A Change of Climate: A Novel

FOUR

Lucy Moyo took a bunch of keys out of the pocket of her apron. She was six foot tall, imposing, solid, like a black bolster inside her print frock; the bunch of keys lay in her hand like a toy.

“This is the key for your office,” she said. She held it up. “These little ones are for your desks and cupboards. This is for the cupboard where we keep the first-aid chest. This one is for the chest itself. Friday nights, Saturdays, you will be wanting that. These keys are for the inside doors of your house. This one is for the pantry and these are for the store cupboards inside the pantry.”

“Are they really necessary?” Anna asked. “Every one?”

Lucy smiled remotely. “Mrs. Eldred, you will find that they are. This key is for the woodshed where the tools are kept. The baas must be sure that anything to stab and cut, anything with a sharp edge, you understand me, is shown to him or to you or some good person at the end of the day when it has been used and then it is locked up till it is wanted again.”

Lucy pressed the keys into Anna’s palm. She folded Anna’s fingers over them. “You must keep all these doors locked. These people are thieves.”

Her own people, Anna thought. And how casually she says it. “Is Lucy a cynic?” she asked later.

“I don’t think we ought to criticize her,” Ralph said. “She’s kept the place ticking over.” His hands moved over his desk, bewildered, flinching. “She probably knows what she’s talking about. It’s just the way she puts things, it’s a bit bald.”

Lucy said, “Mr. and Mrs. Standish, who were here before you, used to sit after their supper most nights and cry. It made me sad to see such old people crying.”

The voyage to Cape Town had taken three weeks. It had allowed Anna a pause for thought, a period of grace. Until the last year of her life, nothing had happened. Then everything had happened together. When she was thirteen or fourteen, she had made up her mind to go to a foreign country: preferably a distant one. Her idea was that she would say goodbye to her parents, and write to them twice a year.

Ralph understood her parents—which was a good thing, because of the time it saved. It would have been a lifetime’s work to explain them to someone who had been brought up in a different fashion. In families like yours and mine, Ralph said, it’s the girls who have the harder time. He knew, he said, what his sister had gone though. Anna reserved judgment. It seemed to her that Emma was not unduly marked by suffering.

The truth was that Emma frightened her; even her small talk was inquisitorial, demanding, sarcastic. Without a word but with an impatient toss of her head, she implied that Anna was decorative but useless. At least, Anna took this to be the implication. Nothing could be less true. Her hands had never been idle.

Anyway, she was putting thousands of miles between herself and Emma. If she had stayed in Norfolk people would have expected them to be friends, they would always be saying, Anna and Emma, Emma and Anna. It was not a harmonious combination—not to her ear. As a child, it was true, she had sometimes wished for a sister. Any companions had to run through a parental censorship, an overview of their lives and antecedents. By the time a prospective friend was approved, the attraction had waned on both sides.

Her mother and father were shopkeepers, with the grocer’s habit of measuring out everything: especially their approval. Nothing is free; they stressed that. God has scales in which he weighs your inclinations against your actions, your needs against your desires. Pleasure is paid for in the coin of pain. Pay in the coin of faith, and God may return a measured quantity of mercy. Or then again, he may not.

Anna had been a great reader, as a child. Her parents gave her paper pamphlets, containing tales of black babies and Eskimos and how they came to Jesus. But what she liked were school stories, where the pupils lived away from home in a mansion by the sea, and played lacrosse and learned French from Mam’selle. Her parents said books were a good thing, but when they picked one up to inspect it—to permit or not permit—their faces expressed suspicion and latent hostility.

They eschewed the cinema and the theater—they did not forbid them, but they knew how to make their views known. No alcohol passed their lips. Women who wore makeup—at least, any more than a smear of tan face powder—were not their sort. Mr. Martin looked at the newspaper, so his wife did not need to bother. She received each day a used opinion from him, just as she received a shirt for laundering, tainted with the smell of smoked bacon and ripe cheese.

Later, when she grew up, Anna realized that her parents were afflicted not simply by godliness, but by social snobbery. It seemed difficult for them to distinguish between the two. They looked up to those customers with big houses, to whom each week they delivered straw-packed boxes containing glace fruits and tiny jars of chicken breasts in nutritious jelly. They looked down on ordinary customers, who queued in the shop for bags of sugar and quarters of tea. The former paid on account; of the latter, they naturally demanded cash. They were among the first in their district to get the ingenious, time-saving, preprinted notice, which encapsulated so neatly their philosophy of life:

PLEASE DO NOT ASK FOR CREDIT, AS A REFUSAL OFTEN OFFENDS

All through her teens, Anna had been tormented by this notice, and by this thought: what if I fall in love, what if I fall in love with someone unsuitable? She knew the chances of this were high; there were so many unsuitable people in the world. But when she came home and said that Ralph Eldred wanted her to get engaged, the Martins looked in vain for a reason to oppose it. It was true that the boy’s future was unsettled; but then, his father was a county councillor.

Anna had been a compliant daughter. She had tried to do everything she could to suit her parents, while knowing that it would not be quite enough: please do not ask for credit … Some unhappy children have fantasies that they are adopted; Anna always knew she was theirs. In adolescence, she fell into reveries, irritating to the people about her, productive of sharp words from her mother. She dreamed of ways of being as unlike her parents as possible. But she didn’t know any ways. To despise them was one thing; to free herself from them was quite another.

And she wondered, now, as the ship moved south, whether she was sailing away from them or toward them. After all, they were such charitable people; weren’t they, in their own way, missionaries at home? There were no luxuries in their household; money was always needed for good causes. Besides, it was wicked to have luxuries when others had not the necessities; unless you were an account customer, of course.

And if the charity did not proceed from love, but from a sense of duty, did that matter? Were the results not the same?

Anna used to think so. The starving eat, whatever the motive of the bread’s donor; perhaps it does not become the starving to be nice about motives.

Ralph saw the issue differently. The Eldreds and the Martins, he said, acted from a desire to make the world comformable. Grocer Martin would like to raise all tramps to the condition of account customers; Betty the grocer’s wife would like to see chain-smoking unmarried mothers scrub their faces and take communion monthly. Cold, poverty, hunger must be remedied because they are extreme states, productive of disorder, of psychic convulsions, of demonstrations by the unemployed. They lead to socialism, and make the streets unsafe.

Ralph passed judgment on his father, and on hers. He knew a poem; he would laugh, and say:

“God made the wicked Grocer

For a mystery and a sign.

That men might shun the awful shops

And go to inns to dine.”

There it was—Ralph hated nothing more than meanness. It seemed to her that he had a spontaneous, uncalculated kindness. She was looking for no more and no less. She slept with him before—just before—the engagement ring was on her finger.

It was she who had made him the offer. When the time came— the one occasion, perhaps in a year, when they had the house at Dereham to themselves—she was seized by fear. Even the touch of his warm hands made her shiver. But he was a young man with little experience—or none, as she supposed—so perhaps the differ-ence between terror and passion was not readily apparent to him.

After the deed was done, she worried a good deal about whether she might be pregnant. She thought of praying not to be, but she did not think she would have God’s ear. And besides, in the one way, disgrace would have delivered her. “I’ll look after you,” Ralph had said. “If that happened, we’d just bring the wedding forward.” When her period came—four days late, late enough to put her into a daze of panic and hope—she leaned against the freezing wall of her parents’ bathroom, against the hostile dark-green paint, and cried over the chance lost.

After this she seemed to lose her equilibrium; she had not thought of herself as a complicated person, but now all sorts of wishes and fears were fighting inside her head. Ralph suggested that they should bring the wedding forward anyway; marry as soon as she left her teacher-training college, not wait until the end of the summer. Uncle James came to meet her parents, and talked about this very interesting post that was going in Dar es Salaam.

Her mother thought that the climate might be unsuitable, but conceded that Anna had never had a day’s illness and had not been brought up to be a shirker. Betty thought, further, that the natives might not be nice. But what surprised Anna was how easily they fell in with James’s suggestion, how quickly they agreed that though the engagement had been unusually short the marriage might as well be in June. For the first time it occurred to her that they might be glad to have her off their hands. Think of the expenditure of emotion a daughter entails! With their daughter married, and at the other side of the world, they would have more energy for the affairs of strangers.

Of course there was something improbable, even hilarious, about the idea of being a missionary in Africa. She said, “I won’t have to wear a sola topi, will I? And be boiled in a pot?”

Ralph said, “I don’t think so. Uncle James has never been boiled. Not so far, anyway.”

Then Ralph came to her with the change of plan. If she agreed, they were not to go to East Africa at all. A job was waiting for them elsewhere, in a township called Elim. It was near Johannesburg, north of the city—not far from Pretoria either, he said, as if that would help her place it. He brought a book, newly published, called Naught for Your Comfort. If she would read it, he suggested, she would know why people were needed and why perhaps if they valued their own comfort they ought not to go. Then she could weigh up the options, think what was best for them. “And best for other people, of course,” she said. At that time—the spring of 1956—she could say such a thing with no ironical intent.

She read the book at once. It painted a picture of a hungry, bloody, barely comprehensible world. She felt ready to enter it. She did not know what use she could be, but Ralph seemed to think their work was cut out for them. And after all, comfort had never been one of her expectations.

She had dreamed about the book too, those last nights before they left England. The dreams seemed to heighten but not betray the text. Policemen strutted in the streets with machine guns. Acts of Parliament were posted up on every street. The populace was cowed.

When she woke, she shuttled these nightmares out of her head. For one thing, the dream streets of Elim were too much like the streets of East Dereham. For another thing, they had to jostle for space in her imagination with the images already there: missionaries’ tales and childhood geography texts, smudgy photographs of mean proportions; women with their teeth filed sharp, men with cicatrized cheeks. Some other part of Africa, no doubt. Some other time. Still she imagined savannah, long horizons, thatched rondavels standing in kraals: a population simply religious, hymn-singing, tractable. In real life, she had almost never seen a black man.

