Life Times: Stories 1952-2007

Not for Publication

It is not generally known — and it is never mentioned in the official biographies — that the Prime Minister spent the first eleven years of his life, as soon as he could be trusted not to get under a car, leading his uncle about the streets. The uncle was not really blind, but nearly, and he was certainly mad. He walked with his right hand on the boy’s left shoulder; they kept moving part of the day, but they also had a pitch on the cold side of the street, between the legless man near the post office who sold bootlaces and copper bracelets, and the one with the doll’s hand growing out of one elbow, whose pitch was outside the YWCA. That was where Adelaide Graham-Grigg found the boy, and later he explained to her, ‘If you sit in the sun they don’t give you anything.’

Miss Graham-Grigg was not looking for Praise Basetse. She was in Johannesburg on one of her visits from a British Protectorate, seeing friends, pulling strings, and pursuing, on the side, her private study of following up the fate of those people of the tribe who had crossed the border and lost themselves, sometimes over several generations, in the city. As she felt down through the papers and letters in her bag to find a sixpence for the old man’s hat, she heard him mumble something to the boy in the tribe’s tongue — which was not in itself anything very significant in this city where many African languages could be heard. But these sounds formed in her ear as words: it was the language that she had learnt to understand a little. She asked, in English, using only the traditional form of address in the tribe’s tongue, whether the old man was a tribesman? But he was mumbling the blessings that the clink of a coin started up like a kick to a worn and useless mechanism. The boy spoke to him, nudged him; he had already learnt in a rough way to be a businessman. Then the old man protested, no, no, he had come a long time from that tribe. A long, long time. He was Johannesburg. She saw that he confused the question with some routine interrogation at the pass offices, where a man from another territory was always in danger of being endorsed out to some forgotten ‘home’. She spoke to the boy, asking him if he came from the Protectorate. He shook his head terrifiedly; once before he had been ordered off the streets by a welfare organisation. ‘But your father? Your mother?’ Miss Graham-Grigg said, smiling. She discovered that the old man had come from the Protectorate, from the very village she had made her own, and that his children had passed on to their children enough of the language for them all to continue to speak it among themselves down to the second generation born in the alien city.

Now the pair were no longer beggars to be ousted from her conscience by a coin: they were members of the tribe. She found out what township they went to ground in after the day’s begging, interviewed the family, established for them the old man’s right to a pension in his adopted country, and, above all, did something for the boy. She never succeeded in finding out exactly who he was — she gathered he must have been the illegitimate child of one of the girls in the family, his parentage concealed so that she might go on with her schooling. Anyway, he was a descendant of the tribe, a displaced tribesman, and he could not be left to go on begging in the streets. That was as far as Miss Graham-Grigg’s thoughts for him went, in the beginning. Nobody wanted him particularly, and she met with no opposition from the family when she proposed to take him back to the Protectorate and put him to school. He went with her just as he had gone through the streets of Johannesburg each day under the weight of the old man’s hand.

The boy had never been to school before. He could not write, but Miss Graham-Grigg was astonished to discover that he could read quite fluently. Sitting beside her in her little car in the khaki shorts and shirt she had bought him, stripped of the protection of his smelly rags and scrubbed bare to her questions, he told her that he had learnt from the newspaper vendor whose pitch was on the corner; from the posters that changed several times a day, and then from the front pages of the newspapers and magazines spread there. Good God, what had he not learnt on the street! Everything from his skin out unfamiliar to him, and even that smelling strangely different — this detachment, she realised, made the child talk as he could never have done when he was himself. Without differentiation, he related the commonplaces of his life; he had also learnt from the legless copper bracelet man how to make dagga cigarettes and smoke them for a nice feeling. She asked him what he thought he would have done when he got older, if he had had to keep on walking with his uncle, and he said that he had wanted to belong to one of the gangs of boys, some little older than himself, who were very good at making money. They got money from white people’s pockets and handbags without them even knowing it, and if the police came they began to play their penny whistles and sing.

She said with a smile, ‘Well, you can forget all about the street, now. You don’t have to think about it ever again.’

And he said, ‘Yes, med-dam’ and she knew she had no idea what he was thinking — how could she? All she could offer were more unfamiliarities, the unfamiliarities of generalised encouragement, saying, ‘And soon you will know how to write.’

She had noticed that he was hatefully ashamed of not being able to write. When he had had to admit it, the face that he turned open and victimised to her every time she spoke had the squinting grimace — teeth showing and a grown-up cut between the faint, child’s eyebrows — of profound humiliation. Humiliation terrified Adelaide Graham-Grigg as the spectacle of savage anger terrifies others. That was one of the things she held against the missionaries: how they stressed Christ’s submission to humiliation, and so had conditioned the people of Africa to humiliation by the white man.

Praise went to the secular school that Miss Graham-Grigg’s committee of friends of the tribe in London had helped pay to set up in the village in opposition to the mission school. The sole qualified teacher was a young man who had received his training in South Africa and now had been brought back to serve his people; but it was a beginning. As Adelaide Graham-Grigg often said to the Chief, shining-eyed as any proud daughter, ‘By the time independence comes we’ll be free not only of the British Government, but of the church as well.’ And he always giggled a little embarrassedly, although he knew her so well and was old enough to be her father, because her own father was both a former British MP and the son of a bishop.

It was true that everything was a beginning; that was the beauty of it — of the smooth mud houses, red earth, flies and heat that visitors from England wondered she could bear to live with for months on end, while their palaces and cathedrals and streets choked on a thousand years of used-up endeavour were an ending. Even Praise was a beginning; one day the tribe would be economically strong enough to gather its exiles home, and it would no longer be necessary for its sons to sell their labour over that border. But it soon became clear that Praise was also exceptional. The business of learning to read from newspaper headlines was not merely a piece of gutter-wit; it proved to have been the irrepressible urge of real intelligence. In six weeks the boy could write, and from the start he could spell perfectly, while boys of sixteen and eighteen never succeeded in mastering English orthography. His arithmetic was so good that he had to be taught with the Standard Three class instead of the beginners; he grasped at once what a map was; and in his spare time showed a remarkable aptitude for understanding the workings of various mechanisms, from water pumps to motorcycle engines. In eighteen months he had completed the Standard Five syllabus, only a year behind the average age of a city white child with all the background advantage of a literate home.

There was as yet no other child in the tribe’s school who was ready for Standard Six. It was difficult to see what could be done, now, but send Praise back over the border to school. So Miss Graham-Grigg decided it would have to be Father Audry. There was nothing else for it. The only alternative was the mission school, those damned Jesuits who’d been sitting in the Protectorate since the days when the white imperialists were on the grab, taking the tribes under their ‘protection’ — and the children the boy would be in class with there wouldn’t provide any sort of stimulation, either. So it would have to be Father Audry, and South Africa. He was a priest, too, an Anglican one, but his school was a place where at least, along with the pious pap, a black child could get an education as good as a white child’s.

When Praise came out into the veld with the other boys his eyes screwed up, against the size: the land ran away all round, and there was no other side to be seen; only the sudden appearance of the sky, that was even bigger. The wind made him snuff like a dog. He stood helpless as the country men he had seen caught by changing traffic lights in the middle of a street. The bits of space between buildings came together, ballooned uninterruptedly over him, he was lost; but there were clouds as big as the buildings had been, and even though space was vaster than any city, it was peopled by birds. If you ran for ten minutes into the veld the village was gone; but down low on the ground thousands of ants knew their way between their hard mounds that stood up endlessly as the land.

He went to herd cattle with the other boys early in the mornings and after school. He taught them some gambling games they had never heard of. He told them about the city they had never seen. The money in the old man’s hat seemed a lot to them, who had never got more than a few pennies when the mail train stopped for water at the halt five miles away; so the sum grew in his own estimation, too, and he exaggerated it a bit. In any case, he was forgetting about the city; in a way; not Miss Graham-Grigg’s way, but in the manner of a child, who makes, like a wasp building with his own spittle, his private context within the circumstance of his surroundings, so that the space around him was reduced to the village, the pan where the cattle were taken to drink, the halt where the train went by; whatever particular patch of sand or rough grass astir with ants the boys rolled on, heads together, among the white egrets and the cattle. He learnt from the others what roots and leaves were good to chew, and how to set wire traps for spring-hares. Though Miss Graham-Grigg had said he need not, he went to church with the children on Sundays.

He did not live where she did, in one of the Chief’s houses, but with the family of one of the other boys; but he was at her house often. She asked him to copy letters for her. She cut things out of the newspapers she got and gave them to him to read; they were about aeroplanes, and dams being built, and the way the people lived in other countries. ‘Now you’ll be able to tell the boys all about the Volta Dam, that is also in Africa — far from here — but still, in Africa,’ she said, with that sudden smile that reddened her face. She had a gramophone and she played records for him. Not only music, but people reading out poems, so that he knew that the poems in the school reader were not just short lines of words, but more like songs. She gave him tea with plenty of sugar and she asked him to help her to learn the language of the tribe, to talk to her in it. He was not allowed to call her madam or missus, as he did the white women who had put money in the hat, but had to learn to say Miss Graham-Grigg.

Although he had never known any white women before except as high-heeled shoes passing quickly in the street, he did not think that all white women must be like her; in the light of what he had seen white people, in their cars, their wealth, their distance, to be, he understood nothing that she did. She looked like them, with her blue eyes, blonde hair and skin that was not one colour but many — brown where the sun burned it, red when she blushed — but she lived here in the Chief’s houses, drove him in his car, and sometimes slept out in the fields with the women when they were harvesting kaffircorn far from the village. He did not know why she had brought him there, or why she should be kind to him. But he could not ask her, any more than he would have asked her why she went out and slept in the fields when she had a gramophone and a lovely gas lamp (he had been able to repair it for her) in her room. If when they were talking together, the talk came anywhere near the pitch outside the post office, she became slowly very red, and they went past it, either by falling silent or (on her part) talking and laughing rather fast.

That was why he was amazed the day she told him that he was going back to Johannesburg. As soon as she had said it she blushed darkly for it, her eyes pleading confusion: so it was really from her that the vision of the pitch outside the post office came again. But she was already speaking: ‘—to school. To a really good boarding school, Father Audry’s school, about nine miles from town. You must get your chance at a good school, Praise. We really can’t teach you properly any longer. Maybe you’ll be the teacher here, yourself, one day. There’ll be a high school and you’ll be the headmaster.’

She succeeded in making him smile; but she looked sad, uncertain. He went on smiling because he couldn’t tell her about the initiation school that he was about to begin with the other boys of his age group. Perhaps someone would tell her. The other women. Even the Chief. But you couldn’t fool her with smiling.

‘You’ll be sorry to leave Tebedi and Joseph and the rest.’

He stood there, smiling.

‘Praise, I don’t think you understand about yourself — about your brain.’ She gave a little sobbing giggle, prodded at her own head. ‘You’ve got an awfully good one. More in there than other boys — you know? It’s something special — it would be such a waste. Lots of people would like to be clever like you, but it’s not easy, when you are the clever one—?’

He went on smiling. He did not want her face looking into his any more and so he fixed his eyes on her feet, white feet in sandals with the veins standing out over the ankles like the feet of Christ dangling above his head in the church.

Adelaide Graham-Grigg had met Father Audry before, of course. All those white people who do not accept the colour bar in Southern Africa seem to know each other, however different the bases of their rejection. She had sat with him on some committee or other in London a few years earlier, along with a couple of exiled white South African leftists and a black nationalist leader. Anyway, everyone knew him — from the newspapers if nowhere else: he had been warned, in a public speech by the Prime Minister of South Africa, Dr Verwoerd, that the interference of a churchman in political matters would not be tolerated. He continued to speak his mind, and (as the newspapers quoted him) ‘to obey the commands of God before the dictates of the State’. He had close friends among African and Indian leaders, and it was said that he even got on well with certain ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church, that, in fact, he was behind some of the dissidents who now and then questioned Divine Sanction for the colour bar — such was the presence of his restless, black-cassocked figure, stammering eloquence and jagged handsome face.

