A Sailor's Honour (14 page)

There were two stinkwood riempie chairs in front of the desk. Spokie occupied one of them.

‘Sit down, boy,' the magistrate said, pointing to the second chair. The nameplate on the desk read: Chief Magistrate Piet Fourie
.

Johann sat next to Spokie. He had not seen him since the incident. Johann looked around and saw two rows of seating at the back of the room. The people at the back had taken sides. In the front row immediately behind him, Johann saw his mother, oom Daan, the district surgeon and the sergeant. In the row behind them was Von Schauroth. On the other side of the room, in the front row, Johann saw an elderly couple he recognised from the days years earlier when they had brought Spokie to school. A man in a dark suit sat next to them. He held a briefcase in his lap. In the row behind Spokie's parents Johann recognised Mr Steynberg, the head housemaster and the school principal.

Magistrate Fourie spoke first. ‘We are here to see if we can resolve this matter without a court case. You,' he pointed at Spokie, ‘have assaulted and robbed this boy.' He pointed at Johann. ‘You can go to jail for that,' he said to Spokie. ‘You have put your whole future in jeopardy. With a criminal conviction, you won't be able to get a job in the civil service, you won't be admitted to any university and you won't even be able to travel overseas.'

There was a brown file on the magistrate's desk. He opened it and pulled a sheet from it. ‘You have been charged with assault with intent and robbery. What do you have to say?'

Spokie turned to Johann. ‘I am very sorry and I won't do it again.' Spokie's voice was trembling but the words sounded rehearsed.

Mr Fourie looked at Johann. ‘It's up to you now. What do you say?'

Johann was caught by surprise and was completely overwhelmed. He wanted Spokie to be sent to jail or at least kicked out of school, but he didn't want to be the one taking the decision. He started to cry.

‘I'll speak for him, Your Worship. If you will allow me,' Johann heard the district surgeon say.

‘Come forward, Doctor Barnard, and speak from the front,' Magistrate Fourie said.

The doctor came and stood next to Johann's chair. He put his hand on Johann's shoulder. ‘We'll agree to the charges being withdrawn subject to several conditions,' Doctor Barnard said.

Magistrate Fourie removed the cap of his pen and opened the file. ‘Go slowly, Doctor, and I'll jot them down.'

‘One,' the doctor said, ‘all forms of initiation at school and at the hostel must stop immediately. Two, the new boys must be housed in a separate section and have special prefects and a sympathetic housemaster assigned to them.' He waited for the magistrate to finish writing. ‘Three, the new boys may not be forced to do any work for the older boys. None at all. No washing of their socks and handkerchiefs and no cleaning of the senior boys' rooms. No making beds and no errands.'

The doctor stopped and Magistrate Fourie asked, ‘Is that all? It sounds reasonable to me.'

‘No,' said Doctor Barnard. ‘There are two more. The boy's hospital expenses must be paid and he must be paid compensation for his injuries and for the physical and emotional pain he has suffered. And then there is also the disfiguring scar to his face. He will have that for life.'

The doctor turned Johann's face so that the magistrate could see the scar in the light from the window.

‘An inch, by my estimate,' Magistrate Fourie said. ‘Just below the right cheek. Still a little red, but likely to fade in time. Am I right?' He looked at Doctor Barnard.

The doctor smiled. He had given evidence before Magistrate Fourie many times. ‘Yes, Your Worship.' There was a pause. ‘And perhaps some community service. At the hospital and the police station.' He squeezed Johann's shoulder.

‘I'll work at the police station,' Johann said, ‘but I don't want to work at the hospital.'

‘No, not you. Him.' The magistrate pointed with his pen at Spokie.

The magistrate looked toward the back. ‘Would that be acceptable to you, Mrs Weber?'

Anna Weber stood up and spoke softly. ‘I just don't want it to happen again.'

‘And to you, sir?' He looked at Spokie's father.

‘Yes.'

