'No,' said Florence. 'That is not true. I do not turn my back on my children.' She folded the sheet crosswise and lengthwise, crosswise and lengthwise, the corners falling together neatly, decisively. 'These are good children, they are like iron, we are proud of them.' On the board she spread the first of the pillowslips. I waited for her to say more. But there was no more. She was not interested in debating with me.
Children of iron, I thought. Florence herself, too, not unlike iron. The age of iron. After which conies the age of bronze. How long, how long before the softer ages return in their cycle, the age of clay, the age of earth? A Spartan matron, iron-hearted, bearing warrior-sons for the nation. 'We are proud of them.' We. Come home either with your shield or on your shield.
And I? Where is my heart in all of this? My only child is thousands of miles away, safe; soon I will be smoke and ash; so what is it to me that a time has come when childhood is despised, when children school each other never to smile, never to cry, to raise fists in the air like hammers? Is it truly a time out of time, heaved up out of the earth, misbegotten, monstrous? What, after all, gave birth to the age of iron but the age of granite? Did we not have Voortrekkers, generation after generation of Voortrekkers, grim-faced, tight-lipped Afrikaner children, marching, singing their patriotic hymns, saluting their flag, vowing to die for their fatherland? Ons sal lewe, ons sal sterwe. Are there not still white zealots preaching the old regime of discipline, work, obedience, self-sacrifice, a regime of death, to children some too young to tie their own shoelaces? What a nightmare from beginning to end! The spirit of Geneva triumphant in Africa. Calvin, black-robed, thin-blooded, forever cold, rubbing his hands in the after-world, smiling his wintry smile. Calvin victorious, reborn in the dogmatists and witch-hunters of both armies. How fortunate you are to have put all this behind you!
The other boy, Bheki's friend, arrived on a red bicycle with fat sky-blue tyres. When I went to bed last night the bicycle was in the courtyard, glistening wet in the moonlight. At seven this morning, when I looked out of the window, it was still there. I took the morning pills and had another hour's sleep. I dreamed I was trapped in a crowd. Shapes pushed at me, hit at me, swore in words I could not make out, filthy, full of menace. I hit back, but my arms were a child's arms: foo, foo went my blows, like puffs of air.
I awoke to the sound of raised voices, Florence 's and someone else's. I rang the bell once, twice, three times, four times. At last Florence came.
'Is there someone at the door, Florence?'
Florence picked up the quilt from the floor and folded it over the foot of the bed. 'It is nobody,' she said.
'Did your son's friend stay here last night?'
'Yes. He cannot ride a bicycle in the dark, it is too dangerous. '
'And where did he sleep?'
Florence drew herself up. 'In the garage. Bheki and he slept in the garage.'
'But how did they get into the garage?'
'They opened the window.'
'Can't they ask me before they do something like that?'
A silence. Florence picked up the tray.
'Is this boy going to be living here too, in the garage? Are they sleeping in my car, Florence?'
Florence shook her head. 'I do not know. You must ask them yourself.'
Midday, and the bicycle was still here. Of the boys themselves no sign. But when I went out to the mailbox there was a yellow police van parked across the street with two uniformed men in it, the one on the near side asleep, his cheek against the glass.
I beckoned to the man behind the wheel. The engine came to life, the sleeper sat: up, the van climbed the sidewalk, made a brisk U-turn, and pulled up beside me.
I expected them to get out. But no, there they sat without a word, waiting for me to speak. A cold north-wester was blowing. 1 held my dressing-gown closed at my throat. The radio in the van crackled. ' Vier-drie-agt, ' said a woman's voice. They ignored it. Two young men in blue.
'Can I help you?' I said. 'Are you waiting for someone?'
'Can you help us? I don't know, lady. You tell us, can you help us.'
In my day, I thought, policemen spoke respectfully to ladies. In my day children did not set fire to schools. In my day: a phrase one came across in this day only in Letters to the Editor. Old men and women, trembling with just fury, taking up the pen, weapon of last resort. In my day, now over; in my life, now past.
