Speak the Truth Laughing: Nine Stories and a Novella House Arrest Read online

  ©Christopher Dauth

  Rose Zwi was born in Mexico, lived in London and Israel, but spent most of her life in South Africa. She has lived in Australia since 1988. She has won several prizes for her work, including Another Year in Africa, Last Walk in Naryshkin Park and Safe Houses.

  Speak the Truth, Laughing

  Nine stories and a novella, House Arrest

  Rose Zwi

  Spinifex Press Pty Ltd

  504 Queensberry Street

  North Melbourne, Vic. 3051

  Australia

  [email protected]

  http://www.spinifexpress.com.au

  First published 2002

  Copyright © Rose Zwi

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealings for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, this book may not be reproduced in whole or in part by any process, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without prior written permission of the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

  Cover design by Deb Snibson, Modern Art Production Group

  Typeset by Palmer Higgs Pty Ltd

  Printed and bound by McPherson’s Printing Group

  National Library of Australia

  cataloguing-in-publication data:

  Zwi, Rose.

  Speak the truth, laughing.

  ISBN 978-1-74219-191-1 Master e-book ISBN

  ISBN 978-1-74219-467-7 (ePub Format)

  ISBN 1 876756 21 7.

  1. Jews – Social life and customs – Fiction. 2. Social

  conflict – Fiction. I. Title.

  A823.3

  For Lionel and Patrick

  with gratitude and affection

  CONTENTS

  To Speak the Truth, Laughing

  One Single to Boksburg East

  Carved in Stone

  Indigenous Man

  Laugh, Kookaburra

  Conquest of America

  Love, Sara

  The Matriarch

  Give a Stone for Bread

  House Arrest

  Acknowledgments

  Some of the stories in this collection have appeared in other publications as follows:

  ‘To Speak the Truth, Laughing’ was first published in the South African literary magazine Staffrider, Vol.7 No.2, 1988 and was included in the following short story collections: A Snake with Ice Water: Prison Writings by South African Women, Ed. Barbara Schreiner, Johannesburg 1992 and Sounding Wings: Stories from South Africa, Eds Rosemary Gray and Stephen Finn, 1994. ‘Give a Stone for Bread’ was first published as ‘Stones’ in the Johannesburg literary magazine Sesame, Summer 86/87, Ed. Lionel Abrahams, and appeared in Voices, The Quarterly Journal of the National Library of Australia, Ed. Paul Hetherington, Winter 1991. (‘Stones’ won the English Academy of Southern Africa’s Thomas Pringle Award for the year 1988.) A section of the novella ‘House Arrest’ was previously published as ‘A Lonely Walk to Freedom’ in LIP from Southern African Women, Eds Susan Brown, Isabel Hofmeyr, Susan Rosenberg, 1983 and in Raising the Blinds: A Century of South African Women’s Stories, Ed. Annemarie Van Niekerk, 1990. The story ‘Conquest of America’ was first published in the Johannesburg literary journal Quarry, Ed. Lionel Abrahams, 1978/9. The story ‘One Single to Boksburg East’ won third prize in the open section of the Judah Waten Short Story Competition in 1990.

  To Speak the Truth, Laughing

  Anna Bronstein began paying her dues the night she spent in the cells at John Vorster Square. They had been owing since, when a child, she had seen a policeman beat up a black man in the street. She ran, sobbing, to her father’s tailoring workshop.

  “For this we fled the pogromists?” He got up from his old Singer machine and took her into his arms. “Will we never stop running? From one continent to another and where’s it better? The goldine medina,” he added bitterly, holding her close until her sobs subsided. “The golden land. For whom? Not for us and not for the schwartze. My family was right to remain in the old country. There’s a time to stop running.”

  Anna stretched out on the grubby blanket that covered the cold stone floor of the cell. You never knew your grandfather, she wrote to her son Adam, except from photographs. You look like him; tall, thin, with the kindest brown eyes imaginable. When his family was massacred by the Nazis, his heart cracked like the floes on his shtetl’s river, and his blood turned to ice. “I live,” he said, “only to grieve.” He did not grieve long. And before he died, wonder-tailor that he was, he sewed for me a garment of memory and guilt that could only be torn off with my flesh. But your grandmother — short, round, bespectacled like me — gave me the antidote to despair: the bittere gelechter, ironic laughter, which sustained our people through centuries of exile. It assuaged my anguish, tempered my guilt, and drove you crazy throughout your childhood. You think you can laugh at everything, you used to say, missing the underlying pain. Almost everything, I told you. One can speak the truth, laughing.

  There must be a word, Anna thought, for people who compose letters which never get written or read.

  Five women of varying age were sleeping on either side of her. The four nuns sat near the barred door, heads bent, in silent meditation. The rest had gathered around Joan, the student, and were talking in whispers. Three weeks ago Anna had hardly known them. She lay back, cushioning her head on her folded arms. It had been a long journey to John Vorster Square. Her parents’ heritage of laughter and despair had immobilised her politically. The collective memory of her forebears, passed down by her father, had equipped Anna with an acute historical sense. This, however, was impaled on her mother’s ironic laughter, a twin-edged sword: it cut through cant in both just and unjust causes, exposing not only the tyranny of despots, but also the rigidity and earnestness of the radicals and the limp humanism of the liberals. As for the blacks, they withdrew to their insulated ghettos, sending out an unambiguous message: Don’t colonise our suffering, you whites; this is our struggle.

