Frankie and Stankie (44 page)

For a brief while it looks as if the date's mother might have found a way out and up. Because in the months before she leaves London, she's being courted by a clever young Zionist student at the Imperial College of Science and they have whispered plans. But this is when her mother moves in and shops her.

‘If you stay in this country, you'll have the life that I've had,' she says. ‘And, Ida, you've never been strong.'

Strong enough to polish all the shoes. Not strong enough for love. So Ida is shipped out to Krugersdorp to be her brother Benny's typist. And, after some years – since Krugersdorp is not the greatest spot for dating opportunities – Ida enters into a marriage with a man she considers her inferior. This is because he's got a Lithuanian accent and not a lot of money. She derives her precarious sense
of status from being an Englishwoman, an Englishwoman and a Londoner who has ridden the District Line. And now she's pregnant and married to a foreigner who scratches a precarious living by buying and selling what he can.

But the date's dad is a fabulous guy – or that is what Dinah thinks – because she gets round to meeting him quite soon, sooner than she expects. The date's dad has taken a different route to Krugersdorp, because at the age often he's been sent out all alone from a
shtetl
in Lithuania. He docks in London speaking no English and boards a boat en route for Cape Town. A rich uncle, as he has been told, is going to educate him. Once in Cape Town he makes his way to a village somewhere in the Transkei where the rich uncle lives. But the rich uncle turns out not to be rich. He runs a small native trading store and he puts the boy to work. So the date's dad doesn't go to school. He learns English and educates himself by reading everything he can lay his hands on – most of which is what comes out of the Victor Gollancz Left Book Club.

Ever since the date can remember, his dad has had ‘the business'. He's got one small van and one black assistant and he drives the van into the Transvaal hinterland to buy agricultural produce from Afrikaner farmers. Then he sells the produce to wholesalers in various towns round about. He drives the van at twenty miles an hour and, one day, having trundled the routes for something like nineteen years, he runs over a sheep, and finds that his licence, got years back in the Cape – from that place he still refers to as the Colony – has been invalid for fifteen years. Then there's serious panic in the household because he has to take another test. He's been one man with a little van right through the Second World War when news of families like his own is filtering out from occupied Europe – families herded into synagogues and burned alive, en masse. Some of the farmers he visits have got pictures of Hitler on the wall. But they still have a drink with him on the stoep, because he's got the common touch. And they always speak in Afrikaans.

‘Piet,' they say, ‘you're the only Jew that we will have in the house. And you're the only Communist.'

They call him Piet because his initials are P.T. even though his name is really Philip.

And he is a sort of Communist because, having left his homeland
seven years before the events of 1917, he knows that the Russian Revolution was a very wonderful thing. He knows that all the stories leaking out about Stalin and the labour camps are the invention of the capitalist press. Once, way back, he heard an orator on the steps of the Johannesburg City Hall. ‘If the
Rand Daily Mail
tells you it's day,' the orator said, ‘then you know it's night.' So the date's dad knows that the Soviet Union never invaded Hungary. He knows that this is another conspiracy on the part of the capitalist press. The orator was one Jock Campbell of the South African Labour Party.

The date's dad anticipates that his son will grow up to join him in the business, but his mum has other ideas. Her boy is very clever, she tells all the neighbours. That's the neighbours in Blikkies, which is the modest to poorish tin-house white suburb in which the family lives. But this is way before they've made a move to more salubrious quarters.

‘He's going to Oxford one day,' she says.

And the date
is
very clever, which means that after his first year at junior school he's pushed up into a class of older children, where he's terrorised by the teacher and bullied by the older boys. The school experience means that, by the time he's twelve, the date has known for many years that school is very bad news and he's become a professional truant. When he truants he hitch-hikes into Johannesburg where he sits in the basement of the Johannesburg public library and reads back numbers of the
New Statesman
and the
Observer
and the
Listener
. Which explains why he's the only person Dinah's met who knows all about Malcolm Muggeridge and Kingsley Martin and John Strachey and the Aldermaston Marches. He knows what Jacob Bronowski has been saying on the BBC. He's also the only person she knows who owns a genuine duffel coat with proper horn toggles. But the trouble with the duffel coat is that it always sets him wheezing because, like Dinah, he's asthmatic. Plus his birthday's on Bonfire Night, which is stretching credulity.