Ralph had said to Uncle James, “I hardly think my work at the hostel is going to have prepared me for Africa.”

Uncle James had said cheerfully, “Don’t worry. Nothing could prepare you for Africa.”

Her mother had given her a book called The Sun-Drenched Veld. She could read it on the ship, Betty advised. “One of the Windows on the World series, Anna. It cost 9/6.” She picked it up on the day they quit Las Palmas, flicking its pages as they moved through waters where flying fish leaped.

It bore little resemblance to Father Huddleston’s text; but no doubt it was true, in its way. “In descriptions of African wildlife the zebra is often mentioned only in passing. Yet he is a lovely creature; a compact, sturdy little horse with neat mane and flowing tail. And no two of his kind are patterned alike! Having drawn his outline you can paint in the stripes as you please.”

When the sea made her dreamy, unable to concentrate, she gave up on the text, let the book close in her lap and rested her eyes on its cover. It beckoned the reader through arches of the coolest, palest peppermint, into an otherworldly landscape—pink and gold in the foreground, green hills rising in the middle ground, and beyond them the lilac haze of mountains. She wondered if the illustrator had confused it with heaven; got his commissions mixed up, perhaps. But then she remembered a book she had seen on Ralph’s shelves—a book from his years as a fossil hunter. The picture on the cover was much the same—strange, impossible colors. She had turned to the inside flap to see what was represented: On the shores of a Jurassic lagoon, the caption said. Amid the startling viridescence of the palms, archaeopteryx flopped and swooped, feathers glowing with the deep autumn tints of a game bird. A little dinosaur, glinting like steel, scurried on spindle legs. The sky was a delicate eggshell. In the background shone a deeper aqueous blue green—some vast and primitive ocean, with shores that had never been mapped.

But now, how small the sea appeared: a metallic dish, across which they inched. After dark the people who were sailing home stood at the rail, looking for the Southern Cross. And one night it appeared, lying just off south, exactly where everyone had predicted it would be. Anna saw four dull points of light, pale, hardly distinguishable from the meager scattering of stars around. She would not have noticed it, she thought, if it had not been pointed out.

They came into Table Bay in the rain, in drizzle and cloud which lifted from moment to moment, then descended again. Through the murk a solid dark mass became visible. “Table Mountain,” someone told her. A pancake of gray cloud lay over it. The sun broke through, gleamed, was gone—then sent out another searching ray, like an arm reaching into a tent. She could see the contours of the mountain now—its spines of rock, and the ravines and crevices steeped in violet shadow.

What had she expected? Some kind of municipal hill. “Look there,” a man said. “That’s Devil’s Peak.” The cloud was moving now, billowing, parting. The sun was fighting through. The stranger took her arm, and turned her body so that she saw a wisp of cloud, like smoke, rising into the sky.

The Archbishop of Cape Town said, “You’re not like your Uncle James. You’re more of a muscular Christian.”

“Oh, James,” Ralph said. “No, he’s never looked strong.”

“But he has endured,” the archbishop said. He seemed to relish the phrase. It gave a heroic quality to James’s life. Which, Ralph supposed, it really did possess. From some points of view.

He wished he could have avoided this interview. They did not merit a prelate; only James’s letter of introduction had brought them here. They could have gone straight to Johannesburg by rail, and on to Elim. They could have been briefed by an underling from the Pretoria diocese. Or not briefed at all. Frankly, Ralph had expected he would have to muddle through. It was the usual way.

“I wanted James here with me,” the archbishop said. “Some seven years ago. When I was raised to this—ah—dignity. We had here, at that time, everything one could require. Churches, schools, hospitals, clubs. We had the money and the men. We had the blessed opportunity of leadership. Well, perhaps James saw what would come of it. I cannot claim I did.”

The archbishop limped across the room, setting up little vibra-tions in the furniture, making the teacups tremble. He was a vast, heavy man, seventy years old or perhaps more. He handed himself to a sofa; grunting with effort and pain as he lowered himself, he maneuvered his stiff leg and propped it on cushions as if it were a false limb, or as if it belonged to someone else. It was a moment before he spoke again. “We set out with high ideals,” he said. “The things we wanted have not happened. Well, there was no promise that they would.”

The archbishop seemed shy. Could an archbishop be shy? He spoke gruffly, in short, broken phrases; the phrases were, none the less, well planned.

“A year before I was enthroned,” he said, “the electorate threw out Smuts and put the Nationalists in. Then certain laws were enacted, which I presume you know everything about—or if you do not, you will know shortly. You will learn the theory. You will see the practice. You will see that we have come, in effect, to be a police state.” He broke off, waiting for Ralph’s reaction. “Oh, be sure I did not always talk in this fashion. I gave the elected government what leeway I could, for one tries to play the statesman. I understood the machinery of their laws, but I did not know how they would operate it.”

“Apartheid is hard to believe in,” Ralph said. “I mean, you’d have to see it to believe it.”

The archbishop grunted. “ Separateness, they used to say. It is the change of language that is significant—it is rather more than the evolution of a term. But I said to myself, when Daniel Malan came in, he is not an oaf. He is a cultured man. He has a doctorate,” the archbishop broke off and gave a short laugh, “which he got from the University of Utrecht, with a thesis on Bishop Berkeley. Malan has still some regard for public opinion, I told myself. Then behold, out goes Malan, in comes Strydom, who as you may know was at one time an ostrich farmer. Educated where? Stellenbosch and Pre-toria. He is a man from the Transvaal. You will learn what that means. When J. G. Strydom came in I had my moment of despair. That was three years ago now.”

Anna made a tentative movement, in the direction of the tea tray. The archbishop nodded to her, then turned and addressed himself to Ralph.

“You have heard of the Bantu Education Act. They have put you in the picture in London, I hope. You know our preeminence in education; the churches have done everything, the government nothing. It is we who have educated the African. We did not know, when we were doing it, that we were going about to embarrass the government. All we have achieved, as they see it, is to create a threat to them. By this Act they mean to remove the threat.”

“I find it difficult to get my mind around it, I suppose,” Ralph said. “Education is progress, would you not think, it is civilization? I can’t imagine that any government in the history of the world, until now, has set out to make time run backward.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” the archbishop said. “There would be some. It doesn’t do to generalize. But you see why they’ve done it, don’t you? Education for the non-Europeans is now put into the hands of Dr. Verwoerd, at the Native Affairs Department. Dr. Verwoerd’s reasoning is, what is the use of teaching mathematics to an African child? A laborer doesn’t need mathematics. Give him mathematics, he will begin to think he might try to be a little more than a laborer. Well, Dr. Verwoerd would not want him to make that mistake.”

Anna brought the tea. The archbishop tested it. “Very good, my dear,” he said, “Such a pleasure, tea, isn’t it?” He looked, Anna thought, as if his pleasures were few. She melted away, back to her tapestry stool.

“The notion is to bring in a new kind of education,” the archbishop said, looking into his cup. “An education to create coolies and houseboys and fodder for the mines. Two and a half hours a day, taught by little girls who have scraped through their Standard VI. This is not merely the prescription for the children of the illiterate, this is for all—for the children of our brightest mission boys and girls, for the children of university graduates from Fort Hare. The parents have to contain themselves in patience while they see their children stultified.”

“It seems to cut off hope for the future,” Ralph said. “You can repeal other laws, but how will you undo the effect of this one?”

“Precisely,” the archbishop said. “In twenty years’ time, or in forty years’ time, when this idiocy is over, how will you put wisdom into heads that have been deprived of it?”

The archbishop’s hand shook a little now. The teacup seemed to be too much for him, as a delicate piece of china might be too much for a bear. Anna darted forward, took the cup, returned it to the tray. He did not appear to notice her.

“And so now, how are the churches situated?” The old man turned his head toward Ralph. “We sit before the government ’like the rabbit before the cobra,’ as Father Huddleston has so memorably expressed it.” His voice was dry. “Father Huddleston has a gift for the vivid phrase, has he not? Some people say we should close all our schools rather than take part in this fantastic scheme. Others say that any education is better than none. Father Huddleston, if I may quote again, calls that sentiment ’the voice of Vichy.’ Mrs. Eldred,” he turned his head again, stiffly and painfully, “although you are a trained teacher, you will find yourself engaged in amusing children rather than teaching them. We have to try to get them off the streets, where they will get into trouble. This place, you know, Elim—well, it is not in my cure, but I can tell you something of what to expect. Elim is what they call a freehold township. Africans have been settled there since the turn of the century. They have built houses, they own them. Generations have grown up in Elim. There would be, I don’t know, fifty thousand people?”

“About that,” Ralph said.

“And now there is no security anymore, no guarantee of what succeeding years will bring. They are knocking down Sophiatown, and Elim may be next.”

“Where will they put the people?” Anna said.

“Ah, this is the essence of the apartheid policy, my dear. The government wishes to return them to their tribal areas.” Turning his head again, he spoke with grave, weary courtesy, as if he were addressing the president himself, and giving him all the credit he could muster for a foolish scheme. “Well, you will grasp the situation better when you arrive there. But you must understand that for the people you are going to live among everything has become hazardous, impermanent. It is hardly possible for them to step out of doors without wondering if they are falling foul of some new law. And they feel that their futures have been taken away.”

“I hardly feel equal to it,” Ralph said. “To such a situation.”

“Then why did you come?”

He didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t say, to get away from my family. “I thought it was my duty to try to do something. We both thought so. But we have so little experience.”

“Oh, you have youth,” the archbishop said, “therefore you have resilience. That is the pious hope, at least. May I advise you? In your work, try to relate everything to God. Try to work on the scale of eternity. Do you see? Otherwise you will be fettered by trivia. The daily frustrations will cripple you.”

“That seems excellent advice,” Ralph said. “Good advice in any circumstances. If one could follow it.”

Anna said, “If I were a black person in this country, I’m not sure I would believe in God. Particularly.”