  Unable to commit herself, Anna had joined movements and left movements, signed petitions and marched in protests, all of which seemed increasingly absurd to her.

  “We make useless gestures while we retain our privilege and power,” she said to Simon, her husband. “Tokenism, that’s all it is.”

  “Make a revolution,” Simon said without looking up from the papers he was marking, “or leave the country.”

  “I can do neither.”

  “Then don’t agonise. I believe I have as much right to be in Africa as any black, provided I make a meaningful contribution.”

  “Like teaching Chaucer to white University students.”

  “There’s no grand solution to the problems of Africa,” Simon replied loftily. “Everyone must work out his own destiny.”

  Which was precisely what he did, about a year later.

  In the meantime, Anna wrestled with her conscience. Like a lapsed believer on her death bed, she reverted to her former faith, trying to evade the hell-fires of hopelessness. She joined a civil rights movement, worked in their advice office, and stood on lonely vigils with placards that reflected the issues of the moment: Troops out of Namibia; No to Apartheid; Charge or Release Detainees; End Conscription; Release Mandela! The women stood alone; to be in sight of one another contravened the Riotous Assemblies Act.

  But what if laws are repressive, framed to safeguard a powerful minority? Anna was reading Thoreau. “… Law never made men a whit more just; and by means of
their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made agents of injustice.” Civil disobedience was the obvious answer.

  The first test presented itself during a protest against detention without trial. The demonstration was planned for the rush hour, in the late afternoon. She was to take her stand at five o’clock, outside the University, at the Jan Smuts entrance.

  As she drove through the cool, green suburbs, saturated with the smell of newly-mown grass and damp earth, Anna removed her glasses, shutting out the harsh reality of ever-higher garden walls, iron security gates, and burglar alarm plaques. She saw only a green tunnel of trees and people of indeterminate colour walking along the pavements. Observing the world through a misty gaze, however, had its hazards. Like the red traffic light she drove through because it merged with the brilliant hibiscus flowers hanging over a garden wall. Or mistaking the yellow police vans for caravans or buses. She put on her glasses. Blue-uniformed police were streaming out of the yellow vans, confronting students who had taken up the placards of the women. Bertha Egdus, from the Advice Office, was being bundled into a police van as Anna drove towards the top of the hill. “This is a legal demonstration!”, she shouted, clinging to her placard — Release All Detainees. The door slammed and she was driven away.

  That might’ve been me. Anna turned into a side-street lined with cars. No place to park. It’s over, I might as well go home, no point in offering myself up for arrest at this stage. That’s Simon’s kind of logic, she thought, abandoning her car in a no parking area. She hurried back to Jan Smuts Avenue. The police had confiscated the remaining placards and were moving down the hill towards their vans. The students stood around in groups.

  “They’ve arrested all the women,” a student told her.

  “But it’s a legal demonstration,” Anna said. “They weren’t in sight of one another.”

  “Since when is legality a protection against brute force?” someone asked.

  “I was supposed to take over from her, from the last one,” Anna said.

  “Come join us. We’re going to make our own posters.”

  They looked so vulnerable in their jeans and sloppy shirts; pale, dry-lipped, indignant, pitting themselves against those strutting policemen in their yellow vans. Adam might have been among them. Anna longed to embrace them, protect them, send them home. Instead she found herself saying, “I’ve left my car in a no-park area.”

  “Then you’d better move it, lady,” a sarcastic voice called out. “You mustn’t under any circumstances break the law, even a traffic law.”

  Later that evening she gave Adam an edited version of the day’s events. You can’t tell a son everything.

  Adam’s call-up papers had arrived at about the same time as the black townships erupted into what the media called “unrest”. And out of the dust and dry grass of the veld, names the whites had never heard of hit the headlines: Sebokeng, Bophelong, Boipatong, Tumahole, Duduza, Tsakane, Kagiso … Burning, stoning, singing and dancing, the young ones of the townships defied the Army which had been sent in to “pacify” them, with bullets and teargas.

  “There’s no way I’m going into the Army,” Adam had said. “Especially now. But I don’t want to leave South Africa. This is where I belong.”

  “Leave,” Anna urged. “I’ll carry on with what you call The Struggle.”

  Adam looked at her — middle-aged, grey-haired, bespectacled, podgy. He laughed, kindly.

  “First you’ll have to go into training,” he said, poking gently at the tyre of fat around her waist. “Twice around the golf course before breakfast. Better still, instead of breakfast.”

  “You think you can laugh at everything,” she mocked.

  “Almost everything. I had a good teacher.”

  Anna had paged through his army call-up papers and found a letter addressed to her and the absent Simon: “Dear Parents … within the next few weeks your son will report for his National Service. As parents, we realise that you are concerned about his well-being …” Adam’s call-up instructions were printed in green: “In accordance with the Defence Act, 1957, you have been allotted …”

  “You could, of course, shoot off your big toe,” she had said to Adam, rubbing her tingling nose. “Your paternal great-uncle Itzik did just that when he was summoned to serve in the Czar’s army.”

