Small Circle of Beings

by Galgut, Damon

  Far more arresting on either side was the presence of a million tiny hovels, built from tin and mud and broken stones. There did truly seem to be millions of them, going on and on as far as the eye could see. I could make out patterns on the walls. The torn roofs and windows suggested that this ugly city was in fact a ruin. I was prepared to accept, with relief, that people didn’t live here. But there were fires, enormous, ghostlike and soundless, inside these buildings. The red light from the flames sketched on the twilight the outlines of doorways and openings. ‘My God,’ I said. ‘Who lives here?’

  As I spoke, two figures came into the yellow beam of the headlamps. She braked and the car slid across the thick dust surface of the road. The instant we came to a halt the figures were at either window, craning in, holding objects of dried clay in their dust-reddened hands. I saw only figures reaching for me, savage motion blurred by dark. I was afraid. I cried:

  ‘What is it? What do they want?’

  Their jabbering was shrill. I couldn’t make it out.

  ‘They’re selling oxen,’ she said. ‘Clay oxen.’

  Her voice calmed me. It made me feel foolish. There was a moment, then, in which I saw with complete detachment the little ox lying on its side on the palm stretched out to me. It was indeed made and baked from clay. It had horns. It had eyes scratched out with the end of a twig. The clay was reddish-brown and had in it the marks of thumbs that had tamped it into shape.

  ‘How much?’ I said.

  ‘One cent, one cent,’ screamed the voice in my left ear.

  I looked from the ox to the hand that held it. I moved my eyes from the hand up the arm to the face at the window. We stared at each other.

  ‘Children,’ I observed stupidly. There didn’t seem to be anything else to say. They were indeed children. But they were children dressed in the rags of an unutterable poverty. Shoeless and shivering, they stood like me at forsaken roadsides, crying for a single cent to weigh down their pockets or hands with something – anything – of substance.

  ‘My God,’ I said again. ‘Buy one. Buy an ox.’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘A cent!’ I shouted. ‘Look at them, they’re starving! What’s a cent to you?’

  ‘No,’ she repeated, staring out at the tiny black faces peering with furious hope into the car.

  With knotted fingers I pulled a five rand note from my pocket and pushed it out the window. It was all the money I had. In a violent scrambling the two children leaped at it and at each other. They fell to the ground at the edge of sight, tearing at and beating one another for possession of the grubby rectangle of paper. It was only as she pulled away that I realised I did not have even a clay ox to show for my impulsive charity. We bumped along the road now at reckless speed, jarring from side to side.

  ‘Don’t you care?’ I said.

  She said to me: ‘Every cent you give them takes them further from desperation. They must be desperate,’ she said, ‘before the revolution will begin.’

  We drove on for a little way in silence before she said, more softly than before, ‘Five rand. You bastard.’

  I’m not in search of a better world. How could I be when I run from things? I’m not crazy with dreams of progress and brotherhood and peace. People speak a great deal these days of The Struggle. What Struggle is this? I want no part in struggle. I understand only simple ideas. The most terrible thing about the Nazi era was that it made no exceptions. Not even for children. We must allow children to believe in things like happiness. If not in happiness, then in the possibility of happiness. I can put it no bettter than this (I don’t want to grow old). Desperation should be reserved for old age. And what’s five rand to me anyway?

  She’d been there before, she knew the road. The campsite was a level field of lawn, hemmed in with tall fragrant trees. A short slope went down to a stream at the bottom edge of the grass. On all other sides one felt a brooding immensity indistinguishable from the darkness of the night. It was out of season and no other campers were there, but through the leaning trunks of trees one glimpsed still the trembling of the fires we had passed on the road. It was a clear night.

  ‘You’ve left it late, haven’t you?’ I said, as we dragged the folded tent from the back of the car. But she didn’t answer me.

  We struggled to put up the tent. Fumbling in the yellow glow of a gas-lamp, we pushed and pulled till the skin of canvas was stretched across its steel skeleton. It was really too small for both of us. There was also only one stretcher. But after spending so many nights in the open, I was quite happy to sleep in a corner.

