Frankie and Stankie (22 page)

Irmi's story is that the train she was on was end-to-end with maimed German soldiers wrapped in newspaper and rags. They groaned and screamed through the night. Half the train's upper body had been blown away. A woman had lost her baby on the train and was wailing and pulling at her hair. There was talk that the Russians were taking up the tracks behind them as they went. And when she made it to Hamburg, the city, Irmi says, ‘wasn't there'. Hamburg, as Dinah appreciates only much later, from aerial photographs, looked at the time like an early Flemish horror painting of the world after Armageddon.

The island was crowded with fleeing German civilians and there was no room in anybody's house. Irmi was lucky to get part shares in a cowshed. This was something that she did for months. She slept, shivering, on straw. When the war was over, the British authorities moved in and processed her, but everything took time. Dinah is not at all clear about what became of Irmi between her billet in the cowshed and her coming to claim the oak thrones, but at some point she must have hooked up with her in-laws and she'd learned to speak good English. Or it might have been, Dinah thinks, that, since the English ‘th' had clearly never given Irmi a problem, she had long ago been the better able to benefit from the instruction of the
fin-de-siècle
Bohemian. Or perhaps the British were on the island for longer than Dinah thinks.

Not that Irmi's English was much of a help to her on the boat which, for unexplained reasons, she had boarded in Southampton – a Union Castle liner stuffed with post-war British immigrants – and none of them willing to exchange a single word with the daughter of the enemy. Poor bereaved Irmi who, thanks to the man with the egg stains down his shirt, had lost everything she ever possessed, except for Heinrich – bald Heinrich, with his little mutters, shuffles and sniffs.

Irmi and Heinrich set up house in Hillbrow, Johannesburg's inner-city flatland, overhung with the smell of ageing gas cookers. In time, it became a pioneering mixed-race area: the first place in the country where young, dreadlocked black men would neck openly with white girls in the street, the first white area in which blacks began, illegally, to rent cheap high-rise ‘bachelor' flats. Hillbrow could boast South Africa's first and only all-night bookshop. It was full of elderly, concert-going, transplanted German Jews. It was the only place to get good rye bread and salt beef. It was the place where, in 1963, Barney Simon, director of Johannesburg's Market Theatre, bumped into the Rivonia Trial's two most rigorously hunted political escapees.

‘Hide us,' they said – Harold Wolpe and Arthur Goldreich – ‘our pick-up car didn't show.'

And he hid them in his flat, taking them up in the service lift, risking imprisonment himself – a secret good deed that needed to remain a secret for the next thirty years.

Then gradually the old German Jews got too scared to leave their flats at night and the concert audiences declined. Likewise the theatre's audiences, which got scared of the inner-city flick-knives and the muggings and the shoot-outs. Hillbrow became the terrain of drug barons and then, with the opening of South Africa's borders, the local drug barons were effectively seen off by bigger and scarier drug barons, who entered the country from the north.

By this time, Heinrich and Irmi had retired. They'd packed up and gone back to Berlin, taking the oak thrones with them. They had neither of them ever quite shuffled off that air of being displaced persons. Then Heinrich died within weeks of their reentry, and Irmi, finding that Berlin wasn't home any more without him, returned on the rebound to Johannesburg. She placed herself in the German Old People's Home, a hang-out full of aged ghastlies
who'd done time in South West Africa.
Sudwest
, as they said. Dinah, when she visits her aunt there, in her small, functional room with shower and kitchenette, doesn't like to ask Irmi why the two oak thrones are not a feature of her living space. She fancies that they'll have gone under the hammer in an auction house somewhere in Berlin.

Lisa and Dinah go to high school in the same year. It's the year in which Dr Malan, the Prime Minister, retires. He's replaced by Mr J.G. Strijdom who is rabid to achieve what Dr Malan has tried to do and failed. That is to get rid of the Cape's Coloured franchise. Mr Strijdom does this by increasing the number of Appeal Court judges and Nat-supporting senators until he's got enough to push the business through. This is called the Separate Representation of Voters Act. Then he makes ‘mixed' trade unions illegal, so that black and white workers won't make common cause. This is called the Industrial Reconciliation Act. In Durban, most of the English are less bothered by these measures than by Mr Strijdom's determination to make South Africa a republic. And when he declares that ‘God Save the Queen' is no longer the national anthem, white Durbanites are bristling. There's an English translation on offer for them, of the droney, slow-motion Afrikaans national anthem, but nobody Dinah's come across ever bothers to learn the words.

