Eddie was emboldened, frowned agreement, but giggling. ‘And some mealie-meal. Not always rice.’
‘Oh Charles and I like mealie-pap too. But I thought you’d be insulted, you’d think I bought it specially for you.’
They all laughed with her, at her. As Vusi remarked once when the black men talked in the privacy of their own language, ‘Joy’ was a funny kind of cell-name for that girl, without flesh or flirtatiousness for any man to enjoy. Yet she was the one who came out bluntly with things that detached the four of them from their separate, unknown existences behind them and the separate existences that would be taken up ahead, and made a life of their own together, in this house and yard.
It took Charles, Vusi and Eddie to hang an articulated metal garage door in the entrance of the converted shed. It thundered smoothly down and was secured by a heavy padlock to a ring embedded in Joy’s cement. There was the pleasure to be expected of any structure of brick and mortar successfully completed; a satisfaction in itself, no matter what mere stage of means to an end it might represent. They stood about, looking at it. Charles put his arm on the girl’s shoulder, and she put out an arm on Vusi’s.
Eddie raised and lowered the door again, for them.
‘It reminds me of my grandfather’s big old roll-top desk.’
Eddie looked up at the girl, from their handiwork. ‘Desk like that? I never saw one. What did your grandfather do?’
‘He was a magistrate. Sent people to jail.’ She smiled.
‘Hell, Joy, man!’ Either it was a marvel that the girl’s progenitor should have been a magistrate, or a marvel that a magistrate should have had her for a granddaughter.
One thing she never forgot to bring from town was beer. All four drank a lot of beer; the bottom shelf of the refrigerator was neatly stocked with cans. Charles went and fetched some and they sat in the yard before the shining door, slowly drinking. Vusi picked up tidily the tagged metal rings that snapped off the cans when they were opened.
Until the garage door was in place the necessities Charles brought in the combi had had to be stored in the house. Over the weeks the bedroom empty except for two mattresses and a trunk with a lamp was slowly furnished behind drawn curtains and a locked door whose key was kept in a place known only to Vusi – though, as Charles said to Joy, what sense in that? If anyone came they would kick in any locked door.
At night Eddie and Vusi lay low on their mattresses in a perspective that enclosed them with boxes and packing cases like a skyline of children’s piled blocks. Eddie slept quickly but Vusi, with his shaved head with the tiny, gristly ears placed at exactly the level of the cheekbones that stretched his face and formed the widest plane of the whole skull, lay longing to smoke. Yet the craving was just another appetite, some petty recurrence, assuaged a thousand times and easily to be so again with something bought across a corner shop counter. Around him in the dark, a horizon darker than the dark held the cold forms in which the old, real, terrible needs of his life, his father’s life and his father’s father’s life were now so strangely realised. He had sat at school farting the gases of an empty stomach, he had seen fathers, uncles, brothers, come home without work from days-long queues, he had watched, too young to understand, the tin and board that had been the shack he was born in, carted away by government demolishers. His bare feet had been shod in shoes worn to the shape of a white child’s feet. He had sniffed glue to see a rosy future. He had taken a diploma by correspondence to better himself. He had spoken nobody’s name under interrogation. He had left a girl and baby without hope of being able to show himself to them again. You could not eat the AKM assault rifles that Charles had brought in golf bags, you could not dig a road or turn a lathe with the limpet mines, could not shoe and clothe feet and body with the offensive and defensive hand grenades, could not use the AKM bayonets to compete with the white man’s education, or to thrust a way out of solitary confinement in maximum security, and the wooden boxes that held hundreds of rounds of ammunition would not make even a squatter’s shack for the girl and child. But all these hungers found their shape, distorted, forged as no one could conceive they ever should have to be, in the objects packed around him. These were made not for life; for death. He and Eddie lay there protected by it as they had never been by life.
