A Soldier’s Embrace
Town and Country Lovers
One
Dr Franz-Josef von Leinsdorf is a geologist absorbed in his work; wrapped up in it, as the saying goes — year after year the experience of this work enfolds him, swaddling him away from the landscapes, the cities and the people, wherever he lives: Peru, New Zealand, the United States. He’s always been like that, his mother could confirm from their native Austria. There, even as a handsome small boy he presented only his profile to her: turned away to his bits of rock and stone. His few relaxations have not changed much since then. An occasional skiing trip, listening to music, reading poetry — Rainer Maria Rilke once stayed in his grandmother’s hunting lodge in the forests of Styria and the boy was introduced to Rilke’s poems while very young.
Layer upon layer, country after country, wherever his work takes him — and now he has been almost seven years in Africa. First the Côte d’Ivoire, and for the past five years, South Africa. The shortage of skilled manpower brought about his recruitment here. He has no interest in the politics of the countries he works in. His private preoccupation-within-the-preoccupation of his work has been research into underground watercourses, but the mining company that employs him in a senior though not executive capacity is interested only in mineral discovery. So he is much out in the field — which is the veld, here — seeking new gold, copper, platinum and uranium deposits. When he is at home — on this particular job, in this particular country, this city — he lives in a two-roomed flat in a suburban block with a landscaped garden, and does his shopping at a supermarket conveniently across the street. He is not married — yet. That is how his colleagues, and the typists and secretaries at the mining company’s head office, would define his situation. Both men and women would describe him as a good-looking man, in a foreign way, with the lower half of the face dark and middle-aged (his mouth is thin and curving, and no matter how close-shaven his beard shows like fine shot embedded in the skin round mouth and chin) and the upper half contradictorily young, with deep-set eyes (some would say grey, some black), thick eyelashes and brows. A tangled gaze: through which concentration and gleaming thoughtfulness perhaps appear as fire and languor. It is this that the women in the office mean when they remark he’s not unattractive. Although the gaze seems to promise, he has never invited any one of them to go out with him. There is the general assumption he probably has a girl who’s been picked for him, he’s bespoken by one of his own kind, back home in Europe where he comes from. Many of these well-educated Europeans have no intention of becoming permanent immigrants; neither the remnant of white colonial life nor idealistic involvement with Black Africa appeals to them.
One advantage, at least, of living in underdeveloped or half-developed countries is that flats are serviced. All Dr von Leinsdorf has to do for himself is buy his own supplies and cook an evening meal if he doesn’t want to go to a restaurant. It is simply a matter of dropping in to the supermarket on his way from his car to his flat after work in the afternoon. He wheels a trolley up and down the shelves, and his simple needs are presented to him in the form of tins, packages, plastic-wrapped meat, cheeses, fruit and vegetables, tubes, bottles. . At the cashiers’ counters where customers must converge and queue there are racks of small items uncategorised, for last-minute purchase. Here, as the coloured girl cashier punches the adding machine, he picks up cigarettes and perhaps a packet of salted nuts or a bar of nougat. Or razor blades, when he remembers he’s running short. One evening in winter he saw that the cardboard display was empty of the brand of blades he preferred, and he drew the cashier’s attention to this. These young coloured girls are usually pretty unhelpful, taking money and punching their machines in a manner that asserts with the time-serving obstinacy of the half-literate the limit of any responsibility towards customers, but this one ran an alert glance over the selection of razor blades, apologised that she was not allowed to leave her post, and said she would see that the stock was replenished ‘next time’. A day or two later she recognised him, gravely, as he took his turn before her counter — ‘I ahssed them, but it’s out of stock. You can’t get it. I did ahss about it.’ He said this didn’t matter. ‘When it comes in, I can keep a few packets for you.’ He thanked her.
He was away with the prospectors the whole of the next week. He arrived back in town just before nightfall on Friday, and was on his way from car to flat with his arms full of briefcase, suitcase and canvas bags when someone stopped him by standing timidly in his path. He was about to dodge round unseeingly on the crowded pavement but she spoke. ‘We got the blades in now. I didn’t see you in the shop this week, but I kept some for when you come. So…’
He recognised her. He had never seen her standing before, and she was wearing a coat. She was rather small and finely made, for one of them. The coat was skimpy but no big backside jutted. The cold brought an apricot-graining of warm colour to her cheekbones, beneath which a very small face was quite delicately hollowed, and the skin was smooth, the subdued satiny colour of certain yellow wood. That crepey hair, but worn drawn back flat and in a little knot pushed into one of the cheap wool chignons that (he recognised also) hung in the miscellany of small goods along with the razor blades, at the supermarket. He said thanks, he was in a hurry, he’d only just got back from a trip — shifting the burdens he carried, to demonstrate. ‘Oh shame.’ She acknowledged his load. ‘But if you want I can run in and get it for you quickly. If you want.’
He saw at once it was perfectly clear that all the girl meant was that she would go back to the supermarket, buy the blades and bring the packet to him there where he stood, on the pavement. And it seemed that it was this certainty that made him say, in the kindly tone of assumption used for an obliging underling, ‘I live just across there — Atlantis — that apartment building. Could you drop them by, for me — number seven hundred and eighteen, seventh floor—’
She had not before been inside one of these big flat buildings near where she worked. She lived a bus- and train-ride away to the west of the city, but this side of the black townships, in a township for people her tint. There was a pool with ferns, not plastic, and even a little waterfall pumped electrically over rocks, in the entrance of the building Atlantis; she didn’t wait for the lift marked GOODS but took the one meant for whites and a white woman with one of those sausage-dogs on a lead got in with her but did not pay her any attention. The corridors leading to the flats were nicely glassed-in, not draughty.
He wondered if he should give her a twenty-cent piece for her trouble — ten cents would be right for a black; but she said, ‘Oh no — please, here—’ standing outside his open door and awkwardly pushing back at his hand the change from the money he’d given her for the razor blades. She was smiling, for the first time, in the dignity of refusing a tip. It was difficult to know how to treat these people, in this country; to know what they expected. In spite of her embarrassing refusal of the coin, she stood there, completely unassuming, fists thrust down the pockets of her cheap coat against the cold she’d come in from, rather pretty thin legs neatly aligned, knee to knee, ankle to ankle.
‘Would you like a cup of coffee or something?’
He couldn’t very well take her into his study-cum-living room and offer her a drink. She followed him to his kitchen, but at the sight of her pulling out the single chair to drink her cup of coffee at the kitchen table, he said, ‘No — bring it in here—’ and led the way into the big room where, among his books and his papers, his files of scientific correspondence (and the cigar boxes of stamps from the envelopes) his racks of records, his specimens of minerals and rocks, he lived alone.
It was no trouble to her; she saved him the trips to the supermarket and brought him his groceries two or three times a week. All he had to do was to leave a list and the key under the doormat, and she would come up in her lunch hour to collect them, returning to put his supplies in the flat after work. Sometimes he was home and sometimes not. He bought a box of chocolates and left it, with a note, for her to find; and that was acceptable, apparently, as a gratuity.
Her eyes went over everything in the flat although her body tried to conceal its sense of being out of place by remaining as still as possible, holding its contours in the chair offered her as a stranger’s coat is set aside and remains exactly as left until the owner takes it up to go. ‘You collect?’
‘Well, these are specimens — connected with my work.’
‘My brother used to collect. Miniatures. With brandy and whisky and that, in them. From all over. Different countries.’
The second time she watched him grinding coffee for the cup he had offered her she said, ‘You always do that? Always when you make coffee?’
‘But of course. Is it no good, for you? Do I make it too strong?’
‘Oh it’s just I’m not used to it. We buy it ready — you know, it’s in a bottle, you just add a bit to the milk or water.’
He laughed, instructive: ‘That’s not coffee, that’s a synthetic flavouring. In my country we drink only real coffee, fresh, from the beans — you smell how good it is as it’s being ground?’
She was stopped by the caretaker and asked what she wanted in the building? Heavy with the bona fides of groceries clutched to her body, she said she was working at number 718, on the seventh floor. The caretaker did not tell her not to use the whites’ lift; after all, she was not black; her family was very light-skinned.
There was the item ‘grey button for trousers’ on one of his shopping lists. She said as she unpacked the supermarket carrier ‘Give me the pants, so long, then,’ and sat on his sofa that was always gritty with fragments of pipe tobacco, sewing in and out through the four holes of the button with firm, fluent movements of the right hand, gestures supplying the articulacy missing from her talk. She had a little yokel’s, peasant’s (he thought of it) gap between her two front teeth when she smiled that he didn’t much like, but, face ellipsed to three-quarter angle, eyes cast down in concentration with soft lips almost closed, this didn’t matter.
He said, watching her sew, ‘You’re a good girl’; and touched her.
She remade the bed every late afternoon when they left it and she dressed again before she went home. After a week there was a day when late afternoon became evening, and they were still in the bed.
‘Can’t you stay the night?’
‘My mother,’ she said.
‘Phone her. Make an excuse.’ He was a foreigner. He had been in the country five years, but he didn’t understand that people don’t usually have telephones in their houses, where she lived. She got up to dress. He didn’t want that tender body to go out in the night cold and kept hindering her with the interruption of his hands; saying nothing. Before she put on her coat, when the body had already disappeared, he spoke. ‘But you must make some arrangement.’
‘Oh my mother!’ Her face opened to fear and vacancy he could not read.
He was not entirely convinced the woman would think of her daughter as some pure and unsullied virgin. . ‘Why?’
The girl said, ‘S’e’ll be scared. S’e’ll be scared we get caught.’
‘Don’t tell her anything. Say I’m employing you.’ In this country he was working in now there were generally rooms on the roofs of flat buildings for tenants’ servants.
She said: ‘That’s what I told the caretaker.’
She ground fresh coffee beans every time he wanted a cup while he was working at night. She never attempted to cook anything until she had watched in silence while he did it the way he liked, and she learned to reproduce exactly the simple dishes he preferred. She handled his pieces of rock and stone, at first admiring the colours — ‘It’d make a beautiful ring or a necklace, ay.’ Then he showed her the striations, the formation of each piece, and explained what each was, and how, in the long life of the earth, it had been formed. He named the mineral it yielded, and what that was used for. He worked at his papers, writing, writing, every night, so it did not matter that they could not go out together to public places. On Sundays she got into his car in the basement garage and they drove to the country and picnicked away up in the Magaliesberg, where there was no one. He read or poked about among the rocks; they climbed together, to the mountain pools. He taught her to swim. She had never seen the sea. She squealed and shrieked in the water, showing the gap between her teeth, as — it crossed his mind — she must do when among her own people. Occasionally he had to go out to dinner at the houses of colleagues from the mining company; she sewed and listened to the radio in the flat and he found her in the bed, warm and already asleep, by the time he came in. He made his way into her body without speaking; she made him welcome without a word.
Once he put on evening dress for a dinner at his country’s consulate; watching him brush one or two fallen hairs from the shoulders of the dark jacket that sat so well on him, she saw a huge room, all chandeliers and people dancing some dance from a costume film — stately, hand-to-hand. She supposed he was going to fetch, in her place in the car, a partner for the evening. They never kissed when either left the flat; he said, suddenly, kindly, pausing as he picked up cigarettes and keys, ‘Don’t be lonely.’ And added, ‘Wouldn’t you like to visit your family sometimes, when I have to go out?’
He had told her he was going home to his mother in the forests and mountains of his country near the Italian border (he showed her on the map) after Christmas. She had not told him how her mother, not knowing there was any other variety, assumed he was a medical doctor, so she had talked to her about the doctor’s children and the doctor’s wife who was a very kind lady, glad to have someone who could help out in the surgery as well as the flat.
She remarked wonderingly on his ability to work until midnight or later, after a day at work. She was so tired when she came home from her cash register at the supermarket that once dinner was eaten she could scarcely keep awake. He explained in a way she could understand that while the work she did was repetitive, undemanding of any real response from her intelligence, requiring little mental or physical effort and therefore unrewarding, his work was his greatest interest, it taxed his mental capacities to their limit, exercised all his concentration, and rewarded him constantly as much with the excitement of a problem presented as with the satisfaction of a problem solved.
He said later, putting away his papers, speaking out of a silence: ‘Have you done other kinds of work?’
She said, ‘I was in a clothing factory before. Sportbeau shirts; you know? But the pay’s better in the shop.’
Of course. Being a conscientious newspaper reader in every country he lived in, he was aware that it was only recently that the retail consumer trade in this one had been allowed to employ coloureds as shop assistants; even punching a cash register represented advancement. With the continuing shortage of semi-skilled whites a girl like this might be able to edge a little farther into the white-collar category. He began to teach her to type. He was aware that her English was poor, even though, as a foreigner, in his ears her pronunciation did not offend, nor categorise her as it would in those of someone of his education whose mother tongue was English. He corrected her grammatical mistakes but missed the less obvious ones because of his own sometimes exotic English usage — she continued to use the singular pronoun ‘it’ when what was required was the plural ‘they’. Because he was a foreigner (although so clever, as she saw) she was less inhibited than she might have been by the words she knew she misspelled in her typing. While she sat at the typewriter she thought how one day she would type notes for him, as well as making coffee the way he liked it, and taking him inside her body without saying anything, and sitting (even if only through the empty streets of quiet Sundays) beside him in his car, like a wife.
On a summer night near Christmas — he had already bought and hidden a slightly showy but nevertheless good watch he thought she would like — there was a knocking at the door that brought her out of the bathroom and him to his feet, at his work-table. No one ever came to the flat at night; he had no friends intimate enough to drop in without warning. The summons was an imperious banging that did not pause and clearly would not stop until the door was opened.
She stood in the open bathroom doorway gazing at him across the passage into the living room; her bare feet and shoulders were free of a big bath-towel. She said nothing, did not even whisper. The flat seemed to shake with the strong unhurried blows.
He made as if to go to the door, at last, but now she ran and clutched him by both arms. She shook her head wildly; her lips drew back but her teeth were clenched, she didn’t speak. She pulled him into the bedroom, snatched some clothes from the clean laundry laid out on the bed and got into the wall cupboard, thrusting the key at his hand. Although his arms and calves felt weakly cold he was horrified, distastefully embarrassed at the sight of her pressed back crouching there under his suits and coat; it was horrible and ridiculous. Come out! he whispered.
No!
Come out!
She hissed: Where? Where can I go?
Never mind! Get out of there!
He put out his hand to grasp her. At bay, she said with all the force of her terrible whisper, baring the gap in her teeth: I’ll throw myself out the window.
She forced the key into his hand like the handle of a knife. He closed the door on her face and drove the key home in the lock, then dropped it among coins in his trouser pocket.
He unslotted the chain that was looped across the flat door. He turned the serrated knob of the Yale lock. The three policemen, two in plain clothes, stood there without impatience although they had been banging on the door for several minutes. The big dark one with an elaborate moustache held out in a hand wearing a plaited gilt ring some sort of identity card.
Dr von Leinsdorf said quietly, the blood coming strangely back to legs and arms, ‘What is it?’
The sergeant told him they knew there was a coloured girl in the flat. They had had information; ‘I been watching this flat three months, I know.’