Dinah can't help noticing that Communist is now coming top among the government's favourite buzz words. There's been Dr Malan's Suppression of Communism Act, but now it's Communist this and Communist that pouring out of the radio. This is mainly because of the Defiance Campaign. Thousands of black South Africans have right then got the government shaking in its shoes, simply by organising a nation-wide sit-down in station waiting rooms, train carriages and public libraries marked ‘Europeans Only/
Slegs Blankes
'. Everything has now been labelled in the two official white languages, so that even the school buses say ‘No spitting/
Moenie Spoeg Nie
', and persons visiting from abroad will
often wonder why public lavatories, having announced ‘Gents/
Here
, will then go on to say ‘Ladies/
Dames
'. It's confusing if you don't realise that
here
is Afrikaans for gents. It's like the plural of
Herr
. Some foreigners are also a bit freaked by the signs in butchers' shop windows that say ‘Boys' Meat Two Shillings', because they don't like its cannibalistic ring. And sometimes you can still see those butchers' signs that say ‘Boys' Meat Two Shillings. Dogs' Meat Two and Sixpence'.

The government has managed to arrest eight thousand of the Defiance Campaigners and is using the Suppression of Communism Act as a catchall to nobble its leaders. Dinah hasn't the first clue about what a Communist is, except that the runaway Brainy Rebel used to be one before the recent arrival of the black-edged telegram announcing his demise. So, along with most South Africans, she now thinks it's Communism for a black person to sit in a white person's waiting room, or for a black person to enter the public library. The list of banned persons is getting so long that to think about it is a bit like looking at the Roll of Honour on the Cenotaph.

Meanwhile, the Nats are pretty pleased about the firm hand that Mr Strijdom is taking and Parliament has been proudly referring to its own ‘reign of terror' against the passive-resistance campaigners. Agitator is another of the government's favourite words. Agitators must be eliminated, root and branch, because it's a long-term conviction of the apartheid state that, without agitators, no black person would feel himself to have any grievance. Soon the state is rounding up five hundred Treason Trial accused – Communists and agitators from all ethnic groups – though the court whittles the number down to a mere one hundred and fifty. Even so, it's a lot of people to have in the dock all at once and the trial drags on for four years, taking on an atmosphere of macabre fairground gaiety as the accused suddenly have the world's media at their feet and the prosecution is repeatedly outwitted.

While it's impossible for the accused to earn a living during this time, the good news is that the trial provides a rare opportunity for resistance leaders to liaise across ethnic boundaries – a thing which the state has by now rendered strictly illegal in real life. This is the high point of resistance success: a triumphant farce to be remembered in the dark and brutal days to come. When the last trialist is
acquitted, there's nothing much the state can do, except raid the house in which the celebrations take place in the hopes of nailing a few ‘mixed' drinkers, because serving alcohol to a black person is also against the law.

As the politics gets more intense, Dinah's dad has to spend more and more of his early morning time shouting back at the radio, so this is the girls' regular daily wake-up sound – that's before he's blocked his rage by blasting them out with items from his ever-increasing record collection. Among recent early morning favourites are Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears promising doom and brimstone.

From Brig' o' Dread when thou may'st pass,
Ev-ery nighte and alle
To Purgatory fire thou comest at last
And Christe receive thy saule

Meanwhile Lisa and Dinah are getting on with their ordinary little white schoolgirl lives.

