Azanian Bridges

by Nick Wood

It’s been a while since I’ve driven down to Durban.

  A full three years since I’ve driven the ninety K distance with my stomach a cold ball of tension the entire way, seeming to balloon the distance and time into eternity.

  Four roadblocks on the way don’t help either; the police seem more intense and abrupt, even their veneer of politeness with white people stripped bare. My breath catches each time they look at my ID book, in case Brand is still after me and has alerted the police, but my ID is handed back with a cursory grunt each time, their search of my car revealing nothing except scraps of Lunch and Tex bar chocolate wrappings and a few battered editions of the South African Journal of Psychology.

  By the time I hit the outskirts of Durban, my stomach is tied in a knot so tight it feels as if I’m on the verge of vomiting. The distant sparkle of the Indian Ocean soothes the stomach subtly, helping me breathe somewhat easier as I swing across the Umgeni River and begin the quick turns that take me to my parent’s barricaded home in Durban North.

  I pull up outside the mechanised white gate, fighting the impulse to reverse and get the hell out of here.

  The number on the gate is a cute and curlicued blue ‘33’, a contrast to high walls that look like they host a fully manned watch-tower behind them – complete with razor wire and surveillance cameras. Judging from the taut fist that tugs at my innards, there may just as well be a harsh and prison-like environment waiting within.

  The gate rolls open. I have been observed.

  I have to remind myself that it’s just my parents who await me. Nothing nasty, nothing terrible – just my own flesh and blood – and, after all, he is my father.

  I creep up a driveway flanked by hydrangea bushes, offering up a prayer to a God I no longer believe in.

  I don’t recognise her at first – a slightly bent woman with a forceful swagger struts across the paved walkway from the house to meet me. I step out of the car and fall into her arms. She smells slightly of nutmeg and almond essence. Old memories of cake and koeksisters are sparked by her smell and her initially slightly hesitant, but finally firm, hug.

  “Hi, Ma,” I say, “How are you?”

  We look at each other and she keeps a firm grip on my elbows. She’s quite a bit greyer, and has chosen not to hide it. Her black-grey hair is bobbed onto the stiff collars of her frilly pink blouse, tucked into her long grey skirt that drops down to square and sensible brown shoes. Always sensible is Ma – but God, suddenly so old.

  “You’ve gone plump, Marty,” she says, with a bluntness that rolls back the years.

  “Yes, Ma,” I say, with a resignation that anticipates yet another conflict ridden visit.

  But still I remember Sibusiso’s words – he’d told me he was scared, but he needed to put things right with his father and insisted I make the family appointment. When I asked why, he just said: ‘He’s my father.’

  Physician, heal thyself.

  Ma leads me up the pathway towards the door, past familiar imported roses and flowers alien to the gathering wet heat of a Durban summer day. The door is open and she pulls me in to the cold chill of a dark and severe air-conned house, sitting room and lounge saturated with dark woods and lace curtains and table cloths, old pictures of people and places that track and anchor our families past and future; stiff, respectful, good Afrikaner ancestral volk who stare at you from pictures that both fade and breathe with residual life and expectation. I remember it all, yet it feels so terribly alien, so distant.

  The air is humid and thick with expectations I cannot fulfil – a good and devout Afrikaner wife who anticipates and echoes my thoughts, babies who do likewise and me being both a stern father and a caring son, doing my part for my elders. Staying close and caring for his parents as an only son should do. Attending the local NG Kerk with them on Sundays, doing some diligent and respected law work during the week, work which reinforces the justness of the apartheid system.

  This was a mistake. I should leave. But I suddenly notice the old man seated in the big rocking chair, facing out the window, with a dull look on his face.

  Jesus. I mean – liewe God! – Pa has aged much more than Ma has. He’s now completely bald with liver spots and seems to have bent into the shape of the rocking chair. He’s dressed in restrained brown shirt and trousers – but looks at me now, with eyes that sharpen with each passing second.

  “Hello, my boy.” His voice is much more muscular than his body appears and he makes an attempt to stand. Ma helps him up and he holds out a shaky right hand.