He had aged since she saw him last; he was less handsome. But he had still what he would have as long as he lived: the unconscious bearing of a natural prince among men that makes a celebrated actor, a political leader, a successful lover; an object of attraction and envy who, whatever his generosity of spirit, is careless of one cruelty for which other people will never forgive him — the distinction, the luck with which he was born.

He was tired and closed his eyes in a grimace straining at concentration when he talked to her, yet in spite of this she felt the dimness of the candle of her being within his radius. Everything was right, with him; nothing was quite right with her. She was only thirty-six but she had never looked any younger. Her eyes were the bright shy eyes of a young woman but her feet and hands with their ridged nails had the look of tension and suffering of extremities that would never caress: she saw it, he saw it, she knew in his presence that they were deprived for ever.

Her humiliation gave her force. She said, ‘I must tell you we want him back in the tribe — I mean, there are terribly few with enough education even for administration. Within the next few years we’ll desperately need more and more educated men. . We shouldn’t want him to be allowed to think of becoming a priest.’

Father Audry smiled at what he knew he was expected to come out with: that if the boy chose the way of the Lord, etc.

He said, ‘What you want is someone who will turn out to be an able politician without challenging the tribal system.’

They both laughed, but, again, he had unconsciously taken the advantage of admitting their deeply divergent views; he believed the chiefs must go, while she, of course, saw no reason why Africans shouldn’t develop their own tribal democracy instead of taking over the Western pattern.

‘Well, he’s a little young for us to be worrying about that now, don’t you think. .?’ He smiled. There were a great many papers on his desk and she had the sense of pressure of his preoccupation with other things. ‘What about the Lemeribe Mission? What’s the teaching like these days — I used to know Father Chalmon when he was there—’

‘I wouldn’t send him to those people,’ she said spiritedly, implying that he knew her views on missionaries and their role in Africa. In this atmosphere of candour they discussed Praise’s background. Father Audry suggested that the boy should be encouraged to resume relations with his family, once he was back within reach of Johannesburg.

‘They’re pretty awful.’

‘It would be best for him to acknowledge what he was, if he is to accept what he is to become.’ He got up with a swish of his black skirts and strode, stooping in the opened door, to call, ‘Simon, bring the boy.’ Miss Graham-Grigg was smiling excitedly towards the doorway, all the will to love pacing behind the bars of her glance.

Praise entered in the navy-blue shorts and white shirt of his new school uniform. The woman’s kindness, the man’s attention, got him in the eyes like the sun striking off the pan where the cattle had been taken to drink. Father Audry came from England, Miss Graham-Grigg had told him, like herself. That was what they were, these two white people who were not like any white people he had seen to be. What they were was being English. From far off; six thousand miles from here, as he knew from his geography book.

Praise did very well at the new school. He sang in the choir in the big church on Sundays; his body, that was to have been made a man’s out in the bush, was hidden under the white robes. The boys smoked in the lavatories and once there was a girl who came and lay down for them in a storm-water ditch behind the workshops. He knew all about these things from before, on the streets and in the location where he had slept in one room with a whole family. But he did not tell the boys about the initiation. The women had not said anything to Miss Graham-Grigg. The Chief hadn’t, either. Soon when Praise thought about it he realised that by now it must be over. Those boys must have come back from the bush. Miss Graham-Grigg had said that after a year, when Christmas came, she would fetch him for the summer holidays. She did come and see him twice that first year, when she was down in Johannesburg, but he couldn’t go back with her at Christmas because Father Audry had him in the Nativity play, and was giving him personal coaching in Latin and algebra. Father Audry didn’t actually teach in the school at all — it was ‘his’ school simply because he had begun it, and it was run by the Order of which he was Father Provincial — but the reports of the boy’s progress were so astonishing that, as he said to Miss Graham-Grigg, one felt one must give him all the mental stimulation one could.

‘I begin to believe we may be able to sit him for his matric when he is just sixteen.’ Father Audry made the pronouncement with the air of doing so at the risk of sounding ridiculous.

Miss Graham-Grigg always had her hair done when she got to Johannesburg, she was looking pretty and optimistic. ‘D’you think he could do a Cambridge entrance? My committee in London would set up a scholarship, I’m sure — investment in a future Prime Minister for the Chief!’

When Praise was sent for, she said she hardly knew him; he hadn’t grown much, but he looked so grown-up, with his long trousers and glasses. ‘You really needn’t wear them when you’re not working,’ said Father Audry. ‘Well, I suppose if you take ’em on and off you keep leaving them about, eh?’ They both stood back, smiling, letting the phenomenon embody in the boy.

Praise saw that she had never been reminded by anyone about the initiation. She began to give him news of his friends, Tebedi and Joseph and the others, but when he heard their names they seemed to belong to people he couldn’t see in his mind.

Father Audry talked to him sometimes about what Father called his ‘family’, and when first he came to the school he had been told to write to them. It was a well-written, well-spelled letter in English, exactly the letter he presented as a school exercise when one was required in class. They didn’t answer. Then Father Audry must have made private efforts to get in touch with them, because the old woman, a couple of children who had been babies when he left and one of his grown-up ‘sisters’ came to the school on a visiting day. They had to be pointed out to him among the other boys’ visitors; he would not have known them, nor they him.

He said, ‘Where’s my uncle?’ — because he would have known him at once; he had never grown out of the slight stoop of the left shoulder where the weight of the old man’s hand had impressed the young bone. But the old man was dead.

Father Audry came up and put a long arm round the bent shoulder and another long arm round one of the small children and said from one to the other: ‘Are you going to work hard and learn a lot like your brother?’ and the small black child stared up into the nostrils filled with strong hair, the tufted eyebrows, the red mouth surrounded by the pale jowl dark-pored with beard beneath the skin, and then down, torn by fascination, to the string of beads that hung from the leather belt.

They did not come again, but Praise did not much miss visitors because he spent more and more time with Father Audry. When he was not actually being coached, he was set to work to prepare his lessons or do his reading in the Father’s study, where he could concentrate as one could not hope to do up at the school. Father Audry taught him chess as a form of mental gymnastics, and was jubilant the first time Praise beat him. Praise went up to the house for a game nearly every evening after supper. He tried to teach the other boys but after the first ten minutes of explanation of moves, someone would bring out the cards or dice and they would all play one of the old games that were played in the streets and yards and locations. Johannesburg was only nine miles away; you could see the lights.

Father Audry rediscovered what Miss Graham-Grigg had found — that Praise listened attentively to music, serious music. One day Father Audry handed the boy the flute that had lain for years in its velvet-lined box that bore still the little silver nameplate: Rowland Audry. He watched while Praise gave the preliminary swaying wriggle and assumed the bent-kneed stance of all the urchin performers Father Audry had seen, and then tried to blow down it in the shy, fierce attack of penny whistle music. Father Audry took it out of his hands. ‘It’s what you’ve just heard there.’ Bach’s unaccompanied flute sonata lay on the record player. Praise smiled and frowned, giving his glasses a lift with his nose — a habit he was developing. ‘But you’ll soon learn to play it the right way round,’ said Father Audry, and with the lack of self-consciousness that comes from the habit of privilege, put the flute to his mouth and played what he remembered after ten years.

He taught Praise not only how to play the flute, but also the elements of musical composition, so that he should not simply play by ear, or simply listen with pleasure, but also understand what it was that he heard. The flute-playing was much more of a success with the boys than the chess had been, and on Saturday nights, when they sometimes made up concerts, he was allowed to take it to the hostel and play it for them. Once he played in a show for white people, in Johannesburg; but the boys could not come to that; he could only tell them about the big hall at the university, the jazz band, the African singers and dancers with their red lips and straightened hair, like white women.

The one thing that dissatisfied Father Audry was that the boy had not filled out and grown as much as one would have expected. He made it a rule that Praise must spend more time on physical exercise — the school couldn’t afford a proper gymnasium, but there was some equipment outdoors. The trouble was that the boy had so little time; even with his exceptional ability, it was not going to be easy for a boy with his lack of background to matriculate at sixteen. Brother George, his form master, was certain he could be made to bring it off; there was a specially strong reason why everyone wanted him to do it since Father Audry had established that he would be eligible for an open scholarship that no black boy had ever won before — what a triumph that would be, for the boy, for the school, for all the African boys who were considered fit only for the inferior standard of ‘Bantu education’! Perhaps some day this beggar-child from the streets of Johannesburg might even become the first black South African to be a Rhodes Scholar. This was what Father Audry jokingly referred to as Brother George’s ‘sin of pride’. But who knew? It was not inconceivable. So far as the boy’s physique was concerned — what Brother George said was probably true: ‘You can’t feed up for those years in the streets.’

From the beginning of the first term of the year he was fifteen Praise had to be coached, pressed on, and to work as even he had never worked before. His teachers gave him tremendous support; he seemed borne along on it by either arm so that he never looked up from his books. To encourage him, Father Audry arranged for him to compete in certain inter-school scholastic contests that were really intended for the white Anglican schools — a spelling team, a debate, a quiz contest. He sat on the platform in the polished halls of huge white schools and gave his correct answers in the African-accented English that the boys who surrounded him knew only as the accent of servants and delivery men.

Brother George often asked him if he were tired. But he was not tired. He only wanted to be left with his books. The boys in the hostel seemed to know this; they never asked him to play cards any more, and even when they shared smokes together in the lavatory, they passed him his drag in silence. He specially did not want Father Audry to come in with a glass of hot milk. He would rest his cheek against the pages of the books, now and then, alone in the study; that was all. The damp stone smell of the books was all he needed. Where he had once had to force himself to return again and again to the pages of things he did not grasp, gazing in blankness at the print until meaning assembled itself, he now had to force himself when it was necessary to leave the swarming facts, outside which he no longer seemed to understand anything. Sometimes he could not work for minutes at a time because he was thinking that Father Audry would come in with the milk. When he did come, it was never actually so bad. But Praise couldn’t look at his face. Once or twice when he had gone out again, Praise shed a few tears. He found himself praying, smiling with the tears and trembling, rubbing at the scalding water that ran down inside his nose and blotched on the books.

One Saturday afternoon when Father Audry had been entertaining guests at lunch he came into the study and suggested that the boy should get some fresh air — go out and join the football game for an hour or so. But Praise was struggling with geometry problems from the previous year’s matriculation paper that, to Brother George’s dismay, he had suddenly got all wrong that morning.

Father Audry could imagine what Brother George was thinking: was this an example of the phenomenon he had met with so often with African boys of a lesser calibre — the inability, through lack of an assumed cultural background, to perform a piece of work well known to them, once it was presented in a slightly different manner outside of their own textbooks? Nonsense, of course, in this case; everyone was over-anxious about the boy. Right from the start he’d shown that there was nothing mechanistic about his thought processes; he had a brain, not just a set of conditioned reflexes.

‘Off you go. You’ll manage better when you’ve taken a few knocks on the field.’

But desperation had settled on the boy’s face like obstinacy. ‘I must, I must,’ he said, putting his palms down over the books.

‘Good. Then let’s see if we can tackle it together.’

The black skirt swishing past the shiny shoes brought a smell of cigars. Praise kept his eyes on the black beads; the leather belt they hung from creaked as the big figure sat down. Father Audry took the chair on the opposite side of the table and switched the exercise book round towards himself. He scrubbed at the thick eyebrows till they stood out tangled, drew the hand down over his great nose, and then screwed his eyes closed a moment, mouth strangely open and lips drawn back in a familiar grimace. There was a jump, like a single painful hiccup, in Praise’s body. The Father was explaining the problem gently, in his offhand English voice.

He said, ‘Praise? D’you follow’ — the boy seemed sluggish, almost deaf, as if the voice reached him as the light of a star reaches the earth from something already dead.

Father Audry put out his fine hand, in question or compassion. But the boy leapt up dodging a blow. ‘Sir — no. Sir — no.’

