'I am going away, I am getting away, I am out of place here,' I answered.
'We are going to fetch the car, ' said Mr Thabane.
'We want to use that car,' said the young man.
'I am not letting anyone have my car,' I said.
'This is a friend of Bheki,' said Mr Thabane. 'I don't care, I am not letting him have my car.'
The young man – not a man at all, in fact, but a boy dressed like a man, bearing himself like a man – made a strange gesture: holding one hand at head-height, he struck it with the other, palm against palm, a glancing blow. What did it mean? Did it mean, anything?
My back was in agony from the walking. I slowed down and stopped. 'I must get home soon,' I said. It was an appeal; 1 could hear the unsteadiness in my voice.
'You have seen enough?' said Mr Thabane, sounding more distant than before.
'Yes, I have seen enough. I didn't come here to see sights. I came to fetch Bheki.'
'And you want to go home?'
'Yes, I want to go home. I am in pain, I am exhausted.'
He turned and walked on. I hobbled behind. Then he stopped again. 'You want to go home,' he said. 'But what of the people who live here? When they want to go home, this is where they must go. What do you think of that?'
We stood in the rain, in the middle of the path, face to face. Passers-by stopped too, regarding me curiously, my business their business, everyone's business.
'I have no answer,' I said. 'It is terrible.'
'It is not just terrible,' he said, 'it is a crime. When you see a crime being committed in front of your eyes, what do you say? Do you say, "I have seen enough, I didn't come to see sights, I want to go home"?'
I shook my head in distress.
'No, you don't,' he said. 'Correct. Then, what do you say? What sort of crime is it that you see? What is its name?'
He is a teacher, I thought: that is why he speaks so well. What he is doing to me he has practised in the classroom. It is the trick one uses to make one's own answer seem to come from the child. Ventriloquism, the legacy of Socrates, as oppressive in Africa as it was in Athens.
I glanced around the ring of spectators. Were they hostile? There was no hostility I could detect. They were merely waiting for me to say my part.
'There are many things I am sure I could say, Mr Thabane,' I said. 'But then they must truly come from me. When one speaks under duress – you should know this – one rarely speaks thr truth.'
He was going to respond, but I stopped him.
'Wait. Give me a minute. I am not evading your question. There are terrible things going on here. But what I think of them I must say in my own way. '
'Then let us hear what you have to say! We are listening! We are waiting!' He raised his hands for silence. The crowd murmured approval.
'These are terrible sights,' I repeated, faltering. 'They are to be condemned. But I cannot denounce them in other people's words. I must find my own words, from myself. Otherwise it is not the rruth. That is all I can say now.'
'This woman talks shit,' said a man in the crowd. He looked around. 'Shit,' he said. No one contradicted Mm. Already some were drifting away.
'Yes,' I said, speaking directly to him- 'you are right, what you say is true.'
He gave me a look as if I were mad.
'But what do you expect?' I went on. 'To speak of this' -I waved a hand over the bush, the smoke, the filth littering the path – 'you would need the tongue of a god.'
'Shit,' he said again, challenging me.
Mr Thabane turned and walked off. I trailed behind him. The crowd parted. In a minute the boy passed me, hurrying. Then the car came in sight.
'It is a Hillman, your car, isn't it,' said Mr Thabane. 'There can't be many left on the roads.'
I was surprised. After what had passed I thought there was a line drawn between us. But he seemed to bear no grudge.
'From the time when British was Best,' I replied. 'I am sorry if I do not make sense. '
He ignored the apology, if that is what it was. 'Was British ever best?' he asked.
'No, of course not. It was just a slogan for a while after the War. You won't remember, you were too young.'
'I was born in 1943,' he said. 'I'm forty-three. Don't you believe me?' He turned, offering me his neat good looks. Vain; but an appealing vanity.
I pulled the starter. The battery was dead. Mr Thabane and the boy got out and pushed, struggling for a footing in the sand. At last the engine caught. 'Go straight,' said the boy. I obeyed.
'Are you a teacher?' I asked Mr Thabane.