  I grip it fearfully and am surprised at the sudden painful snap of his sinewy hand. He grins then, in that old self-assured and cocky way, a smile that asserts he is leading the way on the Only True Way to Life. A retired barrister, I had been unable to reason with him three years ago – about who I was and what I wanted – and I had left, vowing never to return, closing my ears and heart.

  Sometimes it takes more effort to keep something closed, than to try and open it again.

  “Sit, my boy,” he gestures me to the couch, so I take the chair. Ma retires to the kitchen to potter with cakes and tea.

  He folds his body back down into the rocking chair and I stare at his profile as he rocks backwards and forwards, again not getting a prolonged and clear face to face view of who he actually is.

  What I would give to have my EE box here, to clip and connect the air between us!

  “How is work?” he asks eventually, as Ma brings in a tray draped with lace and two mugs and a pile of koeksisters.

  I shake my head as she offers me the sweetmeats: “Aren’t I too fat to risk one of those?” I regret it immediately, my voice sounding harsher than I’d meant.

  Her face crumples briefly and I suddenly see years of hurt layered under her skin. It hits me then – there is an old and familiar path of argument and pain that is easily trodden – or there are attempts to find new roads, pot-holed and empty, scary and threatening, leading past shacks and houses, to new spaces, new people.

  I must take a new and uncertain road, with or without my Box, if I am going to find change, something, anything worthwhile.

  I stand up and take the tray from her: “Sorry, Ma, that was rude of me. You sit please and I’ll get you something to drink. What would you like?”

  She looks at me, too hurt to sit.

  It is then that I remember she likes her tea with hot milk and one sugar. So I place the tray on the tablecloth and make my way into the kitchen, overwhelmed with flashbacks of being shorter, younger and waiting to lick out the mixing bowl of chocolate icing. I wait for nothing now, but pour another mug of tea and heat some milk in the microwave.

  It pings at me after a minute and by the time I walk through, mug in hand, Ma is seated in the chair I have vacated. She looks at me askance, as if unsure of me, but I take the mug over to her and give it to her first. “Here you go, Ma – and thank you.”

  She takes the mug and looks up at me with an uncertain smile.

  But all I see is an empty chair; all I feel is the burn of what seems like a never-ending seep of grief.

  I choke.

  Ma stands in concern, but she seems little more than a ghost, wafting up from a cold and empty chair.

  Her hands are warm though, clutching anxiously at my left arm, almost upsetting my tray.

  Why had I thought for a panicked moment that she was gone, dead?

  Oddly, I bow, carefully placing the tray down.

  “God be with you, Mother.”

  I weep as she kisses my cheek, her breath musty and hot in my nostrils.

  Pa looks up as I offer him a koeksister with his black tea, seemingly unaware of anything unusual. He hesitates for a moment and then takes it with a mumbled ‘dankie’.

  Ma watches me, but with her head cocked in concern.

  I sit on the couch and we sip our tea in silence.

  My tears have frozen on my face; I know Sibusiso’s pain flickers inside me; my life is no longer fully mine.

  “How have t
hings been with you, my boy?” Pa puts his mug down on the chair – Ma has finally started to eat her own koeksister. I smile and fill them in briefly about life and work, but it is an easy decision to leave out the bit about the EE machine and the Security Police. Being with family is a constant show and hide, but this time I show more than usual.

  So too, I feel more respect than is usual.

  I ask them how they are in return and hear a bit about seasonal planting and their garden, what goes on at church and the dire state of the country.

  Somehow, the talk is easier than it was three years ago, shifting through old and new subjects, faltering over hot topics, but no one choosing to enflame these. It’s as if we all have a renewed sense of each other and are tacitly trying to build new and firmer bridges of communication for each other. For Pa, he seems to have mellowed with the bend of his back and the emptying of his scalp. For me, I think perhaps my sense of others has been sharpened by the Box – and I can almost swear I hear Sibusiso’s breath inside me.

  Still, the EE Box itself is not a necessary thing. Sometimes words and good will alone travel a long way. We even finish talking with the hint of a smile hovering between us.

  They ask me if I will stay for the night. I thank them, but decline, realizing good will takes time and enduring energy to build and needs careful, constant nurturing. Perhaps tomorrow will be different anyway, back to old and well-carved paths of pain and disappointment.

