by Paul Theroux
It seemed puzzling to me in Johannesburg to reflect that I had never been there before, for the city seemed so familiar. There was a reason. The voices, the faces, the smells, the slur and twang of speech, the dissonant combination of sunshine and strife, the sense of place in Nadine’s work had made Johannesburg seem like a city I was returning to, as Mahfouz’s work had done for me in Egypt. For an author, there was no greater achievement than this, the successful recreation in prose of the texture and emotions of a real place, making the reading of the work like a travel experience, containing many of the pleasures of a visit. How nice it would be, I thought, if someone reading the narrative of my African trip felt the same, that it was the next best thing to being there, or even better – because reading about being shot at and poisoned and insulted was in general less upsetting than the real thing.
Blossom-filled jacaranda trees hung over Nadine’s garden, big scalloped-leafed monstera vines clung to their trunks. Her garden wall was softened with bougainvillea and thorny whips of rose bushes. The bedding plants were velvety violets and spongy primroses. Nadine’s work was also full of closely observed flora.
I had called the day before and invited her to dinner – she could choose the restaurant. My idea was to enjoy a pleasant meal with a good friend as a secret celebration of my birthday. I went to the iron gate at the driveway, and got barked at by a big brown dog until an African woman at the kitchen door howled at the dog to shut up. An African man in a white shirt and blue pants swung the gate open for me. Something possessed me to thank him in Chichewa, which was widely spoken in southern Africa because of the wandering Malawians, looking for work.
‘Zikomo, bambo.’ Thank you, father.
We talked a bit and I asked him his name.
His name was Albino. He was from Mozambique.
The house was servant-tidy, mopped and spare and rather shadowy. As I was led from one room to another, the kitchen with its tableau of elderly servants (old women sitting, old man standing), through narrow corridors, I could just make out African masks and shadowy baskets and a hat rack piled with wide-brimmed hats.
Then I was propelled through a door, as though onstage, into the sitting room, which was well lighted and hung with family photos and lovely paintings, and Nadine was standing there, very straight, rather small, with piercing eyes. She kissed me, welcoming me with the first good hug – she was strong for her size – 1 had had since leaving home.
‘That looks familiar,’ I said as we kissed for I saw just behind her head, over the fireplace, a framed picture, three vividly drawn figures, heads and shoulders, and you knew it had to be a Daumier the way you knew a certain paragraph had to be a Gordimer.
And turning to size up the room, looking for a place to sit, I saw another brilliantly colored picture, a lithograph of Napoleon flanked by a lancer and an Arab sheik.
‘Toulouse-Lautrec,’ Nadine said. ‘Isn’t Napoleon handsome? I always think he looks like Marlon Brando.’
That was when I saw the other person in the room – motionless, seated with a blanket over his knees, so quiet I had missed him. He was hooked somehow to a breathing machine, tubes to his nostrils, and he was smiling – apparently had been smiling the whole time at the apparition of big badly dressed American ogling his paintings. He was Reinhold Cassirer, bright and friendly, and clearly frail. He was ninety-three years old and ailing, but fully alert, with good color, and even though he was sitting in a wheelchair I could see that he was a tall man.
‘He came from Cairo – on the bus!’ Nadine said sharply to her husband.
Reinhold smiled at me and raised one hand in salute and murmured, ‘Good, good, good.’
He had a beautiful smile, the sort of smile that indicates great generosity and a capacity for pleasure. He sat in the center of the room seeming to enjoy the warmth, the light, the talk. He hated the confinement of his sickroom and the ministrations of his nurse. What he liked best, Nadine told me later, was what he had liked best throughout their marriage, drinking a pre-dinner whisky at the end of the working day.
A young African arrived, Raks Seakhoa, a poet and a former political prisoner.
I said, ‘I want to hear about your imprisonment. I’ve been meeting ex-convicts all along my route.’
‘Paul came from Cairo – on the bus!’
‘I’ll be glad to tell you about it. I served five years on Robben Island.’
‘With Mandela?’
‘Yes. We passed notes secretly, on philosophical subjects.’
