“Howzit, Professor Du Plessis?” Sam Kaleni greets her in a jovial voice. He slips his hand around her thumb, following the traditional handshake among black people. She awkwardly goes into the moves, obligingly. Many Whites are now using this way of greeting to show their liberal views and their — often improbable — acquaintance with black culture. She finds it patronizing.
The young man is well built, though slim, and displays a broad grin that somewhat reminds her of her brother. She restrains from smiling back at him, feeling she must put the record straight from the start.
“Robert told me you’re an excellent driver and mechanic. However, I’m heading to an excavation camp, and I need a digger as well as a driver.”
“Mies, you’re buying here two men for the price of one,” Sam replies, switching from English to Afrikaans and placing his right hand on his heart. There is something irreverent, tainted with self-amusement, in his eyes and body language. Zoe’s black-skinned countrymen are gradually losing all trace of subjection to the white baas. She still has to fully get used to it. Since she was a little girl, the subliminal consciousness of white entitlement has seeped through her skin. Every now and then it resurfaces, uncensored. It happened only a few months ago, she now remembers, on the day when a shop assistant in Johannesburg addressed her in a rude manner. Only a few years ago you’d have never dared speak to me in that tone, she heard her saying to herself. She was horrified: Those were the words of a diehard Boer seething with anger, not of a presumably soft-spoken, enlightened cosmopolitan.
The imminent departure makes her restless. Her adventure spirit is suddenly gnawing at her. Did she ever seriously contemplate the idea of pursuing a career working as a lab rat, fully bent on achieving professional celebrity? No way. She has always known she belongs to the other kind of scientists: those who love to gain their honours in the field, digging their path at the margins, bearing the Spartan hardships of the frontier — far from the clamour and worldly comforts. She may well remain an obscure researcher for the rest of her life, but she will be out there, in the scrub, under the big sky of Africa. Most of all, away from eGoli, this “city of gold” built out of hundreds of mine landfills encroaching on its inhabitants like malignant growths.
On the afternoon before their departure Zoe goes to check one last time the Land Rover and the bakkie, both crammed to capacity. As she enters the garage she catches the unmistakably sweet smell of the dagga. Sam pushes himself out from under the 4x4, a wrench in his right hand, and with elegant insouciance offers her his zol. Zoe shakes her head, turning down her mouth with a look of disapproval.
“Any problems?” she asks, looking at him askance.
“Not at all.”
“Goed, I’ll see you tomorrow morning, then. Half past four, ready to go.”
Teasing her, Sam replicates the subdued tone of black servants: “Yebo, Mejuffrou.”
All this would perhaps amuse her, if she were in an altogether different situation, in another stage of her life, in another country. But here and now, she cannot take any pleasure in jokes, or levity.
Sam grounds the butt of his zol under the sole of his work boot before raising his head and meeting her eye.
“You can’t wait to leave, isn’t it, Miss?” he asks, switching again back to English. And then adds, his head slightly bent on one side, his dreadlocks dangling from underneath his hat: “Who could blame you?”
“Bugger,” she says again under her breath, addressing colleague Robert Stanford as she turns and walks briskly out of the garage.
12
ON THE ROAD
“IT’S ONE OF those places where the ghosts of apartheid still hover menacingly,” Dario wrote in his notebook. Zoe has been reluctant to stop over in Vryburg, asking Koma and his wife to get there by train. But the R31 that will take them to Rietfontein and from there across the border into Namibia cuts through the heart of former Transvaal. Hastily and prosaically renamed North-West Province, the cradle of Afrikanerdom retains its irreconcilable cultural identity.
Not much seems to have changed in this part of the country since the high days of racial segregation. The Rainbow Nation’s concept of equal citizenship among South Africa’s eleven tribes is no more than a thin veneer over the true colours of this Boer stronghold. What Dario wrote no longer than a year ago is as valid as ever: In rural South Africa as everywhere else, race remains central in establishing what people think of each other and, consequently, in determining how they behave toward one another.
