That evening there was the rather prim atmosphere in the house that surrounds someone who has been drunk and now has slept it off. Eddie appeared, sobered of his single repetition, Nothing happened. Vusi must have told him that if he couldn’t stand the Kleynhans place any longer, that was all right, because from tomorrow the three men would be out every night from midnight until just before dawn. It had been Charles’s turn to cook (they had solved the problem of which sex was suited to the kitchen by having a roster) and, in spite of what sort of day it had been, he had made a mutton stew. Eddie loved mutton; but of course it had not been made with a treat for him in mind.
After they had eaten, the men went out into the yard. The moon was not yet risen. The light from the kitchen window touched shallowly the zinc glint of the garage door as it rolled up sufficiently for them to duck in. It rattled down behind them. Eddie didn’t think it was working smoothly enough. ‘Better get us some oil, Charlie, or it’s soon going to rust.’ Charles raised eyebrows, opened nostrils, swallowed a yawn, a man without tenure. While they were checking the heavy picks, the spades and black plastic sheeting Charles had laid in ready for the end of waiting, Joy didn’t mind doing the washing-up on her own for once. If there was something practical to plan, the men liked to do it behind the outhouse door, where they were in tactile reach of the means by which what they were discussing was to be realised.
They were gone a long time. She took a beer from the fridge with her to the living room and turned on Eddie’s tape player, which was always beside his end of the sofa as a pipe smoker will have his paraphernalia handy on a chair-arm. After she had told Vusi about seeing Eddie hitch a lift, she had made it possible for herself to keep out of everyone’s way, all day. In order not to be with Vusi and Charles, not to sit around with them in that same room, or to be in the bedroom which was, after all, Charles’s room as well, she had dragged cardboard boxes, rags, old bones, torn Afrikaans newspapers the black man who used to live in the yard had collected, to the front garden and made her bonfire among the broken poles of the pergola. Now she felt the comfort of being together with them once more – all three of them, Vusi, Charles and Eddie, although they were not in the room with her. The music was whatever Eddie had left in the player; a tape with a strong beat. All on her own, she began to dance, smiling to herself as if to others dancing towards and away from her. She worked off her sandals without pausing, and danced on the nap of the ugly rug Charles had bought along with the job-lot ‘suite’ to make a show to the Naas Kloppers of the district that the house was meant really to be lived in. Rhythm tossed her head and the knot of hair loosened and slowly unravelled, then swung from shoulder to shoulder. She threw her glasses on to Vusi’s chair. At night, moths circled in place of flies above the lop-sided pink shades, falling singed; her bare feet trod one now and then. Her small breasts rose and fell against her chest like a necklace; she swooped and shook, swayed and softly sang.
Vusi’s dreaming face, that had so little to do with the temporal level of his thoughts and actions, took the wash of crude 60-watt light from the chandelier, suddenly in the doorway. The face appeared to her as a wave of phosphorescence in the dark wake of the house around her movements might reveal a head from a submerged statue. Eddie and woolly Charles came up behind him.
She had no breath left, her mouth was open in a panting smile. ‘Come on.’ It could only be Eddie she summoned.
She went on dancing.
Eddie was standing there.
Slowly, Eddie began to stir to life, first from the hips, then with this-way-and-that slither and stub of the feet, then with the pelvis, the buttocks, the elbows, the knees, and as his whole body and head revived, moved to her.
Eddie and Joy were dancing.
Charles could dance only when drunk; a performing bear, round and round; sometimes some girl’s teddy bear. He stretched out on the sofa, occupying Eddie’s end as well, and smiled at them encouragingly. He might have been a father happily embarrassed to see a neglected daughter coming out of herself.
Before the tape ended Vusi fetched his saxophone. That voice that was strangely his own entered the room ahead of him, playing along with the beat, speaking to them all, one last time.