‘I am alone here.’ Dr von Leinsdorf did not raise his voice.
‘I know, I know who is here. Come—’ And the sergeant and his two assistants went into the living room, the kitchen, the bathroom (the sergeant picked up a bottle of after-shave cologne, seemed to study the French label) and the bedroom. The assistants removed the clean laundry that was laid upon the bed and then turned back the bedding, carrying the sheets over to be examined by the sergeant under the lamp. They talked to one another in Afrikaans, which the Doctor did not understand.
The sergeant himself looked under the bed, and lifted the long curtains at the window. The wall cupboard was of the kind that has no knobs; he saw that it was locked and began to ask in Afrikaans, then politely changed to English, ‘Give us the key.’
Dr von Leinsdorf said, ‘I’m sorry, I left it at my office — I always lock and take my keys with me in the mornings.’
‘It’s no good, man, you better give me the key.’
He smiled a little, reasonably. ‘It’s on my office desk.’
The assistants produced a screwdriver and he watched while they inserted it where the cupboard doors met, gave it quick, firm but not forceful leverage. He heard the lock give.
She had been naked, it was true, when they knocked. But now she was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt with an appliquéd butterfly motif on one breast, and a pair of jeans. Her feet were still bare; she had managed, by feel, in the dark, to get into some of the clothing she had snatched from the bed, but she had no shoes. She had perhaps been weeping behind the cupboard door (her cheeks looked stained) but now her face was sullen and she was breathing heavily, her diaphragm contracting and expanding exaggeratedly and her breasts pushing against the cloth. It made her appear angry; it might simply have been that she was half-suffocated in the cupboard and needed oxygen. She did not look at Dr von Leinsdorf. She would not reply to the sergeant’s questions.
They were taken to the police station where they were at once separated and in turn led for examination by the district surgeon. The man’s underwear was taken away and examined, as the sheets had been, for signs of his seed. When the girl was undressed, it was discovered that beneath her jeans she was wearing a pair of men’s briefs with his name on the neatly sewn laundry tag; in her haste, she had taken the wrong garment to her hiding-place.
Now she cried, standing there before the district surgeon in a man’s underwear.
He courteously pretended not to notice. He handed briefs, jeans and T-shirt round the door, and motioned her to lie on a white-sheeted high table where he placed her legs apart, resting in stirrups, and put into her where the other had made his way so warmly a cold hard instrument that expanded wider and wider. Her thighs and knees trembled uncontrollably while the doctor looked into her and touched her deep inside with more hard instruments, carrying wafers of gauze.
When she came out of the examining room back to the charge office, Dr von Leinsdorf was not there; they must have taken him somewhere else. She spent what was left of the night in a cell, as he must be doing; but early in the morning she was released and taken home to her mother’s house in the coloured township by a white man who explained he was the clerk of the lawyer who had been engaged for her by Dr von Leinsdorf. Dr von Leinsdorf, the clerk said, had also been bailed out that morning. He did not say when, or if she would see him again.
A statement made by the girl to the police was handed in to court when she and the man appeared to meet charges of contravening the Immorality Act in a Johannesburg flat on the night of — December, 19—. I lived with the white man in his flat. He had intercourse with me sometimes. He gave me tablets to take to prevent me becoming pregnant.
Interviewed by the Sunday papers, the girl said, ‘I’m sorry for the sadness brought to my mother.’ She said she was one of nine children of a female laundry worker. She had left school in Standard Three because there was no money at home for gym clothes or a school blazer. She had worked as a machinist in a factory and a cashier in a supermarket. Dr von Leinsdorf taught her to type his notes.
Dr Franz-Josef von Leinsdorf, described as the grandson of a baroness, a cultured man engaged in international mineralogical research, said he accepted social distinctions between people but didn’t think they should be legally imposed. ‘Even in my own country it’s difficult for a person from a higher class to marry one from a lower class.’
The two accused gave no evidence. They did not greet or speak to each other in court. The Defence argued that the sergeant’s evidence that they had been living together as man and wife was hearsay. (The woman with the dachshund, the caretaker?) The magistrate acquitted them because the state failed to prove carnal intercourse had taken place on the night of — December, 19—.
The girl’s mother was quoted, with photograph, in the Sunday papers: ‘I won’t let my daughter work as a servant for a white man again.’
Two
The farm children play together when they are small; but once the white children go away to school they soon don’t play together any more, even in the holidays. Although most of the black children get some sort of schooling, they drop every year further behind the grades passed by the white children; the childish vocabulary, the child’s exploration of the adventurous possibilities of dam, koppies, mealie lands and veld — there comes a time when the white children have surpassed these with the vocabulary of boarding school and the possibilities of inter-school sports matches and the kind of adventures seen at the cinema. This usefully coincides with the age of twelve or thirteen; so that by the time early adolescence is reached, the black children are making, along with the bodily changes common to all, an easy transition to adult forms of address, beginning to call their old playmates missus and baasie — little master.
The trouble was Paulus Eysendyck did not seem to realise that Thebedi was now simply one of the crowd of farm children down at the kraal, recognisable in his sisters’ old clothes. The first Christmas holidays after he had gone to boarding school he brought home for Thebedi a painted box he had made in his woodwork class. He had to give it to her secretly because he had nothing for the other children at the kraal. And she gave him, before he went back to school, a bracelet she had made of thin brass wire and the grey-and-white beans of the castor-oil crop his father cultivated. (When they used to play together, she was the one who had taught Paulus how to make clay oxen for their toy spans.) There was a craze, even in the platteland towns like the one where he was at school, for boys to wear elephant-hair and other bracelets beside their watch-straps; his was admired, friends asked him to get similar ones for them. He said the natives made them on his father’s farm and he would try.
When he was fifteen, six feet tall, and tramping round at school dances with the girls from the ‘sister’ school in the same town; when he had learnt how to tease and flirt and fondle quite intimately these girls who were the daughters of prosperous farmers like his father; when he had even met one who, at a wedding he had attended with his parents on a nearby farm, had let him do with her in a locked storeroom what people did when they made love — when he was as far from his childhood as all this, he still brought home from a shop in town a red plastic belt and gilt hoop earrings for the black girl, Thebedi. She told her father the missus had given these to her as a reward for some work she had done — it was true she sometimes was called to help out in the farmhouse. She told the girls in the kraal that she had a sweetheart nobody knew about, far away, away on another farm, and they giggled, and teased, and admired her. There was a boy in the kraal called Njabulo who said he wished he could have bought her a belt and earrings.
When the farmer’s son was home for the holidays she wandered far from the kraal and her companions. He went for walks alone. They had not arranged this; it was an urge each followed independently. He knew it was she, from a long way off. She knew that his dog would not bark at her. Down at the dried-up river bed where five or six years ago the children had caught a leguaan one great day — a creature that combined ideally the size and ferocious aspect of the crocodile with the harmlessness of the lizard — they squatted side by side on the earth bank. He told her traveller’s tales: about school, about the punishments at school, particularly, exaggerating both their nature and his indifference to them. He told her about the town of Middleburg, which she had never seen. She had nothing to tell but she prompted with many questions, like any good listener. While he talked he twisted and tugged at the roots of white stinkwood and Cape willow trees that looped out of the eroded earth around them. It had always been a good spot for children’s games, down there hidden by the mesh of old, ant-eaten trees held in place by vigorous ones, wild asparagus bushing up between the trunks, and here and there prickly pear cactus sunken-skinned and bristly, like an old man’s face, keeping alive sapless until the next rainy season. She punctured the dry hide of a prickly pear again and again with a sharp stick while she listened. She laughed a lot at what he told her, sometimes dropping her face on her knees, sharing amusement with the cool shady earth beneath her bare feet. She put on her pair of shoes — white sandals, thickly Blanco-ed against the farm dust — when he was on the farm, but these were taken off and laid aside, at the river bed.
One summer afternoon when there was water flowing there and it was very hot she waded in as they used to do when they were children, her dress bunched modestly and tucked into the legs of her pants. The schoolgirls he went swimming with at dams or pools on neighbouring farms wore bikinis but the sight of their dazzling bellies and thighs in the sunlight had never made him feel what he felt now, when the girl came up the bank and sat beside him, the drops of water beading off her dark legs the only points of light in the earth-smelling, deep shade. They were not afraid of one another, they had known one another always; he did with her what he had done that time in the storeroom at the wedding, and this time it was so lovely, so lovely, he was surprised. . and she was surprised by it, too — he could see in her dark face that was part of the shade, with her big dark eyes, shiny as soft water, watching him attentively: as she had when they used to huddle over their teams of mud oxen, as she had when he told her about detention weekends at school.
They went to the river bed often through those summer holidays. They met just before the light went, as it does quite quickly, and each returned home with the dark — she to her mother’s hut, he to the farmhouse — in time for the evening meal. He did not tell her about school or town any more. She did not ask questions any longer. He told her, each time, when they would meet again. Once or twice it was very early in the morning; the lowing of the cows being driven to graze came to them where they lay, dividing them with unspoken recognition of the sound read in their two pairs of eyes, opening so close to each other.
He was a popular boy at school. He was in the second, then the first soccer team. The head girl of the ‘sister’ school was said to have a crush on him; he didn’t particularly like her, but there was a pretty blonde who put up her long hair into a kind of doughnut with a black ribbon round it, whom he took to see films when the schoolboys and girls had a free Saturday afternoon. He had been driving tractors and other farm vehicles since he was ten years old, and as soon as he was eighteen he got a driver’s licence and in the holidays, this last year of his school life, he took neighbours’ daughters to dances and to the drive-in cinema that had just opened twenty kilometres from the farm. His sisters were married, by then; his parents often left him in charge of the farm over the weekend while they visited the young wives and grandchildren.
When Thebedi saw the farmer and his wife drive away on a Saturday afternoon, the boot of their Mercedes filled with fresh-killed poultry and vegetables from the garden that it was part of her father’s work to tend, she knew that she must come not to the river bed but up to the house. The house was an old one, thick-walled, dark against the heat. The kitchen was its lively thoroughfare, with servants, food supplies, begging cats and dogs, pots boiling over, washing being damped for ironing, and the big deep freeze the missus had ordered from town, bearing a crocheted mat and a vase of plastic irises. But the dining room with the bulging-legged heavy table was shut up in its rich, old smell of soup and tomato sauce. The sitting-room curtains were drawn and the TV set silent. The door of the parents’ bedroom was locked and the empty rooms where the girls had slept had sheets of plastic spread over the beds. It was in one of these that she and the farmer’s son stayed together whole nights — almost: she had to get away before the house servants, who knew her, came in at dawn. There was a risk someone would discover her or traces of her presence if he took her to his own bedroom, although she had looked into it many times when she was helping out in the house and knew well, there, the row of silver cups he had won at school.
When she was eighteen and the farmer’s son nineteen and working with his father on the farm before entering a veterinary college, the young man Njabulo asked her father for her. Njabulo’s parents met with hers and the money he was to pay in place of the cows it is customary to give a prospective bride’s parents was settled upon. He had no cows to offer; he was a labourer on the Eysendyck farm, like her father. A bright youngster; old Eysendyck had taught him bricklaying and was using him for odd jobs in construction, around the place. She did not tell the farmer’s son that her parents had arranged for her to marry. She did not tell him, either, before he left for his first term at the veterinary college, that she thought she was going to have a baby. Two months after her marriage to Njabulo, she gave birth to a daughter. There was no disgrace in that; among her people it is customary for a young man to make sure, before marriage, that the chosen girl is not barren, and Njabulo had made love to her then. But the infant was very light and did not quickly grow darker as most African babies do. Already at birth there was on its head a quantity of straight, fine floss, like that which carries the seeds of certain weeds in the veld. The unfocused eyes it opened were grey flecked with yellow. Njabulo was the matt, opaque coffee-grounds colour that has always been called black; the colour of Thebedi’s legs on which beaded water looked oyster-shell blue, the same colour as Thebedi’s face, where the black eyes, with their interested gaze and clear whites, were so dominant.
Njabulo made no complaint. Out of his farm labourer’s earnings he bought from the Indian store a cellophane-windowed pack containing a pink plastic bath, six napkins, a card of safety pins, a knitted jacket, cap and bootees, a dress, and a tin of Johnson’s Baby Powder, for Thebedi’s baby.
When it was two weeks old Paulus Eysendyck arrived home from the veterinary college for the holidays. He drank a glass of fresh, still-warm milk in the childhood familiarity of his mother’s kitchen and heard her discussing with the old house-servant where they could get a reliable substitute to help out now that the girl Thebedi had had a baby. For the first time since he was a small boy he came right into the kraal. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. The men were at work in the lands. He looked about him, urgently; the women turned away, each not wanting to be the one approached to point out where Thebedi lived. Thebedi appeared, coming slowly from the hut Njabulo had built in white man’s style, with a tin chimney and a proper window with glass panes set in straight as walls made of unfired bricks would allow. She greeted him with hands brought together and a token movement representing the respectful bob with which she was accustomed to acknowledge she was in the presence of his father or mother. He lowered his head under the doorway of her home and went in. He said, ‘I want to see. Show me.’
She had taken the bundle off her back before she came out into the light to face him. She moved between the iron bedstead made up with Njabulo’s checked blankets and the small wooden table where the pink plastic bath stood among food and kitchen pots, and picked up the bundle from the snugly blanketed grocer’s box where it lay. The infant was asleep; she revealed the closed, pale, plump tiny face, with a bubble of spit at the corner of the mouth, the spidery pink hands stirring. She took off the woollen cap and the straight fine hair flew up after it in static electricity, showing gilded strands here and there. He said nothing. She was watching him as she had done when they were little, and the gang of children had trodden down a crop in their games or transgressed in some other way for which he, as the farmer’s son, the white one among them, must intercede with the farmer. She disturbed the sleeping face by scratching or tickling gently at a cheek with one finger, and slowly the eyes opened, saw nothing, were still asleep, and then, awake, no longer narrowed, looked out at them, grey with yellowish flecks, his own hazel eyes.
He struggled for a moment with a grimace of tears, anger and self-pity. She could not put out her hand to him. He said, ‘You haven’t been near the house with it?’
She shook her head.
‘Never?’
Again she shook her head.
‘Don’t take it out. Stay inside. Can’t you take it away somewhere. You must give it to someone—’
She moved to the door with him.
He said, ‘I’ll see what I will do. I don’t know.’ And then he said: ‘I feel like killing myself.’
Her eyes began to glow, to thicken with tears. For a moment there was the feeling between them that used to come when they were alone down at the river bed.
He walked out.
Two days later, when his mother and father had left the farm for the day, he appeared again. The women were away on the lands, weeding, as they were employed to do as casual labour in summer; only the very old remained, propped up on the ground outside the huts in the flies and the sun. Thebedi did not ask him in. The child had not been well; it had diarrhoea. He asked where its food was. She said, ‘The milk comes from me.’ He went into Njabulo’s house, where the child lay; she did not follow but stayed outside the door and watched without seeing an old crone who had lost her mind, talking to herself, talking to the fowls who ignored her.