The archbishop frowned.

Ralph said, “People may think that when they are so oppressed, when they are told that their nature is somehow inferior, when they have suffered so many misfortunes, that they no longer matter to God. It would be a natural thing for them to think.”

At this the archbishop gave vent to his sentiments, in short bursts of rhetoric, like barks. He referred to “feeble secular humanism” (which he supposed to be a temptation to Ralph) and to the Christian faith as “the charter of man’s greatness.” It was clear that these were phrases from a sermon he was writing, or from one which he had already delivered. Anna looked sideways at Ralph, from under her eyelashes. She didn’t know how either of them had dared say what they had said. They would do anything, she supposed, now that they were so far from home.

When the archbishop had finished barking, she put in a feeble, conciliatory word. It was only that they were inexperienced, she said. They were apprehensive—here in a new country, in their first real jobs.

“Do you also not feel equal to it?” the archbishop inquired.

“I am not sure anyone could be.”

This was a good answer. “Well, I know I am not,” the archbishop said. “There are two things—no, three things—I ask of you, particularly. Try not to despise your opponents; try not to hate them. It will probably be quite difficult for you, but for a Christian the effort is necessary. And try not to break the law. You have not been sent here to get yourselves into the newspapers or the magistrate’s court. I hope you can remember that.”

“The third thing?” Ralph said.

“Oh yes. When you write home to England, ask your people not to make hasty judgments. It is a complicated country, this. I comfort myself that there is little real wickedness in it. But there is so much fear, fear on all sides. Fear paralyzes the sympathies, and the power of reasoning. So it becomes a kind of wickedness, in the end.” The archbishop looked up, nodded. The interview was over. They rose. Unexpectedly he smiled, and patted at his leg, lying before him painful and inert. “Do you know what I did last year? I went to Tristan da Cunha. I expect you did not know my diocese ran so far. They had to tie me into a chair and run me down the side of the frigate on ropes. Then I had to lie in a little boat with a canvas bottom, and they paddled me ashore. Your uncle James wouldn’t have believed his eyes. But you know, I don’t think I’ll go again. I hardly think I’d weather it, do you?”

He didn’t expect an answer. A secretary ushered them out. He was picking up papers to read as they left the room.

Outside Anna said, “The Winston Churchill imitation, do you think it’s deliberate? Do you think he’s studied from recordings?”

“I’m sure.”

“He practically accused us of not being Christians.”

“We are, though,” Ralph said. “Despite provocation.”

“His heart’s in the right place,” Anna said.

“His heart’s irrelevant, I’m afraid.”

At Cape Town Station, the signs said SLEGS VIR BLANKES. The non-European carriages were tacked on like an afterthought to the end of the train.

At stations up the line, children gathered around the carriage doors, their hands cupped for small coins.

At Johannesburg, the station was bustling with black men in slick suits with cardboard briefcases, and with florid white farmers come to town. Their hair seemed insufficient to cover their great heads. Their bellies threatened to burst the buttons of their shirts. Great rufous knees, exposed beneath khaki shorts, butted at the future. Beneath the pavements, Ralph said, were diamonds and gold.

It was cooler than Anna had expected, and the air seemed thin. She shrank away from the hooting and snarling of the traffic and the mosaic of faces in the street. At midnight a noise brought her to the window of their modest hotel. Hailstones—frozen chips of ice, an inch and a half across—rattled at the glass. The bombardment lasted for five minutes. It stopped as suddenly as it began. For an hour, deep in the watches of the night, the city was quiet, as if holding its breath.

The Mission House stood on Flower Street. It was set back from the road, in a kitchen garden in which grew mealies, potatoes, cabbage, pumpkins, and carrots. There were three steps up to the veranda, which was netted in against flies. There had been shade at one time, but the big trees had been cut down. Inside the rooms were small and hot.

Everything had been refurbished, Lucy Moyo said, refurbished in anticipation of their arrival. The linoleum on the floor, polished till it gleamed, was offensively vivid: irrepressibly jazzy, zigzagged, sick making. No expense had been spared—or so Lucy claimed— on providing for the sitting room nylon-fur cushions with buttoned centers, and a coffee table which splayed its legs, like a bitch passing water. With all the vicarious pride of careful stewardship, Lucy showed off a magazine rack of bent gold wire, tapping with the cushion of her finger at its little rubber feet. In the kitchen was an acid-yellow table with a chromium trim and white tubular legs. There were chairs to match.

The town was set on a height; every day there was a breeze. On clear days you could see the prosperous suburbs of Pretoria—white houses sprawling across green lawns, avenues lined with jacaranda trees. Down there, public monuments, Boer pride: up here, swart gevaar, the black peril. Yet what unfolded to the view, at Elim’s center, but a vision of clipped, cold-water respectability: wide roads on a grid plan, well-fenced playing fields, neat brick houses? The houses, true, differed as to the state of their repair. The best were freshly painted; and outside them, in regular rows, grew pot-plants in old paint tins. They were not exactly pot-plants, not strictly. They were things that would have grown just as well, and more naturally, in the soil. But these sprigs had been singled out for special treatment. They bespoke ownership. They were nature tamed. They were a form of civic pride. Everyone seemed proud in Elim. “We live here as neighbors,” Lucy explained. “Not as tribes-people. We all agree together.” This was not quite true, of course. But it was a pleasant idea, and could be entertained for some of the time.

In their first few days they were shepherded from house to house, welcomed in the homes of churchgoers and parish workers. Cups of tea were provided; there were needlepoint footstools, framed photos, lace curtains. There was no artifact that did not rest upon its little crocheted mat.

The price of this fussiness, in labor, was clear at once. Water was fetched in buckets, cement floors scrubbed every day on hands and knees. By a servant, perhaps; even the poverty stricken can afford to employ the destitute. Every morning, in the backyards, clothes were slapped and wrung in tin tubs.

But on the fringes of Elim the houses were overflowing. There were families living in sheds, in less space than a farmer would give an animal. Lucy explained all this; rents were high in the neighboring locations and when families could not pay them and were turned out they came to Elim. And then, relatives came from the bundu all the time, and you couldn’t turn them away, people had to live somehow; perhaps you might build a lean-to at the back, with whatever came to hand, and hope it would withstand the wind and rain; if not, build it again. She indicated dwellings constructed of sheets of tin leaning against a wall. Naked children—naked except for a string of beads around the waist—played in the dust. Lucy stood before them, cajoling till they answered her, her bag matching her shoes, and her Sunday petal hat planted on her close-curled head. Sanitary arrangements? Better not to think about them. Even the Mission House, after all, had only its huts and buckets, emptied every day by Jakob Malajane, also employed as the gardener.

The Indian and Chinese shops were well stocked and orderly, Lucy pointed out. There were several where she knew the proprietors, they were not bad types all of them, they would sometimes put things under the counter for you till you could pay. Every so often, though, the bad boys with knives and coshes came in, left the proprietor bleeding and took what they wanted. “Not all these tsotsis are boys whom you can discipline,” Lucy said. “Some of them are grown men.” She shrugged; she wanted to warn the Eldreds, whom she thought pitiful children, but she did not want to dwell upon this side of life. There was no need either to mention brothels and shebeens. After all, Mr. and Mrs. Standish had got by without talking about them.

So she marched them off to meet church-choir contraltos, a saxophonist in Elim’s jazz band, a neat-waisted colored woman who ran a Girl Guide troop: all good people, she said, all family people. Down the road walked a stately, very black man, robed and bearing a crozier. His wife walked arm in arm with him, her purple frock sweeping the dust; she wore a necklace of bones. “Oh, Mr. and Mrs. Bishop Kwakwa,” Lucy said. “Zionist Mount Carmel Gospel of Africa. Not at all a real church.”

The day in Flower Street began at six o’clock; but they woke earlier. The bedroom curtains were thin. Their background color was tan, with a design of purple sunbursts. They did not quite meet across the glass. Each morning a shaft of sunlight, thin as an axe blade, struck across their pillows and their eyes.

Already the kitchen was busy, the mealie-porridge bubbling on the range. Jakob chopped the wood, then ambled to his garden duties. He was a country boy: his face was battered like a boxer’s. He had, Lucy told them, the falling sickness. The people of his village used to throw stones at him when he fell down in a fit, to drive the devil out. They were illiterate people, Lucy explained, in her lofty way.

They would walk to Matins: the church was five minutes away. Father Alfred would shake their hands, though he would be seeing them perhaps twice before lunch, most days, and twice after lunch, and whenever he felt the need. Father Alfred was a little, anxious man. He smiled perpetually. His eyes in his brown face had an air of faded surprise.

After Matins it was time for Anna to talk to the cook, Rosinah, about the day’s meals. Quantities must be approximate, they must stretch to accommodate whomever might come by. No one could say what the day would bring.

There were a large number of servants at the mission, none of them overworked. They were people with spectacular bad-luck stories, and they were engaged on the basis of these, rather than of any aptitude or proficiency for their work. Jakob, who slept under a tree for most of the day, had an assistant, a young boy with no parents, seemingly no kin of any kind except some shadowy relatives in Durban who could not be traced. He passed his day listlessly raking the ground, and manufacturing elaborate besoms. He was permanently in rags, a disgrace to the mission. Whenever Ralph gave him any clothes, he would sell them. It seemed that his ambition was to be a walking sign, a symbol of wretchedness.

The cook Rosinah sat with her chair wedged into a corner near the stove. The back door was always open, so that her cronies could drift in and out. There was a constant procession of them, rolling through the kitchen and out again, squatting on the floor to exchange gossip. When Anna passed, she smiled and greeted them, but she could not help noticing that they were usually eating something. It disturbed her that the half of Elim that claimed acquaintance with Rosinah was better fed than the half that did not.