It was clearly hysteria; he had never addressed Father Audry as anything but ‘Father’. It was some frightening retrogression, a reversion to the subconscious, a place of symbols and collective memory. He spoke for others, out of another time. Father Audry stood up but saw in alarm that by the boy’s retreat he was made his pursuer, and he let him go, blundering in clumsy panic out of the room.

Brother George was sent to comfort the boy. In half an hour he was down on the football field, running and laughing. But Father Audry took some days to get over the incident. He kept thinking how when the boy had backed away he had almost gone after him. The ugliness of the instinct repelled him; who would have thought how, at the mercy of the instinct to prey, the fox, the wild dog long for the innocence of the gentle rabbit and the lamb. No one had shown fear of him ever before in his life. He had never given a thought to the people who were not like himself; those from whom others turn away. He felt at last a repugnant and resentful pity for them, the dripping-jawed hunters. He even thought that he would like to go into retreat for a few days, but it was inconvenient — he had so many obligations. Finally, the matter-of-factness of the boy, Praise, was the thing that restored normality. So far as the boy was concerned, one would have thought that nothing had happened. The next day he seemed to have forgotten all about it; a good thing. And so Father Audry’s own inner disruption, denied by the boy’s calm, sank away. He allowed the whole affair the one acknowledgement of writing to Miss Graham-Grigg — surely that was not making too much of it — to suggest that the boy was feeling the tension of his final great effort, and that a visit from her, etc.; but she was still away in England — some family troubles had kept her there for months, and in fact she had not been to see her protégé for more than a year.

Praise worked steadily on the last lap. Brother George and Father Audry watched him continuously. He was doing extremely well and seemed quite overcome with the weight of pride and pleasure when Father Audry presented him with a new black fountain pen: this was the pen with which he was to write the matriculation exam. On a Monday afternoon Father Audry, who had been in conference with the Bishop all morning, looked in on his study, where every afternoon the boy would be seen sitting at the table that had been moved in for him. But there was no one there. The books were on the table. A chute of sunlight landed on the seat of the chair. Praise was not found again. The school was searched; and then the police were informed; the boys questioned; there were special prayers said in the mornings and evenings. He had not taken anything with him except the fountain pen.

When everything had been done there was nothing but silence; nobody mentioned the boy’s name. But Father Audry was conducting investigations on his own. Every now and then he would get an idea that would bring a sudden hopeful relief. He wrote to Adelaide Graham-Grigg‘. . what worries me — I believe the boy may have been on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I am hunting everywhere. .’; was it possible that he might make his way to the Protectorate? She was acting as confidential secretary to the Chief, now, but she wrote to say that if the boy turned up she would try to make time to deal with the situation. Father Audry even sought out, at last, the ‘family’ — the people with whom Miss Graham-Grigg had discovered Praise living as a beggar. They had been moved to a new township and it took some time to trace them. He found No. 28b, Block E, in the appropriate ethnic group. He was accustomed to going in and out of African homes and he explained his visit to the old woman in matter-of-fact terms at once, since he knew how suspicious of questioning the people would be. There were no interior doors in these houses and a woman in the inner room who was dressing moved out of the visitor’s line of vision as he sat down. She heard all that passed between Father Audry and the old woman and presently she came in with mild interest.

Out of a silence the old woman was saying ‘My-my-my-my!’ — shaking her head down into her bosom in a stylised expression of commiseration; they had not seen the boy. ‘And he spoke so nice, everything was so nice in the school.’ But they knew nothing about the boy, nothing at all.

The younger woman remarked, ‘Maybe he’s with those boys who sleep in the old empty cars there in town — you know? — there by the beer-hall?’

Through Time and Distance

They had been on the road together seven or eight years, Mondays to Fridays. They did the Free State one week, the northern and eastern Transvaal the next, Natal and Zululand a third. Now and then they did Bechuanaland and Southern Rhodesia and were gone for a month. They sat side by side, for thousands of miles and thousands of hours, the commercial traveller, Hirsch, and his boy. The boy was a youngster when Hirsch took him on, with one pair of grey flannels, a clean shirt and a nervous sniff; he said he’d been a lorry driver, and at least he didn’t stink — ‘When you’re shut up with them in a car all day, believe me, you want to find a native who doesn’t stink.’ Now the boy wore, like Hirsch, the line of American-cut suits that Hirsch carried, and fancy socks, suede shoes and an anti-magnetic watch with a strap of thick gilt links, all bought wholesale. He had an ear of white handkerchief always showing in his breast pocket, though he still economically blew his nose in his fingers when they made a stop out in the veld.

He drove, and Hirsch sat beside him, peeling back the pages of paperbacks, jerking slowly in and out of sleep, or scribbling in his order books. They did not speak. When the car flourished to a stop outside the verandah of some country store, Hirsch got out without haste and went in ahead — he hated to ‘make an impression like a hawker’, coming into a store with his goods behind him. When he had exchanged greetings with the storekeeper and leant on the counter chatting for a minute or two, as if he had nothing to do but enjoy the dimness of the interior, he would stir with a good-humoured sigh: ‘I’d better show you what I’ve got. It’s a shame to drag such lovely stuff about in this dust. Phillip!’ — his face loomed in the doorway a moment — ‘get a move on there.’

So long as it was not raining, Phillip kept one elbow on the rolled-down window, the long forearm reaching up to where his slender hand, shaded like the coat of some rare animal from tea-rose pink on the palm to dark matt brown on the back, appeared to support the car’s gleaming roof like a caryatid. The hand would withdraw, he would swing out of the car on to his feet, he would carry into the store the cardboard boxes, suitcases, and, if the store carried what Hirsch called ‘high-class goods’ as well, the special stand of men’s suits hanging on a rail that was made to fit into the back of the car. Then he would saunter out into the street again, giving his tall shoulders a cat’s pleasurable movement under fur — a movement that conveyed to him the excellent drape of his jacket. He would take cigarettes out of his pocket and lean, smoking, against the car’s warm flank.

Sometimes he held court; like Hirsch, he had become well known on the regular routes. The country people were not exactly shy of him and his kind, but his clothes and his air of city knowhow imposed a certain admiring constraint on them, even if, as in the case of some of the older men and women, they disapproved of the city and the aping of the white man’s ways. He was not above playing a game of mora-baraba, an ancient African kind of draughts, with the blacks from the grain and feed store in a dorp on the Free State run. Hirsch was always a long time in the general store next door, and, meanwhile, Phillip pulled up the perfect creases of his trousers and squatted over the lines of the board drawn with a stone in the dust, ready to show them that you couldn’t beat a chap who had got his training in the big lunch-hour games that are played every day outside the wholesale houses in Johannesburg. At one or two garages, where the petrol attendants in foam-rubber baseball caps given by Shell had picked up a lick of passing sophistication, he sometimes got a poker game. The first time his boss, Hirsch, discovered him at this (Phillip had overestimated the time Hirsch would spend over the quick hand of Klabberyas he was obliged to take, in the way of business, with a local storekeeper), Hirsch’s anger at being kept waiting vanished in a kind of amused and grudging pride. ‘You’re a big fella, now, eh, Phillip? I’ve made a man of you. When you came to me you were a real piccanin. Now you’ve been around so much, you’re taking the boys’ money off them on the road. Did you win?’

‘Ah, no, sir,’ Phillip suddenly lied, with a grin.

‘Ah-h-h, what’s the matter with you? You didn’t win?’ For a moment Hirsch looked almost as if he were about to give him a few tips. After that, he always passed his worn packs of cards on to his boy.

And Phillip learned, as time went by, to say, ‘I don’t like the sound of the engine, boss. There’s something loose there. I’m going to get underneath and have a look while I’m down at the garage taking petrol.’

It was true that Hirsch had taught his boy everything the boy knew, although the years of silence between them in the car had never been broken by conversation or an exchange of ideas. Hirsch was one of those pale, plump, freckled Jews, with pale blue eyes, a thick snub nose and the remains of curly blond hair that had begun to fall out before he was twenty. A number of his best stories depended for their denouement on the fact that somebody or other had not realised that he was a Jew. His pride in this belief that nobody would take him for one was not conventionally anti-Semitic, but based on the reasoning that it was a matter of pride, on the part of the Jewish people, that they could count him among them while he was fitted by nature with the distinguishing characteristics of a more privileged race. Another of his advantages was that he spoke Afrikaans as fluently and idiomatically as any Afrikaner. This, as his boy had heard him explain time and again to English-speaking people, was essential, because, low and ignorant as these back-veld Afrikaners were — hardly better than the natives, most of them — they knew that they had their government up there in power now, and they wouldn’t buy a sixpenny line from you if you spoke the language of the rooineks — the red-neck English.

With the Jewish shopkeepers, he showed that he was quite at home, because, as Phillip, unpacking the sample range, had overheard him admit a thousand times, he was Jewish born and bred — why, his mother’s brother was a rabbi — even though he knew he didn’t look it for a minute. Many of these shops were husband-and-wife affairs, and Hirsch knew how to make himself pleasant to the wives as well. In his chaff with them, the phrases ‘the old country’ and ‘my father, God rest his soul’ were recurrent. There was also an earnest conversation that began: ‘If you want to meet a character, I wish you could see my mother. What a spirit. She’s seventy-five, she’s got sugar and she’s just been operated for cataract, but I’m telling you, there’s more go in her than—’

Every now and then there would be a store with a daughter, as well: not very young, not very beautiful, a worry to the mother who stood with her hands folded under her apron, hoping the girl would slim down and make the best of herself, and to the father, who wasn’t getting any younger and would like to see her settled. Hirsch had an opening for this subject, too, tested and tried. ‘Not much life for a girl in a place like this, eh? It’s a pity. But some of the town girls are such rubbish, perhaps it’s better to marry some nice girl from the country. Such rubbish — the Jewish girls, too; oh, yes, they’re just as bad as the rest these days. I wouldn’t mind settling down with a decent girl who hasn’t run around so much. If she’s not so smart, if she doesn’t get herself up like a film star, well, isn’t it better?’

Phillip thought that his boss was married — in some places, at any rate, he talked about ‘the wife’ — but perhaps it was only that he had once been married, and, anyway, what was the difference when you were on the road? The fat, ugly white girl at the store went and hid herself among the biscuit tins, the mother, half daring to hope, became vivacious by proxy, and the father suddenly began to talk to the traveller intimately about business affairs.

Phillip found he could make the same kind of stir among country blacks. Hirsch had a permit to enter certain African reserves in his rounds, and there, in the humble little shops owned by Africans — shanties, with the inevitable man at work on a treadle sewing machine outside — he used his boy to do business with them in their own lingo. The boy wasn’t half bad at it, either. He caught on so quick, he was often the one to suggest that a line that was unpopular in the white dorps could be got rid of in the reserves. He would palm off the stuff like a real showman.

‘They can be glad to get anything, boss,’ he said, with a grin. ‘They can’t take a bus to town and look in the shops.’ In spite of his city clothes and his signet ring and all, the boy was exactly as simple as they were, underneath, and he got on with them like a house on fire. Many’s the time some old woman or little kid came running up to the car when it was all packed to go on again and gave him a few eggs or a couple of roasted mealies in a bit of newspaper.

Early on in his job driving for Hirsch, Phillip had run into a calf; it did not stir on the deserted red-earth road between walls of mealie fields that creaked in a breeze. ‘Go on,’ said his boss, with the authority of one who knows what he is doing, who has learned in a hard school. ‘Go on, it’s dead, there’s nothing to do.’ The young man hesitated, appalled by the soft thump of the impact with which he had given his first death-dealing blow. ‘Go on. There could have been a terrible accident. We could have turned over. These farmers should be prosecuted, the way they don’t look after the cattle.’

Phillip reversed quickly, avoided the body in a wide curve and drove on. That was what made life on the road; whatever it was, soft touch or hard going, lie or truth, it was left behind. By the time you came by again in a month or two months, things had changed, forgotten and forgiven, and whatever you got yourself into this time, you had always the secret assurance that there would be another breathing space before you could be got at again.