The previous night, before falling asleep, she re-read that passage in Dario’s diary in which he dissects her country giving it little hope: “Two conflicting perceptions of reality are at stake here. Blacks are embittered; to them things are not changing fast enough after the promises of the New South Africa. They are growing impatient and many are increasingly unwilling to keep on playing ‘Mr. Nice.’ Whites, for their part, believe they have already paid their dues by accepting a Black majority government. What’s more, they resent the stigma still hanging over them and the growing lack of prospect for the future. In their eyes, the swart gevaar is no longer a threat but has become a reality. As a consequence, many prefer to leave for less troubled frontier countries — Canada and Australia being top of their list.”
But not the hard-liners who live here, Zoe thinks as she drives into Vryburg, or in Schweizer-Reneke, Louis Trichardt, Ventersdorp. These backveld Boers won’t budge. They are here to stay. On their own terms.
The train on which Koma and his wife are travelling is late. The streets are deserted and, despite the early hour, blindingly white with sheets of heat. Sam and Zoe make their way to a nearby pub. Inside, the place is cool, dark and almost empty. The bartender turns slowly to check out the new customers. He is a blocky white man in his fifties with a bull neck bulging out of a military green shirt and a truculent demeanour. As he sees Sam, he furrows his thick eyebrows and assumes a grim, unfriendly expression. The only other customers, three farmers sitting at a corner table, stop digging into their breakfast to watch the odd couple that has just entered in their line of sight. The place falls into an eerie silence.
Zoe hesitates, standing by the entrance door. She would gladly turn tail and go back into the shimmering heat. Sam walks past her and heads resolutely for the lavatory.
She moves toward the counter and as she rummages in her satchel asks softly, trying to keep a low key: “Two sodas, please.”
The bartender takes the two drinks from the fridge and hands them to her with a wry smile.
“Twee koeledranke,” he says in Afrikaans while gazing up at her, marking his cultural space like a predator would scent mark his territory.
“Dankie,” Zoe says, looking away.
Sam is back by her side now, scouring the place, his teeth bared sardonically.
She hastens to finish her soda water, pays her dues and motions him to head for the exit. Instead, her companion takes a 10-rand note from his pocket and places it on the counter with studied casualness.
“Marlboro, asseblief,” he says, looking into the bartender’s eyes. There are four decades of segregation behind Sam’s defiant and eloquent look, she can’t help thinking. Yes man, it implies, even in Vryburg a black can now sit in a pub next to a white woman, speak English and be served by a racist. With equally theatrical slowness, never lowering his eyes, the bartender puts the pack of cigarettes on the counter together with the change. His gaze, too, full of disdainful condescension, says it all: You can sit here and show off your white girlfriend, but to me you remain a kaffir.
How on earth are we going to mend all this? Zoe asks herself while rushing for the exit in desperate need for fresh air.
The train has entered the station and is about to leave again. As she and Sam cross the street, Zoe spots them: a little man and a little woman standing on the sunny sidewalk, waiting near their bundles. They look so out of place, almost lost, in this asphalt world; they, of all people, who can read the great book of deserts an
d orient themselves in the nothingness of burning sands. Even here, though, they maintain their unmistakable bearing — relaxed, yet alert — always present within themselves and to the world around them.
The moment Namkwa sees Zoe, she starts clapping her hands with joy. Her eyes are hardly visible through the thick pattern of wrinkles in her face. She wears a sun-faded scarf knotted behind her head and a patched flowered dress with white lace around the edges. With her apricot-brown skin and heavy-lidded eyes, she looks like a native American goddess wrapped in a doll dress. She squeezes Zoe’s hands and smiles, revealing a handful of missing teeth. Koma instead, his face straight and enigmatic, just holds his eyes firmly on hers. Those eyes speak of trust and dignity. They also silently convey a resolution: There will be no going back to Schmidtsdrift.
