by MP Miles
“I’ve got some bloods,” said the doctor. “I’ll do some tests.”
*
Ralph had spent a day walking aimlessly around Johannesburg faintly worried about money before realising that he needed to find a job. His room in a dormitory at the YMCA was the cheapest accommodation he could find but the cost would be unsustainable.
The Diplomat hotel stood impassively on the corner of Klein and Bree Streets. It was washed in a welcoming light that disguised the dark dejection of those obliged to sleep away from home and the oily mock concern of those on the evening shift that attended them. Ralph looked through glass doors at the reception area and at a man standing behind a marble and glass counter talking on the phone. He looked Indian and stern, with a big iron bracelet, a dagger tucked into his belt and an impressive turban. On an impulse Ralph thought he’d see if they would take him on. He walked straight in and nervously asked to see the manager but was told to talk to the owner, sitting commandingly like a Sicilian don at a corner table in the restaurant.
Ralph thought he’d come straight to the point.
“Excuse me. I’m looking for a job.”
The man was very white, as though he’d lived his whole life inside the hotel or underground. He had been eating a mound of spaghetti with two forks, one in each hand, shovelling bolognaise into his mouth rapidly with a left then right double action. He held both forks motionless in the air as Ralph spoke, his jowls quivering like a St Bernard. Ralph expected him to talk Italian and was surprised at West Country English, more like a pirate than a Mafioso.
“Where you from, then?” he asked.
“England.”
“Where in England?”
“Dorset.”
“Where in Dorset?”
“A small town called Gillingham.”
“Where did you go to school?”
“Shaftesbury Grammar, sir.”
“So did I. You’d better call me Fred. You’ve got the job.”
Ralph stood staring at him, unable to speak. It had been the first enquiry for work he’d made, and at a randomly selected hotel thousands of miles from home. Fred attacked his dinner. It was like a pheasant shoot, thought Ralph. Left, right, load both barrels.
“But you may not want it,” he said.
Ralph went to speak but Fred put down the forks and held up his hands for silence.
“Listen to an Old Shastonian for a moment. I need to explain some things to you.”
He nodded his head towards the hotel reception.
“You see the Indian gentleman at the front desk, the shift manager?”
Ralph nodded.
“He is a Punjabi Sikh. You won’t find another Indian person doing that job at any other hotel in South Africa.”
“Why?”
“Shush,” said the owner, “just listen. Listen to an old grammar school boy.”
Ralph wondered if Fred was drunk but couldn’t see the empty squat wine bottle in a straw basket that might have accompanied dinner.
“I brought him with me from the mine when I bought the hotel. He’s brilliant.”
He held up two fingers.
“He has two engineering degrees from the Open University. He used to bring his assignments to work and I’d post them to England. He’ll never be able to go to an awards ceremony to collect the certificates: no passport.”
He removed a napkin from his lap.
“He lives in Lenasia with his wife and mother-in-law and five kids. He has no choice. It is an Indian area for the exclusive occupation of his racial group. It’s thirty-five kilometres away. Most of his salary goes on a ‘goodwill’ payment just to be able to rent a house. Six families live in one long structure divided into six units of two rooms. The toilets are shared in the backyard. Three for about fifty people. I have never seen him anything other than immaculately presentable with kirpan and dastaar.”
Ralph didn’t know what those things were. He was unsure whether he had been offered a job or if the man was playing a game with him.
“My restaurant manager over there is amaXhosa.”
He pointed to a tall, very black man in a suit.
“He’s breaking the law doing that job, and I am for giving it to him. It isn’t an approved occupation for native South Africans. I have to put in his passbook that he is a waiter. He lives in a matchbox in Emdeni Soweto, a Black area. It’s further out than Indian Lenasia: takes him two hours to travel to work, two hours to travel home. He has never once been late for his shift.”
He waved at the restaurant manager, who nodded his head.
“He doesn’t mind the commute. It gives him the opportunity to look for his son.”
“Why? Where is his son?” Ralph asked.
“His son has paler skin. No reason for it, just the way it is, but they classified him as Coloured not Black. His Coloured son can’t live in a Black area with his father so he had to give the boy up to a stranger. That was ten years ago. The boy was ten years old at the time. His father hasn’t seen him since. He watches every face on the train twice a day, looking for his son. He consoles himself that he’ll have had better schooling as a Coloured boy.”
He pushed the plate away and a waitress removed it with a smile.
“Mabel here is Coloured as well. She thinks her grandfather was Danish. She stays at Riverlea, which sounds bucolic but isn’t. It’s a Coloured area, so closer to town, but there’s no electricity at her house. Still, she went to school and can read and is quicker at adding up a bill than I am. She asked me the other day what Keats meant by ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty’ as she didn’t know anything that was both true and beautiful. She reads poetry at night by candlelight.”
He held Ralph’s arm.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” he asked.
Ralph wasn’t sure but he nodded.
“You are talking about apartheid, right?”
“I’m going to tell you two more things about apartheid. Take this information back to Shaftesbury and shout it from the tower of the grammar school chapel.”
