Ruby Red Read online

  ‘Girls, girls, girls, it’s a full house tonight!’ He grabbed a glass of champagne out of Thandi’s hands and gulped it down with a flourish. ‘I am parched! Talked the ear off the art critic from the London Times. Girls, did you hear that? The London Times! Your mother is a genius…’ He kissed me on the top of my head and breezed out again.

  ‘Yirra, but this is quite a turnout!’ Thandi wiped the perspiration from above her upper lip. ‘It’s gonna be a morse big night!’ She swivelled her hips and placed the finished tray carefully with the others.

  ‘Yes,’ I croaked, ‘it is.’

  When we had finished the tray task, I laced my way through the crowd to the brightest spot in the room. Mother was wearing a lavender silk skirt with canary-yellow mules and a matching yellow ruffled shirt. She had a beautiful lavender-and-gold silk scarf tied in a large bow in her hair, and her dangling gold earrings swayed like miniature chandeliers as she talked enthusiastically to a group of people who had gathered around.

  ‘No, I haven’t been hiding him as some clever ploy,’ she laughed. ‘I’ve been keeping him safe. And now you’re all about to meet him.’ She raised the fluted stem in her hand and clinked glasses with the eager group, ‘To the unveiling of Julian!’ she said. It was followed by a collective murmur of agreement.

  ‘Ruby, darling!’ she said as she saw me. ‘Feeling okay? Be a love and tell Thandi to go to the car and bring Julian in through the kitchen. Have him wait there until I give the okay. And have her tell your father to come in; I’m about to make a speech.’

  Midnight is the celebrity hour of the day. It is the designated time when magic things happen, when time takes on a special mysterious aura. It is also an unforgiving and unyielding time. It is the moment when one day steals away and another shimmers in, where the mistakes we made in the past twenty-four hours cannot be changed or erased and the joys and pleasure that we experienced cannot be relived. We now refer back to that time as ‘yesterday’. It becomes a part of our history, a place we cannot return to or alter ever again except in our minds. It heralds the delivery of a new beginning and the passing of something old. It was for me, and all that were there that night, a midnight never to forget.

  Mother began speaking just a few minutes before the appointed hour. Being small, she had positioned herself on top of a chair so that everyone could see her. Dashel stood holding its flimsy arm steady on one side while Father, who had brought Julian in through the back door and into the kitchen, and left him there alone to wait for his cue, stood on the other side.

  Julian’s paintings remained covered by their red-and-black cloths, which would be removed by ‘the gallery staff when Mother said the word after Julian had been brought out and introduced.

  The crowd spilled out of the Gallery Grande and into the smaller galleries and people strained to see Mother over the tops of too many heads. There was a gentle clinking of glasses, a settling of feet and someone coughed, but for the most part a hush fell over the room as Mother began to speak.

  ‘Good morning, everyone!’ There was a general titter. ‘I think I can say that, since it’s the beginning of a new day… my watch says twelve-oh-one.’ Mother held her naked wrist up and pretended to look at an imaginary watch. More titters followed. ‘This is also the beginning of a new era in township art and the voice of black artists in a country of oppression.’ She raised her manicured hand as soft applause broke out amongst some in the crowd. My throat started to ache again and a light-headedness came over me. I wished I could have had Johann’s strong arm round my waist to hold me up but Mother and Father had agreed that it was out of the question to invite him. I knew they were right. Apart from the obvious reasons, this was Julian’s night and I did not want to let anything ruin it for him. I placed my hand instead on the wall beside one of Julian’s covered works to steady myself and tried to concentrate on Mother’s next words.

  ‘Ernest Hemingway, in A Farewell to Arms, wrote about a character named Frederic Henry who is put to the test during the madness and atrocity of World War One.’ Mother raised her voice an octave. ‘He was a man of action, self discipline, but, most importantly, he was a man who was able to maintain “grace under pressure”.’ She paused for dramatic effect and held her hand in the direction of the closed kitchen door, which was to her left. ‘Ladies and gentleman, Julian Mambasa is such a man. He has sustained his focus, his passion, his discipline and most of all his gentle grace, under extreme conditions and under intense pressure. He is an extraordinary artist, as you will soon see, but, most importantly, he is a remarkable human being who is able to take the pain and suffering of the human condition of his time and his people and share it with us through his work.’ Mother’s voice crackled with emotion. ‘I am honoured, and humbled and proud to introduce you to… Julian Mambasa!’

