Читать книгу And Justice For All - Stephen Ellmann - Страница 15
ОглавлениеWhile Arthur’s career was taking off and taking shape, his personal life was also being transformed. He had joined the Bar on his return from a trip to Europe with his friend Sydney Lipschitz, in the course of which Sydney had met the love of his life. Now Arthur returned home, to his mother’s house. At this point, in early 1956, Arthur was 24 years old. It may not have been unusual for the young men in his set to live in their parents’ houses well into young adulthood – Rusty Rostowsky, for example, lived in his family’s home until his marriage – but it is worth observing that Arthur did not have to remain at home. He had an inheritance of his own, and if that did not suffice he soon came to have an income from his quickly expanding law practice.
In any case, he did move out, but not at once. He made this move three years after his return to South Africa, in 1959, at the age of 27. It is hard not to think that his moving out either marked, or achieved, some personal transition. His friend Hillary Kuny (later Hillary Hamburger) recalled that Arthur’s mother almost had a nervous breakdown when he left.1 His mother was a strong and even domineering woman; Arthur’s move out of her house may have been many things, but it surely was in part a declaration of independence from his mother.
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What followed came quite quickly – so quickly that it is hard not to conclude that indeed Arthur had turned a corner in his personal life and was now ready to take on the personal responsibilities and pleasures of maturity in addition to the challenges of law practice that he was already mastering. Once Arthur moved out of his mother’s house, he rented a flat in Hillbrow, in the same building where his friends Denis and Hillary Kuny had once lived; they were no longer there, however, because they had decided to emigrate to England (a decision that proved short-lived, as they returned to South Africa within a year). Perhaps because Arthur was lonely on his own, he soon invited a young attorney named Julian Block to join him as a roommate. Arthur and Julian would become lifelong friends, and Julian would later remember that it was from Arthur that he first came to feel genuinely interested in the law (in which he would make his lifetime career).
Not long after Julian moved in with Arthur, Julian’s sister Toni, then a student at Wits, moved into another flat in the same building. In March 1960 Julian went on an extended trip abroad for business, and while he was abroad the Blocks’ father died. Toni was bereft, not only because of her father’s death and her brother’s absence but also because her own relations with her mother were very difficult. In Julian’s absence, Arthur stepped in to take care of Toni. That meant that he covered a considerable range of her expenses; when Julian returned and tried to repay him, Arthur absolutely refused to let him do so.
Arthur was already becoming known for his generosity. Around this same time his friend Sydney Lipschitz, engaged in his first political trial, got up at about 3 am to drive out to the rural courthouse where the case was being heard. On the way he fell asleep, and rolled his car. He survived unscathed, but the car was a total loss. When the time came for Sydney to drive back again for the rescheduled trial, Arthur lent him his own car for the purpose. Indeed, Arthur’s generosity continued throughout his life. In 1976, Arthur’s brother Sydney had to have open-heart surgery in the United States; Arthur lent Sydney R20,000, then a very substantial amount of money, to enable him to pay for the surgery.2 Years after that, Arthur and Lorraine would travel to Israel and arrive with an enormous wooden crate containing three high-quality blank canvasses, a gift for their artist friend Anne Sassoon – an ‘astonishing’ and ‘almost extravagant’ gift, in the words of Anne’s husband Benjamin Pogrund.3
But Arthur’s help to Toni Block was more than financial generosity; Arthur also provided her with support and companionship. After her father’s funeral, the mourners must have gathered at the Block parents’ home, and her mother asked Toni to stay the night, something Toni did not at all want to do. It was Arthur who, in Toni’s words, ‘stood up very tall over my mother and said, ‘“Hannah, Toni is coming home with me.”’ Arthur also guided her handling of the modest bequest she received from her father’s estate: ‘Arthur said to me, Toni, you have been left some shares what do you want to do with them. I said I had no idea, so he said, “If you had money, would you buy shares?” I said no, and so he saw to it that they were sold. I mean, I knew I could turn to Arthur in any situation and he would look after me and my interests and explain things to me in a simple, effective way.’4
Toni was already engaged to Gideon Shimoni, but Gideon, Toni recalls, was always involved in one meeting or another. He was both a very active Zionist – Gideon and Toni would soon make their Aliyah to Israel, where they still live – and a student beginning an academic career, which he would pursue with great success at Hebrew University. Arthur stepped in and took Toni out. They went boating with Arthur’s brother Sydney; they went to art exhibitions (and Toni still has two pictures Arthur bought for her, one by Arthur Goldreich, who would play an important part in the Rivonia case); they went shopping. Toni recalls that salesmen could see Arthur coming from far away, and that if he went into a store to buy socks, he would come out with a suit. In one shopping expedition, Toni apparently bought a mattress from the Chaskalson family mattress company, Transvaal Mattress; Arthur took her to the store and they got one that was cheap because it had been on store display.
