Gods and Soldiers

by Rob Spillman

  Mrs. King has her left thigh crossed over her right, her left foot crooked around her right ankle, her left arm coiled to clutch one of our glossy brochures to her breast. The wooden slats are slickly varnished with sunlight, and she sits upon them gingerly, as if the last coat’s not quite dry. Yet her right arm reposes along the backrest with the careless grace of a stem. There’s an odd ambiguity in her body, and it’s reflected in her face too, in an expression which superimposes the past upon the present: she looks both timorous and audacious. The WHITES ONLY sign under her dangling thumb in the very middle of the picture might be taken up the wrong way as an irreverent reference to her eyes, which she opens wide in an expression of mock alarm—or is it outrage? The rest of her features are more prudently composed, the lips quilted with bitterness, but tucked in mockingly at one corner.

  The photographer was wise to choose black and white. These stark contrasts, coupled with Mrs. King’s old-fashioned suit and hairdo, confound the period entirely. The photograph might have been taken thirty years ago, or yesterday.

  Charmaine was tickled pink, she says her bench is finally avenged for being upstaged by that impostor from the Municipal Bus Drivers’ Association. I doubt that Strickland has even noticed.

  There seems to be a tacit agreement around here that Mrs. King is an acceptable form, although it won’t do for anyone else. When I pointed this out, Charmaine said it’s a special case because Mr. King, rest his soul, is no more. I fail to see what difference that makes, and I said so. Then Reddy, whose ears were flapping, said that “Mrs. King” is tolerated precisely because it preserves the memory of the absent Mr. King, like it or not. He said it’s like a dead metaphor.

  I can’t make up my mind. Aren’t we reading too much into it?

  Charmaine has sliced the photograph out of the unread newspaper with a Stanley knife and pinned the cutting up on the notice-board in reception. She says her bench has been immortalized. “Immortality” is easy to bandy about, but for a while it was touch and go whether Charmaine’s bench would make it to the end of the week.

  We were working late one evening, as usual, when the little drama began. The Museum was due to open in six weeks’ time but the whole place was still upside down. It wasn’t clear yet who was in charge, if anyone, and we were all in a state.

  Charmaine was putting the finishing touches to her bench, I was knocking together a couple of rostra for the Congress of the People, when Strickland came in. She had been with us for less than a week and it was the first time she had set foot in the workshop. We weren’t sure at all then what to make of our new Director, and so we both greeted her politely and went on with our work.

  She waved a right hand as limp as a kid glove to show that we shouldn’t mind her, and then clasped it behind her back. She began to wander around on tiptoe even though I was hammering in nails, swiveling her head from side to side, peering into boxes, scanning the photographs and diagrams pinned to chipboard display stands, taking stock of the contents of tables and desks. She never touched a thing, but there was something grossly intrusive about the inspection. Strickland wears large, rimless spectacles, double glazed and tinted pink, and they sometimes make her look like a pair of television monitors.

  After a soundless, interrogative circuit of the room she stopped behind Charmaine and looked over her shoulder. Charmaine had just finished the “I,” and now she laid her brush across the top of the paint tin, peeled off the stencil and flourished it in the air to dry the excess paint.

  I put down my hammer—the racket had become unbearable—and took up some sandpaper instead. The people here will tell you that I don’t miss a thing.

  Strickland looked at the half-formed word. Then she unclasped her hands and slid them smoothly into the pockets of her linen suit. The cloth was fresh cream with a dab of butter in it, richly textured, the pockets cool as arum lilies.

  “What are you doing?” Strickland asked, in a tone that bristled like a new broom.

  Charmaine stood back with the stencil in her hand and Strickland had to step hastily aside to preserve a decent distance between her suit and the grubby overall. Unnoticed by anyone but myself, a drop of white paint fell from the end of the brush resting across the tin onto the shapely beige toe of Strickland’s shoe.

  The answer to Strickland’s question was so plain to see that it hardly needed voicing, but she blinked her enlarged eyes expectantly, and so Charmaine said, “It’s the WHITES ONLY bench.” When Strickland showed no sign of recognition, Charmaine added, “You remember the benches. For whites only?”