Fred thanked Mabel as she brought him coffee.
“Firstly, no one teaches white kids how to be racist. They imbibe it, unconsciously.”
“And the second?” asked Ralph.
“The second is more worrying.”
He drank some coffee.
“There’s nothing different about white South African kids. Given the same circumstances all kids would be racist, anywhere. Kids in India, or Iran, or Indonesia. Apartheid is a rotten system, but the white people in South Africa aren’t more rotten than any other people in the world. That is the worry.”
He raised himself heavily from the table.
“Do you still want the job?”
Ralph started, there and then, his first illegal employment in South Africa, working the cash register in the restaurant of The Diplomat hotel alongside Indian, Black and Coloured South Africans.
*
Ralph quickly learnt that The Diplomat was unusual and probably unique, catering for foreign businessmen, ‘Honorary’ white citizens like the Japanese, and visiting dignitaries from the neighbouring African countries that the South African government felt obliged to be cordial to. All of them stayed at The Diplomat. As the despondent liberal owner miserably commented with near tear-filled eyes, the authorities tolerated it only because it kept all the rotten eggs in one basket.
“What do you mean?” Ralph asked him.
“A Nigerian selling oil, or a Kenyan buying electrical transformers, needs to stay somewhere. The government allows them to stay here with us; that way it keeps all the foreigners who are likely to be critical of apartheid in one place.”
Some unsuspecting white South African visitors, often sent as a joke by their more informed friends, found it too much. Most, although often scathing in c
riticism when it came to paying the bill, found themselves secretly enthralled by the novelty of Indians in managerial positions and African heads of state in ceremonial dress.
Tramps, the basement club of The Diplomat, took all of them by surprise, even those from outside the restricted confines of South Africa. Fred laughed as he proudly explained it to Ralph.
“Sex between men is a crime in South Africa, Ralph, and I have the only gay bar in the country.”
He smiled delightedly, pleased at the endless frustration it caused the authorities.
“They always try and shut us down but they can’t because we know the rules. It’s not a crime until sodomy occurs, so no doing it on the property.”
“Doing what?” asked Ralph.
Fred smiled and patted his shoulder.
“You are a long way from Shaftesbury, Ralph,” he said.
At weekends a succession of effeminate white South Africans in drag would fill the hotel foyer day and night, waving and blowing kisses as they lounged in reception to the serious plainclothes policemen outside photographing them through the glass doors. Ralph was young and lean, pretty with boyish good looks like a young thin male model for expensive Italian shirts in a fashion magazine. He fought a running battle to get to the restaurant without proposition, not helped by the night manager letting them all know in unnecessarily loud Afrikaans that Ralph stayed at the Young Men’s Christian Association hostel. The YMCA filled the corner of Rissik and Smit Streets, an easy walk for Ralph to and from work, and he never felt at any risk walking home late at night as police patrols scoured the whole of the Central Business District. The YMCA was cheap and convenient, but he hadn’t considered the gay angle.
A guest at The Diplomat from Hong Kong, Chinese but travelling on an Irish passport thanks to a costly education in Dublin, and a little older than Ralph, had made a suggestion. He had befriended Ralph out of loneliness while visiting South Africa to sell barbecue tongs. Braais were big in South Africa. They must need lots of tongs, or so the thinking went as he explained to Ralph the logic behind his grand scheme. He would clean up in the South African tong market. He helpfully told Ralph that dressing for work in a borrowed suit and his old school tie only made him look like a schoolboy and that might be making things worse, an explanation to Ralph’s problem that he had never considered.
*
Snyman stood in the waiting room of a private clinic in Sandton, relieved when Elanza came out of a treatment room and walked down a corridor, her hand on the wall. He went to follow her but a doctor held his arm and stopped him.
“Leave her. A counsellor will go with her. Can we talk?”
The doctor and Snyman sat underneath a poster for antenatal classes.
“Are you family?”
“She has no family. I’m her trustee.”
“I see.”
The doctor hesitated.
“I’ll talk freely, just as I talked to her. I think she has a new disease. We’ve only just given it a name. In the States it’s been called lymphadenopathy because it’s often associated with swollen glands. More recently it’s been known as KSOI because of an associated incidence of a skin cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma. We called it GRID and then AID, Acquired Immune Deficiency. We now refer to it as AIDS. It’s important to recognise that it’s acquired rather than inherited. We added the S because it is a syndrome with several manifestations, rather than a single disease. I think Elanza has probably had it for some time.”
He stopped for a moment and looked at the poster.
“I’m afraid there is no cure. And her vision loss is quite advanced.”
“Vision loss?”
“Yes. For some time Elanza has been experiencing flashing lights, blurriness, photophobia. She is losing her sight rapidly. It’s called cytomegalovirus retinitis, CMV for short. It’s an inflammation of the retina caused by infection with a herpes virus. About forty per cent of the worldwide population has it. A healthy body can fight it off but if the immune system is compromised then it’s a problem. I would expect rapidly progressive deterioration until near blindness. You must understand, we are only at the beginning of our understanding about the disease. Useful work is being done in France at the Pasteur Institute. There are high hopes for new therapies.”