During the day, he instructed Eddie in the correct use and maintenance of their necessities. He was the more experienced; he had been operational like this before. He checked detonators and timing devices, and the state of the ammunition. Necessities obtained the way these were were not always complete and in good order. He and Charles discussed the mechanisms and merits of various makes and classes of necessities; Charles had done his South African army service and understood such things.
Once the garage door like a grandfather’s roll-top desk was installed, they were able to move everything into the shed. They did so at night, without talking and without light. There had been rain, by then. A bullfrog that had waited a whole season underground came up that night and accompanied the silent activity with his retching bellow.
A chimpanzee, some insist.
Just a large monkey, say others.
It was seen again in the suburb of wooded gardens where Stanley Dobrow took the only photograph so far obtained. If you could call that image of clashed branches a likeness of anything.
Every household in the fine suburb had several black servants – trusted cooks who were allowed to invite their grandchildren to spend their holidays in the backyard, faithful gardeners from whom the family watchdog was inseparable, a shifting population of pretty young housemaids whose long red nails and pertness not only asserted the indignity of being undiscovered or out-of-work fashion models but kept hoisted a cocky guerrilla pride against servitude to whites: there are many forms of resistance not recognised in orthodox revolutionary strategy. One of these girls said the beast slipped out of her room one night, just as she was crossing the yard from the kitchen. She had dropped her dinner, carried in one enamel dish covered with another to keep it hot. The cook, twenty-one years with the white family, told the lady of the house more likely it was one of the girl’s boyfriends who had been to her room to ‘check out’ if there was another boyfriend there with her. Why hadn’t she screamed?
The girl left without notice, anyway, first blazing out at the cook and the old gardener that if they didn’t mind living ‘like chickens in a hok’, stuck away in a shit yard where anyone could come in over the wall and steal your things, murder you, while the whites had a burglar siren that went off if you breathed on their windows – if they were happy to yesbaas and yesmissus, with that horrible thing loose, baboons could bite off your whole hand – she wasn’t. Couldn’t they see the whites always ran away and hid and left us to be hurt?
And she didn’t even have the respect not to bring up what had happened to the cook’s brother, although the cook was still wearing the mourning band on the sleeve of the pastel-coloured overalls she spent her life in. He had been a watchman at a block of flats, sitting all night in the underground garage to guard the tenants’ cars. He had an army surplus overcoat provided to keep him warm and a knobkerrie to defend himself with. But the thieves had a revolver and shot him in the stomach while the owners of the cars went on sleeping, stacked twelve storeys high over his dead body.
Other servants round about reported signs of something out there. It was common talk where they gathered, to hear from the Chinese runner what symbol had come up in their daily gamble on the numbers game, in a lane between two of ‘their’ houses – after ten or twenty years, living just across the yard from the big house, there develops such a thing as a deferred sense of property, just as there can be deferred pain felt in a part of the human body other than that of its source. Since no one actually saw whoever or whatever was watching them – timid or threatening? – rumour began to go round that it was what (to reduce any power of malediction it might possess) they called – not in their own language with its rich vocabulary recognising th
e supernatural, but adopting the childish Afrikaans word – a spook.
An urban haunter, a factory or kitchen ghost. Powerless like themselves, long migrated from the remotest possibility of being a spirit of the ancestors just as they themselves, that kind of inner attention broken by the batter and scream of commuter trains, the jumping of mine drills and the harangue of pop music, were far from the possibility of any oracle making itself heard to them. A heavy drinker reminded how, two Christmases ago, on the koppie behind ‘your’ house (he indicated the Dobrow cook, Sophie) a man must have lost his footing coming over the rocks from the shebeen there, and was found dead on Boxing Day. They said that one came from Transkei. Someone like that had woken up now, without his body, and was trying to find his way back to the hostel where his worker’s contract, thumbprint affixed, had long ago run out. That was all.
Eddie wanted Charles to hire a TV set.
‘But Charlie, he just laughs, man, he doesn’t do anything about it.’ Eddie complained to him through remarks addressed to the others. And they laughed, too.