When signs were not noted for a week or so in a suburb where the fugitive had been active, residents there at once lost interest in having it trapped. So long as it attacked other people’s cats and dogs, frightened other people’s maids – that was other people’s affair. Indignation and complaints shifted from suburb to suburb, from the affluent to the salaried man. The creature was no snob; or no respecter of persons, whichever way you cared to look at it. The policeman’s venison in a lower-income-group housing estate, a pedigree Shih Tzu carried away when let out for its late-night leg-lift in an Inanda rose garden – each served equally as means of survival. And the creature never went beyond the bounds of white Johannesburg. Like the contract labourers who had to leave their families to find work where work was, like the unemployed who were endorsed out to where there was no work and somehow kept getting back in through the barbed strands of Influx Control; like all those who are the uncounted doubling of census figures for Soweto and Tembisa and Natalspruit and Alexandra townships, it was canny about where it was possible somehow to exist off the pickings of plenty. And if charity does not move those who have everything to spare, fear will. All the residents of the suburbs wanted was for the animal to be confined in its appropriate place, that’s all, zoo or even circus. They were prepared to pay for this to be done. (But the owner of the largest circus that travels the country said it was unlikely an ape that had learnt to fend for itself in a hostile environment would be ever again psychologically amenable to training.)
Almost two months had passed since a thirteen-year-old schoolboy had been the first to sight the creature while playing with friends in the family swimming pool. Arriving as a result of somebody’s lack of vigilance, it seemed to some people the menace might be trapped for ever in refuge among them, as an eel may fall by hazard into a well on its migratory nocturnal wriggle towards a suitable environment and survive for many years, growing enormous, down out of reach. It was inevitable that when it was worth a line or two in the papers, now, the creature was facetiously dubbed King Kong, and sometimes even King Kong of the mink-and-manure belt, although it had been seen only once, and then first by a horse, causing the horse to bolt with owner-rider, in the country estate area of the far Northern Suburbs. Former wife of the chairman of a public relations company, the rider was known to her friends as quite a gal, and typically she wheeled the horse and rode after the thing through a eucalyptus plantation, but never caught up or caught more than a glimpse of something dark. Anyway, that was no King Kong; what she’d chased was about the size of the average dwarf.
In the opinion of a zoologist, a monkey, baboon or ape may survive on the koppies round about Johannesburg, in summer, yes. But when the Highveld winter comes . . . Simiadae suffer from the common cold, die of pneumonia, like people – just like people.
One day, they disappeared.
The back bedroom was empty and nobody slept on the mattresses or read Africa Undermined by the light of the goose-neck lamp between them. Joy tugged the badly hung curtains across the windows and closed the door quietly as she went out. She could have moved in there, now, but didn’t. She and Charles kept each other company, lying in the dark in the front bedroom and thinking in silence about Vusi and Eddie. He said to her once: ‘One thing – you and I have been closer to those two than we’ll ever be to anyone else in our lives, I don’t care who that might be.’
It might be the lovers they once were, the lovers to come; wife, husband, children.
Once or twice in the following nights Charles went to Vusi and Eddie in the small hours. ‘They say I shouldn’t, any more. It’s right; there’s danger that might lead someone to them.’ Only then did he add the conclusion – his conclusion and hers – to what he had said in the dark. ‘And most likely we’ll never see t
hem again.’
There was not much to tidy up. It was just a careful routine matter of making sure there was nothing by which anyone could be identified. Neither to have it lying about nor in one’s possession or on one’s person: he stopped her from folding up her conch-printed cloth, now familiarly wrinkled from its use on the sofa. ‘Well, I’ll just let it stay where it is, then.’
‘No you won’t. Haven’t you got some kind of dress or something of that stuff? Your preggy outfit? You’ve been seen wearing the same material.’
During the last few weeks, she had taken the precaution of making herself a loose shirt to disguise her lack of belly when she went shopping and might meet Mrs Naas Klopper. So there was another bonfire, this time down at what had once been the Kleynhans piggery. The cloth burned in patches; pieces, eaten into shapes by the flames, kept escaping destruction. Again, Joy had a branch with which to poke them back into the furnace heart of the fire. It served her right for carrying unnecessary possessions with her into a situation too different, from anything known, to be imagined in advance.