Phillip had married after he had been travelling with Hirsch for a couple of years; the girl had had a baby by him earlier, but they had waited, as Africans sometimes do, until he could get a house for her before they actually got married. They had two more children, and he kept them pretty well — he wasn’t too badly paid, and of course he could get things wholesale, like the stove for the house. But up Piet Retief way, on one of the routes they took every month, there was a girl he had been sleeping with regularly for years. She swept up the hair cuttings in the local barbershop, where Hirsch sometimes went for a trim if he hadn’t had a chance over the weekend in Johannesburg. That was how Phillip had met her; he was waiting in the car for Hirsch one day, and the girl came out to sweep the step at the shop’s entrance. ‘Hi, wena sisi. I wish you would come and sweep my house for me,’ he called out drowsily.

For a long time now she had worn a signet ring, nine carats, engraved with his first name and hers; Hirsch did not carry anything in the jewellery line, but of course Phillip, in the fraternity of the road, knew the boys of other travellers who did. She was a plump, hysterical little thing, with very large eyes that could accommodate unshed tears for minutes on end, and — something unusual for black women — a faint moustache outlining her top lip. She would have been a shrew to live with, but it was pleasant to see how she awaited him every month with coy, bridling passion. When she pressed him to settle the date when they might marry, he filched some minor item from the extensive women’s range that Hirsch carried, and that kept her quiet until next time. Phillip did not consider this as stealing, but as part of the running expenses of the road to which he was entitled, and he was trustworthy with his boss’s money or goods in all other circumstances.

In fact, if he had known it and if Hirsch had known it, his filching fell below the margin for dishonesty that Hirsch, in his reckoning of the running expenses of the road, allowed: ‘They all steal, what’s the good of worrying about it? You change one, you get a worse thief, that’s all.’ It was one of Hirsch’s maxims in the philosophy of the road.

The morning they left on the Bechuanaland run, Hirsch looked up from the newspaper and said to his boy, ‘You’ve got your passbook, eh?’ There was the slightest emphasis on the ‘you’ve’, an emphasis confident rather than questioning. Hirsch was well aware that, although the blurred front-page picture before him showed black faces open-mouthed, black hands flung up triumphant around a bonfire of passbooks, Phillip was not the type to look for trouble.

‘Yes, sir, I’ve got it,’ said Phillip, overtaking, as the traffic lights changed, a row of cars driven by white men; he had driven so much and so well that there was a certain beauty in his performance — he might have been skiing, or jumping hurdles.

Hirsch went back to the paper; there was nothing in it but reports of this anti-pass campaign that the natives had started up. He read them all with a deep distrust of the amorphous threat that he thought of as ‘trouble’, taking on any particular form. Trouble was always there, hanging over every human head, of course; it was only when it drew near, ‘came down’, that it took on a specific guise: illness, a drop in business, the blacks wanting to live like white men. Anyway, he himself had nothing to worry about: his boy knew his job, and he knew he must have his pass on him in case, in a routine demand in the streets of any of the villages they passed through, a policeman should ask him to show it.

Phillip was not worried, either. When the men in the location came to the door to urge him to destroy his pass, he was away on the road, and only his wife was at home to assure them that he had done so; when some policeman in a dorp stopped him to see it, there it was, in the inner pocket of the rayon lining of his jacket. And one day, when this campaign or another was successful, he would never need to carry it again.

At every call they made on that trip, people were eager for news of what was happening in Johannesburg. Old barefoot men in the dignity of battered hats came from the yards behind the stores, trembling with dread and wild hope. Was it true that so many people were burning their passes that the police couldn’t arrest them all? Was it true that in such-and-such a location people had gone to the police station and left passes in a pile in front of the door? Was it the wild young men who called themselves Africanists who were doing this? Or did Congress want it, did the old Chief, Luthuli, call for it too?

‘We are going to free you all of the pass,’ Phillip found himself declaiming. Children, hanging about, gave the Congress raised-thumb salute. ‘The white man won’t bend our backs like yours, old man.’ They could see for themselves how much he had already taken from the white man, wearing the same clothes as the white man, driving the white man’s big car — an emissary from the knowledgeable, political world of the city, where black men were learning to be masters. Even Hirsch’s cry, ‘Phillip, get a move on there!’, came as an insignificant interruption, a relic of the present almost become the past.

Over the border, in the British protectorate, Bechuanaland, the interest was just as high. Phillip found it remarkably easy to talk to the little groups of men who approached him in the luxurious dust that surrounded village buildings, the kitchen boys who gathered in country hotel yards where cats fought beside glittering mounds of empty beer bottles. ‘We are going to see that this is the end of the pass. The struggle for freedom — the white man won’t stand on our backs — ’

It was a long, hot trip. Hirsch, pale and exhausted, dozed and twitched in his sleep between one dorp and the next. For the last few months he had been putting pills instead of sugar into his tea, and he no longer drank the endless bottles of lemonade and ginger beer that he had sent the boy to buy at every stop for as long as he could remember. There was a strange, sweetish smell that seemed to follow Hirsch around these days; it settled in the car on that long trip and was there even when Hirsch wasn’t; but Phillip, who, like most travellers’ boys, slept in the car at night, soon got used to it.

They went as far as Francistown, where, all day, while they were in and out of the long line of stores facing the railway station, a truckload of Herero women from further north in the Kalahari Desert sat beside the road in their Victorian dress, turbaned, unsmiling, stiff and voluminous, like a row of tea cosies. The travelling salesmen did not go on to Rhodesia. From Francistown they turned back for Johannesburg, with a stop overnight at Palapye Road, so that they could make a detour to Serowe, an African town of round mud houses, dark euphorbia hedges and tinkling goat bells, where the deposed chief and his English wife lived on a hill in a large house with many bathrooms, but there was no hotel. The hotel in Palapye Road was a fly-screened box on the railway station, and Hirsch spent a bad night amid the huffing and blowing of trains taking water and the bursts of stamping — a gigantic Spanish dance — of shunting trains.

They left for home early on Friday morning. By half-past five in the afternoon they were flying along towards the outskirts of Johannesburg, with the weary heat of the day blowing out of the windows in whiffs of high land and the sweat suddenly deliciously cool on their hands and foreheads. The row of suits on the rack behind them slid obediently down and up again with each rise and dip accomplished in the turn of the road. The usual landmarks, all in their places, passed unlooked at: straggling, small-enterprise factories, a brickfield, a chicken farm, the rose nursery with the toy Dutch windmill, various gatherings of low, patchy huts and sagging houses — small locations where the blacks who worked round about lived. At one point, the road closely skirted one of these places; the children would wave and shout from where they played in the dirt. Today, quite suddenly, a shower of stones came from them. For a moment Hirsch truly thought that he had become aware of a sudden summer hailstorm; he was always so totally enclosed by the car it would not have been unusual for him not to have noticed a storm rising. He put his hand on the handle that raised the window; instantly, a sharp grey chip pitted the fold of flesh between thumb and first finger.

‘Drive on,’ he yelled, putting the blood to his mouth. ‘Drive on!’ But his boy, Phillip, had at the same moment seen what they had blundered into. Fifty yards ahead a labouring green bus, its windows, under flapping canvas, crammed with black heads, had lurched to a stop. It appeared to burst as people jumped out at doors and windows; from the houses, a jagged rush of more people met them and spread around the bus over the road.

Phillip stopped the car so fiercely that Hirsch was nearly pitched through the windscreen. With a roar the car reversed, swinging off the road sideways on to the veld, and then swung wildly around on to the road again, facing where it had come from. The steering wheel spun in the ferocious, urgent skill of the pink-and-brown hands. Hirsch understood and anxiously trusted; at the feel of the car righting itself, a grin broke through in his boy’s face.

But as Phillip’s suede shoe was coming down on the accelerator, a black hand in a greasy, buttonless coat sleeve seized his arm through the window, and the car rocked with the weight of the bodies that flung and clung against it. When the engine stalled, there was quiet; the hand let go of Phillip’s arm. The men and women around the car were murmuring to themselves, pausing for breath; their power and indecision gave Hirsch the strongest feeling he had ever had in his life, a sheer, pure cleavage of terror that, as he fell apart, exposed — tiny kernel, his only defence, his only hope, his only truth — the will to live. ‘You talk to them,’ he whispered, rapping it out, confidential, desperately confident. ‘You tell them — one of their own people, what can they want with you? Make it right. Let them take the stuff. Anything, for God’s sake. You understand me? Speak to them.’

‘They can’t want nothing with this car,’ Phillip was saying loudly and in a superior tone. ‘This car is not the government.’

But a woman’s shrill demand came again and again, and apparently it was to have them out. ‘Get out, come on, get out,’ came threateningly, in English, at Hirsch’s window, and at his boy’s side a heated, fast-breathing exchange in their own language.

Phillip’s voice was injured, protesting, and angry. ‘What do you want to stop us for? We’re going home from a week selling on the road. Any harm in that? I work for him, and I’m driving back to Jo’burg. Come on now, clear off. I’m a Congress man myself—’

A thin woman broke the hearing with a derisive sound like a shake of castanets at the back of her tongue. ‘Congress! Everybody can say. Why you’re working?’

And a man in a sweatshirt, with a knitted woollen cap on his head, shouted, ‘Stay-at-home. Nobody but traitors work today. What are you driving the white man for?’

‘I’ve just told you, man, I’ve been away a week in Bechuanaland. I must get home somehow, mustn’t I? Finish this, man, let us get on, I tell you.’

They made Hirsch and his boy get out of the car, but Hirsch, watching and listening to the explosive vehemence between his boy and the crowd, clung to the edge of a desperate, icy confidence: the boy was explaining to them — one of their own people. They did not actually hold Hirsch, but they stood around him, men whose nostrils moved in and out as they breathed; big-breasted warriors from the washtub who looked at him, spoke together, and spat; even children, who filled up the spaces between the legs so that the stirring human press that surrounded him was solid and all alive. ‘Tell them, can’t you?’ he kept appealing, encouragingly.

‘Where’s your pass?’

‘His pass, his pass!’ the women began to yell.

‘Where’s your pass?’ the man who had caught Phillip through the car window screamed in his face.

And he yelled back, too quickly, ‘I’ve burned it! It’s burned! I’ve finished with the pass!’

The women began to pull at his clothes. The men might have let him go, but the women set upon his fine city clothes as if he were an effigy. They tore and poked and snatched, and there — perhaps they had not really been looking for it or expected it — at once, fell the passbook. One of them ran off with it through the crowd, yelling and holding it high and hitting herself on the breast with it. People began to fight over it, like a souvenir. ‘Burn! Burn!’ ‘Kill him!’

Somebody gave Phillip a felling blow aimed for the back of his neck, but whoever it was was too short to reach the target and the blow caught him on the shoulder blade instead.

‘O my God, tell them, tell them, your own people!’ Hirsch was shouting angrily. With a perfect, hypnotising swiftness — the moment of survival, when the buck outleaps the arc of its own strength past the lion’s jaws — his boy was in the car, and with a shuddering rush of power, shaking the men off as they came, crushing someone’s foot as the tyres scudded madly, drove on.

‘Come back!’ Hirsch’s voice, although he could not hear it, swelled so thick in his throat it almost choked him. ‘Come back, I tell you!’ Beside him and around him, the crowd ran. Their mouths were wide, and he did not know for whom they were clamouring — himself or the boy.

A Chip of Glass Ruby

When the duplicating machine was brought into the house, Bamjee said, ‘Isn’t it enough that you’ve got the Indians’ troubles on your back?’ Mrs Bamjee said, with a smile that showed the gap of a missing tooth but was confident all the same, ‘What’s the difference, Yusuf? — we’ve all got the same troubles.’

‘Don’t tell me that. We don’t have to carry passes; let the natives protest against passes on their own, there are millions of them. Let them go ahead with it.’