  Silence. What on earth did she want? My sandpaper was doing nothing to smooth the ragged edges of our nerves, and so I put it down. We all looked at the bench.

  It was a beautiful bench—as a useful object, I mean, rather than a symbol of injustice. The wooden slats were tomato-sauce red. The arms and legs were made of iron, but cleverly moulded to resemble branches, and painted brown to enhance a rustic illusion. The bench looked well used, which is often a sign that a thing has been loved. But when you looked closer, as Strickland was doing now, you saw that all these signs of wear and tear were no more than skin-deep. Charmaine had applied all of them in the workshop. The bruised hollows on the seat, where the surface had been abraded by decades of white thighs and buttocks, were really patches of brown and purple paint. The flashes of raw metal on the armrests, where the paint had been worn away by countless white palms and elbows, turned out to be mere discs of silver paint themselves. Charmaine had even smeared the city’s grimy shadows into the grain.

  Strickland pored over these special effects with an expression of amazed distaste, and then stared for a minute on end at the letters WHI on the uppermost slat of the backrest. The silence congealed around us, slowing us down, making us slur our movements, until the absence of sound was as tangible as a crinkly skin on the surface of the air. “Forgive me,” she said at last, with an awakening toss of her head. “You’re manufacturing a WHITES ONLY bench?”

  “Ja. For Room 27.”

  Strickland went to the floor plan taped to one of the walls and looked for Room 27: Petty Apartheid. Then she gazed at the calendar next to the plan, but whether she was mulling over the dates, or studying the photograph—children with stones in their hands, riot policemen with rifles, between the lines a misplaced reporter with a camera—or simply lost in thought, I couldn’t tell. Did she realize that the calendar was ten years old?

  Charmaine and I exchanged glances behind her back.

  “Surely we should have the real thing,” Strickland said, turning.

  “Of course—if only we could find it.”

  “You can’t find a genuine WHITES ONLY bench?”

  “No.”

  “That’s very hard to believe.”

  “We’ve looked everywhere. It’s not as easy as you’d think. This kind of thing was frowned upon, you know, in the end. Discrimination I mean. The municipalities were given instructions to paint them over. There wasn’t much point in hunting for something that doesn’t exist, so we decided at our last meeting—this was before your time, I’m afraid—that it would be better if I recreated one.”

  “Recreated one,” Strickland echoed.

  “Faithfully. I researched it and everything. I’ve got the sources here somewhere.” Charmaine scratched together some photocopies splattered with paint and dusted with fingerprints and tread-marks from her running-shoes. “The bench itself is a genuine 1960s one, I’m glad to say, from the darkest decade of repression. Donated by Reddy’s father-in-law, who stole it from a bus-stop for use in the garden. It was a long time ago, mind you, the family is very respectable. From a black bus-stop—for Indians. Interestingly, the Indian benches didn’t have INDIANS ONLY on them—not in Natal anyway, according to Mr. Mookadam. Or even ASIATICS. Not that it matters.”

  “It matters to me,” Strickland said curtly—Charmaine does go on sometimes—and pushed her glasses up on her nose so that her eyes were doubly magnified. “This is a mu
seum, not some high-school operetta. It is our historical duty to be authentic.”

  I must say that made me feel bad, when I thought about all the effort Charmaine and I had put into everything from the Sharpeville Massacre to the Soweto Uprising, trying to get the details right, every abandoned shoe, every spent cartridge, every bloodied stitch of clothing, only to have this jenny-come-lately (as Charmaine puts it) give us a lecture about authenticity. What about our professional duty? (Charmaine again.)

  “Have we advertised?” Strickland asked, and I could tell by her voice that she meant to argue the issue out. But at that moment she glanced down and saw the blob of paint on the toe of her shoe.

  I had the fantastic notion to venture an excuse on Charmaine’s behalf: to tell Strickland that she had dripped ice-cream on her shoe. Vanilla ice-cream! I actually saw her hand grasping the cone, her sharp tongue curling around the white cupola, the droplet plummeting. Fortunately I came to my senses before I opened my big mouth.