‘But if you can’t go to them any more, will they have enough food to last out?’ And she, in what she thought of as her stupidity, her left-over dilettantism of austerity, not realising you eat while you can, had started off by buying them cheap sausages!
Charles was tearing apart the spines of a few books, with marginal notes in Vusi’s handwriting, they had left behind. Feeding a fire with books was something he could not have believed he would ever do.
He stopped, with the peculiar weight of helplessness big men are subject to, when they must hold back. ‘Eddie says he’ll manage.’
She looked, in alarm.
‘Vusi has his mind on only one thing. I don’t think he cares whether he eats or not, now.’
The cotton cloth gave off the smell of its dye as it smouldered – the natural dye made from the indigo berry, she had been told like any tourist when she bought it in the other African country where she had received her new surname and passport on her way back to where she had been born. Now Eddie and Vusi, who were not known to her then, even under those names, were somewhere she had never seen. Charles had tried to describe it; she marvelled that it could have been adapted and wondered if it could possibly be maintained long enough. Charles explained that Vusi and Eddie would have to wait until the day, the hour, in which the exact coincidence of their preparedness, contingency arrangements, and the gap in the routine Vusi had studied, arrived. Vusi had this charted in his head as precisely as an analemma on a sundial.
Charles and Joy could sit on the front stoep, now, in the evenings, like any other plot owners taking the air. They sat drinking beer and she tried to visualise for herself where she had never seen, gazing way off, as to a horizon of mountains, at the only feature of the Kleynhans place view, the towers of the power station whose curved planes signalled after-light back to the sunken sun, and above whose height toy puffs of smoke were congealed by distance.
And then the man came on his bicycle to see how his mealies were doing. Charles and Joy were helping themselves to bread and coffee, in the kitchen, at seven in the morning; even Charles had not slept well. They saw him cautiously wheel the bicycle behind the shed, and then appear, sticking his neck out, withdrawing it, sticking it out, like a nervous rooster. He went up to the door of his old room and called softly, in his language. They watched him.
‘Oh Christ.’
‘I’ll go.’ Joy slept in an outsize T-shirt; she put her Indian skirt over it and went out into the yard with the right amount of white madam manner, not enough to be too repugnant to her, not too little to seem normal to the former Kleynhans labourer.
‘Yes? Do you want something?’
Mild as her presence was, it clamped him by the leg; caught there, he took off his hat and greeted her in Afrikaans. ‘Môre missus, môre missus.’
She changed to Afrikaans, too. ‘What it is you want here?’
He shook his head reassuringly, he wanted nothing from the missus, he asked nothing, only where was her boy? He wanted, please, to speak to her boy.
She was like all white missuses, she knew very well whom he meant but she suspected him, they always suspect a strange black man at the door. And she refused to understand because she knew he had something he wasn’t telling – like his mealie patch he’d left on what was now her property. ‘What boy? Which boy d’you mean? What’s his name?’
No, missus, he didn’t know the name – those two boys that work for the baas on the farm, now. Could he please see those boys? They were (in an inspiration, they had suddenly become) his wife’s cousins.
Now the white missus smiled sympathetically. ‘Oh those. No, they don’t work here any more. They’ve gone. My husband has finished with the building, he didn’t need them any longer.’
Gone?
He knew it was no use asking where. When black people leave a white man’s place, they’ve gone, that’s all; it’s not the white man’s business to know where they’ll find work next. Then he had another sudden idea, and again he saw in her face she knew it as soon as he did. ‘Does the baas need a boy for the farm? Me, I’m old Baas Kleynhans’s boy, I’m work here before, long time.’
She was smiling refusal while he pleaded. ‘No, no, I’m sorry. We don’t need anyone. My husband’s got someone coming – next month, yes, from another farm, his brother’s farm—’
They knew exactly how to lie to each other, standing in the yard in which she was the newcomer and he the old inhabitant.
She said it again: she was sorry . . . And this gave him the courage of an opening.