  ‘Get out,’ she said, ‘while I change.’

  I walked across a narrow plank bridge that spanned the stream and found myself on a dust road following the steepening incline of the land. A hundred metres further up a footpath led off to the left. I followed it and was almost immediately on the needled floor of a pine forest. Blue shadows rippled across the ground. I sat, hugging my knees, and let the forest breathe its green breath into my face.

  After half an hour, I rose and retraced my steps. The tent was in the middle of the field, lit from inside as though it were burning.

  Much later, when I was lying on my back in the corner, one hand behind my head, she sat up in her sleeping-bag and said:

  ‘I know who you are.’

  She knew who I was. Of course she did. But I couldn’t even work up a faint alarm. Perhaps it was just that I was too tired, but I like to think that I trusted her with a fundamental trust that was completely strange to me. In any event, my mind remained numb. I had stripped down to my underwear and the lamp was cold across my skin. I studied the subtle shadows between my ribs. Then I cleared my throat.

  ‘Yes?’ I said.

  ‘It’s been in the papers,’ she said. ‘The Weekly Mail. Your family’s mad with worry.’

  ‘No, they’re not,’ I said.

  ‘They had your photo and everything. You were even on police file. Your father made a statement about that. He said something about how they were making you out to look like a criminal.’

  ‘Really,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Jesus,’ she said, and there was glee in her voice. ‘You showed them. You showed those bastards.’ Then she kept quiet for a long while, so long that I found myself falling asleep. When she spoke again, it was with an insistence that made me roll onto my stomach to look at her. ‘How did you do it?’ she asked. ‘Tell me how you did it.’

  ‘I walked,’ I told her.

  ‘Bullshit,’ she said. ‘There’s a desert to cross. And miles of bush. Please tell me.’

  ‘I walked,’ I said.

  ‘The army had an inquiry.’ I think she was talking to herself. ‘They decided that you’d either been killed by SWAPO or eaten by wild animals. Anything can happen up there. But you showed them. You showed those bastards. How did you do it? Please tell me how you did it.’

  ‘I walked,’ I said for a third time and now I was slipping away. Her voice was faint.

  ‘Okay, so don’t tell me. Keep it a secret. I guess that’s your right. But tell me this: what do you plan now? Where do you want to go from here?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I mumbled and then my voice was extinguished. This time she let me sleep.

  I opened my eyes on pale daylight coming in through the seams of the tent. Birds called and answered outside. She was still asleep, turned away under her blanket with one arm over her head. I crawled on cold-stiffened knees to the entrance and lifted aside the flap. I looked up at the mountains. I knelt in this way, insulated in a kind of white amazement, for a long time.

  I had never seen such mountains before. In the first level rays of sun they were huge and static and grim. Mist was moving between the crags. I’m quite prepared to believe that man’s lingering obsession with inhospitable regions like jungles, icelands and (dare I say it?) deserts, comes from spiritual equivalents to all these places in himself. But what barrier in me could ever equal this? I broke out in goo
seflesh. I shivered.

  But not for long. Within half an hour, when I’d dressed and made a fire, I was almost accustomed to the close cliffs teetering over us. I boiled water for coffee. As I crouched over the coals, holding the mug in my hands as hot as a gun, she came out of the tent. She was brushing her hair with little nervous strokes as she looked around her. ‘Something, huh?’ she said. ‘I love the mountains. I come here as often as I can. I needed to come now …’

  She fell silent.

  ‘Before what?’

  But she didn’t answer. She was by now also kneeling at the edge of the fire. There was a faint reflected glow, like a smear of red, under her eyes. She was staring at me, steadily and hard. She said, ‘Did we wake you?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Last night. Some people came round. We tried to be quiet. I hope we didn’t …’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I didn’t wake.’