Koos Snyman realised he knew nothing about Elanza, other than the balances of her bank accounts.
“When did she get it?”
“It’s hard to say. The progression isn’t well understood. It may have been three or four years ago; that’s when she started having problems with her eyes. Say 1979, not before ’78.”
“How?”
“Up until recently we only saw it in homosexual men.”
“The gay plague?”
“We don’t call it that. We are seeing it in other groups now: haemophiliacs who receive blood, intravenous drug users.”
He hesitated.
“Prostitutes.”
Koos Snyman thought about Elanza.
“Three or four years ago?”
The doctor nodded.
“She would have been twenty-two or twenty-three, a difficult time for her. Her father died in ’76 when she was twenty.”
He had to know now.
“How long?”
The doctor remained silent.
“How long has she got?”
“I’ll tell you what I told her. The simple answer is I don’t know. I would expect her to lose her sight nearly completely. Thereafter we’ll provide the best care.”
“Can you answer my question?”
“I apologise. I can’t be accurate. There may be a range of environmental factors influencing the outcome. Some reports predict an average of nine to eleven years from infection. It’s just guesswork. I told her between five and eight years. Not much more than that unless some new drugs are developed and approved.”
*
Elanza drank and bartered pills in Tramps, the basement club of The Diplomat. The man whom Nels elbowed, his nose splinted and his face bruised, avoided her. Her vision seemed tunnelled and she wasn’t sure if she should blame the Pinks or something the doctor had told her about her failing eyesight. A man in a flowing neon blue ballgown danced with an impossibly slim youth of Asiatic appearance. Both started to zoom away and then come close, except that when they did she could only see the middle of them, the rest in black shadow. It scared her. She fought to see their faces and their feet at the same time. Brushing aside a man with drooping gold earrings like long snakes, she stumbled upstairs to the restaurant, feeling her way along a countertop.
Ralph liked to talk to the restaurant manager, proud and thin in his suit, encouraging him to teach him useful isiXhosa words, or so Ralph believed. They could have been anything. Mabel the waitress would relax and laugh listening to them, an improbable scene unlikely to have been played out in public at any other place in Johannesburg at that time. Elanza barged past them and fell into a booth against the wall. The waitress looked at Ralph and shook her head. She’d been reading a torn and yellowed King Lear secretly at night and her lunchtime discussions with Ralph, whom she naturally assumed to be knowledgeable on all things Shakespearian, had allowed her to feel comfortable enough to warn him about a drugged-up white hooker.
Ralph asked the woman if she wanted something. She didn’t speak at all but stared at him as though blind. Ralph suddenly laughed, thinking about his earlier literary discussion with Mabel the waitress. He wondered about her real name. Mabel didn’t sound very Xhosa.
Elanza slumped and mumbled.
“I know; I bet you’d like a cup of tea,” he said. “Mabel.”
For Elanza, who couldn’t remember when she had last eaten, the sugar in the tea hit as fast as a mainline. Through a dark fog she saw Ralph holding the restaurant manager’s arm and all of them smiling and laughing. Ralph went over to her, pleased to see that
she sat straighter in the chair.
“You aren’t from around here,” she slurred. “Where are you from?”
“Far away. Bet you can guess.”
She muttered something in Afrikaans that he couldn’t catch, a frequent problem for him. Often Afrikaans speakers would call down for room service and he’d apologise, saying as politely as he could that he didn’t understand them. Many put the phone down. Why Fred the owner never said anything to him remained a constant curiosity. He imagined any negative comments might be balanced by positive ones from the very English-speaking guests who would bark at him in a Churchillian tone, calling for more gin and wondering if he knew the best form of defence. Attack, he’d tell them, and they’d all laugh.
Elanza tried to focus on him.
“What’s your name?”
“Ralph.”
“Is that Ralph with an f or ph?”
“With an R.”
Later, after Ralph had bargained a taxi to take her home, and with the familiarity of known obstacles she had guided herself to bed, she couldn’t remember when she had heard something so funny.
*
At The Diplomat the next evening Ralph beamed with pleasure at the girl he’d given tea, surprised when he saw her sitting in the restaurant. He looked closely at her. She may have been seven or eight years older than him. She looked hunted, exhausted and drowsy, as though a pack had been chasing her. Something struck him about her eyes, the pupils as small as pinpricks. They looked beautiful, yet empty, cold and lifeless. A tall drink stood beside her and Ralph guessed it wasn’t the first. The menu had been pushed determinedly almost off the table.
“Where is Ralph with an R?” she shouted across the restaurant.
Ralph went over to her.
“Nice to see you again. Can I get you some more tea?” He looked at her drink. “Or something stronger?”
“Stronger.”
Through the evening she sat, scratching, looking around abstractly.
“Ralph with an R, you can get me a cab now.”
As she left she stopped and listened to Ralph chatting with the staff by the cash register.
“What are you talking about?”