She thought she heard small grunts from the hut, the kind of infant grunt that indicates a full stomach, a deep sleep. After a time, long or short she did not know, he came out and walked away with plodding stride (his father’s gait) out of sight, towards his father’s house.
The baby was not fed during the night and although she kept telling Njabulo it was sleeping, he saw for himself in the morning that it was dead. He comforted her with words and caresses. She did not cry but simply sat, staring at the door. Her hands were cold as dead chickens’ feet to his touch.
Njabulo buried the little baby where farm workers were buried, in the place in the veld the farmer had given them. Some of the mounds had been left to weather away unmarked, others were covered with stones and a few had fallen wooden crosses. He was going to make a cross but before it was finished the police came and dug up the grave and took away the dead baby: someone — one of the other labourers? their women? — had reported that the baby was almost white, that, strong and healthy, it had died suddenly after a visit by the farmer’s son. Pathological tests on the infant corpse showed intestinal damage not always consistent with death by natural causes.
Thebedi went for the first time to the country town where Paulus had been to school, to give evidence at the preparatory examination into the charge of murder brought against him. She cried hysterically in the witness box, saying yes, yes (the gilt hoop earrings swung in her ears), she saw the accused pouring liquid into the baby’s mouth. She said he had threatened to shoot her if she told anyone.
More than a year went by before, in that same town, the case was brought to trial. She came to court with a newborn baby on her back. She wore gilt hoop earrings; she was calm; she said she had not seen what the white man did in the house.
Paulus Eysendyck said he had visited the hut but had not poisoned the child.
The Defence did not contest that there had been a love relationship between the accused and the girl, or that intercourse had taken place, but submitted there was no proof that the child was the accused’s.
The judge told the accused there was strong suspicion against him but not enough proof that he had committed the crime. The court could not accept the girl’s evidence because it was clear she had committed perjury either at this trial or at the preparatory examination. There was the suggestion in the mind of the court that she might be an accomplice in the crime; but, again, insufficient proof.
The judge commended the honourable behaviour of the husband (sitting in court in a brown-and-yellow-quartered golf cap bought for Sundays) who had not rejected his wife and had ‘even provided clothes for the unfortunate infant out of his slender means’.
The verdict on the accused was ‘not guilty’.
The young white man refused to accept the congratulations of press and public and left the court with his mother’s raincoat shielding his face from photographers. His father said to the press, ‘I will try and carry on as best I can to hold up my head in the district.’
Interviewed by the Sunday papers, who spelled her name in a variety of ways, the black girl, speaking in her own language, was quoted beneath her photograph: ‘It was a thing of our childhood, we don’t see each other any more.’
One
Dr Franz-Josef von Leinsdorf is a geologist absorbed in his work; wrapped up in it, as the saying goes — year after year the experience of this work enfolds him, swaddling him away from the landscapes, the cities and the people, wherever he lives: Peru, New Zealand, the United States. He’s always been like that, his mother could confirm from their native Austria. There, even as a handsome small boy he presented only his profile to her: turned away to his bits of rock and stone. His few relaxations have not changed much since then. An occasional skiing trip, listening to music, reading poetry — Rainer Maria Rilke once stayed in his grandmother’s hunting lodge in the forests of Styria and the boy was introduced to Rilke’s poems while very young.
Layer upon layer, country after country, wherever his work takes him — and now he has been almost seven years in Africa. First the Côte d’Ivoire, and for the past five years, South Africa. The shortage of skilled manpower brought about his recruitment here. He has no interest in the politics of the countries he works in. His private preoccupation-within-the-preoccupation of his work has been research into underground watercourses, but the mining company that employs him in a senior though not executive capacity is interested only in mineral discovery. So he is much out in the field — which is the veld, here — seeking new gold, copper, platinum and uranium deposits. When he is at home — on this particular job, in this particular country, this city — he lives in a two-roomed flat in a suburban block with a landscaped garden, and does his shopping at a supermarket conveniently across the street. He is not married — yet. That is how his colleagues, and the typists and secretaries at the mining company’s head office, would define his situation. Both men and women would describe him as a good-looking man, in a foreign way, with the lower half of the face dark and middle-aged (his mouth is thin and curving, and no matter how close-shaven his beard shows like fine shot embedded in the skin round mouth and chin) and the upper half contradictorily young, with deep-set eyes (some would say grey, some black), thick eyelashes and brows. A tangled gaze: through which concentration and gleaming thoughtfulness perhaps appear as fire and languor. It is this that the women in the office mean when they remark he’s not unattractive. Although the gaze seems to promise, he has never invited any one of them to go out with him. There is the general assumption he probably has a girl who’s been picked for him, he’s bespoken by one of his own kind, back home in Europe where he comes from. Many of these well-educated Europeans have no intention of becoming permanent immigrants; neither the remnant of white colonial life nor idealistic involvement with Black Africa appeals to them.
One advantage, at least, of living in underdeveloped or half-developed countries is that flats are serviced. All Dr von Leinsdorf has to do for himself is buy his own supplies and cook an evening meal if he doesn’t want to go to a restaurant. It is simply a matter of dropping in to the supermarket on his way from his car to his flat after work in the afternoon. He wheels a trolley up and down the shelves, and his simple needs are presented to him in the form of tins, packages, plastic-wrapped meat, cheeses, fruit and vegetables, tubes, bottles. . At the cashiers’ counters where customers must converge and queue there are racks of small items uncategorised, for last-minute purchase. Here, as the coloured girl cashier punches the adding machine, he picks up cigarettes and perhaps a packet of salted nuts or a bar of nougat. Or razor blades, when he remembers he’s running short. One evening in winter he saw that the cardboard display was empty of the brand of blades he preferred, and he drew the cashier’s attention to this. These young coloured girls are usually pretty unhelpful, taking money and punching their machines in a manner that asserts with the time-serving obstinacy of the half-literate the limit of any responsibility towards customers, but this one ran an alert glance over the selection of razor blades, apologised that she was not allowed to leave her post, and said she would see that the stock was replenished ‘next time’. A day or two later she recognised him, gravely, as he took his turn before her counter — ‘I ahssed them, but it’s out of stock. You can’t get it. I did ahss about it.’ He said this didn’t matter. ‘When it comes in, I can keep a few packets for you.’ He thanked her.
He was away with the prospectors the whole of the next week. He arrived back in town just before nightfall on Friday, and was on his way from car to flat with his arms full of briefcase, suitcase and canvas bags when someone stopped him by standing timidly in his path. He was about to dodge round unseeingly on the crowded pavement but she spoke. ‘We got the blades in now. I didn’t see you in the shop this week, but I kept some for when you come. So…’
He recognised her. He had never seen her standing before, and she was wearing a coat. She was rather small and finely made, for one of them. The coat was skimpy but no big backside jutted. The cold brought an apricot-graining of warm colour to her cheekbones, beneath which a very small face was quite delicately hollowed, and the skin was smooth, the subdued satiny colour of certain yellow wood. That crepey hair, but worn drawn back flat and in a little knot pushed into one of the cheap wool chignons that (he recognised also) hung in the miscellany of small goods along with the razor blades, at the supermarket. He said thanks, he was in a hurry, he’d only just got back from a trip — shifting the burdens he carried, to demonstrate. ‘Oh shame.’ She acknowledged his load. ‘But if you want I can run in and get it for you quickly. If you want.’
He saw at once it was perfectly clear that all the girl meant was that she would go back to the supermarket, buy the blades and bring the packet to him there where he stood, on the pavement. And it seemed that it was this certainty that made him say, in the kindly tone of assumption used for an obliging underling, ‘I live just across there — Atlantis — that apartment building. Could you drop them by, for me — number seven hundred and eighteen, seventh floor—’
She had not before been inside one of these big flat buildings near where she worked. She lived a bus- and train-ride away to the west of the city, but this side of the black townships, in a township for people her tint. There was a pool with ferns, not plastic, and even a little waterfall pumped electrically over rocks, in the entrance of the building Atlantis; she didn’t wait for the lift marked GOODS but took the one meant for whites and a white woman with one of those sausage-dogs on a lead got in with her but did not pay her any attention. The corridors leading to the flats were nicely glassed-in, not draughty.
He wondered if he should give her a twenty-cent piece for her trouble — ten cents would be right for a black; but she said, ‘Oh no — please, here—’ standing outside his open door and awkwardly pushing back at his hand the change from the money he’d given her for the razor blades. She was smiling, for the first time, in the dignity of refusing a tip. It was difficult to know how to treat these people, in this country; to know what they expected. In spite of her embarrassing refusal of the coin, she stood there, completely unassuming, fists thrust down the pockets of her cheap coat against the cold she’d come in from, rather pretty thin legs neatly aligned, knee to knee, ankle to ankle.
‘Would you like a cup of coffee or something?’
He couldn’t very well take her into his study-cum-living room and offer her a drink. She followed him to his kitchen, but at the sight of her pulling out the single chair to drink her cup of coffee at the kitchen table, he said, ‘No — bring it in here—’ and led the way into the big room where, among his books and his papers, his files of scientific correspondence (and the cigar boxes of stamps from the envelopes) his racks of records, his specimens of minerals and rocks, he lived alone.
It was no trouble to her; she saved him the trips to the supermarket and brought him his groceries two or three times a week. All he had to do was to leave a list and the key under the doormat, and she would come up in her lunch hour to collect them, returning to put his supplies in the flat after work. Sometimes he was home and sometimes not. He bought a box of chocolates and left it, with a note, for her to find; and that was acceptable, apparently, as a gratuity.
Her eyes went over everything in the flat although her body tried to conceal its sense of being out of place by remaining as still as possible, holding its contours in the chair offered her as a stranger’s coat is set aside and remains exactly as left until the owner takes it up to go. ‘You collect?’
‘Well, these are specimens — connected with my work.’
‘My brother used to collect. Miniatures. With brandy and whisky and that, in them. From all over. Different countries.’
The second time she watched him grinding coffee for the cup he had offered her she said, ‘You always do that? Always when you make coffee?’
‘But of course. Is it no good, for you? Do I make it too strong?’
‘Oh it’s just I’m not used to it. We buy it ready — you know, it’s in a bottle, you just add a bit to the milk or water.’
He laughed, instructive: ‘That’s not coffee, that’s a synthetic flavouring. In my country we drink only real coffee, fresh, from the beans — you smell how good it is as it’s being ground?’
She was stopped by the caretaker and asked what she wanted in the building? Heavy with the bona fides of groceries clutched to her body, she said she was working at number 718, on the seventh floor. The caretaker did not tell her not to use the whites’ lift; after all, she was not black; her family was very light-skinned.
There was the item ‘grey button for trousers’ on one of his shopping lists. She said as she unpacked the supermarket carrier ‘Give me the pants, so long, then,’ and sat on his sofa that was always gritty with fragments of pipe tobacco, sewing in and out through the four holes of the button with firm, fluent movements of the right hand, gestures supplying the articulacy missing from her talk. She had a little yokel’s, peasant’s (he thought of it) gap between her two front teeth when she smiled that he didn’t much like, but, face ellipsed to three-quarter angle, eyes cast down in concentration with soft lips almost closed, this didn’t matter.
He said, watching her sew, ‘You’re a good girl’; and touched her.
She remade the bed every late afternoon when they left it and she dressed again before she went home. After a week there was a day when late afternoon became evening, and they were still in the bed.
‘Can’t you stay the night?’
‘My mother,’ she said.
‘Phone her. Make an excuse.’ He was a foreigner. He had been in the country five years, but he didn’t understand that people don’t usually have telephones in their houses, where she lived. She got up to dress. He didn’t want that tender body to go out in the night cold and kept hindering her with the interruption of his hands; saying nothing. Before she put on her coat, when the body had already disappeared, he spoke. ‘But you must make some arrangement.’
‘Oh my mother!’ Her face opened to fear and vacancy he could not read.
He was not entirely convinced the woman would think of her daughter as some pure and unsullied virgin. . ‘Why?’
The girl said, ‘S’e’ll be scared. S’e’ll be scared we get caught.’
‘Don’t tell her anything. Say I’m employing you.’ In this country he was working in now there were generally rooms on the roofs of flat buildings for tenants’ servants.
She said: ‘That’s what I told the caretaker.’
She ground fresh coffee beans every time he wanted a cup while he was working at night. She never attempted to cook anything until she had watched in silence while he did it the way he liked, and she learned to reproduce exactly the simple dishes he preferred. She handled his pieces of rock and stone, at first admiring the colours — ‘It’d make a beautiful ring or a necklace, ay.’ Then he showed her the striations, the formation of each piece, and explained what each was, and how, in the long life of the earth, it had been formed. He named the mineral it yielded, and what that was used for. He worked at his papers, writing, writing, every night, so it did not matter that they could not go out together to public places. On Sundays she got into his car in the basement garage and they drove to the country and picnicked away up in the Magaliesberg, where there was no one. He read or poked about among the rocks; they climbed together, to the mountain pools. He taught her to swim. She had never seen the sea. She squealed and shrieked in the water, showing the gap between her teeth, as — it crossed his mind — she must do when among her own people. Occasionally he had to go out to dinner at the houses of colleagues from the mining company; she sewed and listened to the radio in the flat and he found her in the bed, warm and already asleep, by the time he came in. He made his way into her body without speaking; she made him welcome without a word.
Once he put on evening dress for a dinner at his country’s consulate; watching him brush one or two fallen hairs from the shoulders of the dark jacket that sat so well on him, she saw a huge room, all chandeliers and people dancing some dance from a costume film — stately, hand-to-hand. She supposed he was going to fetch, in her place in the car, a partner for the evening. They never kissed when either left the flat; he said, suddenly, kindly, pausing as he picked up cigarettes and keys, ‘Don’t be lonely.’ And added, ‘Wouldn’t you like to visit your family sometimes, when I have to go out?’
He had told her he was going home to his mother in the forests and mountains of his country near the Italian border (he showed her on the map) after Christmas. She had not told him how her mother, not knowing there was any other variety, assumed he was a medical doctor, so she had talked to her about the doctor’s children and the doctor’s wife who was a very kind lady, glad to have someone who could help out in the surgery as well as the flat.
She remarked wonderingly on his ability to work until midnight or later, after a day at work. She was so tired when she came home from her cash register at the supermarket that once dinner was eaten she could scarcely keep awake. He explained in a way she could understand that while the work she did was repetitive, undemanding of any real response from her intelligence, requiring little mental or physical effort and therefore unrewarding, his work was his greatest interest, it taxed his mental capacities to their limit, exercised all his concentration, and rewarded him constantly as much with the excitement of a problem presented as with the satisfaction of a problem solved.
He said later, putting away his papers, speaking out of a silence: ‘Have you done other kinds of work?’
She said, ‘I was in a clothing factory before. Sportbeau shirts; you know? But the pay’s better in the shop.’