This was an intimate, although platonic, relationship. Fifty-five years later, Toni Shimoni still speaks of her love for Arthur. With her own flat in the same building, she would regularly come by the flat that Arthur and her brother shared. At least once she arrived in Arthur’s apartment to find him in the bath, reciting poetry. Another time, she, her brother and Arthur (and perhaps others) went skinny-dipping in the pool of some family friends.
On another occasion, Toni came home from her day – she was in her final year as an undergraduate at Wits – and found a group of black penny-whistlers – street musicians using home-made instruments – on the pavement outside their building. Neighbours came outdoors to enjoy the show, but soon the police arrived and arrested all the performers. Toni rushed inside to Arthur’s flat and told him what had happened. They had been planning to go to Arthur’s mother’s home that evening for Shabbat dinner, but she recalls that ‘his reaction when I came up all hot and bothered was simply calmly to take charge and do exactly the right thing’. That was to say: ‘“We must go to Hillbrow police station – that is where they will be.” We went up and the only thing he could do to get these seven or so guys out of jail was to pay their fines – the black mark against them would of course remain. So he paid their fines – took some time – and by then it was too late to go to [his mother’s].’ Arthur’s ability to master a situation and take the steps needed to resolve it would also be seen repeatedly in the years to come.
Arthur would go on to be the best man at Gideon and Toni’s wedding in March 1961. But meanwhile, Toni, feeling very much in Arthur’s debt, set out to matchmake for him and for her brother (to whom she was also very close). She said of Arthur that ‘there was this beautiful, intelligent, interesting, wealthy man of great integrity, in other words totally the most eligible bachelor in town, who was with all that completely shy’. Many people felt, and feel, that Arthur was shy. Toni herself later revised her view, as she thought about her encountering him in the bath and going skinny-dipping with him; she decided he was not shy, or at any rate not physically shy, but ‘reserved, diffident, and unassuming’. In any case, Toni made it her business to ‘parad[e] every girl I knew from school, Habonim and university through the flat’ to meet Arthur and her brother. Arthur was, to use Toni’s word, ‘responsive’ to these visitors. Later on, Rosemary Block recalled, her husband Julian would joke that Arthur used to appropriate the women whom Julian had begun to date.5 But it seems that none of these relationships grew.
It isn’t entirely clear whether Arthur formed any serious relationship with a woman during this period though it does seem that he formed some connections. An old friend of Arthur’s, Gerald Rubenstein, said that Arthur ‘got about all right – he was very well liked by the pretty girls’.6 A cousin, Aubrey Lunz, remarked that Arthur was very discreet about his romantic life.7 But Arthur’s old friend Joel Joffe said that he couldn’t associate Arthur with any women (until Arthur met Lorraine). Joffe even recalled a holiday trip he and Arthur made to Cape Town; a young woman Arthur met there was very keen on him, and came to Johannesburg and wanted to go out with him – but Arthur said he didn’t want to, and asked if Joel would go out with her instead.8
In any event, nothing came of Toni’s matchmaking. What did happen was that Toni graduated from Wits, and did very well. She earned four ‘firsts’ – the highest grades possible – and Arthur was very proud of her. ‘Four firsts,’ he said repeatedly, and in her honour he organised a party in December 1960. Arthur’s roommate Julian invited his girlfriend, Gill Kuper, and then (to Arthur’s irritation, since he was picking up the bill) her younger brother, Richard. Richard Kuper brought his date, a woman with whom he was seriously involved, Lorraine Dianne Ginsberg.