'I was a teacher. But I have left the profession temporarily. Till better times arrive. At present I sell shoes.'
'And you?' I asked the boy.
He mumbled something I did not hear.
'He is an unemployed youth,' said Mr Thabane. 'Are you not?'
The boy smiled selfconsciously. 'Turn here, just after the shops,' he said.
Alone in the wilderness stood a row of three little shops, gutted, scorched.' BHAWOODIEN CASH STORE, said the one sign still legible.
'From long ago,' said Mr Thabane. 'From last year.'
We had come out on a broad dirt road. To our left stood a cluster of houses, proper houses, with brick walls and asbestos roofs and chimneys. Among them, around them, stretching into the distance across the flats, were squatter shacks.
'That building,' said the boy, pointing ahead.
It was a long, low building, a hall or school perhaps, surrounded by a mesh fence. But great lengths of the fence had been trampled down, and of the building itself only the smoke-blackened walls were still standing. In front of it a crowd had gathered. Faces turned to watch the Hillman's approach.
'Shall I switch off?' I said.
'You can switch off, there is nothing to be afraid of,' said Mr Thabane.
'I am not afraid, ' I said. Was it true? In a sense, yes; or at least, after the episode in the bush, I cared less what happened to me.
'There is no need to be afraid anyway,' he continued smoothly: 'your boys are here to protect you.' And he pointed.
I saw them then, further down the road: three khaki-brown troop-carriers almost merging into the trees, and, outlined against the sky, helmeted heads.
'In case you were thinking,' he concluded, 'that this was just a quarrel among blacks, a spot of faction-fighting. Look: there is my sister.'
My sister he called her, not: Florence . Perhaps I alone in all the world called her Florence. Called her by an alias. Now I was on ground where, people were revealed in their true names.
'She stood with her back to the wall, sheltering from the rain: a sober, respectable woman in a burgundy coat and white knitted cap. We threaded our way toward her. Though she gave no sign, I was sure she saw me. ' Florence!' I called. She looked up dully. 'Have you found him?'
She nodded toward the gutted interior, then turned away, not greeting me. Mr Thabane began to push past the throng in the entranceway. Embarrassed, I waited. People milled past, skirting me as though I were bad luck.
A girl in an apple-green school tunic advanced on me, her hand raised as if to give me a slap. I flinched, but it was only in play. Or perhaps I should say: she forbore from actually striking.
'I think you should look too,' said Mr Thabane, re-emerging, breathing fast. He went over to Florence and took her in his arms. Lifting her glasses aside, she put her head on his shoulder and burst into tears.
The inside of the hall was a mess of rubble and charred beams. Against the far wall, shielded from the worst: of the rain, were five bodies neatly laid out. The body in the middle was that of Florence 's Bheki. He still wore the grey flannel trousers, white shirt and maroon pullover of his school, but his feet were bare. His eyes were open and staring, his mouth open too. The rain had been beating on him for hours, on him and his comrades, not only here but wherever they had been when they met their deaths; their clothes, their very hair, had a flattened, dead look. In the corners of his eyes ther
e were grains of sand. There was sand in his mouth.
Someone was tugging my arm. Dazed, I looked down at a little girl with wide, solemn eyes. 'Sister,' she said, 'sister,' but then did not know how to go on.
'She is asking, are you one of the sisters?' explained a woman, smiling benignly.
I did not want to be drawn away, not now. I shook my head.
'She means, are you one of the sisters from the Catholic Church,' said the woman. 'No,' she went on, speaking to the child in English, 'she is not one of the sisters.' Gently she unlocked the child's fingers from my sleeve.
Florence was surrounded by a press of people.
'Must they lie there in the rain?' I asked Mr Thabane.
'Yes, they must lie there. So that everyone can see. '
'But who did it?'
I was shaking: shivers ran up and down my body, my hands trembled. I thought of the boy's open eyes. I thought:
What did he see as his last sight on earth? I thought: This is the worst thing I have witnessed in my life. And I thought: Now my eyes are open and I can never close them again.