Nadine said smartly, ‘Isn’t it your birthday?’
I tried not to look deflated. I said, ‘How did you know?’
‘Someone saw it on the Internet.’
‘Oh, God, the world of useless information.’
Raks Seakhoa said, ‘It’s my birthday, too.’
The rumbling of my secret seemed less awkward then, for someone who shares your birthday shares much more, a certain kinship and characteristics. Raks was turning forty-two. He looked older – another former prisoner whose time in jail had added years to his life, made him gaunt, grayed his hair. I liked the thought that we two Aries were brothers under the skin, but he had suffered in his life and my life had been a picnic.
Another guest entered, hugged Reinhold, hugged Nadine, hugged Raks, and was introduced to me as Maureen Isaacson, literary editor of the Johannesburg Sunday Independent.
‘Happy birthday,’ she said.
‘He came from Cairo – on the bus!’
We drove to the restaurant in two cars; I went with Maureen, Nadine with Raks. Maureen carefully hand-locked each door before we set off, and said, ‘I’ve had robbery attempts. But I refuse to be intimidated by the violence, so I’m vigilant.’
‘What happened?’
‘People trying to get into my car on the Queen Elizabeth Bridge-one bloke taps at the windscreen and distracts me, while another snatches at the back door. Pretty soon I’m surrounded by these men, six or eight of them.’
‘God. What did you do?’
‘I screamed at them. “Fuck off!” ’ Maureen said, sounding fierce. She added quietly, ‘Now I lock everything.’
The restaurant – lovely, furnished with antiques, very large – was almost empty: a consequence of the crime in the city center after dark, muggings and car hijackings. Of perhaps thirty other tables, only one was occupied. The owners warmly welcomed Nadine. She commiserated with them about the crime in the city that kept their restaurant empty. Then she introduced me.
‘Paul came on the bus – from Cairo!’
Over dinner, Nadine said she was weary from spending the day reading the galley proofs of her new novel, The Pick-Up.
‘The American proof-readers often try to correct my English,’ Nadine said. ‘They follow the rules. I don’t. I like my sentences.’
I mentioned that I kept meeting Johannesburgers who had amazing tales to tell. She said this was a characteristic of South Africans generally, their lives full of events. My mention of the recent immigrants stirred memories of her father, his arrival here as a thirteen-year-old.
‘Imagine my father,’ she said, and let her voice trail off.
Her mother had been English, from a Jewish family long established in London. Nadine smiled at the memory of her piano-playing mother turning up her nose at her husband’s origins and in a shocked accent of mimicry said, ‘They slept round the stove.’
There is a pitiless description of her parents in the story, ‘My Father Leaves Home.’
In the quarrels between husband and wife, she saw them [the relatives] as ignorant and dirty, she must have read somewhere that served as a taunt: you slept like animals round a stove, stinking of garlic, you bathed once a week. The children knew how it was to be unwashed. And, whipped into anger, he knew the lowest category of all in her country, this country. You speak to me as if I was a kaffir.
‘Sounds like Mrs Morel in Sons and Lovers. “I was cut out for better things than this.” ’
‘Yes.
That was my mother. Mrs Morel.’
‘But I don’t think I could bear to reread that novel again. What do you reread?’
‘Everything. All the time. I want to reread Dostoievsky.’
I asked, ‘What should I read to understand South Africa better?’
‘There are so many good South African writers,’ Nadine said and she encouraged Raks and Maureen to help make a reading list for me. This included The Peasants’ Revolt, by Govan Mbeki, Hugh Lewin’s Bandiet, Ways of Dying by Zakes Mda, Soft Vengeance by Albie Sachs, and poems by Don Mattera and Jeremy Cronin.
‘And Raks too, I wish he would write more,’ Maureen said.
But Raks got a call on his mobile phone and when Nadine had loudly sighed at the silly noise of the ring, Raks had left the table to talk.
‘I’m glad I read your book about Naipaul,’ Nadine said. ‘The reviews put me off. It’s about you, not him - and unsparing about you. It’s such a good book. I cheered for you at the end. “He’s free,” I thought.’
