Hold My Hand I'm Dying

by John Gordon Davis

  ‘I’ll be all right.’

  ‘But only a short while ago a gang of natives stopped that Mrs. Burton in her car and poured petrol over her and her little girl and roasted them alive. Just outside Kitwe.’

  ‘That was ages ago.’

  ‘Not so long ago. And all over the place the natives are felling trees across the roads and when you stop they leap out of the bushes and panga you. Just because you’re white. They aren’t interested if you are going back to live in America or not.’

  ‘They aren’t doing so much of that, any more.’

  ‘Joe, they’ve only got to do it to you once, you know.’

  ‘I’ll be all right.’

  Silence.

  ‘Well – I must go, good-bye Suzie.’

  ‘Good-bye, Joe.’

  She was looking at the floor steadily. ‘And thank you for everything. For six years.’ She nodded at the floor.

  ‘Thank you too. For six years.’ I wanted to kiss her, but then I didn’t want to because she was letting me go. I opened the door. ‘Which way to the bus stop to get to the station?’

  ‘Down the road, turn right, next corner.’

  ‘How often do they run?’

  ‘Every half hour or so.’

  ‘Oh well – Good-bye, Suzie.’

  She looked up. Her eyes were steady, but they glistened. ‘Goodbye, Joe.’

  I wanted to run to her arms and weep and beg her to take me back, and never leave her, always stay safe next to her. Then I wanted to beat her for letting me go.

  I picked up my bag and opened the door and walked out and closed the door behind me. When I got to the gate, I looked back, with tears in my eyes, but the door was still closed and she was not at any window.

  I walked to the corner and after a while a bus came and took me down to Berea to the City Hall. I sat on a bench ‘Europeans Only – Slegs vir Blankes’. I thought of the six years and of Bulawayo and Inyanga and London and Paris and Madrid and New York and the winter and the summer and the fall, and I thought of the warm feel and scent of Suzie’s bedroom and her dresses which I recognised hanging in the cupboard, and I dropped my head into my hands and pretended I was looking at something between my feet and I cried tears.

  Then I crossed West Street to the Railway Station and I waited for the train to take me out of town on the road that leads north to Johannesburg and the Limpopo, and the land of Monomotapa beyond it.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Walking. The best thing to do when you are unhappy is to walk. Walk away into the sunset and never come back. The most difficult thing is to stay behind and catch the same streetcar every day, pass the same pubs, see the same familiar lonely places and at night go back to the same room. You think and remember and you react by habit to things you once shared, but you react alone and that reminds you. But when you walk away into the sunset you at least feel you are doing something constructive, going into a new life, even if you don’t want the new life. You are disciplining your body into going forward, and that helps your mind. When you walk you can look down at your legs carrying you forward, you can watch your legs getting burnt and brown, you can kick stones and sometimes you’ll see insects or an anthole on the ground and you can stop and bend down and watch them at work for a little while and you’ll think: God, aren’t they wonderful little things, how do they know what to do? If you see a dung beetle crossing the road, the vast strip of tarmac desert, heading purposefully for the other side, you’ll think, surely: now, why does he want to cross the road? How does he know he’ll find anything at all on the other side of the road and whether, if he finds something, it is what he wants? And if he finds something, will he be able to lug it all the way back? Will he be able to find his way back across the desert? What makes him think it is better on the other side of the road than it is on his own side, where his hole is?

  And you realise that there is an infinite amount of life apart from your own, and they also have problems, and you can get to love that dung beetle and even talk to it for a while.

  And you can look down at your shoes starting to scuff and wear away, and it is good because you are changing, and you can feel blisters, and that is good too because your body is changing. And you can count your steps for a while, estimate distances, how far it is to the big tree, and then pace it off to see how accurate you are. You can look at a hill and wonder what you will see when you get to the top of it, and the hill becomes a goal. And when a car comes along and you thumb it and it doesn’t stop you can shout out: ‘Fugyoutoo’ – which makes you feel better. And when you sleep at night, on a bench, in the bush, and you are cold, you think about being cold and how to stop being cold, which is better than lying in bed thinking about her.