'If you are looking for those boys, I want you to know they have my permission to be here.'
'Which boys, lady?'
'The boys who are visiting here. The boys from Guguletu. The schoolboys.'
There was a burst of noise from the radio.
'No, lady, I don't know anything about boys from Guguletu. Do you want us to look out for them?'
A glance passed between the two of them, a glance of merriment. I gripped the bar of the gate. The dressing-gown gaped, I felt the cold wind on my throat, my chest. 'In my day,' I said, enunciating clearly each old, discredited, comical word, 'a policeman did not speak to a lady like that.' And I turned my back on them.
The radio squawked like a parrot behind me; or perhaps they made the sound come from it, I would not put it past them. An hour later the yellow van was still outside the gate.
'I really think you should send this other bay home,' I told Florence. 'He is going to get your son into trouble.'
'I cannot send him home,' said Florence. 'If he goes Bheki will go with him. They are like this.' She held up a hand, two fingers intertwined. 'It is safer for them here. In Guguletu there is trouble all the time, and then the police come in and shoot.'
Shooting in Guguletu: whatever Florence knows about it, whatever you know ten thousand miles away, I do not know. In the news that reaches me there is no mention of trouble, of shooting. The land that is presented to me is a land of smiling neighbours.
'If they are here to get away from the fighting then why are the police after them?'
Florence drew a deep breath. Since the birth of the baby there has been an air of barely contained outrage about her. 'You must not ask me, madam,' she declared, 'why the police are coming after the children and chasing them and shooting them and putting them in jail. You must not ask me.'
'Very well,' I said, 'I will not make that mistake again. But I cannot turn my home into a haven for all the children running away from the townships.'
'But why not?' asked Florence, leaning forward: 'Why not?'
I ran a hot bath, undressed, and painfully lowered myself into the water. Why not? I hung my head; the ends of my hair, falling over my face, touched the water; my legs, mottled, blue-veined, stuck out like sticks before me. An old woman, sick and ugly, clawing on to what she has left. The living, impatient of long dyings; the dying, envious of the living. An unsavoury spectacle: may it be over soon.
No bell in the bathroom. I cleared my throat and called: ' Florence!' Bare pipes and white walls gave back a hollow sound. Absurd to imagine that Florence would hear me. And if she heard, why should she come?
Dear mother, I thought, look down on me, stretch forth your hand!
Shivers began to run through me from head to toe. Behind closed eyes I saw my mother as she is when she appears to me, in her drab old person's clothes, her face hidden.
'Come to me!' I whispered.
But she would not. Stretching out her arms as a coasting hawk does, my mother began to ascend into the sky. Higher and higher she rose above me. She reached the layer of the clouds, pierced it, soared on. With each mile she ascended she became younger. Her hair grew dark again, her skin, fresh. The old clothes fell from her like dry leaves, revealing the blue dress with the feather In the buttonhole that she wears in my earliest memory of her, from the time when the world was young and all things were possible.
On she soared, in the eternal perfection, of youth, changeless, smiling, rapt, forgetful, to the rim of the heavenly sphere itself. 'Mother, look down on me!' I whispered into the bare bathroom.
The rains b
egan early this year. This is the fourth month of rain. Where one touches the walls, streaks of damp form. There are patches where the plaster is blistering and bursting. My clothes have a bitter, mouldy smell. How I long, just once more, to put on, crisp underwear smelling of the sun! Let me be granted just one more summer-afternoon walk down the Avenue amid the nut-brown bodies of children on their way home from school, laughing, giggling, smelling of clean young sweat, the girls every year more beautiful, plus belles. And if that is not to be, let there still be, to the last, gratitude, unbounded, heartfelt gratitude, for having been granted a spell in this world of wonders.
I write these words sitting in bed, my knees pressed together against the August cold. Gratitude I write down the word and read it back. What does it mean? Before my eyes it grows dense, dark, mysterious. Then something happens. Slowly, like a pomegranate, my heart bursts with gratitude; like a fruit splitting open to reveal the seeds of love. Gratitude, pomegranate: sister words.