It was the time when what there was to be done was wait. Charles brought the Sunday papers. He had finished reading a leader that tried to find a moral lesson for both victim and perpetrator in one of the small massacres of an undeclared and unending war. His whole face, beard – like the head of a disgruntled lion resting on its paws – was slumped between two fists. ‘You want to watch cabinet ministers preaching lies? Homeland chiefs getting twenty-one-gun salutes? Better go and weed your mealies if you’re bored, man.’ A small patch of these, evidently planted by the man who had looked after the Kleynhans place while it was unoccupied, had begun to grow silky in the sun, since the rain, and Eddie monitored their progress as though he and Vusi, Charles and Joy would be harvesting the cobs months ahead.
The girl sat on the floor under the ox-wagon wheel chandelier with its pink shades like carnival hats askew, sucking a strand of her hair as she read. Vusi had the single armchair and Eddie and Charles the sofa, whose snot-green plaid Joy could not tolerate, even here, and kept covered with a length of African cotton patterned with indigo cowrie shells: every time she entered this room, a reminder that one really had one’s sense of being (but could not, absolutely not, now) among beautiful, loved objects of familiar use. The four exchanged sheets of newspaper restlessly, searching for the world around them with which they had no connection. The Prime Minister had made another of his speeches of reconciliation; each except Charles read in silence the threats of which it was composed. Charles spoke through lips distorted by the pressure of his fists under his fleshy face, one of those grotesque mouths of ancient Mediterranean cultures from which sibylline utterances are supposed to well.
This government will not stand by and see the peace of mind of its peoples destroyed. It will not see the security of your homes, of your children asleep in their beds, threatened by those who lurk, outside law and order, ready to strike in the dark. It will not see the food snatched from your children’s mouths by those who seek the economic destruction of our country through boycotts in the so-called United Nations and violence at home. I say to countries on our borders to whom we have been and shall continue to be good neighbours: we shall not hesitate to strike with all our might at those who harbour terrorists . . .
When they heard this rhetoric on the radio, they were accustomed to smile as people will when they must realise that those being referred to as monsters are the human beings drinking a glass of water, cutting a hangnail, writing a letter, in the same room; are themselves. Sometimes they would restore their sense of reality by derision (all of them) or one of them (Vusi or Charles) would reply to thin air with the other rhetoric, of rebellion; but the closer time drew them to act, the less need there was for platform language.
‘Scared. Afraid.’
Vusi dropped single words, as if to see what rings of meaning others would feel ripple from them.
The girl looked up, not knowing if this was a question and if anyone was expected to answer it.
Eddie sniffed with a twist of the nose and cocked his head indifferently, parrying the words towards the public office, occupied by interchangeable faces, that had made the speech.
The moment passed, and with it perhaps some passing test Vusi had put them to – and himself. He had opened a hand on the extreme danger hidden in this boring, fly-buzzing Sunday ‘living room’; in that instant they had all looked at it; and their silence said, calm: I know.
The allusion swerved away from themselves. Vusi was still speaking. ‘Can’t give any other reason why he should have them in his power, so he’s got to scare them into it. Scare. That’s all they’ve got left. What else is in that speech? After three hundred and fifty years. After how many governments? Spook people.’
It was a proposition that had comforted, spurred, lulled or inspired over many years. ‘So?’ Charles’s beard jutted. ‘That goes to show the power of fear, not the collapse of power.’
‘Exactly. Otherwise we wouldn’t need to be here.’ Joy’s reference to this house, their presence and purpose, sounded innocently vulgar: to be there was to have gone beyond discussion of why; to be freed of words.
Eddie gave hers a different, general application. ‘If whites could have been cured of being scared of blacks, that would have solved everything?’ He was laughing at the old liberal theory.
Charles swallowed a rough crumb of impulse to tell Eddie he didn’t need Eddie to give him a lesson on class and economics. ‘Hell, man . . . Just that there’s no point in telling ourselves they’re finished, they’re running down.’