Of course. Being a conscientious newspaper reader in every country he lived in, he was aware that it was only recently that the retail consumer trade in this one had been allowed to employ coloureds as shop assistants; even punching a cash register represented advancement. With the continuing shortage of semi-skilled whites a girl like this might be able to edge a little farther into the white-collar category. He began to teach her to type. He was aware that her English was poor, even though, as a foreigner, in his ears her pronunciation did not offend, nor categorise her as it would in those of someone of his education whose mother tongue was English. He corrected her grammatical mistakes but missed the less obvious ones because of his own sometimes exotic English usage — she continued to use the singular pronoun ‘it’ when what was required was the plural ‘they’. Because he was a foreigner (although so clever, as she saw) she was less inhibited than she might have been by the words she knew she misspelled in her typing. While she sat at the typewriter she thought how one day she would type notes for him, as well as making coffee the way he liked it, and taking him inside her body without saying anything, and sitting (even if only through the empty streets of quiet Sundays) beside him in his car, like a wife.
On a summer night near Christmas — he had already bought and hidden a slightly showy but nevertheless good watch he thought she would like — there was a knocking at the door that brought her out of the bathroom and him to his feet, at his work-table. No one ever came to the flat at night; he had no friends intimate enough to drop in without warning. The summons was an imperious banging that did not pause and clearly would not stop until the door was opened.
She stood in the open bathroom doorway gazing at him across the passage into the living room; her bare feet and shoulders were free of a big bath-towel. She said nothing, did not even whisper. The flat seemed to shake with the strong unhurried blows.
He made as if to go to the door, at last, but now she ran and clutched him by both arms. She shook her head wildly; her lips drew back but her teeth were clenched, she didn’t speak. She pulled him into the bedroom, snatched some clothes from the clean laundry laid out on the bed and got into the wall cupboard, thrusting the key at his hand. Although his arms and calves felt weakly cold he was horrified, distastefully embarrassed at the sight of her pressed back crouching there under his suits and coat; it was horrible and ridiculous. Come out! he whispered.
No!
Come out!
She hissed: Where? Where can I go?
Never mind! Get out of there!
He put out his hand to grasp her. At bay, she said with all the force of her terrible whisper, baring the gap in her teeth: I’ll throw myself out the window.
She forced the key into his hand like the handle of a knife. He closed the door on her face and drove the key home in the lock, then dropped it among coins in his trouser pocket.
He unslotted the chain that was looped across the flat door. He turned the serrated knob of the Yale lock. The three policemen, two in plain clothes, stood there without impatience although they had been banging on the door for several minutes. The big dark one with an elaborate moustache held out in a hand wearing a plaited gilt ring some sort of identity card.
Dr von Leinsdorf said quietly, the blood coming strangely back to legs and arms, ‘What is it?’
The sergeant told him they knew there was a coloured girl in the flat. They had had information; ‘I been watching this flat three months, I know.’
‘I am alone here.’ Dr von Leinsdorf did not raise his voice.
‘I know, I know who is here. Come—’ And the sergeant and his two assistants went into the living room, the kitchen, the bathroom (the sergeant picked up a bottle of after-shave cologne, seemed to study the French label) and the bedroom. The assistants removed the clean laundry that was laid upon the bed and then turned back the bedding, carrying the sheets over to be examined by the sergeant under the lamp. They talked to one another in Afrikaans, which the Doctor did not understand.
The sergeant himself looked under the bed, and lifted the long curtains at the window. The wall cupboard was of the kind that has no knobs; he saw that it was locked and began to ask in Afrikaans, then politely changed to English, ‘Give us the key.’
Dr von Leinsdorf said, ‘I’m sorry, I left it at my office — I always lock and take my keys with me in the mornings.’
‘It’s no good, man, you better give me the key.’
He smiled a little, reasonably. ‘It’s on my office desk.’
The assistants produced a screwdriver and he watched while they inserted it where the cupboard doors met, gave it quick, firm but not forceful leverage. He heard the lock give.
She had been naked, it was true, when they knocked. But now she was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt with an appliquéd butterfly motif on one breast, and a pair of jeans. Her feet were still bare; she had managed, by feel, in the dark, to get into some of the clothing she had snatched from the bed, but she had no shoes. She had perhaps been weeping behind the cupboard door (her cheeks looked stained) but now her face was sullen and she was breathing heavily, her diaphragm contracting and expanding exaggeratedly and her breasts pushing against the cloth. It made her appear angry; it might simply have been that she was half-suffocated in the cupboard and needed oxygen. She did not look at Dr von Leinsdorf. She would not reply to the sergeant’s questions.
They were taken to the police station where they were at once separated and in turn led for examination by the district surgeon. The man’s underwear was taken away and examined, as the sheets had been, for signs of his seed. When the girl was undressed, it was discovered that beneath her jeans she was wearing a pair of men’s briefs with his name on the neatly sewn laundry tag; in her haste, she had taken the wrong garment to her hiding-place.
Now she cried, standing there before the district surgeon in a man’s underwear.
He courteously pretended not to notice. He handed briefs, jeans and T-shirt round the door, and motioned her to lie on a white-sheeted high table where he placed her legs apart, resting in stirrups, and put into her where the other had made his way so warmly a cold hard instrument that expanded wider and wider. Her thighs and knees trembled uncontrollably while the doctor looked into her and touched her deep inside with more hard instruments, carrying wafers of gauze.
When she came out of the examining room back to the charge office, Dr von Leinsdorf was not there; they must have taken him somewhere else. She spent what was left of the night in a cell, as he must be doing; but early in the morning she was released and taken home to her mother’s house in the coloured township by a white man who explained he was the clerk of the lawyer who had been engaged for her by Dr von Leinsdorf. Dr von Leinsdorf, the clerk said, had also been bailed out that morning. He did not say when, or if she would see him again.
A statement made by the girl to the police was handed in to court when she and the man appeared to meet charges of contravening the Immorality Act in a Johannesburg flat on the night of — December, 19—. I lived with the white man in his flat. He had intercourse with me sometimes. He gave me tablets to take to prevent me becoming pregnant.
Interviewed by the Sunday papers, the girl said, ‘I’m sorry for the sadness brought to my mother.’ She said she was one of nine children of a female laundry worker. She had left school in Standard Three because there was no money at home for gym clothes or a school blazer. She had worked as a machinist in a factory and a cashier in a supermarket. Dr von Leinsdorf taught her to type his notes.
Dr Franz-Josef von Leinsdorf, described as the grandson of a baroness, a cultured man engaged in international mineralogical research, said he accepted social distinctions between people but didn’t think they should be legally imposed. ‘Even in my own country it’s difficult for a person from a higher class to marry one from a lower class.’
The two accused gave no evidence. They did not greet or speak to each other in court. The Defence argued that the sergeant’s evidence that they had been living together as man and wife was hearsay. (The woman with the dachshund, the caretaker?) The magistrate acquitted them because the state failed to prove carnal intercourse had taken place on the night of — December, 19—.
The girl’s mother was quoted, with photograph, in the Sunday papers: ‘I won’t let my daughter work as a servant for a white man again.’
Two
The farm children play together when they are small; but once the white children go away to school they soon don’t play together any more, even in the holidays. Although most of the black children get some sort of schooling, they drop every year further behind the grades passed by the white children; the childish vocabulary, the child’s exploration of the adventurous possibilities of dam, koppies, mealie lands and veld — there comes a time when the white children have surpassed these with the vocabulary of boarding school and the possibilities of inter-school sports matches and the kind of adventures seen at the cinema. This usefully coincides with the age of twelve or thirteen; so that by the time early adolescence is reached, the black children are making, along with the bodily changes common to all, an easy transition to adult forms of address, beginning to call their old playmates missus and baasie — little master.
The trouble was Paulus Eysendyck did not seem to realise that Thebedi was now simply one of the crowd of farm children down at the kraal, recognisable in his sisters’ old clothes. The first Christmas holidays after he had gone to boarding school he brought home for Thebedi a painted box he had made in his woodwork class. He had to give it to her secretly because he had nothing for the other children at the kraal. And she gave him, before he went back to school, a bracelet she had made of thin brass wire and the grey-and-white beans of the castor-oil crop his father cultivated. (When they used to play together, she was the one who had taught Paulus how to make clay oxen for their toy spans.) There was a craze, even in the platteland towns like the one where he was at school, for boys to wear elephant-hair and other bracelets beside their watch-straps; his was admired, friends asked him to get similar ones for them. He said the natives made them on his father’s farm and he would try.
When he was fifteen, six feet tall, and tramping round at school dances with the girls from the ‘sister’ school in the same town; when he had learnt how to tease and flirt and fondle quite intimately these girls who were the daughters of prosperous farmers like his father; when he had even met one who, at a wedding he had attended with his parents on a nearby farm, had let him do with her in a locked storeroom what people did when they made love — when he was as far from his childhood as all this, he still brought home from a shop in town a red plastic belt and gilt hoop earrings for the black girl, Thebedi. She told her father the missus had given these to her as a reward for some work she had done — it was true she sometimes was called to help out in the farmhouse. She told the girls in the kraal that she had a sweetheart nobody knew about, far away, away on another farm, and they giggled, and teased, and admired her. There was a boy in the kraal called Njabulo who said he wished he could have bought her a belt and earrings.
When the farmer’s son was home for the holidays she wandered far from the kraal and her companions. He went for walks alone. They had not arranged this; it was an urge each followed independently. He knew it was she, from a long way off. She knew that his dog would not bark at her. Down at the dried-up river bed where five or six years ago the children had caught a leguaan one great day — a creature that combined ideally the size and ferocious aspect of the crocodile with the harmlessness of the lizard — they squatted side by side on the earth bank. He told her traveller’s tales: about school, about the punishments at school, particularly, exaggerating both their nature and his indifference to them. He told her about the town of Middleburg, which she had never seen. She had nothing to tell but she prompted with many questions, like any good listener. While he talked he twisted and tugged at the roots of white stinkwood and Cape willow trees that looped out of the eroded earth around them. It had always been a good spot for children’s games, down there hidden by the mesh of old, ant-eaten trees held in place by vigorous ones, wild asparagus bushing up between the trunks, and here and there prickly pear cactus sunken-skinned and bristly, like an old man’s face, keeping alive sapless until the next rainy season. She punctured the dry hide of a prickly pear again and again with a sharp stick while she listened. She laughed a lot at what he told her, sometimes dropping her face on her knees, sharing amusement with the cool shady earth beneath her bare feet. She put on her pair of shoes — white sandals, thickly Blanco-ed against the farm dust — when he was on the farm, but these were taken off and laid aside, at the river bed.
One summer afternoon when there was water flowing there and it was very hot she waded in as they used to do when they were children, her dress bunched modestly and tucked into the legs of her pants. The schoolgirls he went swimming with at dams or pools on neighbouring farms wore bikinis but the sight of their dazzling bellies and thighs in the sunlight had never made him feel what he felt now, when the girl came up the bank and sat beside him, the drops of water beading off her dark legs the only points of light in the earth-smelling, deep shade. They were not afraid of one another, they had known one another always; he did with her what he had done that time in the storeroom at the wedding, and this time it was so lovely, so lovely, he was surprised. . and she was surprised by it, too — he could see in her dark face that was part of the shade, with her big dark eyes, shiny as soft water, watching him attentively: as she had when they used to huddle over their teams of mud oxen, as she had when he told her about detention weekends at school.
They went to the river bed often through those summer holidays. They met just before the light went, as it does quite quickly, and each returned home with the dark — she to her mother’s hut, he to the farmhouse — in time for the evening meal. He did not tell her about school or town any more. She did not ask questions any longer. He told her, each time, when they would meet again. Once or twice it was very early in the morning; the lowing of the cows being driven to graze came to them where they lay, dividing them with unspoken recognition of the sound read in their two pairs of eyes, opening so close to each other.
He was a popular boy at school. He was in the second, then the first soccer team. The head girl of the ‘sister’ school was said to have a crush on him; he didn’t particularly like her, but there was a pretty blonde who put up her long hair into a kind of doughnut with a black ribbon round it, whom he took to see films when the schoolboys and girls had a free Saturday afternoon. He had been driving tractors and other farm vehicles since he was ten years old, and as soon as he was eighteen he got a driver’s licence and in the holidays, this last year of his school life, he took neighbours’ daughters to dances and to the drive-in cinema that had just opened twenty kilometres from the farm. His sisters were married, by then; his parents often left him in charge of the farm over the weekend while they visited the young wives and grandchildren.
When Thebedi saw the farmer and his wife drive away on a Saturday afternoon, the boot of their Mercedes filled with fresh-killed poultry and vegetables from the garden that it was part of her father’s work to tend, she knew that she must come not to the river bed but up to the house. The house was an old one, thick-walled, dark against the heat. The kitchen was its lively thoroughfare, with servants, food supplies, begging cats and dogs, pots boiling over, washing being damped for ironing, and the big deep freeze the missus had ordered from town, bearing a crocheted mat and a vase of plastic irises. But the dining room with the bulging-legged heavy table was shut up in its rich, old smell of soup and tomato sauce. The sitting-room curtains were drawn and the TV set silent. The door of the parents’ bedroom was locked and the empty rooms where the girls had slept had sheets of plastic spread over the beds. It was in one of these that she and the farmer’s son stayed together whole nights — almost: she had to get away before the house servants, who knew her, came in at dawn. There was a risk someone would discover her or traces of her presence if he took her to his own bedroom, although she had looked into it many times when she was helping out in the house and knew well, there, the row of silver cups he had won at school.
When she was eighteen and the farmer’s son nineteen and working with his father on the farm before entering a veterinary college, the young man Njabulo asked her father for her. Njabulo’s parents met with hers and the money he was to pay in place of the cows it is customary to give a prospective bride’s parents was settled upon. He had no cows to offer; he was a labourer on the Eysendyck farm, like her father. A bright youngster; old Eysendyck had taught him bricklaying and was using him for odd jobs in construction, around the place. She did not tell the farmer’s son that her parents had arranged for her to marry. She did not tell him, either, before he left for his first term at the veterinary college, that she thought she was going to have a baby. Two months after her marriage to Njabulo, she gave birth to a daughter. There was no disgrace in that; among her people it is customary for a young man to make sure, before marriage, that the chosen girl is not barren, and Njabulo had made love to her then. But the infant was very light and did not quickly grow darker as most African babies do. Already at birth there was on its head a quantity of straight, fine floss, like that which carries the seeds of certain weeds in the veld. The unfocused eyes it opened were grey flecked with yellow. Njabulo was the matt, opaque coffee-grounds colour that has always been called black; the colour of Thebedi’s legs on which beaded water looked oyster-shell blue, the same colour as Thebedi’s face, where the black eyes, with their interested gaze and clear whites, were so dominant.
Njabulo made no complaint. Out of his farm labourer’s earnings he bought from the Indian store a cellophane-windowed pack containing a pink plastic bath, six napkins, a card of safety pins, a knitted jacket, cap and bootees, a dress, and a tin of Johnson’s Baby Powder, for Thebedi’s baby.
When it was two weeks old Paulus Eysendyck arrived home from the veterinary college for the holidays. He drank a glass of fresh, still-warm milk in the childhood familiarity of his mother’s kitchen and heard her discussing with the old house-servant where they could get a reliable substitute to help out now that the girl Thebedi had had a baby. For the first time since he was a small boy he came right into the kraal. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. The men were at work in the lands. He looked about him, urgently; the women turned away, each not wanting to be the one approached to point out where Thebedi lived. Thebedi appeared, coming slowly from the hut Njabulo had built in white man’s style, with a tin chimney and a proper window with glass panes set in straight as walls made of unfired bricks would allow. She greeted him with hands brought together and a token movement representing the respectful bob with which she was accustomed to acknowledge she was in the presence of his father or mother. He lowered his head under the doorway of her home and went in. He said, ‘I want to see. Show me.’
