Dark Star Safari

23. Blue Train Blues

The Blue Train that ran every few weeks between Cape Town and Pretoria was described on its brochure as ‘the world’s most luxurious train.’ I returned to Johannesburg on it. The superlative was perhaps true, but even more amazing, this luxury train was operated by the South African government, the same department that ran the Trans-Karoo Express, and the dusty Trans-Oranjie to Durban and the littered halting choo-choo to Simonstown. Butlers in zebra-striped shirts met me at Cape Town station and served snacks, looking disappointed at my small scuffed bag. How were they to know that it contained some lovely Chokwe carvings, and my expensive watch, my spare cash, and tanzanite baubles to propitiate my wife in her enduring my long absence?

A tour group of twenty Japanese men and women scuttled ahead to board the train. And then I was shown to my wood-paneled compartment, where there was a phone and a fax machine. I winced, imagining that they would disturb my solitude, but they never rang for me.

‘I am Dalton, your butler.’

He brought me champagne. I sat with a book, and sipped wine and read. Even from the best train across the Karoo the scenery was the same — the great blue hills, the vineyards, the grassland, the startled ostriches, boozers under bridges, bright lime-washed bungalows blazing in the stony desert, the sight of shanty towns and squatter camps and magnificent mountains.

My book was a small Penguin of Montaigne’s essays, which I kept for emergencies, when I had nothing else to read; it was my bedside book, my solace. I had finished recopying the erotic story, my notes were done, so I reread ’On the Cannibals.’ This short essay was to me like a sacred text, for in it Montaigne discussed the hypocrisy of seeing strangers as savage: ‘every man calls barbarous the thing he is not accustomed to.’ Cannibalism Montaigne regarded as less offensive than the many French cruelties. The wider world was unknown. ‘What we need is topographers who would make detailed accounts of the places they had actually been to.’ At the end he recalled his encounter in Rouen in 1562, with three self-possessed Brazilian natives, cannibals perhaps, remembering their sense of honor, their courage in battle, their dignity as leaders.

Not at all bad, that. Ah! But they wear no breeches…

My berth on the Blue Train was the softest bed of my entire trip, the dining car food the most delicious, the comfort incomparable. This comfort gave me a keener eye for seeing Africans toiling in the fields out the window: the old woman carrying two beat-up suitcases across a hot dry road, walking away from the tracks towards a distant hill; a man in blue overalls bent double under a mealie sack — his month’s food slung over his shoulder; a child standing bare assed in a filthy yard.

At Laingsburg a well-heeled couple on the train tossed apples from their crystal fruit bowl to children panhandling by the tracks. At Leeu-Gamka a skinny girl of about ten or eleven pleaded with me for food, murmuring in the shy prayerful way of a child softly begging. She was so thin and curveless her blue dress hung straight down from her shoulders to her knees like a faded flag of defeat. I could not bring myself to fling food at her. She ducked out of sight, and after we started up she reappeared, fierce-faced, and flung a small stone through the window, just missing my head. A few more small stones clattered into my sumptuous compartment, plopping on the cushions and smacking the wall — not serious, but meaningful; a symbolic stoning.

The Blue Train cut through the late afternoon, its wide black shadow lying flat and hurrying next to it. At dusk a great watery darkness descended, dissolving the light, the high plains going purple then blue then black, with a flattening orange stripe of sunset in the sky that made the landscape blacker.

The next day we stopped at Kimberley, a dust-blown mining town, slummy at the edges, with a huge pit in the middle, ‘the biggest man-made hole in the world.’ Billions of dollars’ worth of gems had been scooped from this pit, yet the town was just a dreary dorp, of waste dumps and hills of gravel, and bungalows with tin roofs, video parlors and fried chicken restaurants and burger joints and used car lots and a hideous desert climate with terrific summer heat and wicked winter frosts, nothing to do in the dorp except dig and sift and pick through the dirt for baubles. All this visible tedium and poorly paid labor was the reality behind the wickedest confidence trick in the world, the diamond trade.

Back on the train: ostrich carpaccio, followed by a choice of honey-glazed breast of duck, or ostrich Wellington, or baked kingklip, and dessert of chocolate mousse. I ate and watched the settlements pass, some very grand, but also squatter colonies of tin-roofed shacks, and in some places at nine in the morning drunks on benches, guzzling their free ration of wine.

The train was almost heartbreaking for being so pleasant, for offering this view of South Africa, the same misery, the same splendor. But also my work was done, my safari ended. This trip was just a dying fall; I was clinging to Africa because I had not wanted it to end.