Rosinah had been known to chase people out of the kitchen and across the yard, with some offensive kitchen weapon: sometimes a thing so relatively benign as a wooden spoon, but once at least a small meat cleaver. There seemed no reason for these outbursts of hers, nothing especially which brought them on. The victims would be back after a few days, squatting nervously on the threshold, drawn by the chance of a handout of a bowl of porridge or the heel of a loaf.

No one knew Rosinah’s own particular bad-luck story. She never spoke of her past, but something must have soured her temper, something out of the ordinary run of fire and disease and sudden death. Day to day the chief victim of her wrath was a girl called Dearie, her assistant. Dearie was a frail young woman with rickety legs; pregnant, and with a sick baby bound always on her back.

Dearie’s babies died, Anna was told. This was the third or maybe the fourth, and each one was weaker than the last. Anna decided that this current infant would not die on her; she would fathom the mystery, she would keep Dearie under her eye. She suggested the doctor; Dearie, head bowed, suggested in her monosyllabic way that she saw a doctor of her own.

Anna did not dare insist. She provided powdered milk and rusks, peered anxiously at the small wizened face. The babies slipped away in the night, breathed out the last of their lives while everyone else slept. At least, that was how it appeared to be; Rosinah, in her rages, suggested that Dearie murdered them. There was no husband, and it seemed there never had been. Lucy Moyo said, for one slip you can forgive a girl, but that Dearie, she is a walking outrage. Anna said, I thought we were supposed to forgive seventy times seven? Lucy glared at her. Anna thought, perhaps I have got my Scripture wrong. Perhaps it is God who does that.

A woman called Clara cleaned the house and washed the clothes. She was a mission girl, had passed her junior certificate. She was ashamed to do such work, and Ralph and Anna saw that it was demeaning for her. Whenever she asked them, they wrote her a glowing reference, recommending her for some job in a store, or a post as a hospital orderly. But employers turned her away. She came back to the house, stony-eyed, and picked up her brush to sweep the rooms out.

Clara had once had a husband, but he had disappeared, leaving her with four small children. Her expectations of these mild babies were ferociously high: silence, industry, a useful occupation at all times. Each evening she called them to recite Bible verses; if they failed, she told them to bring her the cane. Their little cries, like the mewing of cats, punctuated the evenings. But who could tell Clara not to do it? They must not be like their father; and she believed that only the weals on their legs stood between them and a life of drink and misery, with hell at the end of it.

It was not difficult to understand why employers turned Clara away, but it was difficult to put into words. She had some quality that stirred unease. It was not an overt violence, as in Rosinah’s case. It was an emptiness; you did not care to think how it might be filled up.

Each morning at Flower Street, Ralph went into the cubbyhole he called his office to deal with letters and the accounts—recording minutely, faithfully, the futile expenditure of tiny sums. Anna went to the nursery school to supervise the local helpers. It was not a small enterprise; there were a hundred and fifty children, organized by twenty or thirty volunteers, who came and went by some bewil-dering rota that they understood and Anna did not.

Each morning they put the children into their blue overalls, smocks which fastened at the backs of their necks; this was the day’s first task, feeding squirming arms into sleeves. They employed two women to wash the overalls at the end of the week, and another woman to make the mealie-porridge for midday. The children had to have their porridge scooped into their mouths; they had to be put down for an afternoon rest, supervised on the swings, slides, and climbing frames; they had to be weighed and measured and told stories. There was a waiting list, bigger by far than the current enrollment.

Once the children were seven they could not keep them at the nursery. They sent them into the dangerous world, for the two and a half hours of education that the new laws allowed them. This period over, the children were at the mercy of circumstance. If their mothers managed to find any kind of work, they took it, leaving the children to the fitful and reluctant supervision of relatives, of older brothers and sisters. Where the supervision failed, they were out on the streets.

For a few of these outcasts, the mission ran what they called a “play group.” They gave the children soup and bread, and fruit when they could get it. They didn’t give them books because that would have been breaking the law. They tried to keep them amused with games and handicrafts, making sure they did not set their feet on any path that could lead anywhere.

And were they enforced, these absurd laws? Oh yes. “This town is full of people who will run to the police,” Lucy said calmly. “They will do it for a few pennies. Mrs. Eldred, you must understand that.”

Anna would ask for nothing for herself, but the sight of the children made her bold. She pleaded with shopkeepers in the white suburbs to help them eke out the daily ration; she petitioned vegetable stores for bruised apples, and bakers for yesterday’s bread. She searched for donors to support children whose parents couldn’t afford the small monthly fee. Every day she set herself a target: so many pieces of effrontery, so many crude demands. She found it hard to work in the house because people were constantly walking in from the stoep, coming to ask her foolish questions or use the telephone; an hour could go by with nothing accomplished.

One of the nursery classrooms had a storeroom—a large broom cupboard really. She took it over. She had to edge around the trestle table that formed her desk, ease herself behind the table, squeeze her narrow body against the wall. She stabbed with two fingers at a rusty typewriter: stabbed out her begging letters.

The fact is, Ralph said, this job reduces us entirely to beggars. You can almost never just buy something, no matter how much you need it. You have to plot for it, appeal for it, arrange to borrow it, coax someone else into paying for it.

Up at the house Ralph had his office door wedged open by a stack of papers. Other papers were stacked on every surface, in dangerous sliding piles. “Do you think the diocese would buy me a filing cabinet?” he asked Anna. “But no …” and he dismissed the thought at once. “There are more urgent needs.”

Often, at the end of the day, there were nursery babies uncol-lected. They were forgotten—or, rather, the complicated arrangements which underpinned family life had come adrift. Anna would gather up the children, who were wailing or dumb with bewilderment; she would take them to the house, give them biscuits, comfort them, send a messenger to find out what had gone wrong at home. Sudden illness? Arrest?

At this time of day, Ralph was usually at the police station. Every morning the police appeared on the streets, picking up their quota of pass offenders, herding them together on the street corners, handcuffed two by two; then a van came to collect them. African policemen performed this chore. At first Ralph thought, how can they do it? Soon he realized that they had a living to make. A white sergeant at the station told him wearily, “Mr. Eldred, we all have a living to make.”

In the afternoon the relatives of those who had been arrested would come to the mission, telling their stories: our son, he just went out to see a neighbor, my sister, she went to buy food and left her pass at home. Ralph would go down to the station, to bail people out, pay their fines. “Next week,” he would say to the relatives, “you must pay me the money back, you understand?” He had to recover the money, or the mission would be out of pocket, and some other head of expenditure would have to be cut. But Ralph could only urge people to remember to take their papers, whenever they stepped out of doors.

He did not like to cooperate with the government in this way. But he was not sent to Africa to encourage people to break the law, and James’s letters reminded him of this. He was not required to be a hero or a martyr, only to go on doing his best in the circumstances in which he found himself.

People are not starving, he wrote to James. The poorest can just about feed and clothe themselves. But they live on the brink of an abyss. A few days’ sickness pushes them over the edge: the loss of a few pence in the week. Women struggle to bring up their children clean and with good manners, literate. They hope there is a future for them, but from the children’s eyes you can see they are wiser than their parents to the drift of events.

Naught for your comfort, Anna thought. Only a long littleness consoles you—putting another stitch, then another row, into a blanket square. As winter approached, the women’s knitting became zealous and purposeful. On Wednesdays there was a sewing circle, too, and Anna felt she must put in an appearance; Lucy Moyo, or some other woman with a strong voice, read from the New Testament while their fingers flew, and faith stiffened their spines. Compare them to these people, and the Norfolk families were atheists; the Martins of East Dereham were godless hedonists, the Eldreds of Norwich were heathens, and debauched.

Thursday was the day for the women’s church meetings. The Mothers’ Union wore starched white blouses and black skirts, with their special brooch pinned to their blouses and black cotton kerchiefs on their heads. Unmarried mothers—if they were penitent—could wear the uniform. But never, ever, the brooch.

The Methodist ladies wore red blouses and black skirts. The Dutch Reformed wore black skirts and white blouses with broad black collars. They made the Methodists look skittish.

Dearie, every Sunday, went missing for hours. Anna was concerned. “Don’t fret, Mrs. Eldred,” Lucy Moyo told her. “She is attending Bishop Kwakwa’s church, all day singing and dancing. She is going there for wearing a uniform with braid, and whooping and making an unseemly spectacle. And their tom-fool pastor going about with blessed water in a bucket.”

In the afternoons at Flower Street, there were meetings of various welfare committees. These concluded, Anna and Ralph went out together to see people who were sick, bouncing over the rutted roads in the mission’s car. Four o’clock, sinuous shapes melted into the walls; the young boys, who had run wild on the veld all day, had come back to town.

By five o’clock they had taken up their station, these boys: they lounged outside the cafes, sometimes passing a cigarette from hand to hand. They gave off a palpable air of dis-ease; they were waiting for dark. It would be sunset when Ralph and Anna arrived home. As they rattled along to the corner of the street, as they approached the corner that would bring the Mission House within view, Ralph felt Anna in the passenger seat grow pale and still with tension. In summer she would be hot and dusty, in winter chilled to the bone. She wanted to wash and eat her supper, just that; but she could not know, until they turned the corner, what was waiting to frustrate her.

What she dreaded was the sight of a half dozen men collected on the stoep, waiting for them with some problem they would not be able to solve. The only worse sight was that of a whole family, waiting with a problem they would not be able to solve. If it was a group of men, possibly Ralph and Anna would have to climb back into the car and jolt to the police station for some verbal conciliation and a payout; but if it was a family, they would need food, and they would need shelter for the night, at the very least. When Anna saw that the stoep was occupied, that they were expected, she felt her pulse rate rise, and a bitter taste, like bile, swim into her mouth.

Evening at Flower Street: Anna had hardly any time with Ralph. They never sat down to a meal alone; Father Alfred would be in, or some of the nursery teachers, or committee people with unfinished business. By bedtime they were often too exhausted to make love, and always too exhausted to talk; sometimes they had no thoughts they cared to voice. And the nights were often broken. A woman had been taken ill, or there had been an accident, or a young man had been hurt in a drunken fight.