  I walked. I walked out of the rolling fecund hills of Natal, rich and green and prosperous, where the Zulus are tall and fat and strong and handsome, through the flat dry Orange Free State and up into the high flat green gold-rich Witwatersrand where the mighty Johannesburg is, where the great mine dumps rise high and yellow into the sky amongst the skyscrapers, and the narrow streets throng with black and white people, hurrying hard and brash about their fortunes. In Johannesburg I threw away my bag, and bought a secondhand knapsack and walked out of the Golden City, north into the boland, the long high golden green plateau of the Transvaal. When I left one car, I walked until another picked me up, and I only stopped for short rests and I slept on benches and behind hedges and in the bush and I ate bread and cheese and fruit. The flesh fell off me, and my body became hard and brown, and I sweated, I began to sweat myself clean, my body and mind and soul clean and empty of all the bad and wrong and unwise things I had done, until all there was left was the grief and the loneliness for Suzie, and it felt that if I walked long and far enough that would be sweated out in the end too, and I would be empty to fill myself with new things. I walked up through South Africa and I felt nothing for the country, I did not feel for the sun and the bush and the black men and the white men that lived in it, they did not feel like my cousins, although I spoke their languages, because South Africa is not my country. I felt like an American. Then I climbed up over the Zoutpansberg mountains, high up over the ceiling of South Africa in the wooded mountains, and when I got to the top I stopped and looked back on the mighty plain below disappearing into the golden mauve of the horizon. Then I swung down the other side of the mountains into the Limpopo Valley, where the bush is hot and brown and grey and more wild, and at last I came to the Limpopo, with Rhodesia, the land of Monomotapa, beyond it.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  You know that South African immigration post on the Limpopo, surrounded by the hundreds of miles of flat bush, how the road runs down from the South African gate in a curve through the bush to the Beit Bridge, across the dirty great Limpopo and disappears in another curve up into the bush on the Rhodesian bank? Hot, quiet, lonely. It doesn’t seem a long way across, that border between the two immigration posts by car, but it’s a long, long walk. I walked across in the height of noon and it was hot. There wasn’t a sound except the crunch of my boots on the gravel and nothing to see but hundreds of miles of uninhabited hot thorn trees and hot caked sand and soldier ants. The sweat ran off me and my haversack cut my shoulders and I could feel the sun burning my arms and legs and face browner and my throat was dry. I saw nothing beautiful in the Limpopo, only brown sandy water flowing through hot thom tree desert. I passed an old tattered African near the bridge and he looked at me sideways for it’s not common to see a white man tramping loaded in the sun in that part of the world, but he touched his hat all the same and said ‘Molo Nkosi’ and I said ‘Molo Keghle’, which is polite and the correct way to address an old native. I didn’t like walking across the Limpopo in the sun into my home country after three years away and being looked at like that by that old African, but do you know that by the time I was halfway across that bridge I began to feel happy. I felt I was coming home.

  For the first time since I left New York. I’d bee
n happy in America, certainly, but it was a different sort of happiness, the happiness of affluence and soft possessions. This was a different sort of happiness, of being young and strong. I looked down at my brown sweaty legs carrying me over the hot brown gravel into my home country and it felt good. I felt like a Rhodesian. Not an American.

  Outside Beit Bridge I got a lift. West Nicholson, Jessie, Gwanda, names and villages I had even forgotten existed, one-eyed villages, just a hotel and a few shops and a few houses, a police post and a Magistrate’s Court and plenty of Africans lounging about in the sun. Miles of flat bush between the villages. Every now and again there were Africans standing at the side of the road trying to sell vegetables and beadwork, holding up their wares as the car went by, and the little piccanins with their bottoms bare and their stomachs sticking out waved to us. The grass was tall at the roadside. I loved every African and thorn tree and turn in the road. Balla Balla, and the sun began to go down and the hot quiet of the sun began to turn into the crick-cricking of the evening and the bush began to turn mauve. Man, there is nothing so beautiful to a Rhodesian as Africa in the late afternoon. Sunset, and we pulled into Bulawayo, my old home town.