Joy heard in Charles’s nervous asperity the fear of faltering he guarded against in others because it was in himself. There should be no love affairs between people doing this kind of – thing – (she still could not think of it as she wished to, as work to be done). She did not, now, want to be known by him as she knew him; there should be some conscious mental process available by which such knowledge would be withdrawn.
‘Don’t worry. If they’re running down, it’s because they know who’s after them.’ Eddie, talking big, seemed to become again the kid he must have been in street-gang rivalries that unknowingly rehearsed, for his generation of blacks, the awful adventure that was coming to them.
‘They were finished when they took the first slave.’ Knowledge of Vusi was barred somewhere between his murmured commonplaces and that face of his. He was not looking at any of them, now; but Joy had said once to Charles, in a lapse to referents of an esoteric culture she carefully avoided because these distanced him and her from Vusi and Eddie, that if Vusi were to be painted, the portrait would be one of those, like Velázquez’ Philip IV, whose eyes would meet yours no matter from what angle the painting were to be seen.
Vusi and Eddie had not been on student tours to the Prado. Vusi’s voice was matter-of-fact, hoarse. ‘It doesn’t matter how many times we have to sit here like this. They can’t stop us because we can’t stop. Never. Every time, when I’m waiting, I know I’m coming nearer.’
Eddie crackled back a page to frame something. ‘Opening of Koeberg’s going to be delayed by months and months, it says, ay Vusi?’
‘Ja, I saw.’
Charles and Joy did not know if Vusi was one of those who had attacked the nuclear reactor installation at the Cape before it was ready to operate, earlier in the year. A classic mission; that was the phrase. A strategic target successfully hit; serious material damage, no deaths, no blood shed. This terrifying task produces its outstanding practitioners, like any other. They did not know if Eddie knew something about Vusi they didn’t, had been told some night in the dark of the back room, while the two men lay there alone on their mattresses. Eddie’s remark might indicate he did know; or that he was fascinatedly curious and thought Vusi might be coaxed, without realising it, into saying something revealing. But Vusi didn’t understand flattery.
Eddie gave up. ‘What’s this committee of Cape Town whites who want it shut down?’
/> Charles took the paper from him. ‘Koeberg’s only thirty kilometres from Cape Town. A bicycle ride, man. Imagine what could happen once it’s producing. But d’you see the way the story’s handled? They write about “security” as if the place’s a jeweller’s shop that might be burgled, not a target we’ve already hit once.’
Joy read at an angle over his shoulder, an ugly strain on the tendons of her neck. ‘Nobody wants to go to jail.’
Charles gave the sweet smile of his most critical mood, for the benefit of Vusi and Eddie. ‘Ah well, but there are ways and ways, ay? A journalist learns to say what he wants without appearing to. But these fellows sit with the book of rules under their backsides . . . well, what’m I talking about – you need wits to outwit.’
‘What makes you think they even want to?’
‘Because it’s their job! Let’s leave convictions out of it!’
‘No, she’s right, man. If you work on these papers, you’re just part of the system.’ Eddie kept as souvenirs the catch-all terms from his Soweto days.
‘To be fair’ (for which ideal the girl hankered so seriously that she would not hesitate to contradict herself) ‘there are some who want to . . . A few who’ve lost their jobs.’
‘Someone reads this, what can he know afterwards?’ A sheet went sailing from Vusi’s hand to join those already spread about the floor. ‘You must call in an interpreter, like in court, to know what’s going on.’
‘Like in court? Jwaleka tsekisong?’ Eddie went zestfully into an act. A long burst in Sesotho; then in English: ‘He can’t remember a thing, My Lord.’ Another lengthy Sesotho sentence, with the cadence, glares and head-shakings of vehement denial: ‘He says yes, My Lord.’ A rigmarole of obvious agreement: ‘He says no, My Lord.’ The pantomime of the bewildered, garrulous black witness, the white Afrikaner prosecutor fond of long English words and not much surer of their meaning than the witness or the bored black interpreter:I put it to you that you claim convenable amnesia.
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