'Who did it?' said Mr Thabane. 'If you want to dig the bullets out of their bodies, you are welcome. But I will tell you in advance what you will find. 'Made in South Africa. SABS Approved.' That is what you will find.'
'Please listen to me,' I said. 'I am not indifferent to this… this war. How can I be? No bars are thick enough, to keep it out.' I felt like crying; but here, beside Florence, what right had I? 'It lives inside me and I live inside it,' I whispered.
Mr Thabane shrugged impatiently. His look had grown uglier. No doubt I grow uglier too by the day. Metamorphosis, that thickens our speech, dulls our feelings, turns us into beasts. Where on these shores does the herb grow that will preserve us from it?
I tell you the story of this morning mindful that the storyteller, from her office, claims the place of right. It is through my eyes that you see; the voice that speaks in your head is mine. Through me alone do you find yourself here on these desolate flats, smell the smoke in the air, see the bodies of the dead, hear the weeping, shiver in the rain. It is my thoughts that you think, my despair that you feel, and also the first stirrings of welcome for whatever will put an end to thought: sleep, death. To me your sympathies flow; your heart beats with mine.
Now, my child, flesh of my flesh, my best self, I ask you to draw back. I tell you this story not so that you will feel for me but so that you will learn how things are. It would be easier for you, I know, if the story came from someone else, if it were a stranger's voice sounding; in your ear. But the fact is, there is no one else. I am the only one. I am the one writing: I, I. So I ask you: attend to the writing, not to me. If lies and pleas and excuses weave among the words, listen for them. Do not pass them over, do not forgive them easily.
Read all, even this adjuration, with a cold eye.
Someone had thrown a rock through the windscreen. Big as a child's head, mute, it lay on the seat amid a scattering of glass as if it now owned the car. My first thought was: Where will I get a windscreen for a Hillman? And then: How fortunate that everything is coming to an end at the same time!
I tumbled the rock, from the seat and began to pick out the loose shards from the windscreen. Now that I had something to do I felt calmer. But I was calmer too because I no longer cared if I lived. What might happen to me no longer mattered. I thought: My life may as well be waste. We shoot these people as if they are waste, but in the end it is we whose lives are not worth living.
I thought of the five bodies, of their massive, solid presence in the burned-down hall. Their ghosts have not departed, I thought, and will not depart. Their ghosts are sitting tight, in possession.
If someone had dug a grave for me there and then in the sand, and pointed, I would without a word have climbed in and lain down and folded my hands on my breast. And when the sand fell in my mouth and in the corners of my eyes I would not have lifted a finger to brush it away.
Do not read in sympathy with me. Let your heart not: beat with mine.
I held out a coin through the window. There was a rush of takers. The children pushed, the engine started. Into thrust-out hands I emptied my purse.
Drawn up among the bushes where the road dwindled to a track stood the military vehicles I had seen, not three, as I had thought, but five. Under the eye of a boy in an olive rain-cape I got out: of the car, so cold in my wet clothes that I might as well have been naked.
I had hoped the words I needed would just come, but: they did not. I held out my hands, palms 'upward. I am bereft, my hands said, bereft of speech. I come to speak but have nothing to say.
' Wag in die motor, ek sal die polisie skakel,' he called down to me. A boy with pimples playing this self-important, murderous game. Wait in the car, I will call the police, I shook my head, went on shaking my head. He was talking to someone beside him, someone I could not see. He was smiling. No doubt they had been watching from the beginning, had their own opinion of me. A mad old do-gooder caught in the rain, bedraggled as a hen. Were they right? Am I a do-gooder? No, I have done no good that I can think of. Am I mad? Yes, I am mad. But they are mad too. All of us running mad, possessed by devils. When madness climbs the throne, who in the landscapes contagion?
'Don't call the police, I can take care of myself,' I called. But the murmuring, the sideways looks continued. Perhaps they were already on the radio.
'What do you think you are doing?' I called up to the boy. The smile stiffened on his lips. 'What do you think you are doing?' I shouted, my voice beginning to crack. Shocked, he stared down. Shocked to be screamed at by a white woman, and one old enough to be his grandmother.
