Despite the Darkness, page 16
‘Well, whatever the rights and wrongs of this, Cameron,’ Patrick said, ‘you are going to need to explain yourself to the Principal. Don’t forget that he is expecting to see you at 9.30. The Department’s reputation is very important and all this publicity is not good for it – you need to watch it.’
‘Funnily enough,’ Cameron retorted, ‘”you need to watch it” were the exact words used by Venter when he left after the raid on Friday. But I’m going to do you the favour of regarding that as a coincidence – I will avoid leaping to the conclusion that you have been collaborating with him in writing the script. Mind you, you might have a bit of difficulty proving that you haven’t been.’
His Parthian shot serving as a minor, but inadequate, safety valve for seething indignation, Cameron continued his interrupted mission to collect his post from the History Department staff room. There was nobody else in the room, but as he stood in front of his pigeon-hole extracting a couple of letters from under yet another pile of essays he heard light footsteps behind him and felt an arm round his waist giving him a squeeze. Whatever scent it was that Lynn was wearing smelt of jasmine and brought back the freshness of the early morning. She was holding another of the leaflets, which had been spread around the lecture and tutorial rooms as well as the residences. The students had been unusually busy, given the early hour.
‘This is gross,’ Lynn said, ‘but nobody will believe it. Are you OK?’
‘Fuck Patrick!’ came the vehement reply. ‘He’s just intercepted me in the corridor outside his office and lectured me on the damage I’m doing to the reputation of the Department. In spite of all the time we’ve worked together I don’t think he is a hundred percent convinced that I’m not working for the SB.’
‘I’d much rather not thanks,’ said Lynn, clearly wanting to keep it light. ‘He’s too old for me and much too pompous.’
‘Definitely,’ Cameron responded, feeling grateful for her concern. ‘I’m almost tempted to plant a bomb or two myself. That would really blow the reputation of the Department sky-high, at least where the people in this country who ultimately won’t matter are concerned.’
Lynn’s smile disappeared and she looked round anxiously, pointing first to the wall and then to her ear. She was right – walls did sometimes have ears. Bomb-talk in present circumstances was less than well advised.
‘I must go now,’ Cameron said, looking at his watch. ‘Having been subjected to a lecture on the Department’s reputation by Patrick, I am now expected to go and see the Principal. The next lecture will be about the reputation of the University. Wish me luck.’
The Principal was a tall, excessively thin man whose slow and oddly hesitant gait around campus brought a stick-insect to mind. Cameron knew relatively little about him. He was said to have been a mathematician whose academic reputation had flourished when he was in his twenties but had declined steadily over the following two decades. He had cut his losses by seeking refuge in a not particularly distinguished career in university administration and had been appointed as Principal in the apparent absence of anyone more inspiring. His tenure to date had been largely unremarkable, apart from a confrontation with the Senate stemming from an apparent phobia about publicity. He seemed to regard any publicity as bad publicity. He had tried to persuade the Senate to approve a blanket ban on any member of staff giving radio or television interviews or publishing anything in the popular media without his personal authorisation.
Cameron had been a lecturers’ representative on Senate at the time and had made a speech arguing, he thought quite eloquently, that it was the role and obligation of universities, particularly in countries like South Africa at the present time, to provide intellectual and moral leadership to their societies. Leaving the obvious issues of freedom of speech and academic freedom aside, he had suggested that this was much better done via the popular media than through academic journals that were only ever read by other academics. Cameron had been only one of many speakers who had opposed the Principal’s injudicious proposal, which had been defeated by a large majority, but ever since then he had had the sense of being a marked man in a world increasingly populated by marksmen.
The Principal’s greeting was less than effusive. Rather than inviting Cameron to join him on the comfortable chairs at the other end of his large office, the Principal sat down at his desk and told Cameron, Head Master-like, to sit down on the chair opposite and explain himself.
‘Explain precisely what?’ Cameron asked. ‘I’m not sure that I understand.’
‘Explain this, then,’ came the instruction, as the Principal pushed one of the leaflets across the desk in Cameron’s direction.
‘I think you would probably need to ask the students who wrote it for an explanation,’ Cameron responded, ‘rather than asking me. The only thing I can explain, which I have already done for my Head of Department, is that my conversation with the Special Branch officer consisted only of a suggestion that throwing paper bags out of his car window onto the pavement was not a good idea.’
‘The police raid on Friday will obviously not have been about paper bags,’ rejoined the Principal. ‘There is no smoke without fire. The police don’t raid just anybody, they must have had a good reason. You are constantly provoking them with your articles and letters to the newspapers. Now, because you won’t keep silent, they are linking the university to the bomb-blast that killed that unfortunate night watchman. The newspapers are telling everyone that your house was raided. All this is dreadfully damaging to the university. We depend on students coming to us – government subsidy doesn’t come anywhere near covering our costs and we have to rely on student fees. Parents won’t send their children to universities full of Marxists who are being targeted by the police. The majority of parents support the government – even if they don’t do so openly.’
