In the next few weeks, Hans and Myra did the reverse of what they had done when they moved from South Africa to Canada. They sold all the furniture, which, having been so expensive in the first place, might have fetched a good price had it not been so badly maintained. They had a yard sale for the smaller items, including every South African knick-knack in the house. They got five dollars for the black-and-white aerial photograph of Table Mountain and the City Bowl that had hung for years on the wall above the sofa. They were in such a hurry to get rid of the house that they got far less for it than they should have.
“I’ve arranged for my diaries and my collection of Het Achterhuis to be kept in a storage unit until we come back,” Rachel said, as I helped her clean out her bedroom. “It costs next to nothing, and I’ve been assured that the books will be as safe as they would be in a bank vault. When we were standing around the barrel in your parents’ backyard, I thought about burning both my collections, every volume of my diary and every copy of Anne Frank’s. Obviously, I chickened out.”
“Good,” I said. “You would have regretted it.”
“Well, I’m taking a couple of copies of Het Achterhuis to read while we’re away.”
Fritz and Carmen stayed at the house on Freshwater Road the night before we all left on the midnight plane to London, the first leg of our journey. To my relief, they lay low in their room, from which the smell of hash wafted downstairs. Rachel and I sat about in the front room while her parents and Bethany confined themselves to the kitchen. Rachel told me that the flight to Cape Town would take twenty-five hours, counting stopovers, one hour, Rachel said, for every year of my life. “You never know,” she said, “you might have a fear of flying. In that case, each hour might take a year off your life.”
“Thanks,” I said. “But it can’t be worse than bobbing up and down in a dory on a stormy day at sea. I spent my childhood doing that.”
“Turbulence,” she whispered in my ear. “You’ll love it. You might get to be a member of the mile-high club if you play your cards right.” I looked askance at her. “You’ve never heard of it?” I shook my head. When she told me what it was, I said, “Really?”
She burst out laughing. “Really. Gloria and Max are members in good standing.”
Even as we spoke, a phrase from The Great Gatsby kept running through my mind. Nick Carraway, near the end of the book, wrote of being free of his “provincial squeamishness” forever. I wondered if I would ever be sufficiently rid of mine to write about it, but I also couldn’t put aside my feelings of apprehension, of being in over my head with a family as odd-seeming as the van Houts. I thought of my encounter with Fritz and Carmen and of Hans and Myra’s surprise visit to my parents’ house and of all the things Rachel had told me in the first few months after we met. Because of our encounter in the Bare Area, Bethany had called me a prude and Rachel hadn’t come to my defence. I was beginning to wonder if my notions of normalcy seemed as odd to the van Houts as theirs did to me. If they were typical of the greater world, I had more to learn about it than I’d suspected, things that I would never find in books of the kind that I had set myself to read, or in any other kind. I thought of the many hours I’d spent alone in my apartment, hunched over the card table and some massive book. Hans had lived through things about which massive books were written, but there was not a book to be seen in his house besides Het Achterhuis and the many volumes of The Encyclopediary of Rachel van Hout.
We would soon be bound for a continent that figured in none of the big books I had read or had planned to read. I felt unsure of almost everything except that I was in love with one of the van Houts, a family like none I had ever met in life or in books. Was I finally seeing with my own eyes things that were worth writing about? I’d long ago made up my mind that my first book would, like Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, be heavily autobiographical, a barely fictionalized account of my life to date, a coming-of-age novel by a person who, I was beginning to suspect, had yet to come of age. Rachel hugged my arm and pressed her forehead hard against my shoulder. I remembered how I’d felt when I read Rachel’s Dear Wade letter, when I’d assumed that she had gone on knitting for me even after she had taken up with someone else. I felt something like that now—uncertain, foolish, toyed with, overmatched. For a moment, I had the same, sick, falling feeling, as if everything on which my life was built had been ripped out from beneath me.
