far distant this little stream had been diamantiferous. Saltwood’s problem was to isolate the ancient source, but so far he could find no signs of it.

A helicopter was flown in to take him aloft so that he might inspect contiguous areas, but this disclosed nothing, and he had to revert to time-tested procedures of following the little stream. He discovered no more diamond chips, but in reality he needed no more. Those he had found proved that somewhere in this vicinity there had been a source of diamonds, and in time he, or someone like him, would uncover it.

So he was kept at the dig and for some weeks found no opportunity to visit with Sannie, but his spare time was not wasted, for an unusual young man came to visit him, and through this accidental meeting he was about to behold rather more of South Africa than the average foreign geologist would ordinarily have seen.

His visitor was Daniel Nxumalo, a black of about Saltwood’s age; he spoke the precise English of one who had been educated in a colonial college by itinerant scholars from Dublin or London, and he was on a curious mission: “Mr. Philip Saltwood? I’m Daniel Nxumalo, associate professor—as you would call me in America—at Fort Hare. I was advised to come see you.”

“By whom?” Saltwood had the prejudices of a typical Texas engineer:
he would hire anyone, but he had an instinctive distrust of any black who spoke in complete sentences.

“The people in Venloo. They told me you were interested in all things South African.”

“How would they know?”

“They’ve seen you in church. They listen.”

“What was it you wanted?”

“Because you’ve seen so much of Africa, Mr. Saltwood, I thought it would be courteous if I showed you the real part—our portion, that is.”

With this rather condescending introduction, Daniel Nxumalo, home on vacation from his duties at the university, began to take his American guest to little enclaves in eastern Transvaal occupied by blacks who, like his own predecessors, had fled the Mfecane of King Shaka and Mzilikazi. They had survived for the past century and a half in various settings, some attached to white farms like Vrymeer, some living by themselves in hidden valleys. Quite a few clustered about the environs of rural towns like Carolina and Ermelo, but all had made sensible adjustment, and Philip was surprised at the substantial goods some of them had accumulated.

“But under the new laws,” Nxumalo said, “we must move ourselves to one of our Bantustans … By the way, ever met any Xhosa?”

“Had two of them working for me in Vwarda. Spoke with clicks.”

“In some ways they’re more fortunate than the Zulu; in other ways, not.”

“I’m amazed to hear a Zulu confess that anyone is better.”

“I didn’t say better.” Nxumalo laughed. “I said ‘more fortunate.’ ” When he grinned, his teeth were extremely white and his eyes glistened.

“Let me guess,” Saltwood said, for he was growing to like this somewhat cheeky fellow. “It’s something the white man did to the Xhosa and you, something very unfair to the Zulu.”

“You’re perceptive, Mr. Saltwood. The Afrikaners have given the Xhosa a beautiful territory, compact and arable. The Transkei. And next to it another cohesive tract, the Ciskei. In that land the Xhosa have a fighting chance to build something good. But what did they give the Zulu? Fifty, a hundred unconnected fragments of land. They call it kwaZulu, and it’s supposed to be a homeland for all the Zulu. But it’s really a collection of junk. They want us to occupy that broken territory.”

“In time it’ll coalesce, if the idea’s a good one.”

“The idea’s bad and the land’s bad, because all the good parts have been preempted by white men.”

“I should think that could be changed.”

“You haven’t lived here very long.” He altered his tone completely. Up to now he had been a college professor, outlining a general problem; now he became a human being, lamenting a wrong done him personally: “In pursuit of their policy, Mr. Saltwood, they insist that we Zulu, who have made good lives in places like Vrymeer and Venloo, pick up all we have, leave all our friends and our ways of life, and move off to one of the fragmented sections of their kwaZulu.”