  As she said his name I felt the world tilt at an unnatural angle and my stomach lurched as the crowd applauded loudly and enthusiastically. Dashel moved to the kitchen door and flung it open in a majestic flourish. All eyes in the room, including mine, were riveted to the door. The door that would bring forth Julian, the new young face of African art, the carrier of the torch of his people. The applause got louder and then suddenly stopped. A terrifying void, where hands that were just seconds before pounding together with excitement now covered their mouths. I do not know if I first heard the shocked gasp or first saw the face of the man I so feared inside the kitchen door under its frame. It was the searing cold grey eyes and dark crew-cut head of the undercover detective that faced us all. He raised his gun as the crowd moaned collectively; someone screamed and in the sudden chaos the frightened patrons tried to disperse.

  ‘Everybody freeze! Nobody move!’ the detective yelled in a harsh guttural voice.

  I had been unable to move anyway. I had risen above the gallery momentarily, not wanting to stay on the cruel ground below. I watched my mother topple and fall from the chair, her skirt billowing upwards as someone knocked her down in their panic to escape. She lay, small and crumpled, the lavender skirt and yellow blouse her only shield against the onslaught of blue-uniformed policemen who now entered the gallery from all sides, guns raised, their voices bellowing commands to us in both English and Afrikaans. We did what most people do in the face of loaded guns. We raised our hands.

  I was close against the wall and while my one hand was raised, I propped the other protectively against the wall next to one of Julian’s covered paintings. I looked into Father’s face across the room. I knew his eyes had been furtively seeking mine as soon as the police burst through the doors. When he found me in the crowd a look of relief flooded his face followed by a look of unmistakable anger. I held his gaze. It gave me the strength to do what I did next. I slowly inched my hand forward and let my fingers grasp the tiniest edge of the black-and-red cloth that covered Julian’s painting. I did not move another muscle but kept my eyes trained on my father’s face as I slowly pulled the cloth away and let it fall to the ground. I dared not turn to look and see which painting I had exposed, but I knew by the small triumphant smile on Father’s lips that it was an important one.

  ‘Not such a clever girl after all.’ The looming form of the plain-clothes detective approached me. ‘I told you to warn your mother.’ He grabbed my wrist, yanked it off the wall and twisted it. ‘And all for this…’ he sneered, and looked at the painting that I had bared for all to see. It was the last one that we had wrapped. Despair is not for the Defeated.

  He spat at the picture frame. ‘A kaffir whore carrying too many loads of laundry on her head! Bleddy stupid if you asks me.’ He sniffed the air like he did the first time he’d been in the gallery as if he could smell the tired middle-aged woman’s sweat. He gave my wrist a hard squeeze before releasing it and I tried not to let even the smallest sound escape my mouth.

  It was Father who made the next move. Perhaps he was spurred on by my small act of defiance or by the detective’s harsh treatment of me or, perhaps, as an attorney, who had dealt with the
law on a regular basis, he knew what came next. With his hands still in the air Father shouted across the silent and terrified crowd now surrounded by policemen. He aimed his words at the detective, who was approaching the beautiful black woman in her colourful traditional clothes.

  ‘I am a lawyer. I have the right to ask where my client, Mr Mambasa is. I would like an answer.’ Father baited him, as if to draw him away from the petrified woman and her political-activist husband, who stood stoically beside her.