The nine Bamjee and Pahad children were present at this exchange as they were always; in the small house that held them all there was no room for privacy for the discussion of matters they were too young to hear, and so they had never been too young to hear anything. Only their sister and half-sister, Girlie, was missing; she was the eldest, and married. The children looked expectantly, unalarmed and interested, at Bamjee, who had neither left the dining room nor settled down again to the task of rolling his own cigarettes, which had been interrupted by the arrival of the duplicator. He looked at the thing that had come hidden in a wash-basket and conveyed in a black man’s taxi, and the children turned on it, too, their black eyes surrounded by thick lashes like those still, open flowers with hairy tentacles that close on whatever touches them.

‘A fine thing to have on the dining-room table,’ was all he said at last. They smelled the machine among them; a smell of cold black grease. He went out, heavily on tiptoe, in his troubled way.

‘It’s going to go nicely on the sideboard!’ Mrs Bamjee was busy making a place by removing the two pink glass vases filled with plastic carnations and the hand-painted velvet runner with the picture of the Taj Mahal.

After supper she began to run off leaflets on the machine. The family lived in the dining room — the three other rooms in the house were full of beds — and they were all there. The older children shared a bottle of ink while they did their homework, and the two little ones pushed a couple of empty milk bottles in and out the legs of chairs. The three-year-old fell asleep and was carted away by one of the girls. They all drifted off to bed eventually; Bamjee himself went before the older children — he was a fruit and vegetable hawker and was up at half past four every morning to get to the market by five.

‘Not long now,’ said Mrs Bamjee. The older children looked up and smiled at him. He turned his back on her. She still wore the traditional clothing of a Muslim woman, and her body, which was scraggy and unimportant as a dress on a peg when it was not host to a child, was wrapped in the trailing rags of a cheap sari, and her thin black plait was greased. When she was a girl, in the Transvaal town where they lived still, her mother fixed a chip of glass ruby in her nostril; but she had abandoned that adornment as too old-style, even for her, long ago.

She was up until long after midnight, turning out leaflets. She did it as if she might have been pounding chillies.

Bamjee did not have to ask what the leaflets were. He had read the papers. All the past week Africans had been destroying their passes and then presenting themselves for arrest. Their leaders were jailed on charges of incitement, campaign offices were raided — someone must be helping the few minor leaders who were left to keep the campaign going without offices or equipment. What was it the leaflets would say — ‘Don’t go to work tomorrow’, ‘Day of Protest’, ‘Burn Your Pass for Freedom’? He didn’t want to see.

He was used to coming home and finding his wife sitting at the dining-room table deep in discussion with strangers or people whose names were familiar by repute. Some were prominent Indians, like the lawyer, Dr Abdul Mohammed Khan, or the big businessman, Mr Moonsamy Patel, and he was flattered, in a suspicious way, to meet them in his house. As he came home from work next day he met Dr Khan coming out of the house, and Dr Khan — a highly educated man — said to him, ‘A wonderful woman’. But Bamjee had never caught his wife out in any presumption; she behaved properly, as any Muslim woman should, and once her business with such gentlemen was over would never, for instance, have sat down to eat with them.

He found her now back in the kitchen, setting about the preparation of dinner and carrying on a conversation on several different wavelengths with the children. ‘It’s really a shame if you’re tired of lentils, Jimmy, because that’s what you’re getting — Amina, hurry up, get a pot of water going — don’t worry, I’ll mend that in a minute, just bring the yellow cotton, and there’s a needle in the cigarette box on the sideboard.’

‘Was that Dr Khan leaving?’ said Bamjee.

‘Yes, there’s going to be a stay-at-home on Monday. Desai’s ill, and he’s got to get the word around by himself. Bob Jali was up all last night printing leaflets, but he’s gone to have a tooth out.’ She had always treated Bamjee as if it were only a mannerism that made him appear uninterested in politics, the way some woman will persist in interpreting her husband’s bad temper as an endearing gruffness hiding boundless goodwill, and she talked to him of these things just as she passed on to him neighbours’ or family gossip.

‘What for do you want to get mixed up with these killings and stonings and I don’t know what? Congress should keep out of it. Isn’t it enough with the Group Areas?’

She laughed. ‘Now, Yusuf, you know you don’t believe that. Look how you said the same thing when the Group Areas started in Natal. You said we should begin to worry when we get moved out of our own houses here in the Transvaal. And then your own mother lost her house in Noorddorp, and there you are; you saw that nobody’s safe. Oh, Girlie was here this afternoon, she says Ismail’s brother’s engaged — that’s nice, isn’t it? His mother will be pleased; she was worried.’

‘Why was she worried?’ asked Jimmy, who was fifteen, and old enough to patronise his mother.

‘Well, she wanted to see him settled. There’s a party on Sunday week at Ismail’s place — you’d better give me your suit to take to the cleaners tomorrow, Yusuf.’

One of the girls presented herself at once. ‘I’ll have nothing to wear, Ma.’

Mrs Bamjee scratched her sallow face. ‘Perhaps Girlie will lend you her pink, eh? Run over to Girlie’s place now and say I say will she lend it to you?’

The sound of commonplaces often does service as security, and Bamjee, going to sit in the armchair with the shiny armrests that was wedged between the dining table and the sideboard, lapsed into an unthinking doze that, like all times of dreamlike ordinariness during those weeks, was filled with uneasy jerks and starts back into reality. The next morning, as soon as he got to market, he heard that Dr Khan had been arrested. But that night Mrs Bamjee sat up making a new dress for her daughter; the sight disarmed Bamjee, reassured him again, against his will, so that the resentment he had been making ready all day faded into a morose and accusing silence. Heaven knew, of course, who came and went in the house during the day. Twice in that week of riots, raids and arrests he found black women in the house when he came home; plain ordinary native women in doeks, drinking tea. This was not a thing other Indian women would have in their homes, he thought bitterly; but then his wife was not like other people, in a way he could not put his finger on, except to say what it was not: not scandalous, not punishable, not rebellious. It was, like the attraction that had led him to marry her, Pahad’s widow with five children, something he could not see clearly.

When the Special Branch knocked steadily on the door in the small hours of Tuesday morning he did not wake up, for his return to consciousness was always set in his mind to half past four, and that was more than an hour away. Mrs Bamjee got up herself, struggled into Jimmy’s raincoat, which was hanging over a chair, and went to the front door. The clock on the wall — a wedding present when she married Pahad — showed three o’clock when she snapped on the light, and she knew at once who it was on the other side of the door. Although she was not surprised, her hands shook like a very old person’s as she undid the locks and the complicated catch on the wire burglar-proofing. And then she opened the door and they were there — two coloured policemen in plain clothes. ‘Zanip Bamjee?’

‘Yes.’

As they talked, Bamjee woke up in the sudden terror of having overslept. Then he became conscious of men’s voices. He heaved himself out of bed in the dark and went to the window, which, like the front door, was covered with a heavy mesh of thick wire against intruders from the dingy lane it looked upon. Bewildered, he appeared in the dining room, where the policemen were searching through a soapbox of papers beside the duplicating machine.

‘Yusuf, it’s for me,’ Mrs Bamjee said.

At once, the snap of a trap, realisation came. He stood there in an old shirt before the two policemen, and the woman was going off to prison because of the natives. ‘There you are!’ he shouted, standing away from her. ‘That’s what you’ve got for it. Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I? That’s the end of it now. That’s the finish. That’s what it’s come to.’

She listened with her head at the slightest tilt to one side, as if to ward off a blow, or in compassion.

Jimmy, Pahad’s son, appeared at the door with a suitcase; two or three of the girls were behind him. ‘Here, Ma, you take my green jersey.’ ‘I’ve found your clean blouse.’ Bamjee had to keep moving out of their way as they helped their mother to make ready. It was like the preparation for one of the family festivals his wife made such a fuss over; wherever he put himself they bumped into him. Even the two policemen mumbled ‘Excuse me,’ and pushed past into the rest of the house to continue their search. They took with them a tome that Nehru had written in prison; it had been bought from a persevering travelling salesman and kept, for years, on the mantelpiece. ‘Oh, don’t take that, please,’ Mrs Bamjee said suddenly, clinging to the arm of the man who had picked it up.

The man held it away from her.

‘What does it matter, Ma?’

It was true that no one in the house had ever read it; but she said, ‘It’s for my children.’

‘Ma, leave it.’ Jimmy, who was squat and plump, looked like a merchant advising a client against a roll of silk she had set her heart on. She went into the bedroom and got dressed. When she came out in her old yellow sari with a brown coat over it, the faces of the children were behind her like faces on the platform at a railway station. They kissed her goodbye. The policemen did not hurry her, but she seemed to be in a hurry just the same.

‘What am I going to do?’ Bamjee accused them all.

The policemen looked away patiently.

‘It’ll be all right. Girlie will help. The big children can manage. And, Yusuf—’ The children crowded in around her; two of the younger ones had awakened and appeared, asking shrill questions.

‘Come on,’ said the policemen.

‘I want to speak to my husband.’ She broke away and came back to him, and the movement of her sari hid them from the rest of the room for a moment. His face hardened in suspicious anticipation against the request to give some message to the next fool who would take up her pamphleteering until he, too, was arrested. ‘On Sunday,’ she said. ‘Take them on Sunday.’ He did not know what she was talking about. ‘The engagement party,’ she whispered, low and urgent. ‘They shouldn’t miss it. Ismail will be offended.’

They listened to the car drive away. Jimmy bolted and barred the front door, and then at once opened it again; he put on the raincoat that his mother had taken off. ‘Going to tell Girlie,’ he said.

The children went back to bed. Their father did not say a word to any of them; their talk, the crying of the younger ones and the argumentative voices of the older, went on in the bedrooms. He found himself alone; he felt the night all around him. And then he happened to meet the clock face and saw with a terrible sense of unfamiliarity that this was not the secret night but an hour he should have recognised: the time he always got up. He pulled on his trousers and his dirty white hawker’s coat and wound his grey muffler up to the stubble on his chin and went to work.

The duplicating machine was gone from the sideboard. The policemen had taken it with them, along with the pamphlets and the conference reports and the stack of old newspapers that had collected on top of the wardrobe in the bedroom — not the thick dailies of the white men, but the thin, impermanent-looking papers that spoke up, sometimes interrupted by suppression or lack of money, for the rest. It was all gone. When he had married her and moved in with her and her five children, into what had been the Pahad and became the Bamjee house, he had not recognised the humble, harmless, and apparently useless routine tasks — the minutes of meetings being written up on the dining-room table at night, the government blue books that were read while the latest baby was suckled, the employment of the fingers of the older children in the fashioning of crinkle-paper Congress rosettes — as activity intended to move mountains. For years and years he had not noticed it, and now it was gone.

The house was quiet. The children kept to their lairs, crowded on the beds with the doors shut. He sat and looked at the sideboard, where the plastic carnations and the mat with the picture of the Taj Mahal were in place. For the first few weeks he never spoke of her. There was the feeling, in the house, that he had wept and raged at her, that boulders of reproach had thundered down upon her absence, and yet he had said not one word. He had not been to enquire where she was; Jimmy and Girlie had gone to Mohammed Ebrahim, the lawyer, and when he found out that their mother had been taken — when she was arrested, at least — to a prison in the next town, they had stood about outside the big prison door for hours while they waited to be told where she had been moved from there. At last they had discovered that she was fifty miles away, in Pretoria. Jimmy asked Bamjee for five shillings to help Girlie pay the train fare to Pretoria, once she had been interviewed by the police and had been given a permit to visit her mother; he put three two-shilling pieces on the table for Jimmy to pick up, and the boy, looking at him keenly, did not know whether the extra shilling meant anything, or whether it was merely that Bamjee had no change.

It was only when relations and neighbours came to the house that Bamjee would suddenly begin to talk. He had never been so expansive in his life as he was in the company of these visitors, many of them come on a polite call rather in the nature of a visit of condolence. ‘Ah, yes, yes, you see how I am — you see what has been done to me. Nine children, and I am on the cart all day. I get home at seven or eight. What are you to do? What can people like us do?’