‘Naipaul always wears such a gloomy face,’ Maureen said,’ ‘But isn’t A House for Mr Biswas wonderful?’
‘Vidia hates it when people mention only that one book.’
Nadine said, ‘The book of mine that everyone mentions is July’s People.’
‘Patrick White complained that everyone praised Voss, which is a great book.’
Nadine agreed and said that she admired White’s A Fringe of Leaves (‘I want to reread it’). Her generous praise for her contemporaries was not in general a writer’s characteristic.
I said, ‘Will it annoy you if I ask you about July’s People?’
She laughed, and I said that the reason people liked it was because it represented their secret fears – having to flee a political cataclysm, losing your home, becoming a fugitive in your own country, finding that the world has been turned upside-down. This was the extreme white South African nightmare, becoming totally dependent upon your black servants, reduced to living in a simple and remote village.
‘I was writing about the present,’ Nadine said, meaning the years of its composition, between 1976 and 1980. ‘It was a very bad time here. Everything was happening. I put all that into the book.’
She said that by the time she finished July’s People she was committed to staying in South Africa. ‘I felt we had been through it all.’ But there had been a period when she had thought seriously about leaving South Africa, in the late 1960s, when she had been writing A Guest of Honor. ‘We traveled around. We had friends in Zimbabwe and Zambia. I felt I might consider one of those places. I’m an African. That’s Africa.’ She needed to be near South Africa.
‘Or so I thought,’ she added. ‘I looked closely at my friends – they were mostly white, mostly expatriates, they had loyalties elsewhere. So what life would it have been for me? I would have been a nice white woman who was interested in Africans, but living in this world of expatriates. I couldn’t do it. And so I stopped thinking of leaving.’
I said, ‘Were you a member of a political party?’
She smiled at the question. ‘I suppose I could have joined the Liberal Party, but they were so weak – and who did they represent? I thought hard about the South African Communist Party. But it was too late for me. I should have joined earlier. Yet I have the greatest respect for the Communists here. We would never have achieved our freedom without them.’
Raks returned to the table, and talked about what it was like to be hearing about the political struggle while serving time on Robben Island as a political prisoner. The news from the outside world came in whispers and scribbled messages, for newspapers were forbidden.
Nadine had been ruminating. She said, ‘I didn’t leave. I stayed. I saw everything. The people who left – well, you can’t blame the Africans. Life was terrible for them. But the others – the whites, the writers’ – she shook her head – ‘after they left, what did they write?’
Maureen said, ‘I feel sorry for anyone who left, who missed it. All those years. And it went on for so long – beyond Mandela’s release.’
I said, ‘Isn’t it still going on?’
‘Yes, it is. You can write about it,’ Nadine said.
Afterwards, driving Nadine’s car – Nadine navigating – I asked about Reinhold’s health. She said it was terrible but that she felt lucky in having had such a happy marriage. ‘Reini smoked a lot,’ she said. ‘Smoking is nice. Did you ever smoke dagga?’ She lamented that the center of Johannesburg was so empty. We talked about our children. And eventually she wished me a last Happy Birthday, and said, ‘Travel well. Travel safely.’
It is all right to be Steppenwolf, or the Lone Ranger, or Rimbaud, or even me. You visit a place and peer at it closely and then move on, making a virtue of disconnection. But such an evening as this, after months of solitary travel, reminded me that a meal with friends was a mood improver, and that a birthday need not be an ordeal. I had been self-conscious, though. One of Nadine’s many strengths was that she noticed everything. The best writers are scrupulous noticers. And since a birthday is an occasion for a summing up, the annual balance sheet, I was sure that she had seen my Ugandan patched jacket, my baggy pants, my scuffed shoes, my tattoos, my thinning hair, how I had changed in the twenty years since I had last seen her. I couldn’t complain: that was life. And yet, alert, bright, fully engaged and funny, she had not changed at all.
The next day, Raks Seakhoa invited me to a poetry reading at the Windybrow Theater. ‘Take a taxi.’ The theater was in one of the most dangerous areas of Johannesburg. And I almost didn’t go at all, because leaving my hotel I met a man who said that the big event that night was a soccer match between the two best teams in South Africa, the Chiefs against the Pirates. As a visitor, I was duty-bound to see these great local athletes. He said, ‘You can buy tickets at the stadium.’
