The covenant - James A. Michener [626]
Jopie Troxel folded the paper and shoved it over to Sannie. There was so much he wanted to say, but he would not trust himself to speak. They don't understand us, he thought. They accuse us of things we've never done. All we want is to maintain an orderly society, and they protest.
While Sannie and Frikkie prepared sandwiches and beer, he sat staring at his knuckles and brooding. The United Nations had condemned South Africa, but that was a bunch of dark-skinned third nations flexing their feeble muscles, and could be disregarded. The World Council of Churches had condemned apartheid, but they were a gang of radicals. The French-Dutch Commission had spoken harshly, but they were vexed because South Africa did not follow supinely in their missionary-socialist trail. But when Australia and New Zealand canceled a rugby tour, the heart and spirit of the nation were endangered.
'Why can't they try to understand us?' Jopie cried. Sannie and Frikkie kept cutting sandwiches.
A few days later Saltwood was introduced to a South African game even more brutal than rugby, if that was possible. Daniel Nxumalo came casually to Swartstroom and asked, 'You free tonight?'
'Let me phone Sannie.' But when the call went through, Mrs. van Doorn said that her daughter had gone to Pretoria with the Troxel boys, and Philip visualized them moving as a threesome beneath the jacaranda trees. 'I'm free.'
By roundabout paths Nxumalo led Philip to a shack where three tall blacks waited: 'This is my brother Jonathan. This is my cousin Matthew Magubane. This is a new recruit, Abel Tubakwa.'
Philip gasped. A thousand police were searching for Jonathan and Matthew; indeed, the Troxel boys had been on the border primarily to pursue these two into Mocambique, yet here they were, boldly in the same hills as those who were hunting them. 'They were in Soweto last night,' Daniel said, 'and they go north tomorrow. Or at least that's what they told me.' The conspirators laughed.
'We suggested the meeting,' Jonathan said in Afrikaans.
'Why?' Philip asked.
'So that you could tell the Americans, when you go home, that we are far from defeated.'
'I may not go home.'
'You should. In a few years this could be an ugly country.'
Magubane interrupted: 'Marry the girl and get her out of here. All the bright young whites are leaving.' He spoke in such rapid Afrikaans that Saltwood failed to catch his full meaning, so Abel Tubakwa interpreted in fine English.
'How do you see the future?' Philip asked in English, and after that the men used this language.
Jonathan was obviously the tactician: 'If they caught us tonight, we'd all be shot. But they won't catch us. We move about pretty much as we wish.'
'Terrorism?'
'We don't call it that. Sporadic attacks. Harassment. Ridicule. War of nerves.'
'To what purpose?'
'To remind them always that we're serious. That we will never again go away and lie down like good dogs and not growl.'
'Will that accomplish anything?'
'It will gnaw at their minds. Saltwood, you've seen the enlightened Afrikaners. These people are not stupid. They know that accommodation must be made. I think they're ready to accept us now, on some radically new basis. Not total equality, not yet. And not one-man, one-vote. But a true partnership.'
'Look at what's happening in Pretoria right now,' Daniel said excitedly. 'They've built this new theater. With public funds. I understand it's as good as anything in Berlin or the one in Minneapolis.'
'I've been reading the stories,' Philip said. 'Public funds, and then they state that only whites will be admitted.'
Jonathan slammed the table. 'They doing that again?'
'Yes,' his brother said, 'but there's been this great outcry. From all parts of the public. People you'd never expect have stepped forward to demand that the theater be made available to everyone.'
'Goddamn!' Jonathan cried,