‘Poor Mrs Bamjee. Such a kind lady.’

‘Well, you see for yourself. They walk in here in the middle of the night and leave a houseful of children. I’m out on the cart all day, I’ve got a living to earn.’ Standing about in his shirtsleeves, he became quite animated; he would call for the girls to bring fruit drinks for the visitors. When they were gone, it was as if he, who was orthodox if not devout and never drank liquor, had been drunk and abruptly sobered up; he looked dazed and could not have gone over in his mind what he had been saying. And as he cooled, the lump of resentment and wrongedness stopped his throat again.

Bamjee found one of the little boys the centre of a self-important group of championing brothers and sisters in the dining room one evening. ‘They’ve been cruel to Ahmed.’

‘What has he done?’ said the father.

‘Nothing! Nothing!’ The little girl stood twisting her handkerchief excitedly.

An older one, thin as her mother, took over, silencing the others with a gesture of her skinny hand. ‘They did it at school today. They made an example of him.’

‘What is an example?’ said Bamjee impatiently.

‘The teacher made him come up and stand in front of the whole class, and he told them, “You see this boy? His mother’s in jail because she likes the natives so much. She wants the Indians to be the same as natives.” ’

‘It’s terrible,’ he said. His hands fell to his sides. ‘Did she ever think of this?’

‘That’s why Ma’s there,’ said Jimmy, putting aside his comic and emptying out his schoolbooks upon the table. ‘That’s all the kid needs to know. Ma’s there because things like this happen. Petersen’s a coloured teacher, and it’s his black blood that’s brought him trouble all his life, I suppose. He hates anyone who says everybody’s the same, because that takes away from him his bit of whiteness that’s all he’s got. What d’you expect? It’s nothing to make too much fuss about.’

‘Of course, you are fifteen and you know everything,’ Bamjee mumbled at him.

‘I don’t say that. But I know Ma, anyway.’ The boy laughed.

There was a hunger strike among the political prisoners, and Bamjee could not bring himself to ask Girlie if her mother was starving herself too. He would not ask; and yet he saw in the young woman’s face the gradual weakening of her mother. When the strike had gone on for nearly a week one of the elder children burst into tears at the table and could not eat. Bamjee pushed his own plate away in rage.

Sometimes he spoke out loud to himself while he was driving the vegetable lorry. ‘What for?’ Again and again: ‘What for?’ She was not a modern woman who cut her hair and wore short skirts. He had married a good plain Muslim woman who bore children and stamped her own chillies. He had a sudden vision of her at the duplicating machine, that night just before she was taken away, and he felt himself maddened, baffled and hopeless. He had become the ghost of a victim, hanging about the scene of a crime whose motive he could not understand and had not had time to learn.

The hunger strike at the prison went into the second week. Alone in the rattling cab of his lorry, he said things that he heard as if spoken by someone else, and his heart burned in fierce agreement with them. ‘For a crowd of natives who’ll smash our shops and kill us in our houses when their time comes.’ ‘She will starve herself to death there.’ ‘She will die there.’ ‘Devils who will burn and kill us.’ He fell into bed each night like a stone, and dragged himself up in the mornings as a beast of burden is beaten to its feet.

One of these mornings, Girlie appeared very early, while he was wolfing bread and strong tea — alternate sensations of dry solidity and stinging heat — at the kitchen table. Her real name was Fatima, of course, but she had adopted the silly modern name along with the clothes of the young factory girls among whom she worked. She was expecting her first baby in a week or two, and her small face, her cut and curled hair and the sooty arches drawn over her eyebrows did not seem to belong to her thrust-out body under a clean smock. She wore mauve lipstick and was smiling her cocky little white girl’s smile, foolish and bold, not like an Indian girl’s at all.

‘What’s the matter?’ he said.

She smiled again. ‘Don’t you know? I told Bobby he must get me up in time this morning. I wanted to be sure I wouldn’t miss you today.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

She came over and put her arm up around his unwilling neck and kissed the grey bristles at the side of his mouth. ‘Many happy returns! Don’t you know it’s your birthday?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know, didn’t think—’ He broke the pause by swiftly picking up the bread and giving his attention desperately to eating and drinking. His mouth was busy, but his eyes looked at her, intensely black. She said nothing, but stood there with him. She would not speak, and at last he said, swallowing a piece of bread that tore at his throat as it went down, ‘I don’t remember these things.’

The girl nodded, the Woolworth baubles in her ears swinging. ‘That’s the first thing she told me when I saw her yesterday — don’t forget it’s Bajie’s birthday tomorrow.’

He shrugged over it. ‘It means a lot to children. But that’s how she is. Whether it’s one of the old cousins or the neighbour’s grandmother, she always knows when the birthday is. What importance is my birthday, while she’s sitting there in a prison? I don’t understand how she can do the things she does when her mind is always full of woman’s nonsense at the same time — that’s what I don’t understand with her.’

‘Oh, but don’t you see?’ the girl said. ‘It’s because she doesn’t want anybody to be left out. It’s because she always remembers; remembers everything — people without somewhere to live, hungry kids, boys who can’t get educated — remembers all the time. That’s how Ma is.’

‘Nobody else is like that.’ It was half a complaint.

‘No, nobody else,’ said his stepdaughter.

She sat herself down at the table, resting her belly. He put his head in his hands. ‘I’m getting old’ — but he was overcome by something much more curious, by an answer. He knew why he had desired her, the ugly widow with five children; he knew what way it was in which she was not like others; it was there, like the fact of the belly that lay between him and her daughter.

Some Monday for Sure

My sister’s husband, Josias, used to work on the railways but then he got this job where they make dynamite for the mines. He was the one who sits out on that little iron seat clamped to the back of the big red truck, with a red flag in his hand. The idea is that if you drive up too near the truck or look as if you’re going to crash into it, he waves the flag to warn you off. You’ve seen those trucks often on the Main Reef Road between Johannesburg and the mining towns — they carry the stuff and have DANGER — EXPLOSIVES painted on them. The man sits there, with an iron chain looped across his little seat to keep him from being thrown into the road, and he clutches his flag like a kid with a balloon. That’s how Josias was, too. Of course, if you didn’t take any notice of the warning and went on and crashed into the truck, he would be the first to be blown to high heaven and hell, but he always just sits there, this chap, as if he has no idea when he was born or that he might not die on a bed an old man of eighty. As if the dust in his eyes and the racket of the truck are going to last for ever.

My sister knew she had a good man but she never said anything about being afraid of this job. She only grumbled in winter, when he was stuck out there in the cold and used to get a cough (she’s a nurse), and on those times in summer when it rained all day and she said he would land up with rheumatism, crippled, and then who would give him work? The dynamite people? I don’t think it ever came into her head that any day, every day, he could be blown up instead of coming home in the evening. Anyway, you wouldn’t have thought so by the way she took it when he told us what it was he was going to have to do.

I was working down at a garage in town, that time, at the petrol pumps, and I was eating before he came in because I was on night shift. Emma had the water ready for him and he had a wash without saying much, as usual, but then he didn’t speak when they sat down to eat, either, and when his fingers went into the mealie meal he seemed to forget what it was he was holding and not to be able to shape it into a mouthful. Emma must have thought he felt too dry to eat, because she got up and brought him a jam tin of the beer she had made for Saturday. He drank it and then sat back and looked from her to me, but she said, ‘Why don’t you eat?’ and he began to, slowly. She said, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ He got up and yawned and yawned, showing those brown chipped teeth that remind me of the big ape at the Johannesburg zoo that I saw once when I went with the school. He went into the other room of the house, where he and Emma slept, and he came back with his pipe. He filled it carefully, the way a poor man does; I saw, as soon as I went to work at the filling station, how the white men fill their pipes, stuffing the tobacco in, shoving the tin half-shut back into the glovebox of the car.

‘I’m going down to Sela’s place,’ said Emma. ‘I can go with Willie on his way to work if you don’t want to come.’

‘No. Not tonight. You stay here.’ Josias always speaks like this, the short words of a schoolmaster or a boss-boy, but if you hear the way he says them, you know he is not really ordering you around at all, he is only asking you.

‘No, I told her I’m coming,’ Emma said, in the voice of a woman having her own way in a little thing.

‘Tomorrow.’ Josias began to yawn again, looking at us with wet eyes.

‘Go to bed,’ Emma said, ‘I won’t be late.’

‘No, no, I want to. .’ he blew a sigh ‘—when he’s gone, man—’ he moved his pipe at me. ‘I’ll tell you later.’

Emma laughed. ‘What can you tell that Willie can’t hear—’ I’ve lived with them ever since they were married. Emma always was the one who looked after me, even before, when I was a little kid. It was true that whatever happened to us happened to us together. He looked at me; I suppose he saw that I was a man, now: I was in my blue overalls with Shell on the pocket and everything.

He said, ‘. . they want me to do something. . a job with the truck.’

Josias used to turn out regularly to political meetings and he took part in a few protests before everything went underground, but he had never been more than one of the crowd. We had Mandela and the rest of the leaders, cut out of the paper, hanging on the wall, but he had never known, personally, any of them. Of course there were his friends Ndhlovu and Seb Masinde who said they had gone underground and who occasionally came late at night for a meal or slept in my bed for a few hours.

‘They want to stop the truck on the road. .’

‘Stop it?’ Emma was like somebody stepping into cold dark water; with every word that was said she went deeper. ‘But how can you do it — when? Where will they do it?’ She was wild, as if she must go out and prevent it all happening right then.

I felt that cold water of Emma’s rising round the belly because Emma and I often had the same feelings, but I caught also, in Josias’s not looking at me, a signal Emma couldn’t know. Something in me jumped at it like catching a swinging rope. ‘They want the stuff inside. .?’

Nobody said anything.

I said, ‘What a lot of big bangs you could make with that, man,’ and then shut up before Josias needed to tell me to.

‘So what’re you going to do?’ Emma’s mouth stayed open after she had spoken, the lips pulled back.

‘They’ll tell me everything. I just have to give them the best place on the road — that’ll be the Free State road, the others’re too busy. . and. . the time when we pass. .’

‘You’ll be dead.’ Emma’s head was shuddering and her whole body shook; I’ve never seen anybody give up like that. He was dead already, she saw it with her eyes and she was kicking and screaming without knowing how to show it to him. She looked like she wanted to kill Josias herself, for being dead. ‘That’ll be the finish, for sure. He’s got a gun, the white man in front, hasn’t he, you told me. And the one with him? They’ll kill you. You’ll go to prison. They’ll take you to Pretoria gaol and hang you by the rope. . yes, he’s got the gun, you told me, didn’t you. . many times you told me. .’

‘The others’ve got guns too. How d’you think they can hold us up? — they’ve got guns and they’ll come all round him. It’s all worked out—’

‘The one in front will shoot you, I know it, don’t tell me, I know what I say—’ Emma went up and down and around till I thought she would push the walls down — they wouldn’t have needed much pushing, in that house in Tembekile Location — and I was scared of her. I don’t mean for what she would do to me if I got in her way, or to Josias, but for what might happen to her: something like taking a fit or screaming that none of us would be able to forget.

I don’t think Josias was sure about doing the job before but he wanted to do it now. ‘No shooting. Nobody will shoot me. Nobody will know that I know anything. Nobody will know I tell them anything. I’m held up just the same like the others! Same as the white man in front! Who can shoot me? They can shoot me for that?’

‘Someone else can go, I don’t want it, do you hear? You will stay at home, I will say you are sick. . you will be killed, they will shoot you. . Josias, I’m telling you, I don’t want. . I won’t. .’

I was waiting my chance to speak, all the time, and I felt Josias was waiting to talk to someone who had caught the signal. I said quickly, while she went on and on, ‘But even on that road there are some cars?’

‘Roadblocks,’ he said, looking at the floor. ‘They’ve got the signs, the ones you see when a road’s being dug up, and there’ll be some men with picks. After the truck goes through they’ll block the road so that any other cars turn off on to the old road there by Kalmansdrif. The same thing on the other side, two miles on. There where the farm road goes down to Nek Halt.’