She had taken the bundle off her back before she came out into the light to face him. She moved between the iron bedstead made up with Njabulo’s checked blankets and the small wooden table where the pink plastic bath stood among food and kitchen pots, and picked up the bundle from the snugly blanketed grocer’s box where it lay. The infant was asleep; she revealed the closed, pale, plump tiny face, with a bubble of spit at the corner of the mouth, the spidery pink hands stirring. She took off the woollen cap and the straight fine hair flew up after it in static electricity, showing gilded strands here and there. He said nothing. She was watching him as she had done when they were little, and the gang of children had trodden down a crop in their games or transgressed in some other way for which he, as the farmer’s son, the white one among them, must intercede with the farmer. She disturbed the sleeping face by scratching or tickling gently at a cheek with one finger, and slowly the eyes opened, saw nothing, were still asleep, and then, awake, no longer narrowed, looked out at them, grey with yellowish flecks, his own hazel eyes.
He struggled for a moment with a grimace of tears, anger and self-pity. She could not put out her hand to him. He said, ‘You haven’t been near the house with it?’
She shook her head.
‘Never?’
Again she shook her head.
‘Don’t take it out. Stay inside. Can’t you take it away somewhere. You must give it to someone—’
She moved to the door with him.
He said, ‘I’ll see what I will do. I don’t know.’ And then he said: ‘I feel like killing myself.’
Her eyes began to glow, to thicken with tears. For a moment there was the feeling between them that used to come when they were alone down at the river bed.
He walked out.
Two days later, when his mother and father had left the farm for the day, he appeared again. The women were away on the lands, weeding, as they were employed to do as casual labour in summer; only the very old remained, propped up on the ground outside the huts in the flies and the sun. Thebedi did not ask him in. The child had not been well; it had diarrhoea. He asked where its food was. She said, ‘The milk comes from me.’ He went into Njabulo’s house, where the child lay; she did not follow but stayed outside the door and watched without seeing an old crone who had lost her mind, talking to herself, talking to the fowls who ignored her.
She thought she heard small grunts from the hut, the kind of infant grunt that indicates a full stomach, a deep sleep. After a time, long or short she did not know, he came out and walked away with plodding stride (his father’s gait) out of sight, towards his father’s house.
The baby was not fed during the night and although she kept telling Njabulo it was sleeping, he saw for himself in the morning that it was dead. He comforted her with words and caresses. She did not cry but simply sat, staring at the door. Her hands were cold as dead chickens’ feet to his touch.
Njabulo buried the little baby where farm workers were buried, in the place in the veld the farmer had given them. Some of the mounds had been left to weather away unmarked, others were covered with stones and a few had fallen wooden crosses. He was going to make a cross but before it was finished the police came and dug up the grave and took away the dead baby: someone — one of the other labourers? their women? — had reported that the baby was almost white, that, strong and healthy, it had died suddenly after a visit by the farmer’s son. Pathological tests on the infant corpse showed intestinal damage not always consistent with death by natural causes.
Thebedi went for the first time to the country town where Paulus had been to school, to give evidence at the preparatory examination into the charge of murder brought against him. She cried hysterically in the witness box, saying yes, yes (the gilt hoop earrings swung in her ears), she saw the accused pouring liquid into the baby’s mouth. She said he had threatened to shoot her if she told anyone.
More than a year went by before, in that same town, the case was brought to trial. She came to court with a newborn baby on her back. She wore gilt hoop earrings; she was calm; she said she had not seen what the white man did in the house.
Paulus Eysendyck said he had visited the hut but had not poisoned the child.
The Defence did not contest that there had been a love relationship between the accused and the girl, or that intercourse had taken place, but submitted there was no proof that the child was the accused’s.
The judge told the accused there was strong suspicion against him but not enough proof that he had committed the crime. The court could not accept the girl’s evidence because it was clear she had committed perjury either at this trial or at the preparatory examination. There was the suggestion in the mind of the court that she might be an accomplice in the crime; but, again, insufficient proof.
The judge commended the honourable behaviour of the husband (sitting in court in a brown-and-yellow-quartered golf cap bought for Sundays) who had not rejected his wife and had ‘even provided clothes for the unfortunate infant out of his slender means’.
The verdict on the accused was ‘not guilty’.
The young white man refused to accept the congratulations of press and public and left the court with his mother’s raincoat shielding his face from photographers. His father said to the press, ‘I will try and carry on as best I can to hold up my head in the district.’
Interviewed by the Sunday papers, who spelled her name in a variety of ways, the black girl, speaking in her own language, was quoted beneath her photograph: ‘It was a thing of our childhood, we don’t see each other any more.’
A Soldier’s Embrace
The day the ceasefire was signed she was caught in a crowd. Peasant boys from Europe who had made up the colonial army and freedom fighters whose column had marched into town were staggering about together outside the barracks, not three blocks from her house in whose rooms, for ten years, she had heard the blurred parade-ground bellow of colonial troops being trained to kill and be killed.
The men weren’t drunk. They linked and swayed across the street; because all that had come to a stop, everything had to come to a stop: they surrounded cars, bicycles, vans, nannies with children, women with loaves of bread or basins of mangoes on their heads, a road gang with picks and shovels, a Coca-Cola truck, an old man with a barrow who bought bottles and bones. They were grinning and laughing in amazement. That it could be: there they were, bumping into each other’s bodies in joy, looking into each other’s rough faces, all eyes crescent-shaped, brimming greeting. The words were in languages not mutually comprehensible, but the cries were new, a whooping and crowing all understood. She was bumped and jostled and she let go, stopped trying to move in any self-determined direction. There were two soldiers in front of her, blocking her off by their clumsy embrace (how do you do it, how do you do what you’ve never done before) and the embrace opened like a door and took her in — a pink hand with bitten nails grasping her right arm, a black hand with a big-dialled watch and thong bracelet pulling at her left elbow. Their three heads collided gaily, musk of sweat and tang of strong sweet soap clapped a mask to her nose and mouth. They all gasped with delicious shock. They were saying things to each other. She put up an arm round each neck, the rough pile of an army haircut on one side, the soft negro hair on the other, and kissed them both on the cheek. The embrace broke. The crowd wove her away behind backs, arms, jogging heads; she was returned to and took up the will of her direction again — she was walking home from the post office, where she had just sent a telegram to relatives abroad: ALL CALM DON’T WORRY.
The lawyer came back early from his offices because the courts were not sitting although the official celebration holiday was not until next day. He described to his wife the rally before the Town Hall, which he had watched from the office-building balcony. One of the guerrilla leaders (not the most important; he on whose head the biggest price had been laid would not venture so soon and deep into the territory so newly won) had spoken for two hours from the balcony of the Town Hall. ‘Brilliant. Their jaws dropped. Brilliant. They’ve never heard anything on that level: precise, reasoned — none of them would ever have believed it possible, out of the bush. You should have seen de Poorteer’s face. He’d like to be able to get up and open his mouth like that. And be listened to like that. .’ The Governor’s handicap did not even bring the sympathy accorded to a stammer; he paused and gulped between words. The blacks had always used a portmanteau name for him that meant the-crane-who-is-trying-to-swallow-the-bullfrog.
One of the members of the black underground organisation that could now come out in brass-band support of the freedom fighters had recognised the lawyer across from the official balcony and given him the freedom fighters’ salute. The lawyer joked about it, miming, full of pride. ‘You should have been there — should have seen him, up there in the official party. I told you — really — you ought to have come to town with me this morning.’
‘And what did you do?’ She wanted to assemble all details.
‘Oh I gave the salute in return, chaps in the street saluted me. . everybody was doing it. It was marvellous. And the police standing by; just to think, last month — only last week — you’d have been arrested.’
‘Like thumbing your nose at them,’ she said, smiling.
‘Did anything go on around here?’
‘Muchanga was afraid to go out all day. He wouldn’t even run up to the post office for me!’ Their servant had come to them many years ago, from service in the house of her father, a colonial official in the Treasury.
‘But there was no excitement?’
She told him: ‘The soldiers and some freedom fighters mingled outside the barracks. I got caught for a minute or two. They were dancing about; you couldn’t get through. All very good-natured. — Oh, I sent the cable.’
An accolade, one side a white cheek, the other a black. The white one she kissed on the left cheek, the black one on the right cheek, as if these were two sides of one face.
That vision, version, was like a poster; the sort of thing that was soon peeling off dirty shopfronts and bus shelters while the months of wrangling talks preliminary to the takeover by the black government went by.
To begin with, the cheek was not white but pale or rather sallow, the poor boy’s pallor of winter in Europe (that draft must have only just arrived and not yet seen service) with homesick pimples sliced off by the discipline of an army razor. And the cheek was not black but opaque peat-dark, waxed with sweat round the plump contours of the nostril. As if she could return to the moment again, she saw what she had not consciously noted: there had been a narrow pink strip in the darkness near the ear, the sort of tender stripe of healed flesh revealed when a scab is nicked off a little before it is ripe. The scab must have come away that morning: the young man picked at it in the troop carrier or truck (whatever it was the freedom fighters had; the colony had been told for years that they were supplied by the Chinese and Russians indiscriminately) on the way to enter the capital in triumph.
According to newspaper reports, the day would have ended for the two young soldiers in drunkenness and whoring. She was, apparently, not yet too old to belong to the soldier’s embrace of all that a landmine in the bush might have exploded for ever. That was one version of the incident. Another: the opportunity taken by a woman not young enough to be clasped in the arms of the one who (same newspaper, while the war was on, expressing the fears of the colonists for their women) would be expected to rape her.
She considered this version.
She had not kissed on the mouth, she had not sought anonymous lips and tongues in the licence of festival. Yet she had kissed. Watching herself again, she knew that. She had — God knows why — kissed them on either cheek, his left, his right. It was deliberate, if a swift impulse: she had distinctly made the move.
She did not tell what happened not because her husband would suspect licence in her, but because he would see her — born and brought up in the country as the daughter of an enlightened white colonial official, married to a white liberal lawyer well known for his defence of blacks in political trials — as giving free expression to liberal principles.
She had not told, she did not know what had happened.
She thought of a time long ago when a school camp had gone to the sea and immediately on arrival everyone had run down to the beach from the train, tripping and tearing over sand dunes of wild fig, aghast with ecstatic shock at the meeting with the water.
De Poorteer was recalled and the lawyer remarked to one of their black friends, ‘The crane has choked on the bullfrog. I hear that’s what they’re saying in the Quarter.’
The priest who came from the black slum that had always been known simply by that anonymous term did not respond with any sort of glee. His reserve implied it was easy to celebrate; there were people who ‘shouted freedom too loud all of a sudden’.
The lawyer and his wife understood: Father Mulumbua was one who had shouted freedom when it was dangerous to do so, and gone to prison several times for it, while certain people, now on the Interim Council set up to run the country until the new government took over, had kept silent. He named a few, but reluctantly. Enough to confirm their own suspicions — men who perhaps had made some deal with the colonial power to place its interests first, no matter what sort of government might emerge from the new constitution? Yet when the couple plunged into discussion their friend left them talking to each other while he drank his beer and gazed, frowning as if at a headache or because the sunset light hurt his eyes behind his spectacles, round her huge-leaved tropical plants that bowered the terrace in cool humidity.
They had always been rather proud of their friendship with him, this man in a cassock who wore a clenched fist carved of local ebony as well as a silver cross round his neck. His black face was habitually stern — a high seriousness balanced by sudden splurting laughter when they used to tease him over the fist — but never inattentively ill at ease.
‘What was the matter?’ She answered herself; ‘I had the feeling he didn’t want to come here.’ She was using a paper handkerchief dipped in gin to wipe greenfly off the back of a pale new leaf that had shaken itself from its folds like a cut-out paper lantern.
‘Good lord, he’s been here hundreds of times.’
‘Before, yes.’
What things were they saying?
With the shouting in the street and the swaying of the crowd, the sweet powerful presence that confused the senses so that sound, sight, stink (sweat, cheap soap) ran into one tremendous sensation, she could not make out words that came so easily.
Not even what she herself must have said.
A few wealthy white men who had been boastful in their support of the colonial war and knew they would be marked down by the blacks as arch exploiters, left at once. Good riddance, as the lawyer and his wife remarked. Many ordinary white people who had lived contentedly, without questioning its actions, under the colonial government, now expressed an enthusiastic intention to help build a nation, as the newspapers put it. The lawyer’s wife’s neighbourhood butcher was one. ‘I don’t mind blacks.’ He was expansive with her, in his shop that he had occupied for twelve years on a licence available only to white people. ‘Makes no difference to me who you are so long as you’re honest.’ Next to a chart showing a beast mapped according to the cuts of meat it provided, he had hung a picture of the most important leader of the freedom fighters, expected to be first President. People like the butcher turned out with their babies clutching pennants when the leader drove through the town from the airport.
There were incidents (newspaper euphemism again) in the Quarter. It was to be expected. Political factions, tribally based, who had not fought the war, wanted to share power with the freedom fighters’ party. Muchanga no longer went down to the Quarter on his day off. His friends came to see him and sat privately on their hunkers near the garden compost heap. The ugly mansions of the rich who had fled stood empty on the bluff above the sea, but it was said they would make money out of them yet — they would be bought as ambassadorial residences when independence came, and with it many black and yellow diplomats. Zealots who claimed they belonged to the party burned shops and houses of the poorer whites who lived, as the lawyer said, ‘in the inevitable echelon of colonial society’, closest to the Quarter. A house in the lawyer’s street was noticed by his wife to be accommodating what was certainly one of those families, in the outhouses; green nylon curtains had appeared at the garage window, she reported. The suburb was pleasantly overgrown and well-to-do; no one rich, just white professional people and professors from the university. The barracks was empty now, except for an old man with a stump and a police uniform stripped of insignia, a friend of Muchanga, it turned out, who sat on a beer crate at the gates. He had lost his job as night watchman when one of the rich people went away, and was glad to have work.
The street had been perfectly quiet; except for that first day.
The fingernails she sometimes still saw clearly were bitten down until embedded in a thin line of dirt all round, in the pink blunt fingers. The thumb and thick fingertips were turned back coarsely even while grasping her. Such hands had never been allowed to take possession. They were permanently raw, so young, from unloading coal, digging potatoes from the frozen northern hemisphere, washing hotel dishes. He had not been killed, and now that day of the ceasefire was over he would be delivered back across the sea to the docks, the stony farm, the scullery of the grand hotel. He would have to do anything he could get. There was unemployment in Europe where he had returned, the army didn’t need all the young men any more.
A great friend of the lawyer and his wife, Chipande, was coming home from exile. They heard over the radio he was expected, accompanying the future President as confidential secretary, and they waited to hear from him.
