The covenant - James A. Michener [620]
Of the previous attacks, many had resulted in disastrous fires, several had maimed and two had killed, but no suspect had ever even been listed, let alone arrested. In Mrs. Saltwood's case, the bomb destroyed a door and left a heavy fire-stain on the woodwork, but that was all. What the next one would do she could not know, but there would surely be a next one, which the police would investigate and the officials in Pretoria deplore.
The harshest aspect of Laura Saltwood's banning was that on the morning of the day when her five years expired, the same two men could appear at her door and say quietly, 'Laura Saltwood, you are banned for five more years,' and after that, there could be another five, and another.
That was why the members of the Lady Anne Barnard Club wept as they bade her goodbye that first day of June. They expected never to see her free again.
In his discussions with young Afrikaners, both at the fossicking and at Vrymeer, Saltwood was disturbed by the cavalier manner in which they dismissed world opinion. The United Nations would pass a resolution condemning South Africa for its racial policies, or its treatment of Indians, and the Troxel boys would laugh: 'What can they do about it? They need our minerals. To hell with them.' Newspapers in London and New York would print bitter editorials, and the young geologists working with Philip would sneer: 'What can England and the United States do? They've got to rely on us as bulwarks against Communism, so the bleeding hearts can bloody well drop dead.'
No outsider could talk with these vital young people without becoming convinced that they intended using military force to defend their way of life and were prepared to use their guns against either outside threats or internal ones. 'Let their armies step one foot across our borders,' Frikkie said, 'and we'll blow their heads off.'
Jopie made a much different point: 'If this Jonathan Nxumalo or any of his kind try to infiltrate us from Mocambique, we'll shoot them the moment they step on our soil. And we'll shoot any Kaffir inside our country who raises a finger to help them.'
'You sound like the Gotterdammerung Commando,' Saltwood said one Sunday afternoon at the farm.
'What's that?' Jopie asked.
'A German myth. The gods have loused everything up, hideously, so they go into laager, and to solve their problems, they burn down all of heaven.'
'I volunteer for that commando,' Jopie said. 'I, too,' said Sannie.
'You mean you would risk destroying the whole structure of South Africa to prolong your advantage?'
This was the kind of rhetorical question that would have been effective among university students in Paris or Berlin. At Vrymeer it evoked from Frikkie an answer which simply stunned Saltwood: 'No American could understand our situation. You have a problem with your blacks which you solve in ways harmonious to your history. But what you do bears no relationship to us. Because God placed us here to do His work. He put us here to serve as a bulwark of Christian civilization. We must stay.'
Philip gasped. In the United States, Frikkie and Jopie would be professional football players, and he could not conceive of a pair of athletes from the Dallas Cowboys or the Denver Broncos citing God as the sponsor of their political behavior. 'Do you believe what you just said?' he asked, and Sannie replied, 'We were placed here to do God's will, and we shall do it.' When Philip tried to question her, she interrupted: 'If Frikkie and Jopie were to be killed in the first battle, I'd take up their guns.'
'To do what?'
'To preserve our Christian way of life.'
'You would go out to your rondavels and shoot the Nxumalos?'
'I certainly would.' And almost imperceptibly she moved toward the cousins.
Silence fell in the kitchen. This was the first