  It was the first proper meeting of the Steering Committee with the new Director. We hadn’t had a meeting for a month. When Charlie Sibeko left in a huff after the fiasco with the wooden AK-47s, we all heaved a sigh of relief. We were sick to death of meetings: the man’s appetite for circular discussion was insatiable.

  Strickland sat down at the head of the table, and having captured that coveted chair laid claim to another by declaring the meeting open. She seemed to assume that this was her prerogative as Director, and no one had the nerve to challenge her.

  The report-backs were straightforward: we were all behind schedule and over budget. I might add that we were almost past caring. It seemed impossible that we’d be finished in time for the official opening. The builders were still knocking down walls left, right and center, and establishing piles of rubble in every room. Pincus joked that the only exhibit sure to be ready on time was the row of concrete bunks—they were part of the original compound in which the Museum is housed and we had decided to leave them exactly as we found them. He suggested that we think seriously about delaying the opening, which was Portia’s cue to produce the invitations, just back from the printers. Everyone groaned (excluding Strickland and me) and breathed in the chastening scent of fresh ink.

  “As far as we’re concerned, this date is written in stone,” Strickland said, snapping one of the copperplate cards shut. “We will be ready on time. People will have to learn to take their deadlines seriously.” At that point Charmaine began to doodle on her agenda—a hand with a stiff index finger, emerging from a lacy cuff, pointing at Item 4: Bench.

  Item 2: Posters, which followed the reports, was an interesting one. Pincus had had a letter from a man in Bethlehem, a former town clerk and electoral officer, who had collected copies of every election poster displayed in the town since it was founded. He was prepared to entrust the collection to us if it was kept intact. Barbara said she could probably use a couple in the Birth of Apartheid exhibit. We agreed that Pincus would write to the donor, care of the Bethlehem Old-Age Home, offering to house the entire collection and display selected items on a rotating basis.

  Item 3: Poetry, was Portia’s. Ernest Dladla, she informed us, had declined our invitation to read a poem at the opening ceremony, on the perfectly reasonable grounds that he was not a poet. “I have poetic impulses,” he said in his charming note, “but I do not act upon them.” Should she go ahead, Portia wanted to know, and approach Alfred Qabula instead, as Ernie suggested?

  Then Strickland asked in an acerbic tone whether an issue this trivial needed to be tabled at an important meeting. But Portia responded magnificently, pointing out that she knew nothing about poetry, not having had the benefit of a decent education, had embarrassed herself once in the performance of her duties and did not wish to do so again. All she wanted was an answer to a simple question: Is Alfred Qabula a poet? Yes or no?

  No sooner was that settled than Strickland announced Item 4: Bench, and stood up. Perhaps this was a technique she had read about in the business pages somewhere, calculated to intimidate the opposition. “It has come to my attention,” she said, “that our workshop personnel are busily recreating beautiful replicas of apartheid memorabilia, when the ugly originals could be ours for the asking. I do not know what Mr. Sibeko’s policy on this question was, although the saga of the wooden AK-47s is full of suggestion, but as far as I’m concerned it’s an appalling waste of time and money. It’s also dishonest. This is a museum, not an amusement arcade.

  “My immediate concern is the WHITES ONLY bench, which is taking up so much of Charmaine’s time and talent. I find it hard to believe that there is not a genuine example of a bench of this nature somewhere in the country.”

  “Petty apartheid went out ages ago,” said Charmaine, “even in the Free State.”

  “The first Indian townships in the Orange Free State were established way back in October 1986,” said Reddy, who had been unusually quiet so far, “in Harrismith, Virginia and Odendaalsrus. Not many people know that. I remember hearing the glad tidings from my father-in-law, Mr. Mookadam, who confessed that ever since he was a boy it had been a dream of his to visit that forbidden province.”

  “I’ll wager that there are at least a dozen real WHITES ONLY benches in this city alone, in private collections,” Strickland insisted, erasing Reddy’s tangent with the back of her hand. “People are fascinated by the bizarre.”