‘All the more reason, I would have thought,’ Cameron responded, ‘to speak out about the injustice of apartheid. Who is going to do that if the universities don’t? What is the point of gathering the intellectual leaders of society under one roof if they aren’t going to provide intellectual leadership? Universities have a moral obligation to protest about what is going on.’
‘That is what you said in the Senate,’ replied the Principal, emitting a theatrical sigh, ‘and it doesn’t answer the question about what is left of universities when students stop going to them because lecturers can’t keep quiet. You haven’t explained why the students think you are a police spy. It can’t be just on the basis of one conversation with one Security Branch officer.’
‘You’ll need to ask them that, I’m afraid,’ Cameron said.
Cameron didn’t think there was any point in repeating what he had said to Patrick. This wasn’t really about the ins and outs of whether or not he was working for the SB, it was about the Principal’s paranoia about publicity. He seemed to forget that there were plenty of people in South Africa, including the vast majority of the black population, never mind the millions in the outside world, who welcomed whatever opposition to apartheid the English-language universities were able to provide.
‘You will need to be able to prove that you aren’t a police spy if we are going to be able to limit the negative publicity that is bound to be generated by this rumour,’ the Principal said, finally getting to the point.
‘You can’t prove, or disprove, a negative,’ Cameron replied. This was getting tediously repetitive but Cameron was sure it wouldn’t be the last time he would have to hear himself saying it. ‘I can’t possibly prove I am not a police spy, any more than you could, Principal. If some busybody saw you playing with your grandchildren in the park and took it into his head to circulate a rumour that you were a paedophile how could you possibly ever prove that you weren’t? Judicial systems are supposed to work on the basis that you are innocent until proved guilty. I shouldn’t have to prove that I am not a police agent. It should be up to others, in this case the students, to prove that I am – and they certainly couldn’t do that because I am not a police agent. One angry conversation with a Special Branch officer doesn’t make me one.’
‘That is as may be,’ said the Principal, untangling his stick-insect legs and getting to his feet as abruptly as they would allow. ‘I’m hereby issuing a formal warning to you not to bring the university into disrepute by attracting adverse publicity, or in any other way. We cannot afford the financial fall-out. You may go now.’
So much for the University’s institutional stand against apartheid. But when it came to the things Cameron needed to be concerned about right now, the shared disapproval of his line-managers was not top of the list. Worrying about what Venter was up to was taking up a lot more head space, and wondering where Mirambo had got to, and what was happening to him, was taking up even more.
In comparison with his gnawing sense of responsibility for Mirambo, Cameron couldn’t frankly care less about the University’s reputation with the white parents of his students, many of whom would mutter about the iniquities of apartheid over the dinner table and then tick the Nationalist box when they came to vote. On that one point, at least, the Principal had got it right.
Cameron felt a strong compulsion to go to the library in the city to see whether Mirambo had left a message for him. The three long days and four even longer nights that had passed since he had waved Mirambo off into the darkness felt like an eternity.
If Venter’s short-term objective was to isolate him on campus, Cameron was damned if he was going to make it easy for him by hiding away. But he would need to steel himself if he was going to ride the questioning looks and whispered conversations that were bound to greet his arrival in the staff common room for morning tea. He would need to avoid getting so engrossed in a discussion about what had happened – an edited version of what had happened – that he would be late in getting back for his first year tutorial.
It couldn’t just be coincidence that a lull in the conversations around all the tables in the common room happened to coincide with his entry, but the chatter was hastily resumed. Cameron calmed his nerves a little by taking longer over pouring his tea than usual before joining the English and History table. He was immediately asked, as expected, to provide the details of his conversation with Venter and an account of the police raid.
The more often he had to tell the story, the sillier it sounded – but each time he told it the memory of Venter’s hand twitching towards the butt of his 9mm automatic flashed vividly back to mind. Although the story was selectively edited, the one area he didn’t feel any need to hold back on was his description of Venter’s behavior, and his view of Venter as an unmitigated bastard. He didn’t refrain from mentioning Venter’s use of drugs – if Venter was going to concoct false rumours about him, it seemed only reasonable to reciprocate by feeding the rumour-mill with a choice morsel about Venter.
It seemed clear that Jules and Lynn had both been right – the people who worked closely with him weren’t going to believe that he was a police agent on the strength of an SRC leaflet. So it was a pity that the majority of those round the table had to get up and go off to a meeting not long after his arrival. He hoped that wasn’t giving the rest of the common room the wrong impression.
Victoria Simms, who happened to be sitting next to Cameron, was one of the few people who remained at the table. She was a past graduate of the English Department who had recently been appointed to a permanent post after several years of part-time lecturing. Very sharp, but generally quite reticent, Cameron’s account appeared to have touched a nerve.
‘I don’t think you are being altogether fair on Venter,’ Victoria ventured. ‘Your account of him is very one-dimensional. He must be more complex than you allow for. Your account of him makes him sound like a stereotypical pantomime villain – all evil, with no redeeming features whatever. He sounds like a Gestapo lieutenant in a second-rate World War 2 movie – a black and white movie.’