Rachel’s life insurance policy and my savings were not enough to pay the entire cost of what we’d decided would be a six-month stay, so she had convinced her parents to contribute what they could and Gloria and Max to cover the rest. It felt strange, as if Hans was giving me money to make it possible for me to sleep with his daughter. I felt sheepishly beholden to him, and to Rachel, Max and Gloria, as if Rachel and her father and her sister and her brother-in-law were pooling their resources so that she, at age twenty-three, a young woman still recovering from a breakdown, could share a bed with a sexual freeloader who would spend his days writing, or trying to write, or pretending to write, a novel. Earlier in the evening, Hans and Myra had looked at me as if to say they had higher hopes for their youngest daughter than the sort of provider a would-be writer who was not allowed by law to hold a job in South Africa was ever likely to become. They knew I had been a reporter with a newspaper that, even in St. John’s, was looked down upon by all. I was a young Newfoundlander who had quit his low-paying no-status job to write novels full time for no pay at all while on a kind of furlough in my girlfriend’s native country. To make matters worse, their daughter believed he would be a huge success someday. I fancied I would not have looked more like a poseur if I had been wearing a cape and a beret and sporting a cigarette holder.
We flew to London on Air Canada, where we connected at Heathrow to South African Airways for our flight to Cape Town. The SAA flight attendants wore light-blue tunics over white blouses, the tunics belted and double-breasted. Around their necks were scarves that bore the colours of the South African flag: red, white, black, green and yellow. Slightly aslant on their heads were pillbox hats with a large, round button on top that looked like the head of a spike that kept the hat in place. All of them were darkly tanned, almost all of them blond. They were all fluent in English, Dutch, German, French and Afrikaans. “You could be an SAA flight attendant,” I said to Rachel, but she seemed unamused. “One in the family is enough,” she said.
We landed in Tel Aviv, the last refuelling stop before the long flight down the African continent to Johannesburg. South African Airways had had its landing rights in the rest of Africa revoked years before. Rachel told me that Israel and South Africa saw each other as allies of a kind—renegade nations.
“Well, we’re on our own now,” Rachel said when we took off again. “No legal place to land from here to Jo’burg.”
“What will they do if something goes wrong?” I said.
“I suppose one of the African countries would let us land if it was a matter of life or death. I guess this is why South African Airways is cheaper than all the others. You get a kind of suspense discount. And they make it up to you. They pamper you from start to finish.”
She was right about that. From Tel Aviv to Johannesburg, it was like the flight attendants were serving the consecutive courses of one long meal, food and drink coming at us at a rate we couldn’t keep up with. Bethany, sitting in front of us, accepted everything she was offered, then handed it back to me without a word.
Every announcement was made in English and Afrikaans. This was not Myra’s Afrikaans, but harsher, more guttural, far more emphatic—something like German as it might be spoken by some profoundly exasperated parent. It seemed odd coming out of the mouths of these young, ever smiling, ever indulgent flight attendants, who, when they spoke English, sounded faintly like the Australians I’d heard on TV.
No one objected when Rachel curled up on the floor between our row and the one in front, her hands joined palm to palm beneath her head. Despite the incessant noise of the servers, I managed to get to sleep about three hours after she did.
When I woke, she was reading her daily quotient of Het Achterhuis, so I looked out the darkened window, hoping to make out something of the earth below, but there were only occasional lights, the first lights I had ever seen that were not those of Newfoundland. The continent was just six miles below but I couldn’t see it. It seemed right that I couldn’t, that I not be fooled into thinking I had seen it just because I had flown over it, looking down from thirty thousand feet.
While we waited on the runway in Johannesburg for the other passengers to board the flight to Cape Town, Rachel told me that, in June 1976, she and Carmen and their parents had been on this very runway waiting for a flight to London as smoke from the Soweto uprising rolled like fog across the tarmac. “I was terrified,” she said. “We thought a revolution had started. Dad kept glancing over his shoulder and looking out the window. You could actually smell the smoke inside the plane. I thought we’d never get out of here. Dad said the riots were proof that the blacks were uncivilized and impossible to educate, so they should never be allowed to vote or to mix with whites.”
“Your parents—”
“It’s hard to say what they really believe.”