  “We asked everyone we know,” said Charmaine. “And we asked them to ask everyone they know, and so on. Like a chain-letter—except that we didn’t say they would have a terrible accident if they broke the chain. And we couldn’t find a single bench. Not one.”

  “Have we advertised?”

  “No commercials,” said Reddy, and there was a murmur of assenting voices.

  “Why ever not?”

  “It causes more headache.”

  “Oh nonsense!”

  Reddy held up his right hand, with the palm out, and batted the air with it, as if he was bouncing a ball off Strickland’s forehead. This gesture had a peculiarly mollifying effect on her, and she put her hand over her eyes and sat down. Reddy stood up in his ponderous way and padded out of the room.

  Pincus, who has a very low tolerance for silence, said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if Charmaine’s bench turned out to be the whites’ only bench?”

  No one laughed, so he said “whites’ only” again, and drew the apostrophe in the air with his forefinger.

  Reddy came back, carrying a photograph, a Tupperware lunch-box and a paper-knife. He put the photograph in the middle of the table, facing Strickland. She had to lean forward in her chair to see what it was. I wondered whether she fully appreciated the havoc her outsize spectacles wreaked on her face, how they disjointed her features. She looked like a composite portrait in a magazine competition, in which some cartoon character’s eyes had been mismatched with the jaw of a real-life heroine.

  Everyone at the table, with the exception of our Director, had seen this routine before. Some of us had sat through it half a dozen times, with a range of donors, do-gooders, interest groups. For some reason, it never failed to involve me. I also leant forward to view the eight-by-ten. No one else moved.

  I looked first at the pinprick stigmata in the four corners.

  Then I looked, as I always did, at the girl’s outflung hand. Her hand is a jagged speech-bubble filled with disbelief. It casts a shadow shaped like a howling mouth on her body, and that mouth takes up the cry of outrage. The palm Reddy had waved in Strickland’s face was a much more distant echo.

  I looked next at the right hand of the boy who is carrying Hector Peterson. His fingers press into the flesh of a thigh that is still warm, willing it to live, prompting the muscle, animating it. Hector Peterson’s right hand, by contrast, lolling numbly on his belly, knows that it is dead, and it expresses that certainty in dark tones of shadow and blood.

  These hands are still moving, they still speak to me.

  Reddy jabbed the photograph with t
he point of his paper-knife. “This is a photograph of Hector Peterson, in the hour of his death,” he said. Strickland nodded her head impatiently. “The day was 16 June 1976.” She nodded again, urging him to skip the common knowledge and come to the point. “A Wednesday. As it happened, it was fine and mild. The sun rose that morning at 6:53 and set that evening at 5:25. The shot was taken at 10:15 on the dot. It was the third in a series of six. Hector Peterson was the first fatality of what we could come to call the Soweto Riots—the first in a series of seven hundred odd. The photographer was Sam Nzima, then in the employ of the World. The subject, according to the tombstone that now marks his grave, was Zolile Hector Pietersen, P-I-E-T-E-R-S-E-N, but the newspapers called him Hector Peterson and it stuck. We struck out the ‘I,’ we put it to rout in the alphabet of the oppressor. We bore the hero’s body from the uneven field of battle and anointed it with English. According to the tombstone he was thirteen years old, but as you can see he looked no more than half that age . . . Or is it just the angle? If only we had some other pictures of the subject to compare this one with, we might feel able to speak with more authority.”

  This welter of detail, and the offhand tone of the delivery, produced in Strickland the usual baffled silence.

  “Not many people know these things.” Reddy slid the point of the knife onto the girl. “This is Hector’s sister Margot, aka Tiny, now living in Soweto.” The knife slid again. “And this is Mbuyisa Makhubu, whereabouts your guess is as good as mine. Not many people know them either. We have come to the conclusion, here at the Museum, that the living are seldom as famous as the dead.”

  The knife moved again. It creased Mbuyisa Makhubu’s lips, which are bent into a bow of pain like the grimace of a tragic mask, it rasped the brick wall of the matchbox house which we see over his shoulder, skipped along the top of a wire gate, and came to rest on the small figure of a woman in the background. “And who on earth do you suppose this is?”