Cameron looked at her for a few moments before replying. All he needed in life right now was a critic from the English Department on the hunt for rounded characters. He had been trying to give a brief account of what had happened – he wasn’t trying to write a Shakespearean tragedy. Victoria was welcome to spend her life searching for rounded characters if she wanted to, just as long as she didn’t try to regale him with lectures on stereotyping.
‘I wasn’t setting out to produce a creative masterpiece, Victoria,’ Cameron said. ‘I was giving a very brief account of a police raid on my house. This isn’t Jane Austen or Dickens or Lawrence – it’s my life I’m trying to deal with, and the lives of my wife and children. What makes you think Venter must be more complex? The man is an out and out sadist. I’ve spoken to people who have been tortured by him – and those have been the lucky ones, the ones who survived. There have been others who have disappeared without ever being able to tell anyone what he did to them.’
‘But shouldn’t you ask yourself why he does what he does?’ Victoria responded. ‘There must be a reason. Surely as a historian you should want to explore cause and effect? He’s an Afrikaner and Afrikaners have good reason, eighty years on, to hate us English speakers for what the British did to the Boers before, during and after the Anglo-Boer war. You know that better than anybody else on campus. As a Nationalist he will be as passionate about this country as you are, but unlike many English speakers he won’t have a bolt hole to go to in England or anywhere else if things go wrong for him. At bottom he will be trying to do what he thinks is best for his people and his country. He may be wrong about what is best for his country, but one should at least credit him with a kind of patriotism, however misguided. Webster would call it “integrity”.’
‘I also happen to know,’ Victoria went on, ‘that his wife has had a stroke and is an invalid. My sister nursed her at the hospital – he must be under huge strain at home. Nobody is simply evil – nobody is ever entirely one-dimensional. Things are never just black and white, there are always shades of grey between.’
‘Tell that to the government,’ Cameron replied. ‘I didn’t say he was “evil”, did I? I’m not a clergyman. Nor, for that matter, am I a politician or a tabloid journalist. I don’t bandy lazy and emotive categories like “evil” around. Most of the people Venter tortures are blacks. They can hardly be held to have been responsible for the Anglo-Boer war. And what is to say he does what he does out of a noble but misguided attempt to defend his people and his country? He may equally well just be a sick psychopath who enjoys finding creative ways of hurting people. All the evidence points in that direction.’
‘I’m not a mediator or an arbitrator,’ Cameron went on. ‘There’s a low level war going on here, and Venter is the enemy. I don’t need to empathise with him. I’ve got enough of my own problems to worry about without having to worry about his problems. His complexities are of interest to me only in so far as I need to understand them if I am going to try to protect my family against him while I carry on trying to resist this bloody government and the mad apartheid monster it has created in whatever limited way I can.’
Victoria had been sitting forward in her chair, now he saw her slump back as though recognizing that he was a lost cause.
‘Listen to yourself, Cameron,’ she said. ‘It is a kind of war, as you say, and they are winning. If you have lost the capacity for empathy it means that they have got to you. If you are not careful you will end up as dehumanized as you think they are. You need to remember that it is supposed to be a Humanities subject, designed to cultivate humane perspectives, that you teach.’
‘Thanks for the lecture, Victoria,’ Cameron said. ‘When you have had to listen to your little children screaming while a bunch of thugs tears their room apart and a policeman threatens to shoot their dog, your humane perspectives tend to become a bit selective. After being dry for two years Hilton has wet his bed every night since the raid. When you have had to listen to the man who wanted to shoot your dog telling you that he is going to beat the shit out of your wife, quote unquote, you tend not to spend a lot of time agonizing about the extent of the strain he is experiencing in his home life. Now if you’ll excuse me I need to get back to a first year tutorial. I promise I’ll try not to dehumanize the students.’
‘I’m sorry Cameron, I didn’t mean…’
Cameron heard Victoria fall silent as he walked to the door. Braving the stares and whispers – not that there had been as many of those as he had expected – had been worth it. His colleagues didn’t seem to be giving any credibility to the leaflet. But the conversation with Victoria at the end left him feeling strangely sullied.
Chapter 13
Once back in the office, there was just enough time to phone home to check that Margaret had turned up for work before going to his tutorial. Nobody picked up the phone. That could mean that Margaret was out at the back hanging up the washing where she couldn’t hear the phone, but it seemed more likely that she hadn’t arrived for work again. If so, it would be Jules’s state of mind rather than washing the day’s dishes that he would need to worry about.
Cameron felt absurdly nervous as he walked along the corridor to his first-year tutorial – pretty much the same as he had felt when he first started lecturing fifteen years before. There should be sixteen students – in those days there had never been more than ten – and he was relieved to see that most of them had turned up. So at least they weren’t staying away – or not yet anyway. One of them had a copy of the leaflet prominently displayed on top of the pile of books on the table in front of him.