‘Well, I don't believe you,' Dinah says. ‘I'm sorry. I do not believe you. Nobody, except for me, has ever had a birthday on Bonfire Night.'

The date's name is Sam and he must, she thinks, have leapt from the womb as a fully fledged political animal. Or perhaps he gets it
from his dad. He can't ever leave columns of newsprint alone and he's known, for longer than he can remember, that religion is the Opium of the People. As a child he's led a walk-out against the local rabbi who runs the after-school Hebrew class, and after that he doesn't go back. School is boring enough, he says, without having to spend his Saturdays sitting at the feet of an autocratic bully when he could be out playing cricket.

At school, unlike Dinah, Sam has never been grabbed by the morning hymns in assembly. He doesn't know ten verses of any hymn to speak of. In fact he knows not a single verse. Dinah finds it almost impossible to believe that he's managed not to pick up any hymns, but he's never possessed
The Public School Hymn Book
. He's never got round to buying it, so he's never heard of Nahum Tate. Nor does he know the works of Percy the Dreamer. Because he doesn't have the hymn book, he's always been among that band of school slouches who've been issued with the grudging hymn-sheet handouts on which the school secretary has typed up only the four verses of each hymn that the school body actually sings. And it's because of the hymn-sheets that Sam right away knows that his high-school headmaster is mad.

‘Hymn number two hundred and three,' the head announces. ‘The first two verses and the last two verses.'

But Sam's only ever got four verses printed on his hymn-sheet. He also knows that the headmaster's mad because every morning, on his way to school, the head stops and takes two bricks from the building site where the new high school's being erected. He puts them into his rucksack and carries them off to the old school, where he uses the bricks to mend a broken wall. The head says this is to improve his posture – in which case, as Sam deduces, he ought to be carrying the two bricks back. But the bricks only go one way.

It's Dinah's conviction, furthermore, that Sam is remarkably unclued-up about Jewish religious rituals, though he always likes to deny this whenever she tries him out.

‘What's Yom Kippur?' she says. ‘What's Rosh Hashanah?'

‘Um,' Sam says. ‘Urm… I think that's when you eat horse radish.'

‘That's pathetic,' Dinah says. ‘Anyway, which one is for eating horse radish?'

‘Um,' Sam says. ‘Urm…'

But he knows about Pesach, he says. That's when you have to eat matzos. As Made Under the Supervision of the Beth Din, as it says on the matzo box. He knows that his dad always grumbles about having to eat matzos for all those days on end.

‘Tenks
Gott
next veek is bread,' he says as the Passover begins to wind down.

Sam's dad likes to drink cheap whisky in one or other of the working-men's clubs on Jewish religious holidays. He prefers the hangouts of old white miners and he likes to wear his cloth cap.

‘So what's Hanukkah?' Dinah says.

‘Um,' Sam says. ‘Urm … I think Hanukkah must have been invented around 1958. That's to coincide with Christmas. Sort of a bit like Fathers' Day in relation to Mothers' Day. Well, we never had it in
my
day. Not when I was a boy.'

Two things really puzzle Dinah about Sam. They threaten her carefully nurtured prejudices. One is that he's a sporty person and he's been a schoolboy jock. He's run for the province in a vest with his number sewn on the front and no less a person than ‘Baasie' van Wyk with the double set of eyebrows has been a member of Sam's athletics club. His schoolboy means of bringing honour to his high school has been via the rugby team. Plus he's once been touched on the shoulder by Denis Compton, the famous English cricketer. Sam also quite likes to do sports talk.

‘I was at the Ellis Park Cricket Ground,' he'll say, ‘when Hutton and Washbrook put on three hundred and sixty-five runs in a day.'

Dinah's never been with anyone before who'll say things to her like this. Not even her Springbok cricketing admirer. Not in front of the ladies. As a child, Sam always used to play cricket in the local park in Krugersdorp with an assembly of neighbourhood white children. Meanwhile, at the other end of town, Krugersdorp's Indian children would gather to do the same thing. So one day Sam crossed town and challenged the Indian boys to a cricket match. The boys agreed and the match was fixed for the following weekend. It was everybody's first experience of inter-racial sport.

‘And the boy who captained the Indian team,' Sam now tells her, ‘that boy was Yusuf Dadoo's brother.'