When night fell, there were beatings, stabbings, robberies, rapes. Each of these incidents caused the men in the Department of Native Administration to shake their heads and talk of “a trouble spot,” and “the breakdown of law and order.” They did not see the Mothers’ Union, in their starched blouses; they saw only gallows bait. The vogue weapon of the gangs was the sharpened bicycle spoke. Approaching their victim from behind, they would stab the spoke into his thigh, and empty his pockets while he was frozen with shock and pain.

It was onerous, the nightly routine of locking up the Mission House: keys, bolts, bars, clanking from room to room. Futile, really, because if anyone comes knocking you have to let them in. You can shout through the door for their name but if their name means nothing to you that isn’t a reason to keep them outside.

On Saturday mornings Ralph and Anna gave out supplies from the back porch: vegetables, sacks of mealie meal, sugar poured from sacks and bagged up, and whatever tinned food and clothing had been donated by the white charities in the last week. They trusted that no one would come for food who did not need it, but they knew they trusted in vain; they must endure Lucy Moyo’s impatient clucking, the turning up of her eyes to her God. On Saturday afternoons there were funerals; hymn singing, ululation. Charity filled the grumbling stomachs of the mourners.

Ralph would say:

“But who hath seen the grocer

Treat housemaids to his teas

Or crack a bottle offish sauce

Or stand a man a cheese?”

Saturday at sunset, funerals and parties merged. Enamel mugs of sorghum beer were passed from hand to hand: beer that looked like baby vomit. The hosts played gramophones in their yard. There was drumming and dancing far into the night. When the guests had had enough they rolled up in their blankets, and slept on the ground.

Sunday mornings there were church processions, the women in their uniforms, their sons in suits with polished faces. Later the small girls tripped into Sunday school, their hair braided and tied up in ribbons. Their frocks were from the Indian store, and had stiff net skirts, with which they scratched each other’s shins and calves. They had white gloves, and pochettes hanging over their skinny wrists. In a year or two they’d be saving up for skin-lightening cream. They’d be begging their parents, for a birthday treat, to find the money to send them to the hairdressers to get their hair straightened. “When you are older,” parents say. “Wait till you are fifteen, then we will see.”

On Sunday mornings, after church, the men of Elim visited the barbers who set up shop under the trees. On Sunday afternoons there were football matches. Anna and Ralph entertained Father Alfred to tea, and the Sunday-school workers too. Anna could see in her face what opinion Lucy Moyo held of her baking; her scones were flat, and fizzed in the mouth, unlike the scones of Mrs. Stan-dish.

After the tea party was over, they were, briefly, alone. Ralph held her in his arms as she swayed with fatigue, whimpering against his shoulder. “I shouldn’t have brought you,” he whispered to her. “But we can’t go home now.”

Only weeks, months had passed; they were sealed so securely inside Elim’s bitter routines that they could not imagine any other kind of life.

Anna forgot sometimes what lay beneath the surface. She saw the baked soil and red cement floors, the ant trail and the cockroaches’ path. But Ralph was there to remind her of the truth: she was walking on diamonds and gold.

Every evening, at dusk, the women lit braziers. The smoke rose into the darkening sky, and lay over the township in a haze: blue and fine, like the breath of frigid angels. Every evening, when the women lit the braziers, some two-year-old would fall into them.

There were hospitals in Elim, but casualties came to the mission: walking, or carried in their mother’s arms, or limping between two friends and dripping blood. Mrs. Standish had been a nurse, and people could not grasp that Anna had not the same skill. “We have to know our limitations,” Anna said. “I’d feel easier in my mind if we had a doctor on call.”

Ralph said, “Koos is on call. In effect.”

Koos had his surgery on Victoria Street, in a dusty single-story building with a tin roof. There was a waiting room and a consulting room, and another room at the back where Koos slept on a camp bed. In the yard were two shacks, one for cooking and the other fitted out as the laboratory and sometime cathouse of Koos’s dispenser, Luke Mbatha.

Koos might have been thirty, might have been forty. He had straw-colored hair and a worried face; his smile was rare though his general disposition must, one supposed, be benevolent. He wore stone-colored shorts; his legs were mottled and stringy, his knee joints large and starved. His face and arms were red from scrubbing with a fierce antiseptic soap. Ralph washed his hands once at Koos’s place, and felt that the skin had been taken off them.

Koos had a vast number of patients. He treated them for a few coppers. “But they must pay,” he told Ralph. “If they don’t pay for their treatment they don’t believe in it, you know? If you just give them the medicine, they think, this thing must be rubbish, if he is giving it to me. They go out and pour it in the road.”

Ralph said, “Anna’s trying to persuade our kitchen girl Dearie to bring the new baby down. Anna’s worried about him, she says he’s not gaining weight. Dearie won’t admit there’s anything wrong, but I suppose she must care, mustn’t she? We can’t work out what she’s up to. She’s got colored strings tied round his wrists and his ankles. Yesterday, Anna thought he’d been dropped and got a big bruise on his head, but it turned out to be some ash he’d been rubbed with.”

Koos said, “She’s been to see one of my rivals.”

“No harm, I suppose,” Ralph said.

“Except it makes for delay.” Koos shrugged. “Then, you see, perhaps she thinks it’s some African disease.”

“Are there such things?”

“In people’s minds,” Koos said. “They think there are diseases that white people can’t understand. It’s right, up to a point. If I get a woman in here complains of palpitations, fainting, short of breath, I can listen to her chest and send off a blood sample, but sooner or later I have to say to her, look, what’s your church that you go to? Have you been dancing at your church? Have you got possessed by a spirit?”

“They’re not barbarians,” Ralph said, needled.

Koos’s sandy eyebrows shot up. “No? So quick to learn, man. Do you know what I think? I think we’re all barbarians.”

Ralph always wanted to ask Koos, why are you here? It was like meeting a man with only one leg: you feel desperate to know what has happened to him. Accident? Illness? You want to ask, but you can only hope he’ll tell you.

Six months in Elim. Ralph wrote to his uncle James:

We could manage better if there were thirty hours in a day and nine days in a week, and yet I wonder if we are usefully employed at all. We don’t have much time to stop and think, and I don’t know whether that’s bad or good. But every week we have to make some decision which seems a matter of principle rather than of procedure, and there’s no one we can go to when we want to talk things over. My nearest approach to a friend is our Afrikaner doctor, but though I think he is a good man and he has a lot of experience he looks at the world so differently from us that I can’t go to him for advice, because I probably wouldn’t understand the advice he gives me.

Most of these matters of principle we call “blanket problems”—this is our shorthand for anything that derails us, in the ethical line. Now that the cold weather is here, some of the poorest people come to the door every day to ask for blankets. We have or can get or can knit blankets, but it seems that Mr. and Mrs. Standish, after they had given them out, would visit the recipients in their homes to check that the blankets were really needed and that they had not been sold. Anna and I, we feel terrible about this. It seems demeaning to all concerned. Yet Lucy Moyo says that if we don’t do it, it will be widely understood that we are fools.

What should I do? I feel that, if I had had some training in England, I would have been aware that I would meet such problems of conscience—or am I dignifying them, are they indeed just problems of procedure? I keep saying it: I wasn’t ready to come to Africa. Anna says, what is the use of all this effort? There is nothing an individual can do against a political system which, it seems to us, becomes more regressive and savage by the day. I try to urge people to think ahead, to show initiative, to help themselves, but what’s the point when we know that in five years’ time our town will no longer exist?

Lucy Moyo explained Koos, in her usual easy manner: “The doctor went with some bad type of colored girl.” She laughed. “She thought it was for payment. He thought it was for romance.”

Anna reported it to Ralph. “The colored girl had a baby. A small-town scandal, you know?” She had picked up some Afrikaans now, and her voice had taken on the local accent, the lilt. When she saw something pretty and helpless—a child, a kitten—she spoke in chorus with Lucy and Rosinah: “Ag, shame!”

“Yes, I think I do know,” Ralph said. “And I suppose that it happened in the days when it was only a disgrace, not a crime.” He shook his head. “What happened to the woman and the child, does Lucy know?”

Anna was back to herself, her English tone: “Oh, Lucy wouldn’t stoop to know a thing like that.”

He thought of the doctor scrubbing himself, scouring his hands with the blistering soap. Had Koos a home, other than the back room with the camp bed? Seemingly not; not anymore.

Uncle James wrote back:

My dear Ralph, of course you were not ready to go to Africa. You went out of your own need, not out of the need of the people you were supposed to serve. Don’t blame yourselves for that. It is the usual European way. When we find we lack a sense of purpose at home, we export our doubts; I have known people who—mis-guidedly, in my view—have gone to China to save their marriage.

The problems of our own country seem so complicated, that intelligent people wonder if it can be right to take a stance. It seems a thing only professional politicians can do—as we pay them, they can bear the burden of being simpleminded. But when we think of other countries, we imagine their problems are easy to solve—they are clear-cut, and we are so sure of the right moral line. Why do they make such a muddle of it? It is so obvious what ought to be done.

How clear-sighted we are—how benevolent! Until we arrive, of course, and see the reality.

Men and women working in the mission field are supposed to sort out their own notions before they try to foist them on others. But in my experience, when they arrive at their posting, they become—if they are worth anything— more confused than anyone else around them.

So do try, Ralph, not to burden yourself with a compulsion to be better than other people. Just do your best, can’t you? I am aware that this sounds like a nursery nostrum, but it is the only advice I can give. You say you doubt (or Anna doubts) the power of the individual to achieve anything. But what if all the individuals give up? There will be precious little then for the people you are trying to serve. God will not provide, you know. You need not think it. His method is never so direct.

