Information about the book
'In the end, you could choose to say no more than this: that in the high summer of 1938, in a courtroom in the town of Gower in the Union of South Africa, a case of arson came to an abrupt and irregular end, confounding those who had followed the matter and prompting speculation that approached, but did not quite deliver, scandal …’
When an illicit affair in British Ceylon comes to light in 1902, seventeen-year-old Boer prisoner-of-war Henry Vos is disgraced. Months before, a short film made his face widely recognisable, but now he is shunned by Boer and Brit alike.
Three decades later, Henry is the magistrate of Gower, a small inland town in the Union of South Africa, where he makes friends with young newcomer Adaira van Brugge. Adaira’s story will start to echo Henry’s when she takes a secret lover: Ira Gevint, a Jew who fled Europe only to wind up in a town ready to experiment with its own kind of persecution.
As events threaten to unravel the careful life Henry has created for himself, desire surfaces alongside nationalist fervour in Claire Roberston’s arresting new novel about the courage to choose love over fear.
EXTRACT
As spring toughens up to meet the hot months, Gower remembers that it has a Jew, in fact any day now might have a whole family of them. Or let it be said, has not ever forgotten what it had here – so it is really more that Gower has always been aware of having a Jew in Ira Gevint, but is now made aware in a different way.
Without the news from Europe they might have left matters at the level of noticing his otherness and telling themselves that this awareness was not particular to them but was just the way the world was arranged. For example, it is only obvious that he cannot take part in church things with the rest of Gower. The bazaar, for instance, the church bazaar some weeks after he came here: he had donated scraps for making things to sell and then been somewhat bullied into giving a full bolt of gingham to cover the tables, but at the bazaar itself there had been no question but that Ira Gevint was a client; he was welcome to buy jam and so on, of course – in the way that people who motored over from Jamestown were welcome to do this. Somewhere to one side of where Gower proper looks out he is to be found, looking out himself, but also looked upon.
Without the news from Europe, the permission from Europe, they might not have given Ira another thought. But now they are allowed to be cruel, and so, on the pavement, they make way for him an eternal split second later than is polite. At the grocer’s he is served the roughest flour and is dared to make something of it, is given dented tins with no word of apology.
Ira barely notices; he has tried to see the overengineered and almost ridiculous Burggraaff sortie when he first arrived as not a great deal more sinister than the playing-out of this place’s obsession with ‘overseas’, a junior attempt at the actual menace he had known at home. It was the lack of uniforms that made the difference here, or perhaps it was the language: if English delivered its pain in paper cuts and Afrikaans in slow cudgel blows, then German, his German in the mouths of the new men, was a scream from a deep cave, the atavistically horrifying sound of immense wings brushing by in the dark, and nothing this place could imagine came close to it.
Next, in Gower, they take to jostling him. They shove the odd shove, actually block his way on the pavement. Who does this? Who are ‘They’? They are just the everyday them but more so, some essence of them that is leaching, pooling, becoming a thing on its own. He is somehow being defined by another thing that is happening in their lives, the thing that has them sewing long dresses for their daughters (he has had to order extra lawn, poplin, light duck, bolts of the stuff ), the thing that has put on every mantle in Gower a bowl, or set of bowls, of ivory china etched in the brown of dried blood with a wagon and eight.
They have no message for the haberdasher, nothing to impart beyond that he is who he is: ‘You’re a Jew,’ Wyville Burggraaff, back with reinforcements, tells him, loud and red-faced from the pavement outside Ira’s shop. His rigid right hand beats the air as though he is capping an argument with the word ‘Jew’.
And today Ira Gevint makes a mistake. He knows that the code calls for eyes down and retreat, for a noise of irritation at worst. But, heady with fear at confronting it again, at having it said to his face, here, at last, and remembering when he bested Wyville in his shop before, Ira answers back. He stands in the doorway of his shop and takes his spectacles from where he keeps them on his head when he does not need to read something. He sets about polishing a lens on his tie, which keeps his trembling hands moving, and while he does this he says, in an impression of a reasonable voice, ‘You know, it is not true what they are saying about you, Burggraaff.’
And Wyville narrows his eyes and demands: ‘What? What’s that you say?’
‘No, please, no need to worry. I am certain it is not true, in the event,’ says Ira in airy, almost-perfect English, if in tones somewhat higher than his usual voice, and turns his back to invite into his shop, incredibly enough, one of the Burggraaff aunts who at that moment reaches the pavement from the chemist’s next door. He follows her inside to hide his hands among the rayon and crêpe. Burggraaff and his boys, red at their shaven necks, red into the hairline, kick the kerb and leave, but with the fall of evening they are back, and as Ira turns from locking the door of his shop they move in and they block his way, shove and jostle and pluck at him. Ira tries to stand his ground, but it is not possible to hold on to dignity when a man is sent stumbling between five young giants, all kicking feet and chests and knees, and his hat goes flying, and hands grab at his lapels.