  Bulawayo.

  It looked the same old dump, only more so. Streets wide enough in which to turn an ox-wagon, the sun beating down hot on the streets. There seemed to be more Africans on the streets than I remembered. There were no new buildings. The shops on the main street with their Victorian façades looked as deadly as ever. Many shops windows empty with hopeful To Let signs. The Princess Cinema shut down for good. Empty flats everywhere, especially on the ground floors, easy targets for petrol bombs. It had been difficult to find a flat in my day. ‘My day!’ I walked past Suzie’s old flat, just to hurt myself. It had a broken window with newspaper pasted over it and the cement steps which used to be polished bright red every day were brown and scuffed and a child had urinated on them. I walked to the Italian restaurant in Rhodes Street, where you used to be able to fill yourself up with greasy food for five bob and kid yourself you were having a slice of Continental life, and the restaurant was closed with red To Let signs plastered on the windows. The Cloisters Boarding-House was shut up and empty, and you used to think you were lucky to get into the Cloisters. I walked down to Fort Street, to look at my old flat. I had waited a long time to get into that flat. The fruitshop at the entrance to the block of flats was vacant. I walked through the portals into the fourth-rate courtyard and looked up at my old windows. No curtains, no sign of life. I walked up the four flights of steps and looked in the window. Empty, the floor was dirty. I could see in the kitchen and there was an old newspaper lying on the floor. I looked at the place where my bed had stood, where Suzie and I had first made love. Here, against the window, was where my table had stood, where I had sweated over my LL.B. and later over my book. My prized useless book. I turned and looked out from the block of flats and I saw the red corrugated-iron roof-tops and beyond the brown shimmering horizons of Matabeleland. I turned back and looked into the flat window.

  ‘Serves you right, you bastard,’ I whispered, and I walked back down the steps. As I walked I remembered the sound of Suzie’s high heels on the steps. I used to be able to distinguish them all the way from within the flat and despite myself I thought: I do believe I would go back to all this for the sound of Suzie’s high heels coming from work. You could get your job back and—

  And I quickly turned my thoughts to the bloom and frost and boom of America and I walked on down the steps. The next morning I walked up Selbome Avenue till I came to the Magistrate’s Court. I knocked on the door marked Chief Public Prosecutor and I walked in.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ Jock said.

  ‘Hello, Jock.’

  ‘Well—Je-sus—Christ!’

  After work I met Jock and some of the boys at the Exchange Bar. After all the cracks had been made about the number of women I must have screwed over the last three years and how beer sales had dropped since I left, and do you remember that case where this bloke did this and you stood up in Court and said … I said to Jock: ‘And how’s crime these days?’

  And he said: ‘Jesus’ and proceeded to tell me how crime was these days. He pointed to his greying temples: ‘See these?’ The jails full. Politically inspired crime. Thugs belonging to the black nationalist party of ZAPU, terrorising the people. Political intimidation, beatings up, gangs of thugs roaming the townships at night demanding production of Party identity cards. No card, biff bam powee crunch. Beat him with sticks, bicycle chains, stones, kick him, stone him. Note where his house is, stone it at night, beat his wife and children. Petrol bombs. Fill a bottle with petrol, stick a wick through the top, light it and throw it through the window. The bottle smashes, the room is filled with flaming petrol. Always at night, when the victims are sleeping. Women and children charred and scarred for life. Strikes. Gangs of thugs standing at bus stops dragging workers off buses, beating them up if they refused to observe the strike. Boycotting of African schools. Black thugs standing at school gates chasing the black children away from school, building up an explosive atmosphere. Thugs marching into class-rooms, and shouting at the teachers, threatening them with death, thugs sitting at the back of the class and smiling. Thugs roaming beerhalls demanding Party cards, beating up. Gangs overturning motorcars and setting fire to houses. In the country gangs of thugs burning the schools which the natives had built, gangs burning huts, gangs burning churches. Terrorise the people into following ZAPU, create an atmosphere of lawlessness, give the outside world the impression that an explosive situation exists because we haven’t got One Man One Vote. The police working overtime. The courts clogged up.