Dr Yusuf Dadoo is chairman of the now banned South African Communist Party.

The second puzzling thing is that Sam is really keen on South African history. In fact he's consumed by it. Dinah knows that South African history is that yawn-inducing propaganda subject she's been made to do at school. ‘The first shipload of coolies arrived in November I860.' But now it's being transformed for her, because Sam is telling her all sorts of stuff that she's never heard before. He tells her about the white miners' strike of 1922, when the miners marched under a banner that said, ‘Workers of the World Unite for a White South Africa.' He knows why Pansy Kaufmann calls her Russian-Jewish visitors Peruvians. It's because the English and German Jews wouldn't let the Polish and Russian Jews into the Kimberley Club, he says. So they started their own club and they called it the Polish and Russian Union. Then, because its initials were PARU, it quickly became Peru. ‘So its members became Peruvians.' This is what Sam says.

He knows that the first written Afrikaans was commentaries on the Koran. So the language that
Dinah's resisted learning as the medium of white fascists is really a brown person's language
. It's the language of Cape Coloured Muslims.

‘An imam was summoned from the Caliphate,' he says. ‘And, because the Malay population's theology had fallen into disrepair, he ordered that certain religious writings be translated into the vernacular.' The vernacular, by then, was Afrikaans. Or, as the white people called it, Kitchen Dutch.

Sam's got bizarre stories about Malay slave craftsmen who've got Irish immigrant apprentices. He knows that Britain emptied its surplus orphanage population into the Cape Colony, but the orphans quickly vanished from view by falling into the labouring classes and thereby became brown people. He knows that migrant workers from beyond South Africa's borders are classified as ‘foreign natives'. He knows that Maud Gonne's husband – Yeats's ‘drunken vainglorious lout' – has fathered a line of Cape Coloured politicians – a family of orators called MacBride. He knows that Nylstroom – as in ‘Nile Stream' – in the Transvaal is called Nylstroom because a group of trekboers, who were searching for the Holy Land, believed the stream to be the source of the Nile. But the doubting hardliners among the party trekked on and on into Angola, where, instead of finding the source of the Nile, they became destitute and inbred poor whites. He knows the person
who, some years before, painted the slogan on the Johannesburg Public Library: ‘US BLACK FOLKS AIN'T READIN' YET.' The person is a member of the Transvaal Indian Congress and he paints up slogans all the time. He knows that, during the Second World War, the Italians in Abyssinia surrendered to the South African Army, because the British Army deliberately held back its Indian troops. This was so that the Italians wouldn't have to surrender to brown men.

Partly because of the truanting factor, Sam's kept on failing school maths, so his mother gets him a crammer. He's had a notion to become a mining geologist, for reasons that Dinah can't fathom. So finally he gets to university late, having earned some money in a gold mine with one black mine ‘boy' to carry his pick and another to carry his lamp. Then, just when Applied Maths One is beginning to drive him up the wall, he's rescued by a history student who's spotted him in the canteen.

‘There's a guy I've been watching for days,' he says to his history-student friends. ‘He looks like an engineer. And he's dressed like an engineer. And he's sitting with the engineers. But he's always reading the
New Statesman
.'

So Sam becomes a history student and begins to win golden opinions. Leastways, Dinah's leafed through his books and some are presents from two of his tutors, with inscriptions on the flyleaf that indicate faith in his purpose. One of the tutors is a Balliol man and the other's from the LSE – a man who likes to see himself as the last of Laski's sons.

When Sam gives Dinah a lift to Johannesburg so that she can go and stay with Didi, he suggests that, as they drive along, she teach him the words to Blake's Jerusalem'. That's the words as set to music. So she spends the hours between Durban and Ladysmith giving the project a go. And, in the process, discovers not only that Sam has difficulty with learning words verbatim – he who can remember the date of every cattle-raiding skirmish between the Kei and the Kieskhama Rivers – but that he's the third person she's met in her life who has trouble holding a tune. In return he teaches her all the songs he knows from the International Brigades. Which means that, one day, decades on, when Dinah's train stops at a Spanish suburban station, she looks up and reads a railway sign that's announcing ‘Manzaneres'. And instead of a suburban
station, she sees a bloodstained trench, where one Hans Beimler gave his life, leading the fight to save Madrid.