  ‘I knows who you are, Mr Winters. Yes, we at the Special Branch have a very thick file on you. ANC supporter, Rivonia Trial lawyer, defender of the natives.’ The detective took a cigarette out of his chequered jacket pocket and lit it. He spoke through the smoke rings that spun one after another into the face of the beautiful black woman like barbed wire coils. ‘You are, Mr Winters, what we call a kaffir-boetie, a black-lover who will risk his own hide for these vermin.’ He took a step towards the regal woman and blew a stream of smoke straight into her nostrils. I watched her husband clench his fists, which were still raised above his head. The woman began to cough uncontrollably.

  The detective laughed. ‘Couldn’t handle all that up your big nostrils? I’m sure you’ve had other things pumped up there!’

  ‘Enough!’ It was Mother’s voice that echoed across the gallery causing the detective to stop his assault and turn in her direction.

  Mother was surrounded by three young policemen with matching bad crew cuts. She had pulled herself up to a standing position and was the only one in the room without her hands above her head. Those small delicate hands now pointed a finger slowly and methodically around the room at various patrons. ‘Mr Matheson from the London Times, you can put your hands down.’ The nervous moustached gentleman tentatively did as she instructed. ‘Mr Bates of the San Francisco Chronicle—’ her finger trained on him – ‘please feel free to do the same.’ She searched the room for another face. ‘Miss Williamson, is it?’ The young redheaded woman nodded nervously. ‘Brand-new art critic from our very own Rand Daily Mail—’ Mother said the words carefully as if to make a point – ‘please lower your hands.’ The young woman eyed a gun that was drawn close to her but hesitantly did the same.

  I could feel the shift in the room as the policemen seemed suddenly restless, their guns not quite as steady, their legs shifting from one to the other as Mother went around the room and asked people, one by one, to lower their hands.

  The steel-eyed detective ground his cigarette out on the smooth gallery floor and looked from one reporter to another. He clearly had not realized there had been that much media present. It would never have occurred to him that important newspapers would care about a black man from Soweto’s art. I had learned over the years from being the daughter of political parents that there was nothing that a government who ran their country on fear and torture hated more than press, especially foreign press. South Africa presented its gold and diamonds to glitter in the face of other nations and hid their unjust oppression and brutality under censorship and laws.

  I watched curiously as the detective suddenly made the signal for his men to lower their weapons. It was as if the bullets aimed at the crowd held no power any more.

  ‘Now if you would be kind enough to answer my husband,’ my mother said firmly, ‘where is Mr Mambasa?’

  ‘Arrested.’ He smirked. An audible gasp went out amongst the crowd. ‘Didn’t have his passbook on him when I—’

  ‘When you lay in wait outside the gallery and ambushed him once he was alone.’ Mother moved towards the detective. ‘And you are…? Take note,’ she said as she passed the journalist from the San Francisco Chronicle. The reporter now appeared far less afraid and reached for the pen and pad in his breast jacket pocket and began writing.

  ‘I am Detective Groenewald. Member of the Special Forces,’ he said, looking at the reporter. ‘Does the yankee need me to spell it?’

  The reporter shook his head quickly.

  ‘Where is my client now?’ Father walked towards the detective and joined Mother. I wanted to go and throw my arms round them both and sob or laugh, but I stood still, with one hand close to Julian’s beloved painting. What Detective Groenewald had missed in the work of art was that, if you looked closely, the tired washerwoman was walking on the camouflaged faces of angels that stared up at you from the dusty, potholed path. The old woman’s raw knobbled feet stepped on their compassionate, loving faces as they tried to soften each aching step that she took.

  It did not surprise me that Detective Groenewald had not noticed them. He would never have thought to look for angels on a dusty street in Soweto.

  In the end, the night of Julian’s exhibition turned out to be a night of triumph. Detective Groenewald and his men tried to make a bullish show by demanding the passbooks of all the other black people in the room, who luckily all had the right papers with them. He left angrily, but without making a single arrest, including Julian, who was being held in a police van in the parking lot until Mother, never one to overlook all unpleasant possibilities, produced Julian’s sacred passbook that she had put in her bag for safekeeping. His passbook gave him permission to be in Johannesburg and in Sandton, which was where the gallery was. Mother had made sure of that fact. Detective Groenewald and his men even stood by and watched as Dashel, Thandi and I quickly passed out the fake trays to the black patrons, who immediately began acting as hired serving people. There was nothing illegal about that, Mother pointed out to him. She made it very clear to the detective that she had asked the black helpers to put their trays in the kitchen before her speech began. She wanted everyone’s undivided attention. He could not argue with that.