‘When I’m here before – after Oubaas Kleynhans he’s die, I’m look after this place. Those mealies’ (he pointed behind him) ‘I’m plant them. And then the other baas he say I must go. Now those boy – your boy – I’m tell them it’s my mealies and they say they can ask you, I can come for those mealies.’
‘Oh the mealie patch? No, I don’t know anything about that. But there are no mealies yet—’ Both her hands turned palm up in smiling patronage.
‘Not now. But when the mealies they’re coming ready, that boy he’s say he going ask you—’
‘You can have the mealies.’
He grinned with nervous disbelief at the ease of his success. ‘The baas he won’t chase me?’
She must be one of those young white women who tell their men what they must do. She was sure: ‘The baas won’t chase you.’
‘When the missus and the baas like to eat some of those mealies, when they coming still green, the missus must take.’
‘Yes, thank you.’ And then, the usual phrase from white people, who are always in a hurry to get things over, who don’t seem to know or take any pleasure in the lingering disengagement that politely concludes a discussion: ‘All right, then, eh?’ And she was gone, back into the kitchen, while, since he hadn’t been chased away, he took this as the permission he hadn’t asked for – to go through the white people’s property to look at his mealies.
Charles and Joy kept checking on whether the bicycle was still there, behind the shed. Half an hour later it was gone, and so must he be, although they had missed witnessing him ride away.
Charles heated up the coffee. He had not appeared before the man; the man would not be able to describe the baas, only the missus and the two boys who had worked for them. Joy blew on her cup. ‘I really think he’s harmless.’
But that was exactly what made him suspect – his humble pretext for having kept an eye on them for weeks, now, his innocent reason for trying to find out where Eddie and Vusi were: perfect opportunities for someone in plainclothes to have picked up a poor farm labourer out of work and offered him a few rands simply in return for telling what and whom he saw on a farm where nothing was growing but his trespassing patch of mealies.
‘And if I had chased him away?’
‘That’d’ve been much worse. For Pete’s sake!’
Once approved, she had natural grounds for
pointing out her forethought. ‘I told him someone else was coming to work for us, but only next month. To hold him off and at the same time make the set-up not seem too unnatural.’
Charles opened his hands stiffly, doubtingly, and then made fists of them under his bearded jaw again. ‘Next month.’ That part of the proposition was good enough. The day after you have left a country it will be as remote, as a physical environment in which you may be apprehended, as it will be in a year. Next month would be no more able to reach them than the time, months ahead, when the mealies would be ready for eating. ‘But now he’ll be hanging around. He’ll be arriving every day with his hoe and whatnot. He may bring friends with him.’
‘So it would have been better if you’d gone out and played the heavy baas scene.’
‘I’ve told you, you couldn’t have done anything else.’
The occasional lapses of confidence in herself, that had roused his tenderness when they were lovers, now irritated Charles. You had no business to have gone this far, to be the back-up for Vusi and Eddie – all that meant – if you were still at the stage of allowing yourself self-doubt. But they were alone; no Vusi, no Eddie, and there they had to stay until Charles, on one of his outings in the combi, learnt that arrangements were ready for them to get away, as arrangements, at the beginning, had brought them successfully to Klopper’s Eiendoms Beperk to look for a place in this area. They had only each other, even if it was in an awareness very different from that of the lovers they had been. They had lost the scent of one another’s skin; but the house held them together, this place which they had occupied, not lived in, as in old wars soldiers occupied trenches and stuck up pictures of girls there. Neither said to the other what both felt while going matter-of-factly through this stage of what had been undertaken: some days, a desolate desire to get away from the house, the shed with the shiny roll-down door, the veld where except for the mealie patch, khakiweed filled in the pattern of rows where beans and potatoes had once grown; some hours, a sense of attachment to the room under the ox-wagon wheel chandelier and the curlicues of the pressed lead ceiling where the four of them had spent time that could never be recorded in the annals of ordinary life; to the outhouse they had bricked up together, and even to an aspect neither of them would ever have of any landscape again – the presence of the towers of the power station, away over the veld. This sense of attachment was so strong there seemed, while it lasted, no other reality anywhere to be found.
Life Times Page 46