Zoe turns towards Sam, who has kept himself discreetly in the background, and introduces him. To her surprise, he greets the couple in the crackling, snappy language, full of click sounds, of the !Kung people. The couple’s creased faces brighten even more and an animated conversation ensues, of which Zoe doesn’t catch a word.
“How come you know their language?” she asks him at the first opportunity.
“I lived among the Ju/’hoansi for over two years,” he replies with studied casualness as he adjusts his beanie.
“Wow!” Zoe is truly impressed: Ju/’hoansi is no ordinary word; it’s mostly used by the !Kung of Nyae Nyae when referring to themselves. Sam has even pronounced it with the right click in the right place — Dju-kwa-si — recreating the sound of a cork popping out. Her mechanic-cum-digger is far more acquainted with the base camp area than she assumed.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought Professor Stanford already did, Mejuffrou.”
“It’s typical of Robert to omit the relevant facts,” she mutters glancing at her watch. The stopover in Vryburg has lasted all too long.
“Nou goed, let’s get moving.”
Once again Zoe checks the oil and fuel gauges, as well as the radio contact between the two vehicles. The Land Rover responds smoothly to her driving. Koma is sitting beside her, Namkwa in the back. From time to time Zoe looks at the old woman through the rear-view mirror. She sits still and composed, her arms lying at her sides, watching the modern world roll by in front of her at eighty kilometres per hour — she, who has walked slowly her entire life.
For the first hundred kilometres, no one speaks; they are all overwhelmed, although for different reasons.
Zoe has her eyes fixed on the road, while her thoughts run wild. The doubts that have troubled her during the preparations and that she has stubbornly pushed back now return with greater insistence. She has let herself be lured by a scorching desert, a distant world of heat and dust. The thought that she should have been less impulsive now creeps in. She isn’t even sure what counts more: the wish to chase her lover’s dreams or the attempt to run away from hers.
So many times in these last days has she pored over Dario’s journal, trailing her finger over his twisted, almost illegible handwriting. Luckily, he jotted down most of his notes in English, perhaps to allow other colleagues to read them; only occasionally did he add a few words in Italian, probably not knowing their English translation; even more rarely did he write whole sentences in his mother tongue. Was it because his thoughts were too intimate and personal? She will need to have them translated. With her right hand she feels Dario’s small notebook in her breast pocket. For the first time since his death, she feels him close.
Just as well. Let’s vanish into the bush, you and me.
Zoe turns briefly towards Koma. The old man points his index finger towards something high above, beyond the windshield: A blue immensity is opening up in front of them. Soon they will be under his sky.
13
KALAHARI
“THIS DESERT is unnerving. It doesn’t have any of the mystique or the charm of the Sahara,” Dario had written of the Kalahari in his field journal. “It’s just a vast, desolate expanse of yellow earth, scattered with sharp-blade grasses, thorny shrubs and acacias. Only its southern section, which ventures into South African territory, has spectacular red sand dunes, with solitary black-maned lions roaming the open pans. Occasionally, mighty baobabs rise amidst the arid plains. It takes twenty to thirty metres of duct tape to wrap their trunk just once. Some of those giants are more than a thousand years old.”
The baobabs. Zoe thinks of them as “the lords of time,” watching unperturbed the passing of the decades, growing imperceptibly, further strengthening their compact bark, as smooth and hard as stone. Bushmen revere them and would never camp in their vicinity. They believe they have holy water in their trunk and are full of n/om, the energy source that gives life to the universe and all its creatures.
The sun mercilessly beats down on their vehicles as they drive through the flat plains. Only a few stops to stretch their legs, drink coffee from the thermos and have a quick bite from their padkos interrupt the whole-day journey. They are all eager to get to their destination — their destiny, perhaps. She runs a hand over her forehead beaded with sweat, then glances sideways at her companions. They have asked her to keep the air conditioning off and the temperature in the cabin has become unbearably stifling. They sit wooden-still and placid like two kokerbooms: yes, like those centennial desert markers with branches thrust upside down praying silently towards a merciless sky.