The lawyer put up his feet on the empty chair where the priest had sat, shifting it to a comfortable position by hooking his toes, free in sandals, through the slats. ‘Imagine, Chipande!’ Chipande had been almost a protégé — but they didn’t like the term, it smacked of patronage. Tall, cocky, casual Chipande, a boy from the slummiest part of the Quarter, was recommended by the White Fathers’ Mission (was it by Father Mulumbua himself? — the lawyer thought so, his wife was not sure they remembered correctly). A bright kid who wanted to be articled to a lawyer. That was asking a lot, in those days — nine years ago. He never finished his apprenticeship because while he and his employer were soon close friends, and the kid picked up political theories from the books in the house he made free of, he became so involved in politics that he had to skip the country one jump ahead of a detention order signed by the crane-who-was-trying-to-swallow-the-bullfrog.
After two weeks, the lawyer phoned the offices the guerrilla-movement-become-party had set up openly in the town but apparently Chipande had an office in the former colonial secretariat. There he had a secretary of his own; he wasn’t easy to reach. The lawyer left a message. The lawyer and his wife saw from the newspaper pictures he hadn’t changed much: he had a beard and had adopted the Muslim cap favoured by political circles in exile on the East Coast.
He did come to the house eventually. He had the distracted, insistent friendliness of one who has no time to re-establish intimacy; it must be taken as read. And it must not be displayed. When he remarked on a shortage of accommodation for exiles now become officials, and the lawyer said the house was far too big for two people, he was welcome to move in and regard a self-contained part of it as his private living quarters, he did not answer but went on talking generalities.
The lawyer’s wife mentioned Father Mulumbua, whom they had not seen since just after the ceasefire. The lawyer added, ‘There’s obviously some sort of big struggle going on, he’s fighting for his political life there in the Quarter.’
‘Again,’ she said, drawing them into a reminder of what had only just become their past.
But Chipande was restlessly following with his gaze the movements of old Muchanga, dragging the hose from plant to plant, careless of the spray; ‘You remember who this is, Muchanga?’ she had said when the visitor arrived, yet although the old man had given, in their own language, the sort of respectful greeting even an elder gives a young man whose clothes and bearing denote rank and authority, he was not in any way overwhelmed nor enthusiastic — perhaps he secretly supported one of the rival factions?
The lawyer spoke of the latest whites to leave the country — people who had got themselves quickly involved in the sort of currency swindle that draws more outrage than any other kind of crime, in a new state fearing the flight of capital: ‘Let them go, let them go. Good riddance.’ And he turned to talk of other things — there were so many more important questions to occupy the attention of the three old friends.
But Chipande couldn’t stay. Chipande could not stay for supper; his beautiful long velvety black hands with their pale lining (as she thought of the palms) hung impatiently between his knees while he sat forward in the chair, explaining, adamant against persuasion. He should not have been there, even now; he had official business waiting, sometimes he drafted correspondence until one or two in the morning. The lawyer remarked how there hadn’t been a proper chance to talk; he wanted to discuss those fellows in the Interim Council Mulumbua was so warily distrustful of — what did Chipande know?
Chipande, already on his feet, said something dismissing and very slightly disparaging, not about the Council members but of Mulumbua — a reference to his connection with the Jesuit missionaries as an influence that ‘comes through’. ‘But I must make a note to see him sometime.’
It seemed that even black men who presented a threat to the party could be discussed only among black men themselves, now. Chipande put an arm round each of his friends as for the brief official moment of a photograph, left them; he who used to sprawl on the couch arguing half the night before dossing down in the lawyer’s pyjamas. ‘As soon as I’m settled I’ll contact you. You’ll be around, ay?’
‘Oh we’ll be around.’ The lawyer laughed, referring, for his part, to those who were no longer. ‘Glad to see you’re not driving a Mercedes!’ he called with reassured affection at the sight of Chipande getting into a modest car. How many times, in the old days, had they agreed on the necessity for African leaders to live simply when they came to power!
On the terrace to which he turned back, Muchanga was doing something extraordinary — wetting a dirty rag with Gilbey’s. It was supposed to be his day off, anyway; why was he messing about with the plants when one wanted peace to talk undisturbed?
‘Is those thing again, those thing is killing the leaves.’
‘For heaven’s sake, he could use methylated for that! Any kind of alcohol will do! Why don’t you get him some?’
There were shortages of one kind and another in the country, and gin happened to be something in short supply.
Whatever the hand had done in the bush had not coarsened it. It, too, was suede-black, and elegant. The pale lining was hidden against her own skin where the hand grasped her left elbow. Strangely, black does not show toil — she remarked this as one remarks the quality of a fabric. The hand was not as long but as distinguished by beauty as Chipande’s. The watch a fine piece of equipment for a fighter. There was something next to it, in fact looped over the strap by the angle of the wrist as the hand grasped. A bit of thong with a few beads knotted where it was joined as a bracelet. Or amulet. Their babies wore such things; often their first and only garment. Grandmothers or mothers attached it as protection. It had worked; he was alive at ceasefire. Some had been too deep in the bush to know, and had been killed after the fighting was over. He had pumped his head wildly and laughingly at whatever it was she — they — had been babbling.
The lawyer had more free time than he’d ever remembered. So many of his clients had left; he was deputed to collect their rents and pay their taxes for them, in the hope that their property wasn’t going to be confiscated — there had been alarmist rumours among such people since the day of the ceasefire. But without the rich whites there was little litigation over possessions, whether in the form of the children of dissolved marriages or the houses and cars claimed by divorced wives. The Africans had their own ways of resolving such redistribution of goods. And a gathering of elders under a tree was sufficient to settle a dispute over boundaries or argue for and against the guilt of a woman accused of adultery. He had had a message, in a roundabout way, that he might be asked to be consultant on constitutional law to the party, but nothing seemed to come of it. He took home with him the proposals for the draft constitution he had managed to get hold of. He spent whole afternoons in his study making notes for counter- or improved proposals he thought he would send to Chipande or one of the other people he knew in high positions: every time he glanced up, there through his open windows was Muchanga’s little company at the bottom of the garden. Once, when he saw they had straggled off, he wandered down himself to clear his head (he got drowsy, as he never did when he used to work twelve hours a day at the office). They ate dried shrimps, from the market: that’s what they were doing! The ground was full of bitten-off heads and black eyes on stalks.
His wife smiled. ‘They bring them. Muchanga won’t go near the market since the riot.’
‘It’s ridiculous. Who’s going to harm him?’
There was even a suggestion that the lawyer might apply for a professorship at the university. The chair of the Faculty of Law was vacant, since the students had demanded the expulsion of certain professors engaged during the colonial regime — in particular of the fuddy-duddy (good riddance) who had gathered dust in the Law chair, and the quite decent young man (pity about him) who had had Political Science. But what professor of Political Science could expect to survive both a colonial regime and the revolutionary regime that defeated it? The lawyer and his wife decided that since he might still be appointed in some consultative capacity to the new government it would be better to keep out of the university context, where the students were shouting for Africanisation, and even an appointee with his credentials as a fighter of legal battles for blacks against the colonial regime in the past might not escape their ire.
Newspapers sent by friends from over the border gave statistics for the number of what they termed ‘refugees’ who were entering the neighbouring country. The papers from outside also featured sensationally the inevitable mistakes and misunderstandings, in a new administration, that led to several foreign businessmen being held for investigation by the new regime. For the last fifteen years of colonial rule, Gulf had been drilling for oil in the territory, and just as inevitably it was certain that all sorts of questionable people, from the point of view of the regime’s determination not to be exploited preferentially, below the open market for the highest bidder in ideological as well as economic terms, would try to gain concessions.
His wife said, ‘The butcher’s gone.’
He was home, reading at his desk; he could spend the day more usefully there than at the office, most of the time. She had left after breakfast with her fisherman’s basket that she liked to use for shopping, she wasn’t away twenty minutes. ‘You mean the shop’s closed?’ There was nothing in the basket. She must have turned and come straight home.
‘Gone. It’s empty. He’s cleared out over the weekend.’
She sat down suddenly on the edge of the desk; and after a moment of silence, both laughed shortly, a strange, secret, complicit laugh.
‘Why, do you think?’
‘Can’t say. He certainly charged, if you wanted a decent cut. But meat’s so hard to get, now; I thought it was worth it — justified.’
The lawyer raised his eyebrows and pulled down his mouth: ‘Exactly.’ They understood; the man probably knew he was marked to run into trouble for profiteering — he must have been paying through the nose for his supplies on the black market, anyway, didn’t have much choice.
Shops were being looted by the unemployed and loafers (there had always been a lot of unemployed hanging around for the pickings of the town) who felt the new regime should entitle them to take what they dared not before. Radio and television shops were the most favoured objective for gangs who adopted the freedom fighters’ slogans. Transistor radios were the portable luxuries of street life; the new regime issued solemn warnings, over those same radios, that looting and violence would be firmly dealt with but it was difficult for the police to be everywhere at once. Sometimes their actions became street battles, since the struggle with the looters changed character as supporters of the party’s rival political factions joined in with the thieves against the police. It was necessary to be ready to reverse direction, quickly turning down a side street in detour if one encountered such disturbances while driving around town. There were bodies sometimes; both husband and wife had been fortunate enough not to see any close up, so far. A company of the freedom fighters’ army was brought down from the north and installed in the barracks to supplement the police force; they patrolled the Quarter, mainly. Muchanga’s friend kept his job as gatekeeper although there were armed sentries on guard: the lawyer’s wife found that a light touch to mention in letters to relatives in Europe.
‘Where’ll you go now?’
She slid off the desk and picked up her basket. ‘Supermarket, I suppose. Or turn vegetarian.’ He knew that she left the room quickly, smiling, because she didn’t want him to suggest Muchanga ought to be sent to look for fish in the markets along the wharf in the Quarter. Muchanga was being allowed to indulge in all manner of eccentric refusals; for no reason, unless out of some curious sentiment about her father?
She avoided walking past the barracks because of the machine guns the young sentries had in place of rifles. Rifles pointed into the air but machine guns pointed to the street at the level of different parts of people’s bodies, short and tall, the backsides of babies slung on mothers’ backs, the round heads of children, her fisherman’s basket — she knew she was getting like the others: what she felt was afraid. She wondered what the butcher and his wife had said to each other. Because he was at least one whom she had known. He had sold the meat she had bought that these women and their babies passing her in the street didn’t have the money to buy.
It was something quite unexpected and outside their own efforts that decided it. A friend over the border telephoned and offered a place in a lawyers’ firm of highest repute there, and some prestige in the world at large, since the team had defended individuals fighting for freedom of the press and militant churchmen upholding freedom of conscience on political issues. A telephone call; as simple as that. The friend said (and the lawyer did not repeat this even to his wife) they would be proud to have a man of his courage and convictions in the firm. He could be satisfied he would be able to uphold the liberal principles everyone knew he had always stood for; there were many whites, in that country still ruled by a white minority, who deplored the injustices under which their black population suffered, etc., and believed you couldn’t ignore the need for peaceful change, etc.
His offices presented no problem; something called Africa Seabeds (Formosan Chinese who had gained a concession to ship seaweed and dried shrimps in exchange for rice) took over the lease and the typists. The senior clerks and the current articled clerk (the lawyer had always given a chance to young blacks, long before other people had come round to it — it wasn’t only the secretary to the President who owed his start to him) he managed to get employed by the new Trades Union Council; he still knew a few blacks who remembered the times he had acted for black workers in disputes with the colonial government. The house would just have to stand empty, for the time being. It wasn’t imposing enough to attract an embassy but maybe it would do for a Chargé d’Affaires — it was left in the hands of a half-caste letting agent who was likely to stay put: only whites were allowed in, at the country over the border. Getting money out was going to be much more difficult than disposing of the house. The lawyer would have to keep coming back, so long as this remained practicable, hoping to find a loophole in exchange control regulations.
She was deputed to engage the movers. In their innocence, they had thought it as easy as that! Every large vehicle, let alone a pantechnicon, was commandeered for months ahead. She had no choice but to grease a palm, although it went against her principles, it was condoning a practice they believed a young black state must stamp out before corruption took hold. He would take his entire legal library, for a start; that was the most important possession, to him. Neither was particularly attached to furniture. She did not know what there was she felt she really could not do without. Except the plants. And that was out of the question. She could not even mention it. She did not want to leave her towering plants, mostly natives of South America and not Africa, she supposed, whose aerial tubes pushed along the terrace brick erect tips extending hourly in the growth of the rainy season, whose great leaves turned shields to the spatter of Muchanga’s hose glancing off in a shower of harmless arrows, whose two-hand-span trunks were smooth and grooved in one sculptural sweep down their length, or carved by the drop of each dead leaf-stem with concave medallions marking the place and building a pattern at once bold and exquisite. Such things would not travel; they were too big to give away.
The evening she was beginning to pack the books, the telephone rang in the study. Chipande — and he called her by her name, urgently, commandingly — ‘What is this all about? Is it true, what I hear? Let me just talk to him—’
‘Our friend,’ she said, making a long arm, receiver at the end of it, towards her husband.
‘But you can’t leave!’ Chipande shouted down the phone. ‘You can’t go! I’m coming round. Now.’
She went on packing the legal books while Chipande and her husband were shut up together in the living room.
‘He cried. You know, he actually cried.’ Her husband stood in the doorway, alone.
‘I know — that’s what I’ve always liked so much about them, whatever they do. They feel.’
The lawyer made a face: there it is, it happened; hard to believe.
‘Rushing in here, after nearly a year! I said, but we haven’t seen you, all this time. . he took no notice. Suddenly he starts pressing me to take the university job, raising all sorts of objections, why not this. . that. And then he really wept, for a moment.’
They got on with packing books like builder and mate deftly handling and catching bricks.
And the morning they were to leave it was all done; twenty-one years of life in that house gone quite easily into one pantechnicon. They were quiet with each other, perhaps out of apprehension of the tedious search of their possessions that would take place at the border; it was said that if you struck over-conscientious or officious freedom fighter patrols they would even make you unload a piano, a refrigerator or washing machine. She had bought Muchanga a hawker’s licence, a hand-cart, and stocks of small commodities. Now that many small shops owned by white shopkeepers had disappeared, there was an opportunity for humble itinerant black traders. Muchanga had lost his fear of the town. He was proud of what she had done for him and she knew he saw himself as a rich merchant; this was the only sort of freedom he understood, after so many years as a servant. But she also knew, and the lawyer sitting beside her in the car knew she knew, that the shortages of the goods Muchanga could sell from his cart, the sugar and soap and matches and pomade and sunglasses, would soon put him out of business. He promised to come back to the house and look after the plants every week; and he stood waving, as he had done every year when they set off on holiday. She did not know what to call out to him as they drove away. The right words would not come again; whatever they were, she left them behind.
For Dear Life
Swaying along in the howdah of her belly I make procession up steep streets. The drumming of her heart exalts me; I do not know the multitudes. With my thumb-hookah I pass among them unseen and unseeing behind the dancing scarlet brocades of her blood. From time to time I am lurched to rest. Habituation to the motion causes me to move: as if the hidden presence raps testy impatience. They place their hands to read a sign from where there is no cognition of their existence.