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Arthur told the story of that evening many years later, at a party celebrating Lorraine’s 70th birthday. He described Lorraine as
a beautiful young woman with red hair, who captivated me over dinner and later at the flat which Julian and I shared, to which we went after seeing a musical called Lock Up Your Daughters. The most notable thing about the musical was the scenery which was unstable with the result that building facades, which provided the background for the players, wobbled about and looked as if they were about to fall. That is all I can remember about Lock Up Your Daughters.
Lorraine recalled that musical too. She said it was notable for the problems with the sets, and for the inexperience of the actors. She found it almost impossible not to laugh. But meanwhile she looked at Arthur, sprawled in the front row ahead of her (because he was so tall), and felt that he was simply the most beautiful man she had ever seen.9
After the play the party moved back to Arthur’s flat for drinks and talk. Arthur continued, in his speech for Lorraine’s birthday:
I lent Lorraine three books that night, hoping that she would have to return them, or failing that, that I would have to enquire about them. She did return them not long afterwards, but with a note and not in person. It did, however, provide an opportunity for me to ask her out, which with some trepidation I did, and to my delight she accepted.10
Arthur’s opening gambit was a good one. The books – apparently Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, The Castle by Franz Kafka, and The Plague by Albert Camus – marked the beginning of an intellectual and, quite likely, emotional connection between Arthur and Lorraine. They were also important books for Arthur, as we will see. Lorraine would go on to read very widely, but in December 1960 she was just two months past her 18th birthday and in her first year at Wits. These were books that were important to Arthur. They also seemed to mark him as a wide-ranging reader, but Lorraine would later joke that while she had thought these three books were the tip of the iceberg, it turned out that for Arthur, not a big reader at this stage, they were the complete iceberg.11 Nevertheless they broke the ice.
Lorraine returned the books in February 1961. They came back with a note, as Arthur said, referring to only two books; apparently Lorraine had already read the third and so did not take it with her that evening. Her note to Arthur, accompanying the books, showed intellectual excitement and personal gratitude but offered no romantic invitation, unsurprisingly since it was apparently to be delivered by Lorraine’s boyfriend Richard. Still it provided Arthur with the opening he needed – and he kept it for the rest of his life. It read:
10th February, 1961
Dear Arthur:
Thanks very much for the two books which Richard has promised to return tonight. I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t read much of the Thomas Mann, but I’m determined to try The Magic Mountain. I think that The Castle is one of the finest books I’ve ever read and am very grateful to you for introducing me to Kafka.
Yours sincerely,
Lorraine
Meanwhile, Lorraine’s relationship with Richard Kuper deteriorated, by mail – he went overseas to study, presumably after delivering Lorraine’s note to Arthur.
Arthur went on in his speech, describing the beginnings of their courtship:
One of our first outings was to an Athol Fugard play, I think it was the Bloodknot, which I rather enjoyed. I said so, and that led to our first, but not last, disagreement. Lorraine thought that it was sentimental, said so, and made clear why she did not like it. She was much more assured in this debate than me, and I was unable to deal adequately with her arguments. However, we parted on good terms, and despite my ineptness, she was willing to continue going out with me. Soon after that we went to watch the film Hiroshima Mon Amour. Lorraine thought it was a wonderful film; unfortunately, the film had a hypnotic quality to it which caused me to fall asleep, and I had to apologise. Lorraine wanted me to see the film, and that led to our going to see it again. Lorraine enjoyed it even more the second time, but the hypnotic quality proved too much for me, and I fell asleep again.