‘Hell, man! Did you have to pick what part of the road?’

‘I know it like this yard. Don’t I?’

Emma stood there, between the two of us, while we discussed the whole business. We didn’t have to worry about anyone hearing, not only because Emma kept the window wired up in that kitchen, but also because the yard the house was in was a real Tembekile Location one, full of babies yelling and people shouting, night and day, not to mention the transistors playing in the houses all round. Emma was looking at us all the time and out of the corner of my eye I could see her big front going up and down fast in the neck of her dress.

‘. . so they’re going to tie you up as well as the others?’

He drew on his pipe to answer me.

We thought for a moment and then grinned at each other; it was the first time for Josias, that whole evening.

Emma began collecting the dishes under our noses. She dragged the tin bath of hot water from the stove and washed up. ‘I said I’m taking my off on Wednesday. I suppose this is going to be next week.’ Suddenly, yet talking as if carrying on where she let up, she was quite different.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, I have to know because I suppose I must be at home.’

‘What must you be at home for?’ said Josias.

‘If the police come I don’t want them talking to him,’ she said, looking at us both without wanting to see us.

‘The police—’ said Josias, and jerked his head to send them running, while I laughed, to show her.

‘And I want to know what I must say.’

‘What must you say? Why? They can get my statement from me when they find us tied up. In the night I’ll be back here myself.’

‘Oh yes,’ she said, scraping the mealie meal he hadn’t eaten back into the pot. She did everything as usual; she wanted to show us nothing was going to wait because of this big thing, she must wash the dishes and put ash on the fire. ‘You’ll be back, oh yes. Are you going to sit here all night, Willie? — Oh yes, you’ll be back.’

And then, I think, for a moment Josias saw himself dead, too; he didn’t answer when I took my cap and said so long, from the door.

I knew it must be a Monday. I notice that women quite often don’t remember ordinary things like this, I don’t know what they think about — for instance, Emma didn’t catch on that it must be Monday, next Monday or the one after, some Monday for sure, because Monday was the day that we knew Josias went with the truck to the Free State Mines. It was Friday when he told us and all day Saturday I had a terrible feeling that it was going to be that Monday, and it would be all over before I could — what? I didn’t know, man. I felt I must at least see where it was going to happen. Sunday I was off work and I took my bicycle and rode into town before there was even anybody in the streets and went to the big station and found that although there wasn’t a train on Sundays that would take me all the way, I could get one that would take me about thirty miles. I had to pay to put the bike in the luggage van as well as for my ticket, but I’d got my wages on Friday. I got off at the nearest halt to Kalmansdrif and then I asked people along the road the best way. It was a long ride, more than two hours. I came out on the main road from the sand road just at the turn-off Josias had told me about. It was just like he said: a tin sign ‘Kalmansdrif’ pointing down the road I’d come from. And the nice blue tarred road, smooth, straight ahead: was I glad to get on to it! I hadn’t taken much notice of the country so far, while I was sweating along, but from then on I woke up and saw everything. I’ve only got to think about it to see it again now. The veld is flat round about there, it was the end of winter, so the grass was dry. Quite far away and very far apart there was a hill and then another, sticking up in the middle of nothing, pink colour, and with its point cut off like the neck of a bottle. Ride and ride, these hills never got any nearer and there were none beside the road. It all looked empty but there were some people there. It’s funny you don’t notice them like you do in town. All our people, of course; there were barbed-wire fences, so it must have been white farmers’ land, but they’ve got the water and their houses are far off the road and you can usually see them only by the big dark trees that hide them. Our people had mud houses and there would be three or four in the same place made hard by goats and people’s feet. Often the huts were near a kind of crack in the ground, where the little kids played and where, I suppose, in summer, there was water. Even now the women were managing to do washing in some places. I saw children run to the road to jig about and stamp when cars passed, but the men and women took no interest in what was up there. It was funny to think that I was just like them, now, men and women who are always busy inside themselves with jobs, plans, thinking about how to get money or how to talk to someone about something important, instead of like the children, as I used to be only a few years ago, taking in each small thing around them as it happens.

Still, there were people living pretty near the road. What would they do if they saw the dynamite truck held up and a fight going on? (I couldn’t think of it, then, in any other way except like I’d seen hold-ups in Westerns, although I’ve seen plenty of fighting, all my life, among the location gangs and drunks — I was ashamed not to be able to forget those kid-stuff Westerns at a time like this.) Would they go running away to the white farmer? Would somebody jump on a bike and go for the police? Or if there was no bike, what about a horse? — I saw someone riding a horse.

I rode slowly to the next turn-off, the one where a farm road goes down to Nek Halt. There it was, just like Josias said. Here was where the other roadblock would be. But when he spoke about it there was nothing in between! No people, no houses, no flat veld with hills on it! It had been just one of those things grown-ups see worked out in their heads: while all the time here it was, a real place where people had cooking fires, I could hear a herd boy yelling at a dirty bundle of sheep, a big bird I’ve never seen in town balanced on the barbed-wire fence right in front of me. . I got off my bike and it flew away.

I sat a minute on the side of the road. I’d had a cold drink in an Indian shop in the dorp where I’d got off the train, but I was dry again inside my mouth, while plenty of water came out of my skin, I can tell you. I rode back down the road looking for the exact place I would choose if I were Josias. There was a stretch where there was only one kraal, with two houses, and that quite a way back from the road. Also there was a dip where the road went over a donga. Old stumps of trees and nothing but cows’ business down there; men could hide. I got off again and had a good look round.

But I wondered about the people, up top. I don’t know why it was, I wanted to know about those people just as though I was going to have to go and live with them, or something. I left the bike down in the donga and crossed the road behind a Cadillac going so fast the air smacked together after it, and I began to trek over the veld to the houses. I know that most of our people live like this, in the veld, but I’d never been into houses like that before. I was born in some location (I don’t know which one, I must ask Emma one day) and Emma and I lived in Goughville Location with our grandmother. Our mother worked in town and she used to come and see us sometimes, but we never saw our father and Emma thinks that perhaps we didn’t have the same father, because she remembers a man before I was born, and after I was born she didn’t see him again. I don’t really remember anyone, from when I was a little kid, except Emma. Emma dragging me along so fast my arm almost came off my body, because we had nearly been caught by the Indian while stealing peaches from his lorry: we did that every day.

We lived in one room with our grandmother but it was a tin house with a number and later on there was a street light at the corner. These houses I was coming to had a pattern all over them marked into the mud they were built of. There was a mound of dried cows’ business, as tall as I was, stacked up in a pattern, too. And then the usual junk our people have, just like in the location: old tins, broken things collected in white people’s rubbish heaps. The fowls ran sideways from my feet and two old men let their talking die away into a-has and e-hes as I came up. I greeted them the right way to greet old men and they nodded and went on e-he-ing and a-ha-ing to show that they had been greeted properly. One of them had very clean ragged trousers tied with string and sat on the ground, but the other, sitting on a bucket seat that must have been taken from some scrapyard car, was dressed in a way I’ve never seen — from the old days, I suppose. He wore a black suit with very wide trousers, laced boots, a stiff white collar and black tie and, on top of it all, a broken old hat. It was Sunday, of course, so I suppose he was all dressed up. I’ve heard that these people who work for farmers wear sacks most of the time. The old ones didn’t ask me what I wanted there. They just peered at me with their eyes gone the colour of soapy water because they were so old. And I didn’t know what to say because I hadn’t thought what I was going to say, I’d just walked. Then a little kid slipped out of the dark doorway quick as a cockroach. I thought perhaps everyone else was out because it was Sunday but then a voice called from inside the other house, and when the child didn’t answer, called again, and a woman came to the doorway.

I said my bicycle had a puncture and could I have some water.

She said something into the house and in a minute a girl, about fifteen she must’ve been, edged past her carrying a paraffin tin and went off to fetch water. Like all the girls that age, she never looked at you. Her body shook under an ugly old dress and she almost hobbled in her hurry to get away. Her head was tied up in a rag-doek right down to the eyes the way old-fashioned people do, otherwise she would have been quite pretty, like any other girl. When she had gone a little way the kid went pumping after her, panting, yelling, opening his skinny legs wide as scissors over stones and antheaps, and then he caught up with her and you could see that right away she was quite different, I knew how it was, she yelled at him, you heard her laugh as she chased him with the tin, whirled around from out of his clutching hands, struggled with him; they were together like Emma and I used to be when we got away from the old lady, and from the school, and everybody. And Emma was also one of our girls who have the big strong comfortable bodies of mothers even when they’re still kids, maybe it comes from always lugging the smaller one round on their backs.

A man came out of the house behind the woman and was friendly. His hair had the dusty look of someone who’s been sleeping off drink. In fact, he was still a bit heavy with it.

‘You coming from Jo’burg?’

But I wasn’t going to be caught out being careless at all, Josias could count on me for that.

‘Vereeniging.’

He thought there was something funny there — nobody dresses like a Jo’burger, you could always spot us a mile off — but he was too full to follow it up.

He stood stretching his sticky eyelids open and then he fastened on me the way some people will do. ‘Can’t you get me work there where you are?’

‘What kind of work?’

He waved a hand describing me. ‘You got a good work.’

‘S’all right.’

‘Where you working now?’

‘Garden boy.’

He tittered, ‘Look like you work in town,’ shook his head.

I was surprised to find the woman handing me a tin of beer, and I squatted on the ground to drink it. It’s mad to say that a mud house can be pretty, but those patterns made in the mud looked nice. It must have been done with a sharp stone or stick when the mud was smooth and wet, the shapes of things like big leaves and moons filled in with lines that went all one way in this shape, another way in that, so that as you looked at the walls in the sun some shapes were dark and some were light, and if you moved the light ones went dark and the dark ones got light instead. The girl came back with the heavy tin of water on her head making her neck thick. I washed out the jam tin I’d had the beer in and filled it with water. When I thanked them, the old men stirred and a-ha-ed and e-he-ed again.

The man made as if to walk a bit with me, but I was lucky, he didn’t go more than a few yards. ‘No good,’ he said. ‘Every morning, five o’clock, and the pay. . very small.’

How I would have hated to be him, a man already married and with big children, working all his life in the fields wearing sacks. When you think like this about someone he seems something you could never possibly be, as if it’s his fault, and not just the chance of where he happened to be born. At the same time I had a crazy feeling I wanted to tell him something wonderful, something he’d never dreamt could happen, something he’d fall on his knees and thank me for. I wanted to say, ‘Soon you’ll be the farmer yourself and you’ll have shoes like me and your girl will get water from your windmill. Because on Monday, or another Monday, the truck will stop down there and all the stuff will be taken away and they — Josias, me; even you, yes — we’ll win for ever.’ But instead all I said was, ‘Who did that on your house?’ He didn’t understand and I made a drawing in the air with my hand.

‘The women,’ he said, not interested.

Down in the donga I sat a while and then threw away the tin and rode off without looking up again to where the kraal was.

It wasn’t that Monday. Emma and Josias go to bed very early and of course they were asleep by the time I got home late on Sunday night — Emma thought I’d been with the boys I used to go around with at weekends. But Josias got up at half past four every morning, then, because it was a long way from the location to where the dynamite factory was, and although I didn’t usually even hear him making the fire in the kitchen which was also where I was sleeping, that morning I was awake the moment he got out of bed next door. When he came into the kitchen I was sitting up in my blankets and I whispered loudly — ‘I went there yesterday. I saw the turn-off and everything. Down there by the donga, ay? Is that the place?’

He looked at me, a bit dazed. He nodded. Then, ‘Wha’d’you mean you went there?’

‘I could see that’s the only good place. I went up to the houses, too, just to see. . the people are all right. Not many. When it’s not Sunday there may be nobody there but the old man — there were two, I think one was just a visitor. The man and the woman will be over in the fields somewhere, and that must be quite far, because you can’t see the mealies from the road. .’ I could feel myself being listened to carefully, getting in with him (and if with him, with them) while I was talking, and I knew exactly what I was saying, absolutely clearly, just as I would know exactly what I was doing.