Today, however, Wyville Burggraaff and his lot, his brother Wikus and the rest of the pack, have made a bad bet. There are plenty of people on Church Street, people who would be astonished if you said they might choose to look the other way when wild boys roughed up a white man in the open like that, and now a whistle shrieks, and Sergeant Meter does his skipping walk and most of the boys take off down the street, making loud laughing sounds to cover the fact that they are running away.
When Meter reaches them it is in time to let Burggraaff give Ira one last shove and take off himself. Then the policeman clamps his hand on the upper arm of the slowest boy, a Poley grandson, one Doep.
Doep Poley will sleep in the cells at the back of the police station that night. Sergeant Meter sends his boy to Mrs Poley to say that her grandson has been arrested. She says, ‘Keep him, the rubbish,’ and turns away, then tells the sergeant’s boy to wait a minute – what is it for? When he tells her it is for shoving the Jew Gevint, she seems unable to understand, and he tells her again – affray, insult: Doep pushed the Jew Gevint. Eventually she nods, still not seeming to know quite what is meant, but allows him to leave without stating the matter a third time.
Mrs Poley is in court the next day, in time to hear Magistrate Vos give quite as much weight as she had to the aberration at the heart of the matter: that Doep Poley stood to gain nothing by his actions. This in her eyes makes Doep even more of a useless, but those few people in the court can see that it particularly angers the magistrate.
He is colder with the boy in the dock than is warranted by pushing and shoving another man on the street; the evidence part of the case is over in minutes, but his summation takes twice as long again. He presses the point. Nothing was stolen, but to hear the magistrate tell it, this made Doep Poley’s crime more serious, not less. Henry adopts a blank ignorance of what really was going on when they pushed Ira Gevint, and asks, What did he gain by attacking Mr Gevint outside his fabric shop on a Friday evening? All present ignored the cashbox, the cloth and so forth, he says. Well then, a grudge: was this revenge for some past injury, or part of a sequence of injuries?
The magistrate at last lets go of the pretence. He says: To attack a man with no motive of gain or revenge, but only from a sort of national spite, made of Doep Poley something worse than a common criminal, worse than a robber. The magistrate says he will not allow this to go unchecked in Gower at least. Mrs Poley begins to breathe loudly a few sentences into the magistrate’s summation. By the end of it she is openly shaking her head, and shifts about in dumb protest as the magistrate reaches ‘accordingly it is the sentence of this court …’ and sends Doep off to chokey, as Mr Theron puts it when he tells his family about the case that night.
Give it a week or so more. The people of Gower had not stopped to think before telling those rough boys – that Wyville Burggraaff, that boy from Happy Valley – to stop that! To shout, Hey! Stop that, and tug on the arm of Sergeant Meter, and make as if they were about to cross the road themselves to pull them away from Gevint. But give it a week or so, and now they are slower to say something, or something more than, Oh, my. Where once they were almost prepared to cross the street, now they fold their arms and shake their heads.
The wolfish boys with their keen instinct for what the town will bear have not been slowed for an instant by Doep’s punishment.
It’s not right, Gower seems to say. It’s not right, but … One of them says it out loud. Tractor salesman Van der Berg’s wife, Etta, says: ‘Why does he keep coming outside like that if he knows those boys are only going to make trouble with him?’
Behind her on the stoep Van der Berg says, ‘Who?’
And she says, ‘That Gevint. The Jew.’
And he turns the page of his newspaper and says, ‘Oh, him.’
And it is the case that Ira Gevint does not send the boy from his house or even the boy who works in the back of the shop to deal with the slops that cover the left side of the shop window with a film and soft pieces of something, but is there in his shirtsleeves and apron, and it is he who balances on the wooden steps, clumsy with a cloth and a bucket of water, and he who holds his breath and lunges to pick up and tip into the dustbin a stinking shredding paper bag left on the shop’s front step, just as he, at the start of this, made a point of moving towards the sneering boys when they came for him.
Do the good people of Gower say something? Does anyone say more than, You! Wikus Burggraaff! You rubbish!? Not more than that, no. The Therons avoid the subject, and when they stop on Church Street to greet the haberdasher, it is in tones between neutrality and condolence – somewhat consoling, but somewhat cold.
But Adaira becomes unable to leave him alone. She attaches herself to his side, haunts his shop and demands to share in his persecution. To own part of it. Some afternoons she stands behind the pin wheels in the window of the Haberdashers on Church Street, daring a Burggraaff to come near, hoping one will present himself for her to repel.