It turned out that we were very different persons, but our differences proved to be complementary and not divisive, and strengthened our relationship. Believing that we were made for each other we got married. After more than fifty years, and the tensions and stresses inherent in marriage, I still believe that, and marvel at my good fortune.
Lorraine was young – she was more than ten years younger than Arthur, and an undergraduate at Wits – and passionate. Joel Joffe felt that Lorraine brought Arthur to a deeper expression of his emotional capacity, and that this made him better at leading others, listening to them and bringing them together. She could be sharp: Toni Shimoni remembers driving with Arthur and Lorraine in Johannesburg at Christmas, and seeing a large ‘Merry Xmas’ sign – and Lorraine’s saying, ‘If it were up to me it would say “Fuck you”!’ Her feelings were intense, and the fire of those feelings was so hot that Rosemary Block, who married Arthur’s roommate Julian and knew Arthur and Lorraine as a couple very early on, called her ‘erotic’. Arthur’s brother Sydney remembered her running across the lawn, her red hair streaming behind her. Rosemary also recalled that initially, because Lorraine was so much younger than Arthur, the lovers kept their attachment quite secret – so much so that it was a surprise even for Rosemary’s husband Julian, formerly Arthur’s roommate, to learn of the relationship. Toni Shimoni, however, remembered knowing that Arthur was going out with Lorraine more quickly, in fact not long after the party where they met.
Arthur, fifty years later, describes Lorraine’s intensity in more mellow terms. He recalled: ‘Before we were married, Lorraine’s father, a very sweet man who loved her dearly, once took me into his confidence and described her to me as being very stubborn.’12 Arthur’s memory of Lorraine’s father doesn’t spell out what seems to have been the case: that she was a force to be reckoned with in her childhood home. Rosemary Block said that Lorraine had ruled the roost there, but her rule doesn’t seem to have been a happy one for her. Lorraine told me that she felt that her mother wanted her to be a different person from the one she actually was, and this left Lorraine with a deep and lasting anger.13 As a child, she escaped from her mother into books – she and her father would go to the public library to take them out – and no doubt this helped set her on the intellectual path she would follow. Her parents were not wealthy (her father was a travelling salesman), but they must have been committed to her following her star, since they evidently supported her going to university, and in her generation she may have been the only member of the family who did so. (A better-off uncle, however, may have paid her fees.14) Rosemary recalls that Arthur, for his part, was extremely nice to both of Lorraine’s parents, and they were bowled over by him.
Arthur clearly was captivated by Lorraine’s spirit. He went on to reflect on what her father had called stubbornness:
Well, I agree that she does have firm views which when they take root are difficult to counter. This was evident at a very young age when, on a matter of principle, she ran away from nursery school. The school provided the children with milk, but Lorraine did not care for milk and made arrangements with the boy who sat next to her and who liked milk, to take hers as well as his. When that was discovered they were separated and she was required to drink the milk herself. Smarting under this rebuke, but still at the school, she had another dispute, this time over finger painting. Five colours were on offer but only two could be chosen. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and deciding that she could no longer be part of such a mean school, she managed without being observed to walk out, and find her way home on foot, crossing the main highway of Harrow Road on the way. Her mother, shaken by this, decided that a firmer environment was required and sent her to a convent. But she was made of sterner stuff. The nuns failed to beat a fear of god into her, or to break her spirit. One result of that was that when we got married she refused to have a religious ceremony, and we went quietly and discreetly to the Magistrate’s Court to get the certificate that made our union lawful.15
This is by no means simply a story of a very determined, perhaps even ‘stubborn’, little girl. As Arthur tells it, Lorraine’s objection is partly to absurdity, but partly – substantially – to injustice. She herself felt that she was more emotional than he about issues of justice and injustice; he would later say to her that she had taught him the meaning of justice. Their good friend Ilse Fischer Wilson said that Lorraine was Arthur’s moral compass, even though he was a very moral person too.16 We will encounter her moral force more than once; one example, was Arthur’s repeated statement that Lorraine should receive as much recognition as he did, and that especially when they were younger, she understood the society far better than he did.17 And they must have discussed all these things: Rosemary Block recalled that they were entranced with each other’s thinking, had huge conversations, and both enjoyed them.