  She continued to look carefully at me for a moment longer before dropping her eyes. I felt vaguely guilty for no reason at all. I thought back through my sleep, but could recall nothing, no wakeful moments in which there were voices or torches or bodies moving outside the tent. I looked around, hoping to see a footprint in the wet ground.

  ‘You should get civilian clothes,’ she said as she stirred milk over the fire. ‘You’re very obvious like that.’

  ‘Where would I get civilian clothes?’

  She squinted up at the sky. ‘It’s going to be a good day.’

  ‘When are you leaving?’ I said.

  ‘Tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Back to Pretoria,’ she snapped, then pointed with her spoon. ‘Give me the cereal.’

  ‘Why did you come here for one day?’ I asked.

  ‘Give me the cereal,’ she said again, and I did.

  We packed a picnic lunch in her rucksack and set out on a faint track through the same woods I’d rested in the night before. The sun was well up now and its yellow beams stood awkwardly between the trees like thick stalks of bamboo. Apart from the occasional dip, the path ran fairly steadily upwards, following the course of the stream that marked the lower edge of the campsite. We didn’t talk much. The air was layered and heavy, vibrating with the noise of birds and the rattling of the waters in their stony bed. Every so often we stopped to rest, rubbing our thighs and gasping. All the while as we walked I kept my eyes on her back in front of me. I could see the pulse of muscles beneath her shirt. Higher and further the mountains hung on all sides. Eagles or vultures – I can’t say which – stippled the sky.

  After an hour or two the path left the forest and began to climb towards a gorge. The stream still flowed beside us. From there on the landscape changed markedly, losing any geographic constancy as it progressed. We ducked from grassland to forest to jungle to kloof. And other things began to happen. There were no more birds to be seen or heard. Only our feet, our breathing and the leaping water were audible in that whole hushed amphitheatre. Except for what must have been unfelt winds that piped high in the surrounding stone walls like distant jeering laughter. The precipitous crowns of the mountains were on every side. The air seemed darkened by them, although we were still in full sunlight.

  And yet more things began to happen. In places the way was difficult to negotiate, going over rocks and bogs or simply climbing up too steeply. In these places I gave her my hand or shoulder for support and once even lifted her up a bank by her waist. Her grip was firm and feminine. Perhaps it was the altitude, but the higher we climbed the dizzier I became. I was conscious of an ever present fascination with the shapes of her, with the slight dry smell of her hair, with the delicate patches of sweat that glued her shirt to her shoulders and sides. I realized that I had possessed this fascination with her long before I’d ever seen her. She fitted pore for pore into an inconsolable space that had ached till then in my chest and groin. It was possible that I’d been running towards instead of away. It was possible that I’d reached the end of my road.

  It must have been close to noon when we stopped. Shadows clustered beneath trees and bushes. It was certainly a fine place for a picnic. We sat on a sun-warmed sheet of rock beside a dark pool into which the stream spilled in a waterfall from some twenty feet up. We were both hot and had grown tired with this relentless walking. A slope cut off our view, but we were otherwise high enough to have looked out over the lowlands as they washed towards the sky. As it was, we could not see far on any side. We sat, our feet dangling in the icy water of the pool. I held her hand.

  And, much later, we swam. I was not shy to leave all my clothes on the rock and climb naked into the pool. She joined me without hesitation. The water was freezing. It lined my skeleton with ice. I could see her breasts glimmering whitely beneath the surface and wanted to touch them. We kicked over to where the stream came down from above, hurling out pellets of water in a painful spray. The pool was deep, so deep that we couldn’t feel the bottom. It felt eerie, that void beneath. She sensed it too.

  ‘It’s like something’s waiting underneath to grab you,’ she said.

  So we swam back to the side and lay in the sun on our backs. Her pubic hair grew fluffy as it dried. I tried to eat a sandwich, but it was warm and unpleasant. The sky imprisoned us coldly from above. I thought of music and beer but they seemed absurd. I wanted. I needed. Wanted what? Needed what? Forget the sky. I felt far more imprisoned by the ridiculous construction of flesh, the arrangement of bones and hair and … the rest. Oh God. To touch. Just to touch.

