A Sailor's Honour Page 11

  ‘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 ‘We’ll agree to the charges being withdrawn subject to several conditions,’ Doctor Barnard said.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.’

  U-891 1945 18

  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 sa
w 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.

  ‘Why did my father go back?’ Johann asked.

  ‘I asked him the same question,’ Von Schauroth said. ‘The war was as good as over, and I told him he should stay with your mother and that I would take U-891 back. But he refused.’

  ‘Why couldn’t he have stayed with us?’ Johann asked. ‘He left us on a donkey cart!’

  ‘He was going to come back,’ Von Schauroth said. ‘He told me so. After taking his crew back safely. He made me promise that I would look after you and your mother if anything should happen to him. And then he was killed.’

  ‘If he had stayed with my mother, he would be alive now.’

  ‘Once you were safe, his first duty was to his crew, he told me. It was a matter of honour to him,’ Von Schauroth explained, ‘a sailor’s honour.’

  High School 1963 19

  When Johann was in Matric, oom Daan passed away. While Annelise’s birth was a happy event, the incident with Spokie had darkened those middle years of high school.

  Then Spokie returned to school as a newly qualified teacher. He taught accounting, a subject Johann did not take, and they avoided each other for a term, but the opening week of the rugby season brought them into direct conflict again. Spokie was the rugby coach and Johann had been earmarked for the number ten position in the first fifteen. There can be no greater happiness for a rugby-playing schoolboy, but it was short-lived.

  ‘We need a bigger player at fly half,’ Spokie said. ‘You’ll have to move to fullback.’

  After a listless training session at fullback, during which the ball never reached him and the second-team players never penetrated the defence to call upon Johann to make a tackle, he asked to be put back at fly half.

  ‘It’s fullback or nothing,’ Spokie said. ‘And that’s final.’

  The rebellious streak in Johann surfaced. ‘It’s nothing then, sir. Thank you for the opportunity.’ He turned to leave.

  ‘Are you being sarcastic, Weber?’ Spokie demanded. ‘Are you giving me backchat?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Johann replied and again turned to leave.

  Spokie stood very still, rugby ball under his arm. ‘You’re not indispensable. Don’t bother to come to training on Thursday.’

  Johann turned to his books. Algebra and trigonometry. Afrikaans and English. Biology and history. And Latin, for law.

  When an officer from the Defence Headquarters came to the school to tell the school leavers about their national service, Johann saw an opportunity to escape to the navy. The form asked: Has any member of your family served in the armed forces? If so, who? Yes, he wrote. My father. Which branch? the form asked. The navy, he wrote. Since no further detail was required, he did not mention Hitler’s Kriegsmarine or the fate of U-boat 891.

  By midyear when his call-up papers arrived in the post, Johann had stopped attending school functions and stayed in his room when the other boys went out to train or fool around outside. In the late afternoons when the hostel’s corridors were empty, he was in his room studying. He now occupied the room where Spokie had beaten him senseless four years earlier. The scars and memories had faded, but the sound of the coach’s whistle, the line-out calls and the punt of the rugby ball on the field below his window were a distraction on the Tuesdays and Thursdays of rugby practice.

  He was working his way through a translation of one of Ovid’s poems when he heard raised voices from downstairs where Spokie resided with his wife. When he heard things being thrown around and the woman crying and begging her husband to stop, Johann quietly stepped out of his room and peeked down the stairs into the teacher’s flatlet below. Spokie towered over his wife and held her by the hair. She crouched in the corner on the first landing, in her tennis outfit.

  ‘You’re a slut,’ Spokie berated her through clenched teeth. ‘Don’t you see the way the boys look at you?’

  ‘I can’t help the way they look at me,’ she said. ‘It’s not my fault they look at me.’

  ‘Of course you can help it,’ he said. ‘Stop dressing like a tart and walking around like that with your tits hanging out and your panties showing.’

  ‘I have nothing to do,’ she wailed as he twisted her hair. ‘I’m cooped up in our room all day with nothing to do while you’re at school. You won’t allow me to go anywhere. All I have is my tennis.’

 
; ‘You’re my wife now,’ Spokie hissed. ‘You will do as I say.’

  She whimpered and tried to speak, but he slapped her on the back of her head and stormed out of the flat. Johann watched from the upper window as Spokie fired up his Studebaker and drove off with the back wheels spinning and kicking up dust. When he looked down into the stairwell, he found her looking up at him.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ he asked.

  She nodded.

  ‘Do you need help?’

  She nodded again.

  ‘Should I come down?’ he asked. It was against the rules to enter a teacher’s flat without an express invitation.

  ‘Yes, please,’ she whispered.

  He looked over his shoulder. The corridor was deserted: the younger boys were not allowed in their rooms between afternoon study and dinner, and the other Matrics were on the rugby field. He descended slowly. She lay where she had fallen. He went down on one knee and put his arms around her to help her up, but she made no effort to get up and clung to him.

  ‘Just hold me for a while,’ she said.

  She cried against his chest and he felt her tears wet his shirt. He listened for anyone approaching but the place was quiet. Outside he could hear cars passing on the main road to Naboomspruit.

  ‘Help me up,’ she said, but kept her arms around him.

  They struggled to an upright position, holding onto each other. They took the steps down together.

  At the foot of the stairs, Johann saw a small entrance area with a two-seater couch and a coffee table and a bedroom behind it. He led her to the couch and turned her so that she could sit down, but she resisted and turned to face him. She put her arms around his neck and pulled him closer. He tried to pull away, but she wouldn’t let him. She began to rock slowly from side to side, as if to music.

  They danced to her music until she stopped crying and her body had relaxed and softened against his. She pulled him even closer. He was embarrassed to feel his erection pushing against her. He tried again to withdraw, but she spoke softly in his ear. ‘Don’t worry. It’s good like this.’