They were married on Arthur’s 30th birthday, 24 November 1961, less than a year after they had met. Arthur had wanted to get married even sooner, but Lorraine held him off. She turned 19 six weeks earlier, on 11 October. The marriage certificate declares that they were married with ante-nuptial contract, but the contract does not seem to have had the divorce-anticipating function of such documents today. Instead this document, agreed to by Arthur and Lorraine and notarised six days before their marriage by Arthur’s roommate Julian Block, makes it clear that the parties each retain their rights to their income and property rather than being in community of property, frees Lorraine from the potential impact under the law of that era of Arthur’s ‘marital power’, and also has specific financial commitments from Arthur to Lorraine:
That further in consideration of the said intended marriage, the said ARTHUR CHASKALSON hereby agrees to give and donate to the said LORRAINE DIANNE GINSBERG the following property namely:
(a) Assets in cash or in kind or partly in cash and partly in kind to the value of R10,000-00 (TEN THOUSAND RAND);
(b) Certain Policy of Insurance effected on the life of the said ARTHUR CHASKALSON to the value of R10,000-00 (TEN THOUSAND RAND) and the said ARTHUR CHASKALSON undertakes to pay all premiums in respect thereof as the same fall due from time to time;
(c) A dwellinghouse to the value of R14,000-00 (FOURTEEN THOUSAND RAND) together with furniture and household effects, at such time as the parties together decide.
AND the said LORRAINE DIANNE GINSBERG does hereby declare to accept the aforesaid gifts and donations.
I am not certain whether these promises were all literally carried out, though given Arthur’s scrupulous observance of obligations they likely were. For one thing, the Chaskalsons’ home was registered solely in Lorraine’s name. The marriage certificate also indicates that there was a ‘consent filed’ – probably a consent by Lorraine’s father to her marriage before attaining the age of 21, which the law of that era would have required.18
Lorraine recalls that the small wedding party included Lorraine’s parents, Arthur’s mother and perhaps his stepfather, and their friend Hillary Kuny. Also on the scene was a friend named Tony Coghan, who Lorraine recalls (though Coghan does not) had designed Lorraine’s dress from the Marimekko material she was fond of. The dress, Lorraine recalls, was a pyramidal structure – Coghan was an architect – which she believes made the magistrate think she was heavily pregnant. The magistrate was also annoyed that Lorraine was sitting on the wrong side of Arthur. But Coghan did not attend the wedding itself. Lorraine told him that the ceremony would be no big thing, and suggested he stay outside. If Lorraine discounted the moment of her marriage, however, she didn’t discount the friendship with Coghan, whom she and Arthur would stay with in London in later years.
The decision to get married in the magistrate’s court was not a trivial one. Arthur’s mother wanted them to get married in the synagogue, but Lorraine felt she could not bear to have the wedding that Arthur’s mother Mary would have organised. Finally, Lorraine told Mary that she didn’t believe in God and would feel wrong getting married in the synagogue – and Arthur’s mother acquiesced. But there was more, either from relatives or elsewhere. According to Arthur’s older brother Sydney, their Uncle Jack Chaskalson warned Arthur and Lorraine that if they were married in the magistrate’s court their children would be illegitimate. This may have led to a longer process of estrangement, or may have been enough in itself to sever relations; in any event, Sydney’s recollection is that Arthur never spoke to Uncle Jack after this. In another related episode, which Lorraine often recounted, the person who circumcised Matthew told Lorraine that he wouldn’t let his daughters marry Matthew – and Lorraine responded that she wouldn’t let Matthew marry his daughters. As it was, Lorraine picked out a jade ring, which she thought was the one most likely to please her mother-in-law; but Lorraine didn’t wear rings, and after trying to wear this one for a little while, she developed skin problems, and took it off.