‘Well, that leaves the amount of the damages,' Magistrate Fourie said. ‘How much?' He was looking at the man in the suit sitting next to Spokie's mother.

‘I submit that a hundred pounds would adequately meet the exigencies of the case, Your Worship,' the attorney said.

‘No,' said the magistrate. ‘I was thinking at least four hundred.'

Spokie's father nodded and the attorney spoke for him. ‘We can do four hundred.'

‘Four hundred it is then.' The magistrate called the principal to come forward. ‘Mr du Preez, are the other conditions acceptable to the school?'

Mr du Preez nodded.

‘Good,' Magistrate Fourie said. ‘The charges will be withdrawn as soon as I have proof that the hospital expenses have been paid and four hundred pounds have been paid into a Post Office savings account in the name of Johann Weber. And you,' he pointed at Spokie, ‘are to do community service every weekend alternating Saturdays between the hospital and the police station. Sergeant Claassens and Doctor Barnard will make the necessary arrangements. Is everything clear?'

It was. Before the day was out, Johann had a savings account with four hundred pounds in it. And his mother told him that she was going to marry Von Schauroth.

Johann's injuries were severe enough to keep him from returning to school for the rest of the term. When he returned, he had become an outcast. The senior boys tormented him with their words, but kept a physical distance for fear of suffering the same fate as Spokie, who was still doing his community service every Saturday and would miss the whole rugby season as a result. The younger boys avoided Johann like the plague. They had formed their little bands of friends and were apprehensive about being seen in Johann's company for fear of attracting the seniors' attention. The teenage Johann Weber's character had been set, shaped by the events of the year. He had become a loner, independent in spirit and disposition.

He saw Sergeant Claassens in the street one day. ‘I'm going to be a policeman,' he said. ‘Like you.'

‘Better to be a lawyer,' the sergeant said. ‘They make much more money.'

After the setback of the verdict in the Treason Trial, the political allies of the Third Force achieved a major victory in 1961 when the country became a republic and resigned from the Commonwealth before it could be expelled for its policies. At the United Nations, its mandate over South-West Africa was terminated, but the men at the helm refused to relinquish their hold. In a very short time, the northern border of South-West Africa would become the point of conflict, and the young men the Member of Parliament for George had asked for would be sent there to defend the country. With the country beyond the formal scrutiny of the Commonwealth, the lines could now be drawn more clearly. Harsher laws could be passed. Harsher men would be appointed to enforce them. Real bullets would be used on anyone who dared to protest.

The events at Sharpeville in 1961, when the police shot 69 demonstrators, came and went. In his third year of high school, Johann was isolated from the outside world. The boys and girls in the residential units had no access to the news on the radio or in the newspapers. When they did go home for a weekend or for the school holidays, they went back to the even more isolated farmsteads of their parents, where there was no electricity, no running water and no telephone service.

But their little school was different. It had electricity – from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. – and running water. They even had a telephone, but it was in the headmaster's office and could not be accessed in his absence. The news arrived once a week, by railway bus. It brought
Die Landstem
, a weekly family magazine called the
Huisgenoot
,
Die Landbouweekblad
and
Rooi Rose
. The railway bus also brought Johann back home for his mother's wedding.

Johann sat at the small bridal table with oom Daan and watched the otherwise staid farmers and their wives cavorting to the beat of their favourite music on the dance floor of the agricultural show hall. Guitar, concertina, a violin and a piano accordion played by members of the local community.

‘This is German music,' Von Schauroth said to his best man. He had to raise his voice to be heard above the music and spoke in German. ‘Old, traditional German music.'

Johann nodded. He searched for Anna Weber on the dance floor and saw her gliding gracefully in oom Daan's arms. Oom Daan had given the bride away and was entitled to the second dance.

When it was Johann's turn with the bride, he asked his mother the question he had asked before, but which she had never answered. ‘Mutti, how did we get here from Germany? Weren't you happy there?'

This time she answered differently. Previously she had always said, ‘I'll tell you when you're ready to know, when you're old enough to understand.'