A wall-eyed twenty-five-year-old Arab with a knitted cap jumps back into the trench in a cheerful bound. Others clamber stockily, with the dazed open mouth of labourers and the scowl of sweat. Their work clothes are cast-off pinstripe pants brought in rumpled bundles from Tunis and Algiers. Closely modelled to their heads and growing low, straight across their foreheads, their kind of hair is a foreign headgear by which they see themselves known even if they do not speak their soft, guttural, prophet’s tongue. One has gold in his mouth, the family fortune crammed into crooked teeth. Another is emaciated as a beggar or wise man, big feet in earth-sculpted boots the only horizontal as his arms fly up with the pick. Eyes starred like clowns’ with floury dust look up from the ditch just at the level where the distortion of the female body lifts a tent of skirt to show the female thighs. She’s a young one. Mending roads and laying sewage pipes through the French resort over more than a year, they have seen her walking with the man who wanted her, in pursuit, hunting her even while he and she walked side by side, with his gilt-buckled waist, his handbag manacled to his wrist, his snakeskin-snug shirt showing sportsman shoulders, his satyr’s curly red hair, thin on top, creeping down the back of his neck and breast-bone, glinting after her along with his eyes and smile.
Like the other women in this country, she was not for them. She did not nod at them then and the mouth parted now as she’s approaching is not the beginning of the greeting she has for the postman or any village crone. She’s simply panting under her eight-month burden: in there, another foreman, overseer, patron like the one who will come by any minute to make sure they are not idling.
Here — feel it?
Concentrate on the drained cappuccino cups spittled with chocolate-flecked foam. The boom of the juke box someone’s set in motion seems to be preventing. . as if it were a matter of hearing, through the palm!
Give me your hand—
A small-change clink as silver bracelets on the older woman’s wrist move with volition surrendered.
There. There. Lower down, that’s it — now you must be able to.
But was it not always something impossible to detect from outside. . So long ago: tapping, plucking (yes, that was much more the way it was) — plucking at one’s flesh from within as fingers fidget pleating cloth. If I were the one, now, you were inside, I should feel you. You would be unmistakable. You would be unlike the children he had or the children I had. You are a girl because he had no girl. His daughter with his stiff-legged walk (heron-legs, I used to say) and my bottom (bobtail, he used to say) and his oval nails and fine white skin behind the ears. You can crack your knee and ankle joints. Tea leaves tinsel the grey of your irises. Like him, like me. You have our face; when we used to see ourselves as a couple in the mirror of a lift that was carrying us clandestinely.
The doctor says they suck their thumbs in the womb. Sucks its thumb!
As if the doctor were a colleague the young husband confirms with a nod, gazing assessingly at the majestic mound that rises out of the level of water in the bath. Like many people without a profession he has a magazine-article amateur’s claim to knowledge in many.
My boy’s been shown what life is all about from when he wasn’t more than an infant in arms. No sweets, look at the state my teeth are in. You’ll finish school whatever happens. That’s all very fine, earning enough to buy yourself a third-hand Porsche ‘C’ ’59 at nineteen but at thirty-four you find yourself selling TV sets on commission, during a recession. No running around the summer streets, twelve years old and ought to be asleep at night. No chasing girls, catching them, squeezing their little breasts on the dark porch of the old church before it was pulled down. Steer clear of married women who keep you in bed, spoilt bitches, while their husbands get on in the world and buy the Panther Westwinds de Ville, modelled after the Bugatti Royal, best car ever made, Onassis had one, and Purdey guns, gold cigarette lighters, camera equipment, boats with every comfort (bar, sauna) — you could even live on board, for instance if you couldn’t get a rent-controlled flat. Great lover, but the silk shirts and real kid boots from Italy don’t last long when you’re hanging around bars looking for work and all you get offered is the dirty jobs the Arabs are here to do. No smoking, either; bad enough that your mother and I mess up our lungs, 20 per cent reduction of life expectancy, they say. You’ll have more sense or I’ll know why. You’ll be lucky. Women love red hair, a well-known sign of virility. You’ll fly first class with free champagne. You’ll fill in forms: ‘Company Director’. You’ll do as I say. If you aren’t given Coca-Cola to taste, you won’t miss it.
Feel — my belly’s so hard. I’m like a rock.
She does not know the name, but she is thinking of a geode halved, in a shop window; a cave of crystals, a star cracked open. In there, curved as a bean, the wonder of her body blindly gazes.
How long to go?
It is an old woman’s form of greeting. Her stiff dog stands with his front paws on the kitchen window and watches the heads below that come into view and pass. He lifts his nose slightly, as at a recollection, when a boy clatters from the baker’s to the hotel with a headdress of loaves. Beside the dog the crone looks down at a dome under which sandalled feet show, like the cardboard feet of one of those anthropomorphic balloon toys, and above which a bright, smooth face smiles up at her with the kindly patronage of the young.
It can’t be long: for her. Every day, when she and the dog manage to get as far as the front step to sit down in a series of very slow movements in the sun at noon, you can count the breaths left.
He will stand behind a desk in his Immigration Officer’s uniform and stamp how long they can stay and when they must go. He will drive up in his big car that rises and sinks on its soft springs in the dust as a bird settles upon water, and not bother to get out, giving orders through the window to the one among them who understands the language a little better than the others.
No one will know who you are; not even you.
Only we, who are forgetting each other, will know who you never were.
Even possibilities pass.
I don’t cry and I don’t bleed.
My daughter wanted for nothing. I bought a Hammond organ on instalments because she’s so musical. (Since she was a little thing.) She could have gone to a good convent although we’re not religious. Right, she wanted a car, I got her a car and she drove around without a licence: I warned her. The boys were crazy for her; her mother talked to her. She looked like eighteen at fourteen with that figure and that beautiful curly red hair. You don’t see anything like it, usually it all comes out of a bottle. I won’t have her making herself cheap. She could go to study at the university or take up beauty culture. There’s money in that. If anyone lays a finger on her—
The emaciated ditch-digger weeps sometimes as he digs. It is on Mondays that the sight occurs among them, when he is suffering from the drink their religion forbids. His brother has committed suicide in Marseilles knowing the sickness of the genitals he had was punishment for offending Allah by going with a white whore.
It is summer round the empty house in the fields the family left two generations ago. They can’t go back, except to picnic like tourists who bring their cheese and wine and ashamed little caches of toilet paper on to anyone’s property. There’s no electricity and there’s water only in a well. They spray the old vines once a year, and once a year come for the grapes. Cows from neighbouring farms stare from the grass with their calves.
I lean in the solid shadow of the mother’s body, against her flanks.
To those who have already lived, an empty house is unimaginable. They build it only out of what has been placed by the hands of man: from the bricks that enclose space to the rugs put down and curtains drawn there, once — how can there be nobody? The ornamental wooden valance that is breaking away from the eaves is the blows of the grandfather who nailed it. The Virgin with a cake-doily gilt lace halo under glass is the bedroom faith of a grandmother. An old newspaper is the eyes of one who read it.
When I vacate this first place I’ll leave behind the place that was all places. I’ll leave behind nothing. There will be nothing — for I’m taking all with me, I’m taking it on. . all, all, everything. In my swollen sex, obscene for my size, in my newly pressed-into-shape cranium containing the seed pearls of my brain cells, in my minute hands creased as bank notes or immigration papers. Head down, shoving, driven, meeting violence with violence, casting myself out like Jonah from the heaving host whale, bursting lungs that haven’t breathed yet, swimming for dear life. .
I don’t see them covering their eyes in secret, I don’t hear them wailing: it will all be gone through again!
Behind me, the torn membranes of my moorings.
Hauled from the deep where there is no light for sight I find eyes. The ancient Mediterranean sun smithereens against me like a joyous glass dashed to the ground.
Ta mère fit un pet foireux et tu naquis de sa colique.
I begin again.
Oral History
There’s always been one house like a white man’s house in the village of Dilolo. Built of brick with a roof that bounced signals from the sun. You could see it through the mopane trees as you did the flash of paraffin tins the women carried on their heads, bringing water from the river. The rest of the village was built of river mud, grey, shaped by the hollows of hands, with reed thatch and poles of mopane from which the leaves had been ripped like fish scales.
It was the chief’s house. Some chiefs have a car as well but this was not an important chief, the clan is too small for that, and he had the usual stipend from the government. If they had given him a car he would have had no use for it. There is no road: the army patrol Land Rovers come upon the people’s cattle, startled as buck, in the mopane scrub. The village has been there a long time. The chief’s grandfather was the clan’s grandfathers’ chief, and his name is the same as that of the chief who waved his warriors to down assegais and took the first Bible from a Scottish Mission Board white man. Seek and ye shall find, the missionaries said.
The villagers in those parts don’t look up, any more, when the sting-shaped army planes fly over twice a day. Only fish-eagles are disturbed, take off, screaming, keen swerving heads lifting into their invaded domain of sky. The men who have been away to work on the mines can read, but there are no newspapers. The people hear over the radio the government’s count of how many army trucks have been blown up, how many white soldiers are going to be buried with full military honours — something that is apparently white people’s way with their dead.
The chief had a radio, and he could read. He read to the headmen the letter from the government saying that anyone hiding or giving food and water to those who were fighting against the government’s army would be put in prison. He read another letter from the government saying that to protect the village from these men who went over the border and came back with guns to kill people and burn huts, anybody who walked in the bush after dark would be shot. Some of the young men who, going courting or drinking to the next village, might have been in danger, were no longer at home in their fathers’ care anyway. The young go away: once it was to the mines, now — the radio said — it was over the border to learn how to fight. Sons walked out of the clearing of mud huts; past the chief’s house; past the children playing with the models of police patrol Land Rovers made out of twisted wire. The children called out, ‘Where are you going?’ The young men didn’t answer and they hadn’t come back.
There was a church of mopane and mud with a mopane flagpole to fly a white flag when somebody died; the funeral service was more or less the same protestant one the missionaries brought from Scotland and it was combined with older rituals to entrust the newly dead to the ancestors. Ululating women with whitened faces sent them on their way to the missionaries’ last judgement. The children were baptised with names chosen by portent in consultation between the mother and an old man who read immutable fate in the fall of small bones cast like dice from a horn cup. On all occasions and most Saturday nights there was a beer-drink, which the chief attended. An upright chair from his house was brought out for him although everyone else squatted comfortably on the sand, and he was offered the first taste from an old decorated gourd dipper (other people drank from baked-bean or pilchard tins) — it is the way of people of the village.
It is also the way of the tribe to which the clan belongs and the subcontinent to which the tribe belongs, from Matadi in the west to Mombasa in the east, from Entebbe in the north to Empangeni in the south, that everyone is welcome at a beer-drink. No traveller or passer-by, poling down the river in his pirogue, leaving the snake-skin trail of his bicycle wheels through the sand, betraying his approach — if the dogs are sleeping by the cooking fires and the children have left their homemade highways — only by the brittle fragmentation of the dead leaves as he comes unseen through miles of mopane, is a presence to be questioned. Everyone for a long way round on both sides of the border near Dilolo has a black skin, speaks the same language and shares the custom of hospitality. Before the government started to shoot people at night to stop more young men leaving when no one was awake to ask, ‘Where are you going?’ people thought nothing of walking ten miles from one village to another for a beer-drink.
But unfamiliar faces have become unusual. If the firelight caught such a face, it backed into darkness. No one remarked the face. Not even the smallest child who never took its eyes off it, crouching down among the knees of men with soft, little boy’s lips held in wonderingly over teeth as if an invisible grown-up hand were clamped there. The young girls giggled and flirted from the background, as usual. The older men didn’t ask for news of relatives or friends outside the village. The chief seemed not to see one face or faces in distinction from any other. His eyes came to rest instead on some of the older men. He gazed and they felt it.
Coming out of the back door of his brick house with its polished concrete steps, early in the morning, he hailed one of them. The man was passing with his hobbling cows and steadily bleating goats; stopped, with the turn of one who will continue on his way in a moment almost without breaking step. But the summons was for him. The chief wore a frayed collarless shirt and old trousers, like the man, but he was never barefoot. In the hand with a big steel watch on the wrist, he carried his thick-framed spectacles, and drew down his nose between the fingers of the other hand; he had the authoritative body of a man who still has his sexual powers but his eyes flickered against the light of the sun and secreted flecks of matter like cold cream at the corners. After the greetings usual between a chief and one of his headmen together with whom, from the retreat in the mopane forest where they lay together in the same age group recovering from circumcision, he had long ago emerged a man, the chief said, ‘When is your son coming back?’
‘I have no news.’
‘Did he sign for the mines?’
‘No.’
‘He’s gone to the tobacco farms?’
‘He didn’t tell us.’
‘Gone away to find work and doesn’t tell his mother? What sort of child is that? Didn’t you teach him?’
The goats were tonguing three hunchback bushes that were all that was left of a hedge round the chief’s house. The man took out a round tin dented with child’s toothmarks and taking care not to spill any snuff, dosed himself. He gestured at the beasts, for permission: ‘They’re eating up your house. .’ He made a move towards the necessity to drive them on.
‘There is nothing left there to eat.’ The chief ignored his hedge, planted by his oldest wife who had been to school at the mission up the river. He stood among the goats as if he would ask more questions. Then he turned and went back to his yard, dismissing himself. The other man watched. It seemed he might call after; but instead drove his animals with the familiar cries, this time unnecessarily loud and frequent.
Often an army patrol Land Rover came to the village. No one could predict when this would be because it was not possible to count the days in between and be sure that so many would elapse before it returned, as could be done in the case of a tax collector or cattle-dipping officer. But it could be heard minutes away, crashing through the mopane like a frightened animal, and dust hung marking the direction from which it was coming. The children ran to tell. The women went from hut to hut. One of the chief’s wives would enjoy the importance of bearing the news: ‘The government is coming to see you.’
He would be out of his house when the Land Rover stopped and a black soldier (murmuring towards the chief the required respectful greeting in their own language) jumped out and opened the door for the white soldier. The white soldier had learnt the names of all the local chiefs. He gave greetings with white men’s brusqueness: ‘Everything all right?’
And the chief repeated to him: ‘Everything is all right.’
‘No one been bothering you in this village?’
‘No one is troubling us.’
But the white soldier signalled to his black men and they went through every hut busy as wives when they are cleaning, turning over bedding, thrusting gun-butts into the pile of ash and rubbish where the chickens searched, even looking in, their eyes dazzled by darkness, to the hut where one of the old women who had gone crazy had to be kept most of the time. The white soldier stood beside the Land Rover waiting for them. He told the chief of things that were happening not far from the village; not far at all. The road that passed five kilometres away had been blown up. ‘Someone plants landmines in the road and as soon as we repair it they put them there again. Those people come from across the river and they pass this way. They wreck our vehicles and kill people.’
The heads gathered round weaved as if at the sight of bodies laid there horrifyingly before them.
‘They will kill you, too — burn your huts, all of you — if you let them stay with you.’
A woman turned her face away: ‘Aïe-aïe-aïe-aïe.’
His forefinger half-circled his audience. ‘I’m telling you. You’ll see what they do.’