At five this morning I was woken by heavy rain. It came down In sheets, streaming over the edges of the clogged gutters, dripping through cracked rooftiles. I went downstairs, made myself tea, and, wrapped in a blanket, settled down with the month's accounts.
The gate clicked and steps came up the driveway. A figure crouched under a black plastic sack scurried past the window.
I went out on to the veranda. 'Mr Vercueil!' I called into the teeming rain. There was no answer. Hunching my shoulders, clutching the dressing-gown about me, I stepped out. At once my slippers with their silly lambswool collars were soaked through. Through runnels of water I slopped across the yard. In the dark entrance to the shed I collided with someone: Vercueil, standing with his back to me. He swore.
'Come inside!' I shouted above the rain. 'Come into the house! You can't sleep there!'
Still holding the bag like a hood over his head, he followed me into the kitchen and into the light. 'Leave that wet thing outside,' I said. Then with a shock I saw that someone had followed him in. It was a woman, small, no higher than my shoulder, but old, or at least not young, with a leering, bloated face and livid skin.
'Who is this?' I said.
Vercueil stared back at me, yellow-eyed, defiant. Dog-man! I thought.
'You can wait indoors till the rain stops, then. I want you out,' I said coldly, and turned my back on the pair of them.
I changed my clothes, locked myself in my bedroom, and tried to read. But the words rustled past me like leaves. With mild surprise I felt my eyelids droop, heard the book slide through my hands.
When 1 awoke the one thought in my mind was to get them, out of the house.
Of the woman there was no sign; but Vercueil was asleep in the living-room, curled up on the sofa, his hands between his knees, the hat still somehow on his head. I shook him. He stirred, wet his lips, made a reluctant, mumbling, sleepy sound. It was the same sound – it came back to me at once – that you used to make when I woke you for school. 'Time to get up!' I would call as I drew open the curtains; and, turning away from the light, you would mumble just like that. 'Come, my darling, it's time to get up!' I would whisper in your ear, not urging you too hard yet, giving myself time to sit beside you and stroke your hair, stroke after stroke, my fingertips alive with love, while you clung to the last to the body of sleep. Let it be like this forever! I would think, my hand on your head, the current of love coursing through it.
And now your sleepy, comfortable murmur reborn in the throat of this man! Should I sit beside him too, lift off his hat, stroke his greasy hair? A shudder of distaste went through me. How easy it is to love a child, how hard to love what a child turns into! Once upon a time, with his fists to his ears and his eyes pinched shut in ecstasy, this creature too floated in a woman's womb, drank of her blood, belly to belly. He too passed through the gates of bone into the radiance outside, was allowed to know mother-love, amor matris. Then in the course of time was weaned away from it, made to stand alone, and began to grow dry, stunted, crooked. A life apart, deprived, like all lives; but in this case, surely, more undernourished than most. A man in his middle years still sucking on bottles, yearning for the original bliss, reaching for it in his stupors.
While I stood regarding him, his woman entered the room. Ignoring me, she stumbled back into a nest of cushions on the floor. She reeked, of cologne water: mine. Behind her came Florence, bristling.
'Don't ask me to explain, Florence,' I said. 'Just leave them alone, they are sleeping something off.'
Florence 's glasses flashed, she had something to say, but I cut her short. 'Please! They are not going to stay.'
Though I flushed the toilet several times, a smell lingered, both sickly sweet and foul. I tossed the floor-mat out in the rain.
Later, when the children were in the kitchen with Florence having breakfast, I came downstairs again. Without preamble I addressed Bheki,
'I hear you and your friend have been sleeping in my car. Why didn't you ask my permission?'
Silence fell. Bheki did not look up. Florence went on cutting bread.
'Why didn't you ask my permission? Answer me!'
The little girl, stopped chewing, stared at me.
Why was I behaving in this ridiculous fashion? Because I was irritated. Because I was tired of being used. Because it was my car they were sleeping in. My car, my house: mine: I was not yet gone.