When they reach the border between South Africa and Namibia the sun has already started crouching in the western sky, opening a red wound in its blueness. There is no fence, just a signboard that indicates the end of a country and the beginning of another. In front of them, more of the same solitary gravel road seems to disappear into an absolute stillness. Hundreds of kilometres of nothingness stretch around them in all directions. A solitary camelthorn tree is the only hint of green. Two bored South African border guards sitting on plastic chairs in front of a small cabin stop their game of cards as Zoe pulls over and rolls out of the car. The two soldiers look perplexed at the odd travelling party — a red-haired woman, a Rasta and two old Bushmen.
“Where are you headed?” the bulkier and blonder of the two asks.
“Up north, to Tsumkwe,” Zoe answers.
“Doing what exactly?” His blue eyes now on hers.
“I’m with Wits University. We’ll be looking for fossils.”
“Then, no need to go further, Mies!” the border guard cries breaking into a grin. “Here we are, two forgotten skeletons in the middle of nowhere.”
Zoe smiles feebly, but doesn’t reply. They all follow the man in uniform into the cabin and wait for him to check and stamp their documents. When he is done he gestures them towards a door in the middle of the cabin. They walk through it and into Namibia to meet another couple of bored guards. To pass the time, one of them — a skinny black man with greying hair — is crotcheting lace.
“Not much traffic, eh?” Sam says as he hands over his passport.
Neither guard replies. Instead, both take their time examining Koma’s and Namkwa’s papers.
“First time I see a bushman’s passport,” the skinny one says.
Ja, Zoe thinks, they too now have to go through borders. They knew only freedom and unrestrained movement. Now they need to prove they have a surname, an identity, even a domicile. Their births must be registered, their marriages sanctioned. Like everyone else, they have to conform to this modernity. Traditional practices and rituals are leftovers for money-making folklore, for the tourists’ sake. The stamp falls with a thud on the old couple’s papers. It sounds like a life sentence — for a whole people.
They camp fifty kilometres past the border post, in a faintly surreal nowhere land. Only a family of warthogs scuttles about as Koma lights a small fire. Then the scene retreats again into its stream of hushed stillness.
Exhausted, Zoe gulps down her sandwich before reaching for her sleeping bag. While rummaging through her backpack with the help of a torch she comes upon Aun
t Charlotte’s diary. Despite the fatigue, she takes it out and sifts through the pages until she finds her ancestor’s last note. She steadies the torch on it and reads it again, knowing those words will now take on a new meaning.
Franschhoek, November 15, 1899
Today we buried my lover. I didn’t believe my aunties, mistaking their knowledge for mere superstition. I am upset and desperate. Above all, I am angry.
What was wrong — or sinful — or degrading — in offering myself to the only man I wanted?
I still cannot accept the idea that the guilt of one man, albeit tainted with the blood of many innocents, may fall on his descendants in such a blind manner.
I hate these people, my people — their narrowmindedness, their obtuse religion, their self-serving morality.
There must be a way to break free from it all.
After that, Aunt Charlotte didn’t write anything else. What follows are the memories of her young granddaughter Claire — Aunt Claire. Zoe snaps the diary closed, too tired for anything else.
Through the darkness come the click sounds of the conversation between Sam and Koma.
It’s their first night under a star-filled Namibian sky, but she takes little notice of it. Her eyelids close heavily, without warning.
The gravel road is a straight line of dust. On either side of it the rocky plains stretch away indefinitely. There are no trees. Only the spikes of giant aloes challenge from time to time the dullness of flat planes. They have been driving the whole day, the second of their trip, and the sun has moved down once again, stretching the shadows of their vehicles on the ground.
“Baster Country,” Sam’s voice croaks through the twoway radio.
The Afrikaner Page 8