She hadn't finished when the music stopped and he had to get back in line more than once to hear it all.

‘Germany had become too dangerous for us. In fact, the whole of Europe had. I was pregnant with you and your father decided we had to get out.'

Johann looked at the white dress his mother wore. ‘Were you married to him?' he asked.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘Although it was not a time for getting married.'

‘Then why did you?'

‘I was expecting you.'

She looked him in the eye when she said it. He realised, for the first time, that he was as tall as she was in her high heels. He must have smiled because she asked, ‘Why are you laughing?'

‘Because I'm taller than you,' he said.

She stopped him in the middle of the dance floor and held him at arm's length. She kicked her shoes off. ‘So you are,' she said. ‘If you wore a cap,' she said, ‘you would look just like your father.'

Johann suddenly saw his mother as other men might see her. She was beautiful and it wasn't just the occasion. She pulled him closer and gave him a hug.

She stepped back into her shoes and he pulled her back into the waltz. ‘You haven't finished telling me,' he said. ‘How did we get here?'

‘I'm tired,' she said and led him back to the bridal table. ‘There's nothing special to it,' she began. ‘We came on
U
-891. Your father was the captain. I had the quarters they had specially prepared for a senior Nazi official. Bormann, I thought, although no one ever mentioned his name. It was cramped. Everything is cramped on a submarine. I had never been to sea before. I had been on small boats like everyone else, but never out to sea. The strangest thing was this: the boat was steady underwater, but moved with the waves on top. That was when I got very sick … Then they put me ashore and they turned back. I didn't expect them to survive. We never expected the
U
-boat crews to survive.'

‘And then?'

‘Von Schauroth's family had sent for me. They picked me up in a donkey cart and took me to their farm. Seven days, through the desert.'

Johann had been on a donkey cart on oom Daan's farm. It was an uncomfortable ride. The bench seat was hard and the body bounced from side to side on its creaky chassis.

His mother smiled again. The day had made her radiant and happy. ‘I was sick all the time,' she said. ‘And that was when I felt you inside me for the first time. You were pushing and kicking.'

‘Tell me more,' Johann said. ‘You never tell me about my father.'

‘There isn't much to tell,' she said. ‘I loved him very much, but the war came between us, just like it came between other people. In the end we found ourselves so far apart, and then your father was killed. And now his name isn't even on the
U
-boat Memorial in Möltenort.'

‘Because he didn't die in action?'

Anne Weber nodded.

Johann's boyish imagination was caught up in the practicalities of the journey. ‘How did it feel when the boat went under the water?'

‘It felt like being on a train, except that you couldn't see anything. There were steel walls all around us, and the whole boat vibrated all the time. If it wasn't the diesel motors they used on the surface, it was the electric motors when we dived. The smell inside was of oil and stale air. In a short time, everyone smelled like the boat: smoky and oily.

‘I was cooped up in the commander's quarters and had my own bunk. I couldn't come out for the whole six weeks. Only your father and Von Schauroth knew that I was there.

‘We had only seawater to wash ourselves. There was a small desk with a built-in washbasin. The salt ruined my skin, but it was nothing compared to the seven days and nights on the donkey cart. The sun was terrible. There is no sun like that in Europe. The wind was dry and after seven days I nearly didn't recognise myself. I was brown. My skin was cracked and I had blisters on my lips. My hands looked like a farmer's.'

‘But you made it safely, and that's all that matters to me,' Johann said.

Von Schauroth returned to their table. He saw them sitting together without speaking. ‘You've finished already?' he asked.

Johann and his mother nodded at the same time.

‘Then you haven't told him the whole story,' Von Schauroth said to his wife. ‘Not even half of it.'

Annelise von Schauroth was born a year after the wedding. Johann had a mother, but all he had of his father was his name.

He was given time off from school to visit his mother and sister in the maternity section of the hospital. Von Schauroth proudly held the baby for Johann to admire. His sister had a father, but he didn't.