  ‘See these?’ Jock indicated his temples.

  Always operate in gangs. Haven’t got the guts to do their terrorising alone. Intimidate youngsters into joining the gangs, to give each other courage. That’s how we catch the bastards. Catch one member of the gang and he splits on the rest. Gutless bastards.

  ‘I used to be a Liberal,’ Jock said, ‘but I’m not so bloody liberal any more. I don’t mind the civilised ones, but Jesus, I don’t want to live under juvenile savages.’

  And now it’s explosives, dynamite and hand grenades, and sub-machine-guns. Smuggled in over the borders, canoed across the Zambesi, all made in Russia and in Red China. Wide boys trained in Egypt and Russia and in China. Oh, but what tits they are! Trained in Russia and China, but they still take the gang along when they do a job. Trained, but they still leave fingerprints and footprints for us. Trained, but they haven’t succeeded in blowing up a shit house yet. Trained, but as soon as we catch one he splits on the rest. Trained but as soon as they’re caught they tell us where the cache is. And where it came from. Trained? They couldn’t organise a booze-up in a brewery.

  ‘But one day they’ll find a few wide boys with a bit of guts,’I said.

  ‘Yes,’ Jock said.

  ‘Then what’ll you do?’

  ‘We will fight,’ Jock said.

  ‘For what?’ I said.

  ‘For civilisation. For the rule of law. For moderation. For equal rights for all civilissed men. We’ll fight to keep the hoodlums down. We’ll fight until the blacks are civilised. The civilised blacks already have the vote. I refuse to hand to vote to a savage. We’ll fight for sense in this continent of black ineptitude.’

  ‘You’ll lose,’ I said.

  ‘The Attorney General’ll give you back your job,’ Jock said.

  ‘I want it,’ I said, ‘like I want another hole in the head.’

  I visited some married friends in their spacious suburban homes. Toddlers playing on the lawns under nanny’s care, the garden boy looking after the lawns, sundowners brought in by the houseboy in white starched uniform. The toddlers hadn’t been there when I left. Nor had the bars on the windows.

  ‘—petrol bomb thrown down the road last week. Didn’t go off, but there’s always a next time,’ she said.

  ‘We’re safe enough here,’ he said, �
��The police always catch them.’

  ‘That’s what they thought in Kenya,’ she said, ‘I think we should move closer to town.’

  ‘What, and give up all this?’

  ‘I’m here all alone every day,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve got the servants.’

  ‘It was the trusted family servants who cut the most white throats in Kenya,’ she said.

  ‘Amos would never touch you,’ he said.

  ‘I’m worried,’ she said – ‘And what about him?’ Indicating the child. ‘What do you think, Joe?’ she said.

  ‘There have been plenty of changes,’ I said. ‘Tell us about America, would I get a job easily enough?’

  ‘America is beautiful,’ I said. ‘And it’s got no munts.’

  ‘But I would never be able to sell the house,’ he said. ‘You can’t give them away these days.’

  ‘What’s happened to the Davises?’

  ‘He threw in his partnership and went back to England. He saw the writing on the wall.’

  ‘Did you know Jake Jefferson?’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘He’s still around. His wife was killed.’

  ‘And the Johns?’

  ‘Gone to South Africa.’

  ‘And the van der Merwes?’

  ‘They went to the States, to Tennessee. They let us practise there, with no further qualifications. Remember the Todds? They left for Australia. So many have left.’

  ‘I’m going back to America, too.’

  ‘Joe, be a good chap and look out for a job for me over there.’

  Politics, politics, everybody talking politics.

  Christ, there’ve been some changes. It used to be good here, five years ago, it looked so good here, it was booming here five years ago, remember? There was hope here, we were trying Partnership here, remember? The country was opening up here, there had never been so much money here, the wogs were peaceful here, remember? Well, it isn’t like that any more. Britain sold us down the river.