The lines Lorraine drew within her new family were not the last she would insist on. She also drew a sharp line between their home and the home of Arthur’s mother – refusing to go to her mother-in-law’s house for Shabbat dinner on Friday evenings and (as she ruefully recalled later) bringing a book to read when they went, instead, to Sunday lunch. Years later, their son Matthew’s wife Susie, a psychotherapist, would say that part of what Lorraine brought to Arthur was precisely the ability to draw this sharp dividing line, and so to complete the long, slow process by which Arthur had taken himself out of his mother’s home. Given the difficulties Lorraine faced in her home, it is easy to infer that just as she freed Arthur from his birth family, so Arthur freed Lorraine from hers.
But on 24 November 1961 they were creating bonds rather than breaking them, and the bonds between them lasted the rest of their lives. That day, after the magistrate’s court ceremony, Arthur went back to his chambers and did some work. Then the newly-weds went to the apartment of Hillary and Denis Kuny. Pictures from that evening show a young couple who look happy and, as Lorraine said to my wife and me, tired. They didn’t immediately take a honeymoon, but the beginning of their marriage was not overwhelmed by work, for the South African summer holiday was fast approaching, and they went for a honeymoon then in Europe. They stopped first in Paris, where they saw Sydney Lipschitz and his wife; sadly, their small son had just died, two days before the Chaskalsons arrived. Then they moved on to London, where they stayed with Lorraine’s former boyfriend Richard Kuper; the three of them had a profound talk, and after that apparently their stay went fine, and the Chaskalsons’ connection with Kuper endured throughout Arthur’s life.
When they returned to South Africa, they set about making a house and a home. They lived first in Arthur’s flat in Hillbrow, but then moved in 1963 to a house in Atholl, Sandton, where they would live for the rest of Arthur’s life. They also soon began a family; Lorraine was pregnant in her third and final year as an undergraduate at Wits. Friends of theirs at the time had an ‘open marriage’ and Lorraine recalled that she asked Arthur, ‘Should we have an open marriage too?’ He answered, ‘I think we should keep that part just for us,’ and that was that. Again, if Arthur found in Lorraine someone who could help him declare his adulthood, she perhaps found in Arthur, her older, level-headed and extremely talented husband, someone to help guide her into adulthood too.
Their first son, Matthew, was born on 12 August 1963. It’s part of Chaskalson family lore that Matthew was born when his father was cross-examining in the Letsoko case, the subject of much of the previous chapter. Because Matthew’s birth was induced, and so had to be scheduled, everyone around the court became aware of it. At one point, Lt Swanepoel – whom Arthur bluntly cross-examined about his treatment of the suspects in Letsoko – spoke to Arthur, and told him that his wife too was about to give birth. Mrs Swanepoel, her husband said, was going to have a Caesarean. Matthew recalls that Arthur heard this and had an intuition – and so he asked Lt Swanepoel what a Caesarean was, and after some hemming and hawing Swanepoel acknowledged that he did not know. Arthur and Swanepoel would not meet again for some twenty years, until a case in the 1980s in which, once again, Swanepoel was alleged to have treated suspects outrageously; this was a Legal Resources Centre case, in which students boycotting school were beaten up. But then too there was a moment for the two to speak. Swanepoel remembered the last time they had met and proudly reported that his daughter, born in 1963, had just been chosen for the national South African judo team.
Arthur and Lorraine would, indeed, raise their family with the shadow of apartheid and the security state always looming. But they would find a way to do so, to live a meaningful life – and even a comfortable one (most of the time) – despite the injustice they confronted. And there would even be room to observe on occasion formal civilities with members of the security police.