He began to question me; but like I was an older man or a clever one; he didn’t know what to say. He drank his tea while I told him all about it. He was thinking. Just before he left he said, ‘I shouldn’t’ve told you.’

I ran after him, outside, into the yard. It was still dark. I blurted in the same whisper we’d been using, ‘Not today, is it?’ I couldn’t see his face properly but I knew he didn’t know whether to answer or not.

‘Not today.’ I was so happy I couldn’t go to sleep again.

In the evening Josias managed to make some excuse to come out with me alone for a bit. He said, ‘I told them you were a hundred per cent. It’s just the same as if I know.’

‘Of course, no difference. I just haven’t had much of a chance to do anything. .’ I didn’t carry on: ‘. . because I was too young’; we didn’t want to bring Emma into it. And anyway, no one but a real kid is too young any more. Look at the boys who are up for sabotage.

I said, ‘Have they got them all?’

He hunched his shoulders.

‘I mean, even the ones for the picks and spades. .?’

He wouldn’t say anything, but I knew I could ask. ‘Oh, boetie, man, even just to keep a look out, there on the road. .’

I know he didn’t want it but once they knew I knew, and that I’d been there and everything, they were keen to use me. At least that’s what I think. I never went to any meetings or anything where it was planned, and beforehand I only met the two others who were with me at the turn-off in the end, and we were told exactly what we had to do by Seb Masinde. Of course, neither of us said a word to Emma. The Monday that we did it was three weeks later and I can tell you, although a lot’s happened to me since then, I’ll never forget the moment when we flagged the truck through with Josias sitting there on the back in his little seat. Josias! I wanted to laugh and shout there in the veld; I didn’t feel scared — what was there to be scared of, he’d been sitting on a load of dynamite every day of his life for years now, so what’s the odds. We had one of those tins of fire and a bucket of tar and the real ‘Road Closed’ signs from the PWD and everything went smooth at our end. It was at the Nek Halt end that the trouble started when one of these AA patrol bikes had to come along (Josias says it was something new, they’d never met a patrol on that road that time of day, before) and get suspicious about the block there. In the meantime the truck was stopped all right but someone was shot and Josias tried to get the gun from the white man up in front of the truck and there was a hell of a fight and they had to make a get-away with the stuff in a car and van back through our block, instead of taking over the truck and driving it to a hiding place to offload. More than half the stuff had to be left behind in the truck. Still, they got clean away with what they did get and it was never found by the police. Whenever I read in the papers here that something’s been blown up back at home, I wonder if it’s still one of our bangs. Two of our people got picked up right away and some more later and the whole thing was all over the papers with speeches by the Chief of Special Branch about a master plot and everything. But Josias got away OK. We three chaps at the roadblock just ran into the veld to where there were bikes hidden. We went to a place we’d been told in Rustenburg district for a week and then we were told to get over to Bechuanaland. It wasn’t so bad; we had no money but around Rustenburg it was easy to pinch paw-paws and oranges off the farms. . Oh, I sent a message to Emma that I was all right; and at that time it didn’t seem true that I couldn’t go home again.

But in Bechuanaland it was different. We had no money, and you don’t find food on trees in that dry place. They said they would send us money; it didn’t come. But Josias was there too, and we stuck together; people hid us and we kept going. Planes arrived and took away the big shots and the white refugees but although we were told we’d go too, it never came off. We had no money to pay for ourselves. There were plenty others like us, in the beginning. At last we just walked, right up Bechuanaland and through Northern Rhodesia to Mbeya, that’s over the border in Tanganyika, where we were headed for. A long walk; took Josias and me months. We met up with a chap who’d been given a bit of money and from there sometimes we went by bus. No one asks questions when you’re nobody special and you walk, like all the other African people themselves, or take the buses that the whites never use; it’s only if you’ve got the money for cars or to arrive in an aeroplane that all these things happen that you read about: getting sent back over the border, refused permits and so on. So we got here, to Tanganyika at last, down to this town of Dar es Salaam where we’d been told we’d be going.

There’s a refugee camp here and they give you a shilling or two a day until you get work. But it’s out of town, for one thing, and we soon left there and found a room down in the native town. There are some nice buildings, of course, in the real town — nothing like Johannesburg or Durban, though — and that used to be the white town, the whites who are left still live there, but the Africans with big jobs in the government and so on live there too. Some of our leaders who are refugees like us live in these houses and have big cars; everyone knows they’re important men, here, not like at home when if you’re black you’re just rubbish for the locations. The people down where we lived are very poor and it’s hard to get work because they haven’t got enough work for themselves, but I’ve got my standard seven and I managed to get a small job as a clerk. Josias never found steady work. But that didn’t matter so much because the big thing was that Emma was able to come to join us after five months, and she and I earn the money. She’s a nurse, you see, and Africanisation started in the hospitals and the government was short of nurses. So Emma got the chance to come up with a party of them sent for specially from South Africa and Rhodesia. We were very lucky because it’s impossible for people to get their families up here. She came in a plane paid for by the government, and she and the other girls had their photograph taken for the newspaper as they got off at the airport. That day she came we took her to the beach, where everyone can bathe, no restrictions, and for a cool drink in one of the hotels (she’d never been in a hotel before), and we walked up and down the road along the bay where everyone walks and where you can see the ships coming in and going out so near that the men out there wave to you. Whenever we bumped into anyone else from home they would stop and ask her about home, and how everything was. Josias and I couldn’t stop grinning to hear us all, in the middle of Dar, talking away in our language about the things we know. That day it was like it had happened already: the time when we are home again and everything is our way.

Well, that’s nearly three years ago, since Emma came. Josias has been sent away now and there’s only Emma and me. That was always the idea, to send us away for training. Some go to Ethiopia and some go to Algeria and all over the show and by the time they come back there won’t be anything Verwoerd’s men know in the way of handling guns and so on that they won’t know better. That’s for a start. I’m supposed to go too, but some of us have been waiting a long time. In the meantime I go to work and I walk about this place in the evenings and I buy myself a glass of beer in a bar when I’ve got money. Emma and I have still got the flat we had before Josias left and two nurses from the hospital pay us for the other bedroom. Emma still works at the hospital but I don’t know how much longer. Most days now since Josias’s gone she wants me to walk up to fetch her from the hospital when she comes off duty, and when I get under the trees on the drive I see her staring out looking for me as if I’ll never turn up ever again. Every day it’s like that. When I come up she smiles and looks like she used to for a minute but by the time we’re ten yards on the road she’s shaking and shaking her head until the tears come and saying over and over, ‘A person can’t stand it, a person can’t stand it.’ She said right from the beginning that the hospitals here are not like the hospitals at home, where the nurses have to know their job. She’s got a whole ward in her charge and now she says they’re worse and worse and she can’t trust anyone to do anything for her. And the staff don’t like having strangers working with them anyway. She tells me every day like she’s telling me for the first time. Of course it’s true that some of the people don’t like us being here. You know how it is, people haven’t got enough jobs to go round, themselves. But I don’t take much notice; I’ll be sent off one of these days and until then I’ve got to eat and that’s that.

The flat is nice with a real bathroom and we are paying off the table and six chairs she liked so much, but when we walk in, her face is terrible. She keeps saying the place will never be straight. At home there was only a tap in the yard for all the houses but she never said it there. She doesn’t sit down for more than a minute without getting up at once again, but you can’t get her to go out, even on these evenings when it’s so hot you can’t breathe. I go down to the market to buy the food now, she says she can’t stand it. When I asked what — because at the beginning she used to like the market, where you can pick a live fowl for yourself, quite cheap — she said those little rotten tomatoes they grow here, and the dirty people all shouting and she can’t understand. She doesn’t sleep, half the time, at night, either, and lately she wakes me up. It happened only last night. She was standing there in the dark and she said: ‘I felt bad.’

I said, ‘I’ll make you some tea,’ though what good could tea do.

‘There must be something the matter with me,’ she says. ‘I must go to the doctor tomorrow.’

‘Is it pains again, or what?’

She shakes her head slowly, over and over, and I know she’s going to cry again. ‘A place where there’s no one. I get up and look out the window and it’s just like I’m not awake. And every day, every day. I can’t ever wake up and be out of it. I always see this town.’

Of course it’s hard for her. I’ve picked up Swahili and I can get around all right; I mean I can always talk to anyone if I feel like it, but she hasn’t learnt more than ahsante — she could’ve picked it up just as easily, but she can’t, if you know what I mean. It’s just a noise to her, like dogs barking or those black crows in the palm trees. When anyone does come here to see her — someone else from home, usually, or perhaps I bring the Rhodesian who works where I do, she only sits there and whatever anyone talks about she doesn’t listen until she can sigh and say, ‘Heavy, heavy. Yes, for a woman alone. No friends, nobody. For a woman alone, I can tell you.’

Last night I said to her, ‘It would be worse if you were at home, you wouldn’t have seen Josias or me for a long time.’

She said, ‘Yes, it would be bad. Sela and everybody. And the old crowd at the hospital. . but just the same, it would be bad. D’you remember how we used to go right into town on my Saturday off? The people — ay! Even when you were twelve you used to be scared you’d lose me.’

‘I wasn’t scared, you were the one was scared to get run over sometimes.’ But in the location when we stole fruit and sweets from the shops, Emma could always grab me out of the way of trouble, Emma always saves me. The same Emma. And yet it’s not the same. And what could I do for her?

I suppose she wants to be back there now. But still she wouldn’t be the same. I don’t often get the feeling she knows what I’m thinking about, any more, or that I know what she’s thinking, but she said, ‘You and he go off, you come back or perhaps you don’t come back, you know what you must do. But for a woman? What shall I do there in my life? What shall I do here? What time is this for a woman?’

It’s hard for her. Emma. She’ll say all that often now, I know. She tells me everything so many times. Well, I don’t mind it when I fetch her from the hospital and I don’t mind going to the market. But straight after we’ve eaten, now, in the evenings, I let her go through it once and then I’m off. To walk in the streets when it gets a bit cooler in the dark. I don’t know why it is but I’m thinking so bloody hard about getting out there in the streets that I push down my food as fast as I can without her noticing. I’m so keen to get going I feel queer, kind of tight and excited. Just until I can get out and not hear. I wouldn’t even mind skipping the meal. In the streets in the evening everyone is out. On the grass along the bay the fat Indians in their white suits with their wives in those fancy coloured clothes. Men and their girls holding hands. Old watchmen like beggars, sleeping in the doorways of the shut shops. Up and down people walk, walk, just sliding one foot after the other because now and then, like somebody lifting a blanket, there’s air from the sea. She should come out for a bit of air in the evening, man. It’s an old, old place this, they say. Not the buildings, I mean; but the place. They say ships were coming here before even a place like London was a town. She thought the bay was so nice, that first day. The lights from the ships run all over the water and the palms show up a long time even after it gets dark. There’s a smell I’ve smelled ever since we’ve been here — three years! I don’t mean the smells in the native town; a special warm night smell. You can even smell it at three in the morning. I’ve smelled it when I was standing about with Emma, by the window; it’s as hot in the middle of the night here as it is in the middle of the day at home — funny, when you look at the stars and the dark. Well, I’ll be going off soon. It can’t be long now. Now that Josias is gone. You’ve just got to wait your time; they haven’t forgotten about you. Dar es Salaam. Dar. Sometimes I walk with another chap from home, he says some things, makes you laugh! He says the old watchmen who sleep in the doorways get their wives to come there with them. Well, I haven’t seen it. He says we’re definitely going with the next lot. Dar es Salaam. Dar. One day I suppose I’ll remember it and tell my wife I stayed three years there, once. I walk and walk, along the bay, past the shops and hotels and the German church and the big bank, and through the mud streets between old shacks and stalls. It’s dark there and full of other walking shapes as I go past light coming from the cracks in the walls, where the people are in their homes.