Unforgiven Trespasses

A DANCE IN THE SUN (209 pp.)--Don Jacobson--Harcourt, Brace ($3.50).

In ancient law, a debtor was bound to a creditor, sometimes with chains. This piece of jurisprudence, so mysterious to the modern mind, provides the clue to A Dance in the Sun, the second novel of the talented young (27) South African novelist, Dan Jacobson.

It is a short novel and, on the surface, tells simply the story of two white university students who are hitchhiking to Cape Town on their summer vacation. Their road leads through the Karroo, a desert plateau of Cape Province. Beside a dry river at the sun-blistered dorp of Mirredal, they put up for the night in a ruined boarding house. It is full of grotesque and expensive furniture; they are the only lodgers, and its sole occupants are a man, his wife and, of course, the usual African servants.

Windbag Who Babbles. There is something odd about the man, Fletcher, a windbag who babbles about irrigating the Karroo with atomic power and establishing a world government on the lines of South Africa's present Nationalist regime. The man's wife is silent and bitter. But the pair beg the students to stay with them for a free holiday. Thus the boys come to sense the fear that lies under Fletcher's racial brag. The house is subtly menaced by a big old illiterate Kaffir, Joseph, who just hangs about. Man and wife are desperately afraid of this good and harmless man. It is all a boring mystery to the two boys until the wife's brother arrives, and in a night of violence, in which the prodigal wrecks all the furniture in the house, they piece together the elements of a painful melodrama.

The prodigal had been driven from the house, years before, for the worst of South African crimes--he had fathered a child by black Joseph's sister. The girl with her little Bastaard, "yellow and wrinkled like a stone," had been sent packing. Big Joseph, on a pilgrimage as painful as that of the black pastor in Alan Paton's Cry, The Beloved Country, had made his pitiful trek to discover what happened to his sister and her child. After failing in his search, he had returned to make a moral judgment of the whites who had wronged him. His sentence: he dooms the whites to his own company, and still using the language of the "good" (i.e., subservient) Kaffir, moves into the ruined house.

"No, Baas." "Can't you leave me alone?" asks Fletcher. "No, baas." In these simple words, the formula of a social poison is stated. There is no forgiveness of trespasses, but a meting-out predating the New Testament. Joseph has made of himself a human albatross, and he and the ones who have wronged him will hang together to the end. Fletcher, the white man, is left in a hysteria of frustration, "dancing there, solitary in the veld, a grotesque little figure, capering under a blazing sun."

It is a beautifully told parable of South Africa's present condition, and proves, if nothing more, that a racial crisis--like that of adolescence--can produce the good prose of a young man from the pimples of apartheid. Racial strain seems to have made of many South African writers experts with the twisted threads of human intercourse.

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