A man in battledress came over from the next vehicle in the line. Levelly he regarded me. ' Wat is die moeilikheid?' he asked the boy in the troop-carrier. 'Nee, niks moeilikheid nie.' No problem. 'Net hierdie dame wai wil weet wot aangaan.'
'This is a dangerous place to be, lady,' he said, turning to me. An officer, evidently. 'Anything can happen here. I am going to send for an escort to take you back to the road.'
I shook my head. I was in command of myself, I was not even tearful, though I did not put it past myself to break down at any moment.
What did I want? What did the old lady want? What she wanted was to bare something to them, whatever there was that might be bared at this time, in this place. What she wanted, before they got rid of her, was to bring out a scar, a hurt, to force it upon them, to make them see it with their own eyes: a scar, any scar, the scar of all this suffering, but in the end my scar, since our own scars are the only scars we can carry, with us. I even brought a hand up to the buttons of my dress. But my fingers were blue, frozen,
'Have you seen inside that hall?' I asked in my cracked voice. Now the tears were beginning to come.
The officer dropped his cigarette, ground it into the wet sand.
'This unit hasn't fixed a shot in twenty-four hours,' he said softly. 'Let me suggest to you: don't get upset before you know what you are talking about. Those people in there are not the only ones who have died. The killings are going on all the time. Those are just the bodies they picked up from yesterday. The fighting has subsided for the time being, but as soon as the rain stops it will flare up again, I don't know how you got here – they should have closed the road – but this is a bad place, you shouldn't be here. We'll radio the police, they can escort you out. '
'Ek het reeds geskakel,' said the boy in the troop-carrier.
'Why don't you just put down your guns and go home, all of you?' I said. 'Because surely nothing can be worse than what you are doing here. Worse for your souls, I mean.'
'No,' he said. I had expected incomprehension, but no, he understood exactly what I meant. 'We will see it through now. '
I was shivering from head to foot. My fingers, curled into the palms of my hands, would not straighten. The wind drove the sodden clothing against my skin.
'I knew one of those dead boys,' I said. 'I have known
him since he was five. His mother works for me. You are all too young for this. It sickens me. That is all.'
I drove back, to the hall and, sitting in the car, waited. They were bringing the bodies out now. From the gathering crowd I felt a wave of something come out at me: resentment, animosity. Worse than that: hatred. Would it have been different if I had not been seen speaking to the soldiers? No.
Mr Thabane came over to see what I wanted. 'I am sorry, but I am not sure of the way back,' I said.
'Get on to the tar road, turn right, follow the signs,' he said curtly.
'Yes, but which signs?'
'The signs to civilization.' And he turned on his heel.
I drove slowly, in part because of the wind beating into my face, in part because I was numb in body and soul. I strayed into a suburb I had never heard of and spent twenty minutes driving around indistinguishable streets looking for a way out. At last I found myself in Voortrekker Road. Here, fox the first time, people began to stare at the car with the shattered windscreen. Stares followed me all the way home.
The house felt cold and alien. I told myself: Have a hot bath, rest. But an icy lethargy possessed me. It took an effort to drag myself upstairs, peel off the wet clothes, wrap myself in a robe, get into bed. Sand, the grey sand of the Cape Flats, had crusted between my toes. I will never be warm again, I thought. Vercueil has a dog to lie against, Vercueil knows how to live in this climate. But as for me, and for that cold boy soon to be put into the earth, no dog will help us any more. Sand already in his mouth, creeping in, claiming him.
Sixteen years since I shared a bed with man or boy. Sixteen years alone. Does that surprise you?
I wrote. I write. I follow the pen, going where it takes me. What else have I now?
I woke up haggard. It was night again. Where had the day gone? The light in the toilet was on. Sitting on the seat, his trousers around his knees, his hat on his head, fast asleep, was Vercueil. I stared in astonishment.
He did not wake; on the contrary, though his head lolled and his jaw hung open, he slept as sweetly as a babe. His long lean thigh was quite hairless.
Age of Iron Page 9