Every day brings a fresh problem to solve. Some people might argue that if you had a settled faith, you would not experience such turmoil. Myself, I have never believed in settled faith; there is always some emergency, God-given or otherwise, to undermine whatever certainties you have established for yourself. You could not take on, uncritically, your father’s beliefs. You have had to find your own way. Conflict is not, in itself, a sign of lack of faith. It may be a sign of—dare I say itspiritual insight, development. And at the very least—if what faces you is only a mental conflict, and an administrative problem—it shows you are beyond thinking of the world as a simple place, where good intentions are enough.

As for your problem about the blankets—of course you must go and see the people in their own houses. Has it occurred to you that the blankets may be a pretext? The people who apply to you may need far more than blankets, but find it difficult to draw your attention to this fact. And it may be that not all their needs are material.

Yes, Ralph thought, laying the letter aside; but who am I to diagnose these needs?

Anna came in. “Am I interrupting you?”

“No. A letter from James.”

“I’ll read it when I’ve a minute.” She wanted to tell him the news. The play group children were going to give a concert. A ladies’ charity from Jo’burg had donated a secondhand sewing machine, and Anna would make costumes. She had been already to beg remnants from Mr. Ahmed, on Nile Street.

For the next week, the machine’s whine cut through his evening. Rain drummed on the roof, and the streets ran with red-brown water.

One week on, he found Anna running her hand, covetously, across a roll of cloth: it was a soft, limp fabric, a paisley pattern in a faded, near-mud green. “Mr. Ahmed sent this,” she said. “It’s got a big flaw in it. But I wouldn’t mind—I could make wonderful curtains, if I could get some thick lining material. I mean,” she added, “if I could persuade Mr. Ahmed to give me some.”

“Why don’t you do it? You’ve nearly finished the costumes now. You could start after supper, if you’re not too tired.”

Anna shook her head. “We have curtains already, don’t we? Lucy Moyo sewed them with her own hands, those purple efforts with the sunbursts. The Sunday-school teachers had a collection among themselves to buy the material.” She looked up. “Is it wicked to care about the way things look?”

“Of course not.”

“But the way people feel is more important, I suppose.”

So that was the end of the paisley curtains. Anna cut three yards off the bale, where the flaw showed least, and made herself a flowing calf-length skirt, gathered softly into the waist. “Oh, Mrs. Eldred,” Lucy said. “Such a good seamstress you are. If you had your outfit made in Paris it couldn’t fit you better. But that fabric— shame, so dull! Still, we must use what the Lord provides.”

Anna smiled. The weather cleared. Each morning the sun woke them, slashing through the inch where the curtains didn’t meet.

Ralph wrote to James:

How do you live? What is the proper way? The idea is gaining ground—and I find it is not without its appeal— that you should live like the people you work among, that for a Christian that is the only way. Why should you have more money and more comforts than they do? How can you mean anything to them, if you keep yourself apart?

And yet, I can see that the idea might have disabling consequences.

He thought of Koos, with his dinner of mealie-pap and gravy.

I am not sure I am brave enough to try to put it into practice.

James wrote:

Do you have so much, Ralph, for people to envy you? Do I need to tell you that you are 7,000 miles from home? (You might, I realize, think it not much of a sacrifice—but let me tell you, if you do not miss us, we miss you, your sister and I, and we talk of you very often.) In one breath you complain to me of your life, your hardships and frustrations—and in the next you complain of your luxurious standard of living!

Suppose you join the people you work among, and move into a lean-to in someone’s backyard. What conceivable good will it do to anyone? It may make you feel better, for a week or two, but are your feelings the issue? When that life becomes unbearable—as it quickly would—you could escape. It would be, at best, only a well-intentioned experiment. The people around you cannot escape; there is no term put to their sentence. And so, you see, any gestures you might make in the direction of the equality of man are an insult to them. You are free to go, and they are not.

You have your education. You have your white skin, in a country where that means everything. Even the resources of your well-fed body mark you out as different. How dare you think you can become one of them? Privilege cannot be undone, once it has been conferred.

Ralph put his uncle’s letter in the drawer. Again he thought of Koos, trying to scrub his skin away.

“I had another talk with Dearie,” Ralph said to the doctor. “Anna had a talk too. We keep wondering if we should just grab the baby one day and bring it down to you, but that doesn’t seem fair on Dearie, she’s an adult after all. Or maybe you could come up to the mission. Though I don’t know how we’d get him away from Dearie, for you to examine him. She keeps him fastened on her back the whole time. As far as I can see, he’ll die there.”

“Promise her an injection,” Koos said. “That’s my last offer.”

“For her, or for the baby?”

“Both,” Koos said. “Let’s—what’s the expression?—let’s push the boat out. The people here, they love injections. Injections are the main thing with them. And I give so many, because if they don’t get one from me they’ll go and get jabbed with God knows what by God knows who, and pay a fat price for it.”

“It’s not real medicine, is it?” Ralph was uneasy. “Just giving your patients what they want.”

Koos tapped his forehead. “Up here, Ralphie—that’s where the battle’s fought. You know, they have no confidence in me, these people. The girls want to find out if they’re pregnant, and so they go to a diviner the day after they’re late, and the diviner tells them what they want to hear, yes or no as it suits. If he’s wrong, the girls somehow manage to forget it. But they come to me and I say, I can’t tell you now, visit me again after two months. They look at me like—man, hes stupid, this Boer.”

Ralph glanced up at him. Koos wanted to talk; there was so much that he bottled up inside himself every day, and he would talk about anything, anything except what ailed him. “Your girl, Dearie,” he said. “You need to find out why she thinks her babies are always sick. You know, in this part of the world, we don’t have misfortunes plain and simple. If something goes wrong you need somebody to blame. Who’s done this to me, you ask? Who’s put this sickness on me? It might be, you see, your ancestors. It might be some enemy of yours. But it’s not just plain fate. It’s not the hand of God.”

“I suppose that’s comforting, in a way,” Ralph said.

“Is it?”

They both wondered, whether it was comforting or not: in the silence, cattleflies buzzed and dashed against the wire-mesh window. Koos said, “It sounds to me that what your girl needs is to call on Luke Mbatha, my dispenser. You’ve met Luke? You’ve seen Luke, Saturday night, in his zoot suit, with some Jo’burg shebeen queen on his arm? You think he bought that on what I pay him?”

“What, the suit or the woman?”

Koos was bowed by his amusement; his red hand knuckled his head. “Both cost, Ralphie, suit and cunt. No, Luke—he does a good trade in cats’ livers and lizard skins and python fat. You ought to go and see him in the backyard there. A lot of his mixtures you don’t swallow, thank Christ, you just put the bottle on a string and hang it round your neck. Might suit your girl Dearie. He does business by mail, too. Love potions. Maybe other kind of potions— murder ones—but I don’t ask him. A man came in last week and said he had beetles in his bowels. I sent him straight through to the back. If he believes that, it’s Luke he needs, not me.”

Ralph no longer bothered to get on his high horse; to say, they’re not barbarians. He knew Koos was not passing judgment. He was implying that there is another view of the world that you could entertain: and that he did not entirely despise it. “Still,” he said, “you have to keep your eye on Luke, I suppose. To see that he’s not harming anyone.”

“He does less harm than some. Have you seen these things the blacks use?” Koos took a little box out of his desk drawer and skimmed it across at Ralph. Extra Strong Native Pills, he read. “Extra Strong is an understatement,” Koos said. “Almost, if you had beetles, you’d blast them out. And worms—I tell you, man, they’re always deworming themselves, and killing themselves in the process. I’ve seen it—I’ve had people crawl in here and die on me slowly. Certified worm-free, but unluckily for them their blerry worm-free liver’s packed up—and you need to see people dying at that speed, Ralphie, because when the liver’s gone, a person’s life continues three days, and the only pain relief’s a bullet in the brain.” Koos shifted in his chair. “So I let Luke get on with it. It’s like these churches, isn’t it? You wish your mission servants would come to your church—but you know they go to more exciting types of services. What I do is, I go in there every month or so, have a look around among Luke’s stock. Just make sure there’s nothing human, that’s all. Anything human, and—I’ve warned him—I go to the police.”

“What do you mean, human?”

“People disappear, you know? We always say, they’re lost into Johannesburg, but sometimes they’ve gone a lot farther than that.

There is a trade, you can’t deny it. In bodies, live ones. They take the eyes, the tongue, whatever they need for medicine at that time. It’s a big problem for the police as to who’s guilty—and of course they feel they shouldn’t have to handle it, it’s a native problem. The reason why it’s so difficult to pin blame is that gangs do these things, networks, and how can you pick out who’s responsible— who can you say is the killer, if a person’s been cut up by different hands? And of course, if you cut people to pieces, they do die in the end.” Koos looked up, and saw the expression on Ralph’s face. “All right, don’t believe me,” he said. “I don’t like to think about it either. Who wants to admit such things go on?” He jerked his thumb in the general direction of Pretoria. “It gives encouragement to them.”

When the new year came, the bus fares went up, and the bus boycott started. Ralph got up at four each morning to pack the mission’s car with more people than it should hold, and to edge the complaining vehicle out of Elim, downhill toward Pretoria. The people who had permits to work in the city needed to keep their jobs; every taxi in Elim was commandeered, but still they passed silent convoys of men and women, walking downhill in the smoky dawn. The headlights of other cars, going uphill, crept by theirs; there was some sympathy in the liberal suburbs of Johannesburg, and there were men and women willing to drive through the night to help the people from the townships. Ralph had his name noted, at roadblocks. He was questioned, roughly, in Afrikaans. His lack of understanding drove the policemen into a fury. “We’ve got your number, man,” they said. “You must be a communist, eh?”

I want, he thought, to put into practice a different kind of Christianity from my father’s: one in which I don’t pass judgment on people. I don’t judge Lucy Moyo, or Koos, or (without evidence) Luke the dispenser whose trade is so dark; I don’t judge the president, or the police sergeant who has just cursed me out. “But if you don’t judge,” Anna said, “you certainly institute some stiff inquiries into people’s motives. I am not sure that is always quite separate from the process of passing judgment.”