Lisa has been looking forward to the pleasure of going to high school because that way she'll get away from Dinah and Angela and the daily shower of newspaper fiancés. She's really pleased that she's going to be the only one with a hockey stick and a regulation Girls' High navy swimsuit. She anticipates that Dinah will be looking enviously at her new school atlas and her new
Concise Oxford English Dictionary
. She's already got her blue-and-silver tin box of mathematical instruments. In the event, Lisa is cheated out of this pleasure, because the school system changes that year. There's a pilot scheme in which girls from Dinah's school and Dinah's year will move up early and spend five years, not four, in secondary education. So Lisa is stuck with Dinah and Angela after all.

By this time Dinah and Lisa are no longer each other's best friend. Dinah has begun to position herself as a bit of a dissenter and she thinks of Lisa as a goody-goody. She knows that, unlike Lisa, she'll never be a prefect and she doesn't want to be one. She thinks that prefects are scabs. This instinct probably comes in part from not being the first-born, but also it comes from the government. For Dinah merely to think about the government is enough to make her believe that authority is by its nature suspect. Plus she's
messy and creative. She's constantly cutting, gluing, painting and sewing which means a litter of paper clippings, dried paintbrushes, crushed pastels and glitter all over the floor of the shared bedroom. The shared bedroom rankles with both of them and with Lisa especially, who can't stand disorder and is longing to have more privacy. From time to time she draws a chalk line down the middle of the room between the beds and screams at Dinah that she's throwing away anything,
anything
that crosses the line.

Lisa, unbeknown to Dinah, has entered adolescence. She gets into huddles with their mum in a new and unaccustomed form of female bonding that Dinah finds a bit threatening. She has no idea that this has something to do with menstruation and, when she eventually finds out, over a year later, Lisa's orderliness in the matter of female monthlies is quite astonishing to her. All that business with the horrible lumpy crotch pads that you have to wear hooked on to a saggy elastic waist belt that's forever twisting and tweaking and spiralling. Oh yuk. Then there's the business of soaking and laundering your inconveniently bouffant school knickers in those useless 1950s soap flakes. Plus there's the matter of discreet disposal. How has Lisa managed this when there isn't even a pedal bin in the lavatory?

Dinah hasn't noticed any of it. She only notices that Lisa is always cross with her. She says ‘Shut up' and ‘I hate you' and ‘Anyway, everyone in my class thinks you're goofy'. Lisa goes in for angry fits of physical intimidation so that Dinah has to fetch and carry for her at home. ‘Get me a banana,' Lisa says, and if Dinah says she won't, then Lisa will always thump her. Sometimes Dinah feels so angry that she retaliates in sneaky little-sisterish ways. She cuts up Lisa's favourite shorts or she hides Lisa's charm bracelet. She knows that a charm bracelet is a prized possession, because she's got one too. And every time either sister has a birthday, people will give them more and more little silver charms, so that every link in the chain is heavy, now, with double-hung trinkets.

Dinah crouches, quaking with fear, for what seems like hours in the earthy, anti-termite zone under the floorboards of the house, clutching Lisa's things, while above her head Lisa is stamping and raging and bursting into tears.

‘I
know
Dinah's hidden it,' she'll be saying. ‘I
know
she has. And this time I'm really going to kill her. Just wait.'

The trouble with Dinah's strategy is that it wrong-foots her with her parents, because Lisa is very good at inspiring confidence in adults. It leaves Dinah no option but to get herself cast in the role of the bad daughter. And once you're the bad daughter, you might as well go for broke.

The move to high school coincides almost exactly with the move from the Butcher Estate. Almost, but not quite. The university's lease on the estate is up within a few weeks. For the first days, Lisa and Dinah are conveyed the extra distance to their new school alongside the undergraduates, in canvas-covered army trucks left over from the war. Since the undergraduates are all male and nearly all engineers, the testosterone levels in the truck make the girls feel so uncomfortable that they demand the right to go by bus.

In Durban all the green buses are for blacks so these roar and judder past the groups of white schoolchildren in their variously banded panama hats and blazers. There are so many different school blazers in Durban that home-time on the Berea can look like the Henley Regatta, especially as some of the boys get made to wear straw boaters as well. The white kids call the blacks' buses Green Mambas. The green buses are always on their last legs, belching out streams of black smoke and overloaded with downtown workers coming in from the black locations.