But I met Raks instead in the community center that had once been the mansion of a Johannesburg millionaire (cupola, mullioned windows, porches, wood paneling), and after the poetry reading, plucking at his pebble glasses, Raks told me his story. He had been arrested, aged eighteen, in a township outside Johannesburg, and taken into custody. He was charged with sabotage and belonging to an unlawful organization. While in police custody he had been tortured and beaten. This was in the late 1970s.
‘They wanted me to tell them about the ANC, but I didn’t know much,’ Raks said. ‘The Black Consciousness Movement was what animated me.’
‘What about the charge of sabotage?’
‘We were in various actions,’ he said blandly. ‘But the police were vicious. At first, they just hit us. No questions, just whack. We were beaten really hard. It went on for two or three weeks. We were put into sacks and thrown into the river. We thought we would drown – we knew people who had died.’
‘Didn’t they interrogate you?’
‘After that, yes. But the beatings went on. They wanted to know who our friends were – the details. “Who are the Communists?” That kind of thing.’
Raks spoke without much anger but with feeling, as though it had all happened long ago, in another galaxy, far away. He was quite well dressed, wearing a jacket and tie, as he had at the birthday dinner, but there was something about him – an intimation of frailty – that was disturbing.
‘They stopped beating us when they realized that we had nothing to tell them,’ Raks said. ‘Then we went to trial. It was a short trial. Torture was not mentioned, nothing of our treatment came out. We were sentenced. I got five years. In those days you did every day of your sentence.’
‘Tell me about Robben Island.’
Robben Island in the sea, just a mile off Cape Town, was now a popular tourist attraction, though a sobering one. Visitors were taken out in boats, and former political prisoners served as guides.
‘I served my whole sentence there, from 1979 to 1984,’ Raks said. ‘It was cold and uncomfortable and impossible to escape from. As I told you, we saw Nelson Mandela. We passed notes, scribbling on
pieces of paper and smuggling them back and forth.’
But books and papers and pencils were forbidden and were confiscated if they were found. Even Mandela, the future president, was trifled with – his books and writing material taken from him. In place of study or self-improvement or any intellectual activity there was manual labor.
‘We did road repairs,’ Raks said, for the island had once had a community on it – houses, roads, churches, a leper settlement. ‘Most days we dragged seaweed out of the ocean – ten-foot lengths of kelp. The seaweed was sold to Taiwan and Korea.’
That was an interesting detail, the Chinese and the Koreans enjoying the delicacy of Cape Town seaweed with their noodles by wringing the sweat from the faces of these slave laborers. But there was no recrimination against them, no hard words for Margaret Thatcher or Dick Cheney who had both publicly declared Mandela a terrorist; no bitterness against the Belgians who bought diamonds, and the Israelis who traded in guns and food to a racist government which was committed to killing and torturing and imprisoning some Africans and creating ghettos for others; and just laughter for the Japanese who got themselves officially declared white in part so that they could trade with the white supremacist government, but mainly so that they could play golf at whites-only country clubs.
Raks said, ‘When I got out I was deported to Bophuthatswana.’
Bophuthatswana had been a Bantustan, a small deprived ghetto of bad land and poor houses where Separate Development was to take place. Bantustans had since been dismantled, the fences taken down, and were now a source of labor and of emigrants to the urban shanty towns outside the major cities.
That was Raks’ story. He had disliked telling it. But listening to him I saw something familiar in his limp posture and sad expression. It was the ravaged look of someone who had had a near-death experience that had gone on far too long: years in a cage. I had seen that same look in the Ethiopians who had been locked up in the prison in Addis, in my friends in Uganda who had suffered through Amin’s tyranny, in Wahome Mutahi who had been given the water torture in Nairobi. It was a look of seediness, not a broken spirit but a fractured body, premature aging, and a sort of sidelong mode of delivery, hating to look back. In a word, their spirit had not been broken but their health had been shattered.