She knew him better, by now. That kindness of his, which she had taken so personally, was essentially impersonal, she saw.

That morning at the roadblock, the policeman said to Ralph, kafifirboetie. Black man’s brother, or dear friend. “I would like to be,” Ralph said. “But I wouldn’t make the claim.” The policeman spat into the roadway. Only his upbringing prevented him from spitting in Ralph’s face.

On the day of the public meeting, the day of the baton charge, Koos opened his hospital in the nursery school’s hall, rolling up his shocked and bloodied patients in blankets, speaking in five languages to ban the hot sweet tea and ask for water, just water; for bandages—anything, any rags; for anyone with a steady hand to help him swab and clean.

Ralph gave a thought to a dusty office in London, an aerie in Clerkenwell, the headquarters of the organization that had sent him here; and he thought of the churchgoers of Norfolk, passing the collection plate; he heard them say to him, you have no right to misappropriate funds in this way, misuse mission property: to press the blue smock of a nursery school angel to the bleeding mouth of a township whore who has been smashed in the face by a baton. It was the cook, Rosinah, who of all the mission staff had witnessed the police charge; Rosinah, who seemed to have no life outside her dictatorial kitchen practices. Now she rocked herself in a stupor of grief, telling how it was peaceful, baas, hymn singing, a speech, and now the police have chased the young women and beaten them on their breasts, they have done that thing, they know where young women are weak.

Ralph knew that on the scale of atrocity it was small. It was not, for example, Treblinka. Koos showed him what a sjambok cut looked like, administered by an experienced, determined hand. He learned something about himself; that the presence of evil made him shake, like an invalid or octogenarian.

Next day he was able to piece together a little more of the story. It had been a peaceful meeting, as Rosinah said, on a patch of waste ground he knew, a mile away from Flower Street; but this was a typical thing in Elim, that there was no line of communication except an underground one, there was no knowledge, a mile away, of what was occurring on the waste ground; there was no mechanism by which he and Anna could have been warned and told to stand by for casualties. The meeting was to decide strategy for the bus boycott. At the last minute the police had demanded it be called off. A few children had started throwing stones, and the police had charged before the crowd could disperse. A great number of those injured appeared to be passersby. They were dazed and weeping, their shaved and stitched scalps still oozing blood and clear fluid; they said that they had not known anything, not known there was a meeting at all.

Ralph walked over the site of the catastrophe. A few odd shoes had been left behind in the scramble to escape the batons and whips. He saw a straw shopping bag, decorated with a swelling, pink straw rose; it lay on its side, and its contents were by now on someone else’s shelf. The ground had been picked over pretty well, he saw; he thought it was a strange form of looting. It was hard to know who was worse; the policemen who had done what they said was their duty, or the scavengers who had taken from the housemaid’s bag the half loaf, the two ounces of green tripe, perhaps the soap ends or old cardigan some Madam had given, some well-meaning idiot woman down in the white houses, the jacaranda groves.

“Can you do anything, Mr. Eldred?” Lucy Moyo said. “Anything to help us?”

“I can try,” Ralph said.

He went back to his office and rifled through his papers for the list he had been compiling: the names, addresses, telephone numbers of the senior policemen within a hundred miles. He picked up the telephone receiver and began to work his way through the list. These calls did not last long, in most cases; when the policemen heard his English accent, and learned that he lived in Elim, they put the phone down on him.

He sat up for most of the night, writing to the newspapers. “You saw the casualties,” he said to Koos. “You know what happened here, better than anybody. Put your name on these letters with me.”

Koos shook his head. “Better not, Ralph. I have my patients to think about. What would they do without me?” He shrugged. “A lot better, maybe.”

After the baton charge, their situation changed. They were invited to houses in Elim they had never entered before. People who were not churchgoers came to the Mission House. The local organizer of the African National Congress called on them; and on the same day came a man from Sophiatown, a black journalist from Drum magazine. He sat leaning back on one of the metal-legged kitchen chairs, so that its front feet were in the air. He found things to laugh about.

Rosinah’s apprentice served him tea in an enamel mug. Anna said sharply, “The cups and saucers, please, Dearie.” Dearie brought a cup and slapped it down on the table. She scowled. Cups were for whites, enamel mugs were for Africans; this Madam had instituted different practices, which proved she knew nothing. She thought this black man was above himself, putting on airs, in his lightweight blue suit with the sharp creases in the trousers. Trouble came of it: in her opinion.

“Pretoria wants to grow, grow, grow,” the handsome boy said, lolling back on his chair. “The Nats want this place cleared. They will find these people somewhere else, some piece of the veld where they can put them and forget them. Some place with no water and no roads. So that their children can grow back into savages.” The young man laughed, a satirical laugh. His eyes were distant already, and it could be seen that he was on his way to a scholarship abroad: Moscow, perhaps, and who could blame him? “I can tell you, Mrs. Eldred,” he said, “it is hardly possible for an African to live and breathe and be on the right side of the law.” He looked deeply into Anna’s eyes; indicating, one, that she attracted him and two, that he would not think to take any trouble over her.

It was after midnight when the handsome boy left. Next afternoon, a white police sergeant sat on the same chair: its legs now foursquare and grounded. “Makes a change, Mr. Eldred, for me to come and see you. Usually it’s you comes to see us.”

The sergeant was fair-haired, meager, not a big man. But he sat like a true Afrikaner: legs splayed, as if to indicate that in no other way could he ease his bull-like endowment. Ralph did not, at once, dislike him, perhaps because he was of the same familiar, freckled, physical type as Koos, and anxious too, nervously smiling; his nails were bitten down to the quick.

The sergeant had not refused tea. Dearie gave him a cup, of course, and a saucer too. He just wanted Ralph to know, he said, as he helped himself to sugar, that the police were aware what kind of visitors he’d been getting. “You’re a stranger here,” the policeman complained. “You’re new to South Africa. You ought to make nice friends.”

In passing, Ralph felt sorry for him. He was nervous, a chain-smoker, offering his pack each time to Anna; sometimes a fleeting spasm crossed his face, as if he were in pain.

“I didn’t catch your name,” Ralph said, when the sergeant wiped his mouth and stood up to go. “Why don’t you just call me Quintus,” the man said. “Because I expect we’ll be getting to know each other.”

“I think he must have beetles in the bowels,” Ralph said after he’d gone. “Needs to go to Luke Mbatha for some python fat.”

Ralph told Koos that the more stupid the white policemen were, the worse they treated him—except maybe this Quintus, who was well intentioned in his way.

Koos rubbed his red hands through his scrubby pale hair; and Ralph, who had been learning anatomy among other things, felt he could see afternoon light flash between radius and ulna. “Be over to his braai, soon, Ralphie. You drink his beer, man, you eat up his scorched flesh-meat.”

“No. I don’t see we’ll be on those terms.”

“Ah,” Koos said. “But you soon learn to like those motherfuckers. You like me, don’t you? And I’m one of them. Something sweet and simple about us, isn’t there? Something pathetic? Always trying to be liked. Well, there’s this thing we have, a kind of-— hospitality. If a man comes by you make him comfortable; it’s an African thing, the blacks have it and so do we. Do you think that while you’ve been in this township you have learned anything at all about what goes on here? Because if you do, man, you’re more imbecilic than I took you for.”

Later, in a more sober mood, Koos said: “You have to try to understand these—my lot, I mean. The British put their women and children in concentration camps. The Zulu smashed the skulls of their babies against their waggon wheels. They have long memories, Afrikaners. Memory is their specialty.”

Ralph was struck by how he said “these people.” Just as Lucy Moyo did, when she talked about her friends and neighbors.

“All I hope,” Ralph said, “and it’s a fairly faint hope, I know— is that the country will grind to a halt under the weight of its own ludicrous bureaucracy. You can hardly see a gap where a man can slip though.”

“There’s no slipping through,” Koos said. “Everybody’s watching everyone else. This country is like that. My hometown, my people—Jesus, man, you can’t imagine.”

“I think I can,” Ralph said.

“My father believes the world was made in seven days. It’s in the Bible, he says.” Koos laughed.

In the new year the early-morning raids began. They happened over three days. On the first morning, the police entered the township at five o’clock. They had armored vehicles, and they came in force. They cordoned off the area they had chosen and went from house to house, kicking in the doors. Next day, when people came down to the mission to give their accounts, this as much as anything gave rise to indignation: that they had shouted out that they were police, that the doors must be opened, but then they had given no time for the householders to obey them. “As if we were animals,” a woman said, “who would not understand.”

They were looking for liquor, the police said, for evidence of illicit stills. They were also looking for arms; there was a rumor current, which Ralph wished he had not heard, that materiel had been brought into Elim by night, and stowed away against a braver age.

Since the riot—the so-called riot—the atmosphere had been restless and strained, and the corner boys had a sullen, knowing look. He no longer allowed Anna to go out alone. Where people knew them, they were safe enough. Where they were unknown, a white face had become a provocation.

Those nights of the raids, Ralph found it impossible to sleep. There was the fear that some wider kind of trouble would blow up; that forewarned of the police action a crowd would gather, young boys heedless of the consequences, with sticks and bottles and, God knows, perhaps these mysterious arms; then there would be a replay of the baton charge, or perhaps much worse, perhaps bullets. He felt foolish, helpless, inconsequential, as he lay on his back staring up at the ceiling, an orange light insinuating itself through the gap in the curtains.

It had become necessary to fix these lights around the mission compound. A week ago, the nursery school had been broken into. There was no money for the thieves to take, no food; they had kicked the little tables about, torn up some books, ransacked Anna’s broom-cupboard office and made a small fire in there. It could, of course, have burned down the building, if Father Alfred had not seen the flames from his bedroom window.