The chief’s latest wife, taken only the year before and of the age group of his elder grandchildren, had not come out to listen to the white man. But she heard from others what he had said, and fiercely smoothing her legs with grease, demanded of the chief, ‘Why does he want us to die, that white man!’
Her husband, who had just been a passionately shuddering lover, became at once one of the important old with whom she did not count and could not argue. ‘You talk about things you don’t know. Don’t speak for the sake of making a noise.’
To punish him, she picked up the strong, young girl’s baby she had borne him and went out of the room where she slept with him on the big bed that had come down the river by barge, before the army’s machine guns were pointing at the other bank.
He appeared at his mother’s hut. There, the middle-aged man on whom the villagers depended, to whom the government looked when it wanted taxes paid and culling orders carried out, became a son — the ageless category, no matter from which age group to another he passed in the progression of her life and his. The old woman was at her toilet. The great weight of her body settled around her where she sat on a reed mat outside the door. He pushed a stool under himself. Set out was a small mirror with a pink plastic frame and stand, in which he caught sight of his face, screwed up. A large black comb; a little carved box inlaid with red lucky beans she had always had, he used to beg to be allowed to play with it fifty years ago. He waited, not so much out of respect as in the bond of indifference to all outside their mutual contact that reasserts itself when lions and their kin lie against one another.
She cocked a glance, swinging the empty loops of her stretched ear lobes. He did not say what he had come for.
She had chosen a tiny bone spoon from the box and was poking with trembling care up each round hole of distended nostril. She cleaned the crust of dried snot and dust from her delicate instrument and flicked the dirt in the direction away from him.
She said: ‘Do you know where your sons are?’
‘Yes, I know where my sons are. You have seen three of them here today. Two are in school at the mission. The baby — he’s with the mother.’ A slight smile, to which the old woman did not respond. Her preferences among the sons had no connection with sexual pride.
‘Good. You can be glad of all that. But don’t ask other people about theirs.’
As often when people who share the same blood share the same thought, for a moment mother and son looked exactly alike, he old-womanish, she mannish.
‘If the ones we know are missing, there are not always empty places,’ he said.
She stirred consideringly in her bulk. Leaned back to regard him: ‘It used to be that all children were our own children. All sons our sons. Old-fashion, these people here’ — the hard English word rolled out of their language like a pebble, and came to rest where aimed, at his feet.
It was spring: the mopane leaves turn, drying up and dying, spattering the sand with blood and rust — a battlefield, it must have looked, from the patrol planes. In August there is no rain to come for two months yet. Nothing grows but the flies hatch. The heat rises daily and the nights hold it, without a stir, till morning. On these nights the radio voice carried so clearly it could be heard from the chief’s house all through the village. Many were being captured in the bush and killed by the army — seek and destroy was what the white men said now — and many in the army were being set upon in the bush or blown up in their trucks and buried with full military honours. This was expected to continue until October because the men in the bush knew that it was their last chance before the rains came and chained their feet in mud.
On these hot nights when people cannot sleep anyway, beer-drinks last until very late. People drink more; the women know this, and brew more. There is a fire but no one sits close round it.
Without a moon the dark is thick with heat; when the moon is full the dark shimmers thinly in a hot mirage off the river. Black faces are blue, there are watermarks along noses and biceps. The chief sat on his chair and wore shoes and socks in spite of the heat; those drinking nearest him could smell the suffering of his feet. The planes of jaw and lips he noticed in moonlight molten over them, moonlight pouring moths broken from white cases on the mopane and mosquitoes rising from the river, pouring glory like the light in the religious pictures people got at the mission — he had seen those faces about lately in the audacity of day, as well. An ox had been killed and there was the scent of meat sizzling in the village (just look at the behaviour of the dogs, they knew) although there was no marriage or other festival that called for someone to slaughter one of his beasts. When the chief allowed himself, at least, to meet the eyes of a stranger, the whites that had been showing at an oblique angle disappeared and he took rather than saw the full gaze of the seeing eye: the pupils with their defiance, their belief, their claim, hold, on him. He let it happen only once. For the rest, he saw their arrogant lifted jaws to each other and warrior smiles to the girls, as they drank. The children were drawn to them, fighting one another silently for places close up. Towards midnight — his watch had its own glowing galaxy — he left his chair and did not come back from the shadows where men went to urinate. Often at beer-drinks the chief would go home while others were still drinking.
He went to his brick house whose roof shone almost bright as day. He did not go to the room where his new wife and sixth son would be sleeping in the big bed, but simply took from the kitchen, where it was kept when not in use, a bicycle belonging to one of his hangers-on, relative or retainer. He wheeled it away from the huts in the clearing, his village and grandfather’s village that disappeared so quickly behind him in the mopane, and began to ride through the sand. He was not afraid he would meet a patrol and be shot; alone at night in the sand forest, the forested desert he had known before and would know beyond his span of life, he didn’t believe in the power of a roving band of government men to end that life. The going was heavy but he had mastered when young the art of riding on this, the only terrain he knew, and the ability came back. In an hour he arrived at the army post, called out who he was to the sentry with a machine gun, and had to wait, like a beggar rather than a chief, to be allowed to approach and be searched. There were black soldiers on duty but they woke the white man. It was the one who knew his name, his clan, his village, the way these modern white men were taught. He seemed to know at once why the chief had come; frowning in concentration to grasp details, his mouth was open in a smile and the point of his tongue curled touching at back teeth the way a man will verify facts one by one on his fingers. ‘How many?’
‘Six or ten or — but sometimes it’s only, say, three or one. . I don’t know. One is here, he’s gone; they come again.’
‘They take food, they sleep, and off. Yes. They make the people give them what they want, that’s it, eh? And you know who it is who hides them — who shows them where to sleep — of course you know.’
The chief sat on one of the chairs in that place, the army’s place, and the white soldier was standing. ‘Who is it—’ the chief was having difficulty in saying what he wanted in English, he had the feeling it was not coming out as he had meant nor being understood as he had expected. ‘I can’t know who is it’ — a hand moved restlessly, he held a breath and released it — ‘in the village there’s many, plenty people. If it’s this one or this one—’ He stopped, shaking his head with a reminder to the white man of his authority, which the white soldier was quick to placate.
‘Of course. Never mind. They frighten the people; the people can’t say no. They kill people who say no, eh; cut their ears off, you know that? Tear away their lips. Don’t you see the pictures in the papers?’
‘We never saw it. I heard the government say on the radio.’
‘They’re still drinking. . How long — an hour ago?’
The white soldier checked with a look the other men, whose stance had changed to that of bodies ready to break into movement: grab weapons, run, fling themselves at the Land Rovers guarded in the dark outside. He picked up the telephone receiver but blocked the mouthpiece as if it were someone about to make an objection. ‘Chief, I’ll be with you in a moment. Take him to the duty room and make coffee. Just wait—’ he leant his full reach towards a drawer in a cabinet on the left of the desk and, scrabbling to get it open, took out a half-full bottle of brandy. Behind the chief’s back he gestured the bottle towards the chief, and a black soldier jumped obediently to take it.
The chief went to a cousin’s house in a village the other side of the army post later that night. He said he had been to a beer-drink and could not ride home because of the white men’s curfew.
The white soldier had instructed that he should not be in his own village when the arrests were made so that he could not be connected with these and would not be in danger of having his ears cut off for taking heed of what the government wanted of him, or having his lips mutilated for what he had told.
His cousin gave him blankets. He slept in a hut with her father. The deaf old man was aware neither that he had come nor was leaving so early that last night’s moon, the size of the bicycle’s reflector, was still shiny in the sky. The bicycle rode up on spring-hares without disturbing them, in the forest; there was a stink of jackal-fouling still sharp on the dew. Smoke already marked his village; early cooking fires were lit. Then he saw that the smoke, the black particles spindling at his face, were not from cooking fires. Instead of going faster as he pumped his feet against the weight of sand the bicycle seemed to slow along with his mind, to find in each revolution of its wheels the countersurge: to stop; not go on. But there was no way not to reach what he found. The planes only children bothered to look up at any longer had come in the night and dropped something terrible and alive that no one could have read or heard about enough to be sufficiently afraid of. He saw first a bloody kaross, a dog caught on the roots of an upturned tree. The earth under the village seemed to have burst open and flung away what it carried: the huts, pots, gourds, blankets, the tin trunks, alarm clocks, curtain-booth photographs, bicycles, radios and shoes brought back from the mines, the bright cloths young wives wound on their heads, the pretty pictures of white lambs and pink children at the knees of the golden-haired Christ the Scottish Mission Board first brought long ago — all five generations of the clan’s life that had been chronicled by each succeeding generation in episodes told to the next. The huts had staved in like broken anthills. Within earth walls baked and streaked by fire the thatch and roof-poles were ash. He bellowed and stumbled from hut to hut, nothing answered frenzy, not even a chicken rose from under his feet. The walls of his house still stood. It was gutted and the roof had buckled. A black stiff creature lay roasted on its chain in the yard. In one of the huts he saw a human shape transformed the same way, a thing of stiff tar daubed on a recognisable framework. It was the hut where the mad woman lived; when those who had survived fled, they had forgotten her.
The chief’s mother and his youngest wife were not among them. But the baby boy lived, and will grow up in the care of the older wives. No one can say what it was the white soldier said over the telephone to his commanding officer, and if the commanding officer had told him what was going to be done, or whether the white soldier knew, as a matter of procedure laid down in his military training for this kind of war, what would be done. The chief hanged himself in the mopane. The police or the army (much the same these days, people confuse them) found the bicycle beneath his dangling shoes. So the family hanger-on still rides it; it would have been lost if it had been safe in the kitchen when the raid came. No one knows where the chief found a rope, in the ruins of his village.
The people are beginning to go back. The dead are properly buried in ancestral places in the mopane forest. The women are to be seen carrying tins and grain panniers of mud up from the river. In talkative bands they squat and smear, raising the huts again. They bring sheaves of reeds exceeding their own height, balanced like the cross-stroke of a majuscular T on their heads. The men’s voices sound through the mopane as they choose and fell trees for the roof supports.
A white flag on a mopane pole hangs outside the house whose white walls, built like a white man’s, stand from before this time.
A Lion on the Freeway
Open up!
What hammered on the door of sleep?
Who’s that?
Anyone who lives within a mile of the zoo hears lions on summer nights. A tourist could be fooled. Africa already; at last; even though he went to bed in yet another metropole.
Just before light, when it’s supposed to be darkest, the body’s at its lowest ebb and in the hospital on the hill old people die — the night opens, a black hole between stars, and from it comes a deep panting. Very distant and at once very close, right in the ear, for the sound of breath is always intimate. It grows and grows, deeper, faster, more rasping, until a great groan, a rising groan lifts out of the curved bars of the cage and hangs above the whole city—
And then drops back, sinks away, becomes panting again.
Wait for it; it will fall so quiet, hardly more than a faint roughness snagging the air in the ear’s chambers. Just when it seems to have sunk between strophe and antistrophe, a breath is taken and it gasps once; pauses, sustaining the night as a singer holds a note. And begins once more. The panting reaches up up up down down down to that awe-ful groan—
Open up!
Open up!
Open your legs.
In the geriatric wards where lights are burning they take the tubes out of noses and the saline-drip needles out of arms and draw the sheets to cover faces. I pull the sheet over my head. I can smell my own breath caught there. It’s very late; it’s much too early to be awake. Sometimes the rubber tyres of the milk truck rolled over our sleep. You turned. .
Roar is not the word. Children learn not to hear for themselves, doing exercises in the selection of verbs at primary school: ‘Complete these sentences: The cat. . s The dog. . s The lion. . s.’ Whoever decided that had never listened to the real thing. The verb is onomatopoeically incorrect just as the heraldic beasts drawn by thirteenth- and fourteenth-century engravers at second hand from the observations of early explorers are anatomically wrong. Roar is not the word for the sound of great chaps sucking in and out the small hours.
The zoo lions do not utter during the day. They yawn; wait for their ready-slaughtered kill to be tossed at them; keep their unused claws sheathed in huge harmless pads on which top-heavy, untidy heads rest (the visualised lion is always a maned male), gazing through lid-slats with what zoo visitors think of in sentimental prurience as yearning.
Or once we were near the Baltic and the leviathan hooted from the night fog at sea. But would I dare to open my mouth now? Could I trust my breath to be sweet, these stale nights?
It’s only on warm summer nights that the lions are restless. What they’re seeing when they gaze during the day is nothing, their eyes are open but they don’t see us — you can tell that when the lens of the pupil suddenly shutters at the close swoop of one of the popcorn-begging pigeons through the bars of the cage. Otherwise the eye remains blank, registering nothing. The lions were born in the zoo (for a few brief weeks the cubs are on show to the public, children may hold them in their arms). They know nothing but the zoo; they are not expressing our yearnings. It’s only on certain nights that their muscles flex and they begin to pant, their flanks heave as if they had been running through the dark night while other creatures shrank from their path, their jaws hang tense and wet as saliva flows as if in response to a scent of prey, at last they heave up their too-big heads, heavy, heavy heads, and out it comes. Out over the suburbs. A dreadful straining of the bowels to deliver itself: a groan that hangs above the houses in a low-lying cloud of smog and anguish.
O Jack, O Jack, O Jack, oh — I heard it once through a hotel wall. Was alone and listened. Covers drawn over my head and knees drawn up to my fists. Eyes strained wide open. Sleep again! — my command. Sleep again.
It must be because of the new freeway that they are not heard so often lately. It passes its five-lane lasso close by, drawing in the valley between the zoo and the houses on the ridge. There is traffic there very late, too early. Trucks. Tankers, getting a start before daylight. The rising spray of rubber spinning friction on tarmac is part of the quality of city silence; after a time you don’t hear much beyond it. But sometimes — perhaps it’s because of a breeze. Even on a still summer night there must be some sort of breeze opening up towards morning. Not enough to stir the curtains, a current of air has brought, small, clear and distant, right into the ear, the sound of panting.
Or perhaps the neat whisky after dinner. The rule is don’t drink after dinner. A metabolic switch trips in the brain: open up.
Who’s that?
A truck of potatoes going through traffic lights quaked us sixteen flights up.
Slack with sleep, I was impaled in the early hours. You grew like a tree and lifted the pavements; everything rose, cracked and split free.
Who’s that?
Or something read in the paper. . Yes. Last night — this night — in the City Late, front page, there were the black strikers in the streets, dockers with sticks and knobkerries. A thick prancing black centipede with thousands of waving legs advancing. The panting grows louder, it could be in the garden or under the window; there comes that pause, that slump of breath. Wait for it: waiting for it. Prance, advance, over the carefully tended please keep off the grass. They went all through a city not far from this one, their steps are so rhythmical, waving sticks (no spears any more, no guns yet); they can cover any distance, in time. Shops and houses closed against them while they passed. And the cry that came from them as they approached — that groan straining, the rut of freedom bending the bars of the cage, he’s delivered himself of it, it’s as close as if he’s out on the freeway now, bewildered, finding his way, turning his splendid head at last to claim what he’s never seen, the country where he’s king.
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