Her squire’s impulse to rescue, his needing all his strength for himself – Adaira and Ira move at different speeds. She cannot keep away from him, though, and there is something in him that allows her near, and so they are together often, in a miserable huddle against Gower, and at times she, with her vehemence and endless interrogation of the latest insult, is a separate part of his torment.
On a Sunday afternoon, she brings him to the magistrate’s home for tea, for show, and when they are done with speaking about everything except anything to do with Gower’s skirmishing with its haberdasher, Ira and Adaira walk back to Church Street together. Gevint holds himself behind a closed face, carrying dignity before himself when usually he is an eager-faced man pressing forward into what next the world will bring. There is a sudden panic in her to crack this crust of reserve he wears, to reach in and draw him out, but she has nothing on hand with which to do so – no philosophy, no armoury bristling with the right words.
They reach Church Street and she follows him into the Sunday-still air of the empty shop, where the brown of the long counter dominates the room until the coloured bolts, the brass cash machine, the draped cloth, everything else, seems to be just another shade of that brown. There is a sense of time in suspension, of waiting. It is as private as thought, this place, and the thick air slows them down and lays a hand on her so that she makes herself hold still, feeling him willing her to go but wrapped in her compulsion to stay.
She leans now with the small of her back against the counter top, awkward, one hand hanging loose, one laid along the wood, and finds the courage to wait in this assumed pose of femininity, perhaps ungainly but gathering in her skin and hair the mild light of the room. Her body faces him, but she keeps her eyes cast down. She would be ashamed to see him look. At the edge of her vision her breasts rise and fall under the pleats and tucks of her blue dress. Stillness is doing its work here: excitement hums in her like a wakened swarm. She raises a hand to loop her hair behind an ear and her hand stays there, fingertips on her neck, and at that invitation he at last makes the crossing to join her.
Ira is intent on her clothing, on each button and strap, drawing the dress and other pieces deliberately over her hips, over her head, from around her waist, as though he is polishing her skin with the cloth as it leaves her. At last he has her breasts free among the everyday shapes of the shop. He stops, steps quickly to a shelf and tugs out a folded length of something red. This will be their bed. At his gesture, as he cracks it so that the cloth billows out, pleasure, gladness even, joins them in the sombre shop, and their bodies grow rosier – hers, lying back on the red ground, his, peeled open from his shirt and trousers, above her.
He is committed to this, as though, were she to try to interrupt him, he would not stop, as though his name would have to be called more than once before he looked up. Adaira suddenly knows she is not equal to it, the thing she has invited, not its equal at all, but she is more afraid to pull away. The safe place to be is close to him, holding on. At one point the thought comes to her that she has duties in this matter, obligations apart from those met so easily by the mere fact of her body, and that it is up to her to manage matters to preserve the momentum and maintain some elegance, some grace, in the movement of her limbs, his limbs, the sounds she makes to meet those coming from him. There is pain and a flash of irritation – worse: an impulse to defend herself from him. This passes, melts into an ache and a thickened lassitude, as though time has slowed. She notices, far within her, like the echo of an imagined sound, a sense as elusive and maddening as an itch she cannot reach; she thinks that by noticing and naming it she has doomed the feeling never to be felt again, and yet it has, at the same time, taken up permanence in her body, but so far away, so far away, as though she is fathoms deep. At last, propelled by something very like the energy of a shout, Ira strains back.
He walks her home, as far as the corner of the Theron block, and although they hurry and by instinct keep away from the street lights, she is suffused with exceptional, weary clarity. She is aware, for instance, that her senses have begun the work of laying down the moment beyond the reach of language. There is no point in wishing for white linen or scented wine. Whatever it is that will summon this, that is the thing that will: in her case, floor dust, furniture polish, the acrid dye of the German Print, some spicy scent in his hair. And now the cooling tarmac and the road dust.
She is shyly, grimly proud to notice in the indoors bathroom at her Theron home that she bled, like, she thinks in confusion, Joan of Arc. Someone young and brave, this is what she means.
Lying awake that night, tapping into the thoughts it has brought her, this new eye on the world, there is another thought she has about what they have done: she wishes they came from happy, confident peoples, people without doubts. They had brought to the act some tinge of sadness and shame. She brought the ancestral shame, and Ira the sadness. Nevertheless, how subtle is a kiss. How subtle the change from her skin to his, the coming together of their heads with nothing to whisper, no viewpoint to share, but giving their faces, seeing only one another if they see at all, and pressing gently to open their sealed bodies.
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by Claire Robertson
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