Huck never returned from the Territory, as far as we know. Yet Captain Gulliver went home, wiser but also alienated and revolted not by the trip but by the domestic scene. Unable to stand the Yahoo smell that adhered to his wife and the sight of his savage-looking family, he comforted himself by talking to his horse and finding companionship in the stable. Travel had changed him. You go away for a long time and return a different person — you never come all the way back. You think, I is someone else, like Rimbaud.

Several occurrences in South Africa helped me find a sense of proportion. Just before I left Johannesburg I left my locked bag and every expensive thing I owned in the safekeeping of a hotel’s padlocked strongroom. I took a short trip to the coast, carrying only a briefcase, my notes, my story, and a change of clothes. I did not want to be burdened by a bag, or any valuables. I returned to the hotel four days later and handed over my claim check to an uncertain bellhop.

‘We cannot find your bag, sir.’

The thing had been stolen. And so I lost everything I had brought to Africa, watch, wallet, cash, air tickets, as well as artifacts and treasures I had bought along the way; everything except my briefcase and its rattling contents. I still had my house keys, the selection of Montaigne’s Essays, the fair copy of my erotic story, a change of clothes, a small Congolese fetish of wood and beads which was a remedy against thunder, and — a miracle — all the notes I had taken to inform the writing of this book.

‘That’s very Janiceburg,’ a Johannesburger said to me, of the theft. ‘Very Jozi.’

Not long after that, while I was still cursing my loss, Nadine’s husband Reinhold died. The funeral took place on a lovely day, fragrant with sunwarmed yew trees, at Braamfontein crematorium, an old stone building in the middle of a wooded walled-in cemetery. Among the hundred or so mourners were former political prisoners, civil rights lawyers, poets, novelists, journalists, activists, family friends.

Nadine’s son Hugo spoke tenderly of his father. Others apostrophized him. And in the course of the service I got better acquainted with this remarkable man, Reinhold Cassirer — art connoisseur, humanist, businessman, wine expert, philanthropist, horseman, raconteur, great friend, loving husband.

Petite, yet strong and sure of herself, and witty even on this occasion, Nadine spoke of her love for her husband.

‘The first time I met him I asked him for a whisky. He said disapprovingly, “A woman doesn’t drink whisky at lunch.” But I did. And he brought me whisky for the next forty-eight years. I wanted a son and a bulldog. He gave me both. He was my lover, my friend, my supporter. He had a wonderful respect for the privacy of my work. We shared a strong political commitment against racism and apartheid. When the first free elections were held, we went together and voted.’

A measure of how the struggle for political freedom had penetrated people’s lives was Nadine’s speaking of how the act of voting freely together could be one of the tenderest memories of a South African marriage.

‘Attending funerals has become a way of life in the townships,’ one of the African speakers said. ‘I have attended a lot of funerals lately.’

‘We felt we were part of the family,’ another man said.

That was how this funeral seemed, like a family affair. The long political struggle had made a family of all South Africans — a forgiving if sometimes unruly family. The mourners were all sorts, every color, all ages, rich and poor, listening to Mozart during the interludes.

Nadine invited everyone back to her house for lunch. And so later that morning I was standing in her garden, drinking wine among the mourners, part of the family. Some people commiserated with me about my theft, even Nadine. ‘I’ m so sorry about your bag.’ But the funeral of this much-loved man, at which everyone was so gracious and philosophical, had shown me that the loss of my possessions was insignificant.

Traveling light, I thought I was returning home with nothing but my notes. I stopped in Ethiopia to break the long return journey and in those few days, I ate something poisonous. The morning I left Addis Ababa my bowels exploded, not simple squitters but an infestation. And so I arrived home Africanized — robbed and diseased.

‘Parasites,’ my doctor said. And, ‘Let’s treat them empirically.’ For months, nothing seemed to work on easing my aching guts. I was inert, weak, with the odd debauched nausea of an extravagant illness. I felt like the cursed explorer in Edmund Lucas White’s horror story ‘Lukundoo’, who falls ill in Africa, and breaks out in carbuncles, each septic bulge containing a plum-sized African head, ‘hideous, gibbering’, with ‘wicked wee eyes.’ Throughout the writing of this book I have had the reminding motion and gassy gurgle of my parasites within me — Africa stirring inside me for almost as many months as I was astir in Africa.

But it is so much worse for Africans. The most civilized ones I met never used the word civilization. The wickedest believed themselves to be anointed leaders for life, and wouldn’t let go of their delusion. The worst of them stole from foreign donors and their own people, like the lowest thieves, who rob the church’s poor boxes. The kindest Africans had not changed at all and even after all these years the best of them are bare-assed.