  After Julian was unshackled and released from the police van he walked into the gallery through the kitchen door to a thunderous applause that lasted for many minutes. We happily removed all the red-and-black cloths and at last everyone was able to see the depth and brilliance of his work.

  Over the next few weeks, in the newspapers in Johannesburg and London and San Francisco, it was said that a star had been set free and now held his place in the heavens. BLACK ARTIST’S ARREST AT EXHIBITION OPENING IS THWARTED’ made Julian, and Mother’s gallery, instantly famous in the art community around the word.

  Even Mother, with her original and innovative marketing skills, could not have come up with such an effective launch plan.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The mood in our house went from one of tension and anxiety to one of relaxed chaos. The telephone did not stop ringing both at home and at the gallery with requests for interviews with Mother and Julian from art critics and newspapers local and abroad. A steady stream of people came to the gallery every day to see Julian’s works, and Dashel joked that we should start charging an entrance fee at the door.

  Most of Julian’s paintings were bought rather quickly and had orange stickers marking SOLD on each one. They would go to their new owners once the exhibition was over in a month. Julian seemed quietly baffled by all the attention he was now getting but Mother kept telling him, ‘I told you so.’

  Fame, it seemed, had a unique way of instilling a false sense of safety into our world. Mother and Father behaved as if a shield had suddenly been placed on our house, guarding against any ills that might befall us. It was as if Glorious Attention was an armour-suited knight whose silver sword was all encompassing. As such, for a brief period, Mother and Father seemed to overlook the fact that we were still under surveillance and our doors were once again opened to ANC members who came and went in the still, dark hours of the night.

  With the exhibition opening behind him and now having established himself in the art community, Julian began to direct his energy towards his hatred of the government’s system of apartheid. In the weeks that followed, he spent less time in the gallery and more time in Father’s office in closed-door meetings with other black men and women. Julian would sleep most of the day because he was up a good deal of the night now. His bedroom door was usually sti
ll closed as I passed by when I returned from school in the afternoons. The only time, it seemed, that Julian altered his daytime sleeping routine was if there were an interview arranged. Mother would rouse him, then drive him to the gallery where the meetings would take place. Julian, always uncomfortable with scrutiny, let her do most of the talking. He answered questions directed at him in short, clipped sentences. Although not his intention, he was often written about as a brooding, angry young artist whose pain and fury were as prevalent in his art as they were in his persona. This, of course, evoked even greater intrigue and drew more curious reporters to him.

  One afternoon, after a particularly miserable day at school, I rode to the gallery and sat in on an interview in Mother’s office that had just begun. It soon became clear to me why Julian was getting such a reputation.

  ‘Mr Mambasa, can you tell us what inspired you to become an artist?’ the eager young journalist in a pinstriped suit and thinning hair asked, pen poised.

  ‘Harold and the Purple Crayon,’ Julian said, without missing a beat.

  A look of confusion crossed the novice journalist’s face. ‘I’m sorry, can you explain what that is…?’

  But Julian, satisfied that he had answered the question, gave the young man a blank stare. Mother, realizing that Julian had said all he wanted on the subject, chimed in quickly to embellish.

  ‘Harold and the Purple Crayon is a wonderful children’s book that Julian first heard when he was just a small boy. His mother was a domestic servant and the madam of the house was reading the book to her son. Julian, who was supposed to be in the kitchen helping out, hid behind the living-room door and listened to the whole story. It seemed to resound in his young soul.’

  ‘I see…’ The young journalist wrote haltingly. ‘And what is it about?’

  Mother was suddenly at a loss for words, clearly unable to remember the details of the story. She glanced over at Julian for assistance but his eyes were focused on a spot on the floor.