  “But he wasn’t a long-distance runner like me, was he?” Adam said. “My father trained me well.” Simon, while he lived with them, had taken Adam with him on his daily run around the golf course. Until he ran off, in the other direction.

  “True, Itzik didn’t run very far. From Yaneshik to Zhager perhaps. He never left the old country. The Czar didn’t get him, but the Nazis did.”

  After Adam left the country, Anna’s progress towards the cells had been swift and direct. She and her fellow-felons, a disparate collection of students, academics, housewives and nuns, had been shamed into action by a black woman at a meeting where Anna had read a paper on civil disobedience.

  “… all our sons,” Anna had said, “black, white, brown, are being drawn into a tragic conflict which cannot be resolved by sacrificing young lives … Many of our white sons have fled rather than serve in an Army which enforces a deplorable system; many of our black sons have crossed the border for military training … The time for making peace is now, before the land is saturated with the blood of all our sons …”

  I’d like to say there wasn’t a dry eye in the audience, Anna imagined another letter to Adam. But that would be an exaggeration. There certainly was an incisive voice that cut through the rhetoric — Nomsa Modise’s. “You white women talk and do nothing,” she said. “Our children are shot and arrested; yours serve in the army or run away. If you really want to show solidarity with black mothers, go into the townships and tell them.” So, Adam, we’re going into the townships.

  “If you go into the townships during the State of Emergency,” Lisa, a civil rights lawyer told them, “you’ll be arrested. And remember how volatile the mood is. Anything can spark off violence, even a group of harmless white women.”

  “When they release the dogs,” a seasoned protester advised, “stand still, or they’ll tear the flesh off your arms. And if there’s teargas, cover your eyes and nose and walk away quietly. Don’t panic.”

  After this invaluable advice, their numbers dropped from thirty-seven white women and three black women, to nineteen whites and three blacks. Reality, Anna discovered, was an effective extinguisher of moral ardour. Hers flickered dangerously, reviving only when she remembered her promise to Adam, Thoreau’s essay on Civil Disobedience, and her father’s injunction to stop running.

  “Shall we pray?” Sister Imelda had asked softly before they left for the township.

  Anna liked the nuns. They were pink-cheeked and serene, though Sister Caroline trembled as they joined hands to form a circle. If she, with her Connections, is so nervous, how should I feel?

  “In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,” Sister Imelda began. Anna raised her head from her chest and looked around the circle. She was the only Jew among them, and an agnostic at that. A little prayer won’t hurt. She lowered her head.

  Dear Anon — even her prayer took the form of a letter. Please arrange a roadblock so’s we’ll be able to retreat with honour. And if you can’t manage that, please give me strength to cope with my claustrophobia. You’ll have noticed that all week I’ve practised incarceration in the toilet, but it’s not the same; I could get out any time I liked. I don’t want to disgrace myself before the Enemy and go stark staring crazy. You know how I panic in closed-in places.

  Friends drove them to the township. There was no roadblock, and Anna’s scepticism about the efficacy of prayer was affirmed. Her hands grew clammier and her tongue felt like sandpaper. When they were dropped off in the open lot opposite the police station, her stomach lurched and heaved. What, she wondered, if I get an attack of diarrhoea? Call off your hounds, sergeant major, I have to go to the lav. Heroic. She drew back
her shoulders, raised her head and tightened her sphincter. Above all, one must retain one’s dignity.

  “Let’s sing Nkosi Sikelela iAfrica,” one of the younger women suggested. Anna wondered if she was an agent provocateur. The dogs would maul them before they said “Nkosi”.

  “I only know the words of God Save the Queen,” Anna said.

  “Perhaps a silent demonstration is better,” said Debra, a very large, very black woman whom Anna had often seen at meetings. Anna moved nearer to her. Except for one or two women from the Advice Office, she hardly knew any of the others. From across the road, Lisa, their lawyer, waved reassuringly at them.

  They drew their white calico bibs over their heads. Solidarity with Black Mothers, hers read. Release the Children; Troops out of the Townships, End the State of Emergency, No to Conscription, were some of the other messages written on the bibs with varying degrees of calligraphic skill. They had no strategy, no plan, only words. Linking arms in groups of five, they crossed the main road, forming a long, straggling line opposite the police station in whose cells large numbers of black children were being held.

  “How long is a protest?” someone had asked at their last meeting. No one knew. Until we’re chewed up by dogs, poisoned by gas, or shot dead by the riot squad, Anna thought as she watched four policemen stride out of the police station towards them. They wore jeans and floral shirts, but had holstered guns on their hips. She’d rather burst than ask to use their toilets.

  “This is an illegal gathering!” the tallest one shouted.

  Why, Anna wondered, gooseflesh exploding all over her body, were law-breakers thought to be hard of hearing? They’d have heard him had he whispered. He filled the place with menace as he took up an aggressive stance in the middle of the road. A weary horse dragging an ancient cart, a battered car and two bicycles came to a halt beside him. There were few other people in the street.