Then, fortunately, Vercueil made his appearance and the tension was broken. He passed through the kitchen, glancing neither left nor right, and out on to the veranda. I followed. The dog was leaping up at him, bounding, frisking, full of joy. It leapt at me too, streaking my skirt with its wet paws. How silly one looks fending off a dog!
'Will you, get your friend out of the house, please,' I said to him.
Staring up into an overcast sky, he made no reply.
'Get her out at once or I will get her out!' I shouted in a fury.
He ignored me.
'Help me,' I ordered Florence.
The woman lay face down on her bed of cushions, a patch of wetness at the corner of her mouth. Florence tugged her by the arm. Groggily she stood up. Half guiding, half pushing, Florence propelled her out of the house. On the pathway Vercueil caught up with us. 'This is too much!' I snapped at him.
The two boys were already out on the street with, their bicycle. Pretending not to notice our squabble, they set off up Schoonder Street, Bheki hunched on the crossbar, his friend pedalling.
In a hoarse voice, in a rambling stream of obscenity, the woman began to curse Florence. Florence gave me a malicious look. 'Rubbish person,' she said, and stamped off.
'I don't ever want to see this woman again,' I said to Vercueil.
The bicycle with the two boys on it reappeared over the crest of Schoonder Street and raced towards us, Bheki's friend pedalling hard. On their heels followed the yellow police van from yesterday.
A light truck stood parked at the curbside, with pipes and rods in the back, plumbing materials. There was room enough for the bicycle to pass. But as the yellow van drew level with the boys, the near-side door swung open and slapped them sideways. The bicycle wobbled and went out of control. I had a glimpse of Bheki sliding down, his arms above his head, of the other boy standing on the pedals, averting his face, stretching out a hand, in a warding gesture. Above the sound of the traffic from Mill Street I heard quite clearly the thud of a body stopped In mid-flight, a deep, surprised 'Ah!' of exhaled breath, the crash of the bicycle colliding with the plumber's truck. 'God!' I screamed in a shrill voice that, hanging In the air, I did not recognize as my own. Time seemed to stop and then resume, leaving a gap: in one instant the boy put out a hand to save himself, in the next he was part of a tangle in the gutter. Then the echo of my scream, dwindled and the scene reassembled itself in all its familiarity: Schoonder Street on a quiet weekday morning, with a canary-yellow van just turning the corner.
A dog, a retriever, came trotting up to investigate. Vercueil's dog sniffed the retriever, while th
e retriever, ignoring him, sniffed at the pavement, then began to lick it. I wanted to move but could not. There was a coldness In me, my limbs felt distant, the word fainting occurred to me, though I have never fainted in my life. This country!, I thought. And then: Thank God she is out!
A gate opened and a man in blue work-clothes appeared. He kicked at the retriever, which sprang away in hurt surprise. 'Jesus!' said the man. He bent down and began to thread, limbs through the frame of the bicycle.
I approached, shaking. ' Florence!' I called. But there was no sign of Florence.
Straddling the bodies, the man lifted the bicycle aside.
Bheki lay under the other boy. There was a deep frown on his face; he wet his lips with his tongue over and over; his eyes were closed. Vercueil's dog tried to lick him. 'Go away!' I whispered, and gave it a push with my foot. It wagged its tail.
A woman appeared at my elbow, drying her hands on a towel. 'Are they newspaper boys?' she said. 'Are they newspaper boys, do you know?' I shook my head.
With an uncertain air, the man in blue straddled the bodies again. What he should have done was to lift the dead weight of the other boy, who lay face down across Bheki. But he did not want to, nor did I want him to. There was something wrong, something unnatural in the way the boy lay.
'I'll go and phone for an ambulance, ' said the woman.
I bent and raised the boy's limp arm. 'Wait!' said the man. 'Let's be careful'
Coming erect, I was overtaken with such dizziness that I had to close my eyes.
Age of Iron Page 5