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She and Neil Aggett had been a couple for the better part of a decade. In that time, they both became doctors, then followed separate paths into welfare and trade union activities on behalf of black industrial workers.
Their medical and political preoccupations were similar but not always shared. Often they were so intensely involved in their work that they were apart even when they were together. When the knock on the door they had long expected finally came early one morning 13 months ago and the security police burst in, their working lives were suspended and time froze.
Elizabeth Floyd speaks with tenderness of the morning of her arrest, not simply because those moments proved to be her last with Neil Aggett, but more especially because they were brought so close together before they were parted. For two hours the police searched the house they had shared.
'Absolutely No Panic'
''We made some tea,'' she recalls. ''They kept on wanting us to watch the searching but we weren't very interested. We were more interested in spending whatever time we could together.''
''It was actually very amazing,'' she says, speaking of the closeness. ''There was absolutely no panic. I mean we were kind of going into it together.''
Nothing will ever erase the ordeal that began then. But in a sense it ended Dec. 21 when a magistrate, dismissing all the evidence that Dr. Aggett had been tortured, exonerated the security police for his suicide in their headquarters here last Feb. 5.
Dr. Floyd's last public duty as a survivor was to denounce the inquest findings at a news conference in the offices of the Food and Canning Workers Union, the mainly black organization Dr. Aggett had served. Now, as she starts to rebuild her life, she is able to attempt her own summing up and to answer the question of why he died as clearly as it is ever likely to be answered.
''I had always known that if we were detained together they would use us against each other,'' she said in a long evening's conversation.
They had come to consider arrest a likelihood, she said, not because they had broken any laws but because some of their closest friends in the new black trade unions had already been arrested, including one who was seized in their house. Besides, Dr. Aggett had known for months he was being followed. Together but Apart
The looming threat brought them together but also drove them apart. Dr. Floyd tried to steel herself and him by bringing suppressed tensions between them into the open so they could not later be discovered and manipulated by interrogators. In the weeks before their arrests they lived in separate houses. But they were together on the night the police came.
What she could not have anticipated was the way, as she expresses it, that her mental horizon would narrow as a result of solitary confinement and interrogation so that finally she was unable to concentrate on anything else; not even brushing her teeth, which sometimes took her a half hour to complete - and not even Neil.
If she had not been detained herself, she said, she would never have thought him capable of suicide. But now she considers indefinite detention without trial as ''just a continous suicide story.'' The precautions the authorities take to make it impossible - serving meals without knives and forks, insuring there is no glass in the cells, putting bars on the windows of the interrogation rooms - help plant the idea that it might be the only way out, she said.
She can remember the first time she entered one of her cells, looking at the bars on the window and calculating coolly, ''If one was going to do it, you'd do it with these bars.'' On the day before Dr. Aggett's death, an interrogator told her in intimate tones how one person he had questioned committed suicide and how, as he recounted it, he had saved another from it by holding his ankles as he dangled from a window.
Contact Through Interrogators
Early on she was allowed to discover that the officers who were interrogating her were also interrogating Dr. Aggett. They would never tell her where he was but they would occasionally repeat a remark or even, as happened twice, promise to send her love. ''Our only possible contact was through our interrogators,'' she said.
Thus it was a policewoman who told her Dr. Aggett had said he would ask her to marry him when their detention ended, a message she accepted as genuine and now cherishes. In all their years together, she said, they had never discussed the subject seriously. Another officer asked if he would be invited to the wedding. Once when she was being driven through one of Johannesburg's most fashionable suburbs on her way to an interrogation, her escort asked in a manner that seemed more curious than manipulative why she and Dr. Aggett did not become ''normal doctors.''
''You could have any of these houses,'' he said. The remark seemed to her to contain a hint of why she and Dr. Aggett found it so hard to make the security police understand how two professional people could dedicate themselves to serving blacks, turning their backs on luxury, unless they were Communists or members of the banned African National Congress, or both.
Her own interrogation was broken off abruptly in early January, and for five weeks she was left in her cell to wonder when the police would come for her again. ''I kept on thinking, 'The rough stuff is still to come,' '' she said. '' 'They haven't really started on me.' ''
They came again Feb. 4, taking her to the interrogation rooms on the 10th floor of John Vorster Square, the security police headquarters here. Soon she came to sense that Dr. Aggett was nearby, that some interrogators were actually shuttling between him and her.
Her arrival at John Vorster Square that day - the last day of Dr. Aggett's life - was a new element in his interrogation. It is a fact that leaps out of the thousands of pages of inquest record but one that Magistrate Petrus Kotze, who discounted Dr. Floyd's testimony on the ground she had a ''bias'' against the police, chose to overlook entirely.
He Was in Deep Trouble
For a time Dr. Floyd was made to stand, she testified. Heavy hints were dropped that she might be interrogated through the night or even the weekend if she did not become more cooperative. She believes that Dr. Aggett must have been made aware that she was coming under pressure, just as she came to realize that day that he was in deep trouble.
An officer told her that Dr. Aggett now regretted that he ever went to the University of Cape Town. Somehow that stray remark, torn out of whatever context, told her he was desperately disoriented, because it would mean that he regretted his medical training, which she could not imagine any more than she could imagine the officer making it up.
She was returned to her cell that night, after all, and told that she would be summoned again the next morning. ''I can remember sitting down and saying to myself, because I wanted to say it to Neil:
'Look Neil, I understand. I know.' I kept on saying, 'It's O.K. Neil, it's O.K.'
Trying to talk to him, just to say, 'Anything you said about me you would have said under pressure and that's all right,' you know.''
When she wasn't summoned in the morning, she knew something was wrong. In the afternoon she was escorted into the presence of her parents and her best friend, who told her what had happened. Then she was released to a psychiatric ward for her own protection. ''I responded appropriately,'' she recalled. ''I cried and I was very distressed. I can remember some of the things that I said, that 'I'm not surprised someone's died, but I never thought Neil would die.' Then within minutes I was functioning terribly logically.''
Her first thought was that he had killed himself for her, to save her from what he had just gone through. She does not say that is a total explanation but she feels certain that his death was prompted by a remark that let him know she was about to come under pressure.
''What's so distressing about it is that he got it wrong, you know,'' she said. ''I would rather have been tortured, and come out of it and Neil been alive than have to go through what I have gone through this last year.''
She accepted immediately, as none of his friends who had not been in detention were able to do, the official story that he had hanged himself. Then an eerie realization came over her, that she could no longer remember what he looked like. It was only after the inquest hearings finally halted that he started to re-emerge in her conciousness as a person, rather than as a case, a cause, an obligation.
So it is only now that she is able to feel his absence from her life and to mourn.
''I was just totally abnormal for a year,'' she said. ''I've learned to gauge my own mental state by whether I can remember my own telephone number or not. Or how long it takes me to work it out. Only since the hearings stopped did I begin to remember Neil.''