  ‘I’m also on a quest,’ she said.

  ‘For what?’ I asked.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she said dreamily, ‘I am going to park a car full of explosives in Church Street in Pretoria.’

  ‘Where in Church Street?’ I whispered back.

  She told me.

  ‘But that’s the army,’ I cried.

  ‘Yes.’ She was whispering now too. (My cry was incongruous.) ‘Yes. They’ll all be lined up waiting for their afternoon buses. Bang.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Don’t do it. Please don’t do it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Please don’t. Please come with me. Please stay with me. We’ll go down to Durban and stow away on a ship. We’ll sail to some other place where nobody needs a bang to change anything. Please …’

  My voice trailed off. Of course I’d lied to her the previous evening. Of course I knew where I wanted to go. I was committed to trusting in some other land where children did not sell clay oxen at the side of the road. Some part of me forever approached this shore across acres of wind-chopped sea. But what ship could take me there? No ship from Durban harbour. At times I could well believe that this was an empty universe apart from tiny planet earth, that all the stars were waiting in uninhabited desolation for men to find and cover and blacken them till no refuge was left in skies or seas or space anywhere. Anywhere at all.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you come with me?’

  ‘They’ll catch you,’ I said. ‘They’ll catch you and hang you …’

  ‘They won’t,’ she said.

  ‘You’re a coward,’ I said. ‘I know your type. I know you people. You plant bombs and run away. You’re all cowards.’

  She laughed at me. ‘I’m going to be sitting in the car when it explodes,’ she said. ‘Come and sit with me.’

  Oh yes. So that’s it. But is this all that’s awaited me through the short years of my life? Surely I was devised for better things. Or was I? What of all the other victims at the roadside with their briefcases and starched uniforms, furtively saluting one another, looking at the shoulders of approaching people rather than their eyes? With them I hear the explosion of the hidden bomb. I see the perimeters of my existence shrinking at incredible speed. I witness my own extermination converging on me from all sides. What right do I have to determine where the end of my road lies?

  Later I left her drowsing on the rock, face down. Still unclothed, I made my way up through dense bushes to
another pool at the top of the waterfall. There was a basin of rock and I leaned against its side. From there, by turning my head to the right, I could look down on her from above. Perhaps it was just the way the air quivered with heat, but there seemed to be an immense distance between us. Her buttocks were white and untanned. There was also a narrow strip of white across her shoulder-blades. Her hair lay partly across the side of her face. She hadn’t seemed to register my leaving her side. For an instant I think I seriously contemplated a continuation of my flight, plunging up toward the source of the stream, reeling naked into the mountains on bruised feet. But the sight of her feather-fine body on the rock was enough to keep me there. I reached down and took myself in hand. It didn’t need much. A few brief tremblings of the wrist and her form wavered before my eyes as though it lay beneath water. I spurted hotly against the crushing weight of the mountains.

  And later still, washed clean, embarrassed, I strode in front of her on the long walk back to the tent. We were dressed once more, but my clothes felt strange on me. I was hardened by my days of movement, but my limbs hurt with fatigue as we came stumbling back to the campsite. She lit the gas-lamp. I put out deck-chairs on the grass. As the sun sank behind the mountains, deep shadows spilled from the gorge towards us. The air turned cool. We sat side by side, but I could not bring myself to hold her hand.

  ‘Guy,’ she said. ‘Will you be coming with me tomorrow?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

  After a long silence she said again: ‘Guy?’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘Guy,’ she said, so softly that I wasn’t sure if she’d actually spoken. ‘Guy, I think we should …’

  She didn’t finish. But I knew what she meant. I had thought of nothing else since we’d swum naked in the icy water of the pool. But now no motion came. I knew that if I reached for her she would crumble in my fingers like bread. I twitched words from my mouth.