Then, on Sunday, when the mission workers were at their various services, a sneak thief had entered Rosinah’s single-room house, taken her clothing, including a woolen hat which belonged to Dearie and which Rosinah had extracted from her on a forced loan. The cook’s retching sobs had been out of all proportion to the loss. They had—himself and Anna, Dearie, the gardeners—spent an hour trying to coax her to stop crying. Clara, the educated washerwoman, stood by the door not speaking. There was no expression on her face. She looked like a woman who might have lost everything, many times over.

Hence the security lights. Their sleep had been broken since. His wife’s tension seemed to communicate itself to Ralph through the sagging springs of the bed. Toward dawn he dozed. Phrases ran through his head, the phrases that he lived with each day: Thirty shillings or ten days. My husband, baas, is whereabouts unknown.

And toward dawn on the third day the police came to the mission. It was almost a relief to hear them pounding at the door. He and Anna were both out of bed in a moment; their faces peaked in the gray light, they understood the extent of each other’s wakeful-ness. Ralph pulled on the trousers and shirt he had left folded by the bed. Anna belted her dressing gown over her long nightdress. What was the point of rushing? The police would break the door down anyway.

In the event, the police checked themselves; as if, here on the mission steps, some notion of civility still held sway. “It’s you,” Ralph said, opening the door; Quintus stood there. He had feared unknown faces, Special Branch perhaps. Haifa dozen men trooped in. Quintus introduced his colleague, Sergeant van Zyl. They had hardly got through the pleasantries when the men began to stomp through the house, looking in the cupboards and under the bed. “Of course, Sergeant,” Ralph said, you spotted at once that I’m the type to run a still. Me and my wife, aren’t we just your typical shebeen-owners?”

Sergeant van Zyl said, “We are looking for a person we have reason to believe may be on your premises.”

“What person? Dr. Verwoerd? Mickey Mouse?” Van Zyl looked baleful. He was a big man; hitching his thumbs into his belt, he moved the burden of his belly a little. “You wrote a letter to the Pretoria News, Mr. Eldred. Don’t do that again.”

Let’s stay calm, Ralph said to himself. “My letter was only to tell people what really happened the day of your baton charge. I wrote to invite people to come up here and look at Elim for themselves. To look at our churches and our schools, and ask themselves if we are the hotbed of vice and crime they are constantly told that we are. To look at what we do here, and ask themselves if we deserve to be destroyed.”

“We know what your letter said,” van Zyl told him. “We have read it ourselves in the newspaper. The brigadier doesn’t like your tone, Mr. Eldred.”

“Well, if it’s only my tone,” Ralph said easily. “The content doesn’t trouble him?”

“You’d have more idea about crime,” van Zyl said, “if you spent some time with us at the police station.”

“But I do spend time. I could hardly spend any more. Unless I moved in with you.”

“I suppose that might be arranged,” van Zyl said.

The police had given up on the mysterious person, whoever he was. They were in Ralph’s office, rummaging through his papers. Sergeant van Zyl settled on his desk. Again he twitched at his belt, settling his bulk comfortably, as if his gut were something apart from him, a pet animal he kept.

“If I knew what you wanted,” Ralph said, “I could perhaps help you out.”

“Help yourself out, man,” van Zyl said. “Keep out of our way.”

Quintus attempted covert signals. He looked sick. Ralph would not meet his eyes. His clear meaning was, be careful, for van Zyl is not your decent type of policeman. And that was evident; there was no need to collude on it. If Quintus felt bad, let him quit; he, Ralph, was not going to do anything to ease a policeman’s conscience.

The search was a perfunctory one, but as messy as could be contrived. They had done it for the nuisance value, Ralph thought. Even so, he knew that Anna, standing against the wall, was trembling. He would have liked to turn to her, hold her in his arms, but he did not want to take his eyes from van Zyl’s eyes. He would not be the one to look away first.

Quintus ushered them from the office, grumbling. “I don’t know how you find anything in this place.”

“We’ve always managed,” Anna said. “But I don’t suppose we’ll manage now.”

Her voice was cool. Quintus shook his head. He spoke in Afrikaans to his colleague. Enough’s enough, he seemed to be saying. The men trooped out. They were left alone, with their papers scattered about the Mission House, as if a gale had blown through, or some apocalyptic wind.

The same day, late afternoon, Quintus turned up with a truck. “Got something for you,” he said, smiling as if he had not seen them earlier that day.

Two black boys leapt down from the back of the truck, and maneuvered onto the stoep a large filing cabinet, battered and scratched, dark green in color. “Just what you need, eh?” Quintus said.

“Oh, Quintus, a donation,” Anna said. She smiled, as if deeply touched.

Quintus did not know the difference between affectation and reality. “No need to thank me, man,” he said modestly. “It’s just scrap metal. We were throwing it out. A drawer fell out and broke the brigadier’s toe, that’s why.” He addressed Ralph. “So you take care and don’t be rough when you pull it out.”

“Cup of coffee?” Anna said. Like Ralph, she felt a sneaking pity for the man. Quintus sat down at the kitchen table. He said, “I know you don’t like me coming round here. But we’ve been told to keep an eye on you. Look, there are worse people in the force.”

“I know. We’ve met him,” Ralph said. The sergeant sat brooding over his cup. “Hell, man, you think I like my job? A man’s got to earn a living.”

“I get tired of hearing that,” Anna said. “There are other ways, surely?”

The sergeant reached into a pocket of his uniform, took out his wallet. To Ralph’s deep embarrassment, he drew from it a family snapshot. “My girls,” he said.

Ralph looked at it. Three daughters. Twelve, ten, and eight they might be. Graded by height, the arms of one sister around the waist of the next, blond heads leaning back onto the shoulder of a woman slighter, more modest than they, scarcely taller than the eldest girl. Filaments of hair escaped from their plaits, and stood out like halos as they smiled into the sun. Hitler’s wet dreams, he thought. He handed the photograph to Anna. “Beauties,” he said. “Your wife, Quintus, she looks a lovely girl.”

“When you’re a family man you’ll understand a lot you don’t understand now,” the policeman promised. “You think about them all the time, Jesus, you worry. What sort of a world are they going to grow up in? Are they going to marry kaffirs?”

“We don’t use that word here.”

“Oh, words,” the sergeant said. “That’s what gets to me about you people. Words.”

He didn’t explain his objection; he stood up, said he must be going. “Next time we come,” he said, indicating the filing cabinet, “you’ll have everything in the one place for us?” Tentatively, he touched his uniformed chest and winced. “Mrs. Eldred, could I trouble you? Have you got anything to take the acid off my stomach?”

“Quintus wants to be human,” Anna said, when he left.

“He must get another job then.”

That evening Koos came to the back door. Just for a few minutes; he wouldn’t eat with them. Couldn’t, really, he said. His jaw was swollen. He had lost two teeth. The police had called on him too. They had smashed their way through the front of his surgery, smashed in the windows—though everybody knew he slept in the room at the back. They said they wanted to talk to Luke Mbatha, the dispenser. They’d given Luke’s shack a going-over, and taken Luke away in a van.

Koos wanted Ralph to come down to the station, bringing what money he had by him, to try and bail Luke out. “God knows he’s no innocent,” Koos said. “But you know what happens to black men in police cells.” He had, he explained, no money of his own. The matter was urgent, he said, looking away. Otherwise he would not have come. They might have taken Luke Mbatha down the hill to Pretoria by now, and perhaps they would never find him again.

“Why didn’t you come before?” Ralph said.

“Because I can’t walk when I’m unconscious,” Koos said. His pale eyes were bloodshot, and his hands shook. One of the policemen had hit him in the face with a pistol butt, and then presumably hit him on the head, because he had come to at the house of one of his patients, lying on a pallet and covered with one of Anna’s knitted blankets. “A good blanket,” he said. “Very warm. Thank you, Anna.” He couldn’t remember much of what had happened. The policeman who hit him had called him a white kaffir. That sergeant, he said—not van Zyl. The thin one. The other. Quintus Brink.

They realized, over the next few days, that it was no longer safe to make telephone calls. They knew there was nothing seditious in their conversation. But anything could be twisted, and would be, and they knew that there were listeners on the line.

Van Zyl came by again—just visiting, he said—and it went badly. He stared at the filing cabinet as if he knew it from somewhere. “Any visitors last night?” he said.

“No.”

“You surprise me. You’re sure no visitors after dark?”

“I’m quite sure.”

“Any visitors in your servants’ quarters?”

“I can’t help you there. But I’m sure no one was on the compound whom you would be interested in.”

“Luke Mbatha has given them the slip,” Anna said from the doorway. She spoke derisively. Van Zyl was not pleased.

“Where did you hear that rubbish?”

“It’s not rubbish. I heard it on the street. Everybody knows it. How did he get away, Sergeant? Did he bewitch you? Did he bewitch the brigadier?”

Van Zyl got up from his chair, and tossed his paunch threateningly. “Tell your woman to watch her mouth,” he said. “Or she’ll feel my hand across it.”

“Out,” Ralph said. “Voetsak, Sergeant. Out of this house.”

It is the word you use to a dog, and only then if it is a dog of bad character. But van Zyl would not hesitate to use it, to a man of inferior race; Ralph believed now that there were inferior races, distinguished not by culture or genes, but by some missing faculty of pity. “Voetsak, Sergeant,” he said again, and moved toward him as if to push him out of the front door, across the stoep and down the steps into the yard.

Sergeant van Zyl knew he should not fight; he had received warnings about his excess of zeal. He attempted some sort of lumbering side step—so when Ralph did push him, he was not truly on course for the door. “You must be a stinking Jew,” the policeman told Ralph. “In my opinion, Hitler was right.” Ralph’s fists against his belly, he careered backward. His right arm flailed out, swept to the floor the papers from Anna’s temporary desk. He backed his calves into the wastepaper basket, overturned it, and, attempting to regain his balance, trod in it. Ralph would never forget the feeling of his hands sinking into the sergeant’s flesh. It gave him a shock, how easy it was to topple that great bulk.

The Special Branch came at three the following morning, and took them both away.