  I will take what I have, while it still buds inside me.

  I have brought my costume and towel, perhaps in order to wash off a bitter visit in the warm and rough waves of Durban North Beach. This time I will just bodysurf in the water, flirting with dolphins and not sharks, I hope – or maybe there will just be other (white) swimmers.

  Then, finally, I will return home and think of a new way to find Sibusiso and my EE Box.

  As they open the gate for me and I cruise down the driveway, I know it will be much less than three years before I come back next time.

  In the rear-view mirror I catch a glimpse of the gate closing on my parents, standing together, arm in arm. Almost forty-five years together, I remember, turning down to the beach, my spirits soaring as the sound of the surf builds in my ears, my right arm burning in the sun as I tap the roof of my car to the banned hip-hop beat of Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.’

  Chapter 11

  Sibusiso in Zambia

  Ladysmith is the furthest I have been from Underberg, the place of my birth.

  I went with tata once, when the baas drove us up for a cattle show, as he wanted to ask Father what he thought of some of the cattle he was hoping to buy. Father insisted I come too, the eldest son, as he thought I was ready to learn some cattle lore from them.

  We travelled in the back of the baas’sbakkie of course, through the worst of the day’s heat, but Father gave me the biggest sips from the water bottle he had brought.

  The baas believes we do not get sunburnt because we are black. Father had a light cloth he covered us with when the sun baked the most. I’m still burnt sore and bored stiff at the cattle show though – Ladysmith itself seemed like a dull and dusty town and the white people seemed even ruder than usual; I heard the word ‘kaffir’ thrown around a good deal more than I was used to.

  Father loved it, though – cattle were in his blood, he has always been a real umZulu. As for me, I pretended I loved cows as much as I could, as they trailed around a large ring on show, but I was constantly longing to go home and learn of other things at school, like history, geography and mathematics.

  From geography, I learned Ladysmith was two hundred and fifty kilometres from home. That seemed a long, long way to have travelled indeed, something to boast about at school, although a few claimed to have gone further than me. On a few maps of Africa I’d seen, however, the continent had stretched above us for thousands and thousands of kilometres; over fifty countries, all ruled by black people, almost all men – except for our land, defiantly white South Africa.

  Zambia itself had seemed especially important. Although we were not taught so formally, we all knew amongst ourselves that some of our exiled leaders were there: Mbeki, the son, Zuma, and Hani himself, the stuff of legend, military chief, dodger of bombs.

  Yes, others were banned or in hiding or on Robben Island – but some at least were free in Lusaka, the capital of a black African country – managing itself fine off the back of large copper sales, mainly to the Russians and Chinese.

  And now I am on my way there myself.

  This time it would be thousands of kays, not hundreds.

  But only in the slowest and most uncomfortable way – so here I lie, on the bottom of a truck carrying bags of polystyrene bubbles used as packaging fillers, down to Durban and the harbour. The routes through the Mozambique border have apparently been sealed by the South African army, with inside info from the SB. Zimbabwe, of course is a no-go zone, with Mugabe selling out to his white Southern neighbours, who’d squeezed his trade lifelines mercilessly until he’d caved in.

  This is a completely new way, so Mamma had told me – we hoped the SA naval patrols were less vigilant on the sea route up to Maputo, past Richard’s Bay, past Pondoland, into foreign waters, where a sprightly Samora Machel stays president.

  Right now, though, the sea seems a long way off. The Durban road is better than most, but I feel every bounce bruises my backbone – and although the bags are light and loose and bounce around, they still seem to suck the air from the back of the truck, so that I gasp for breath, although I know that it is in my head. I look over to Numbers, occasionally losing sight of him behind tumbling bags; but he lies quietly, as if dead, head propped underneath a heavier bag that seems to act like a pillow. I don’t know how he can look so comfortable, as the bag includes the doctor’s Thought Box.

  I have a similar bag for my head – its heaviness comes from accumulated gifts and letters for relatives in Zambia, but to me it pokes and pricks my head in new and discomfiting ways, with each jolt and jar of the truck.

  We are stopped and twice the doors at the back are opened and I lie, panicking about the loudness of my held breath. I fail to see Numbers as the bags have settled over our bodies and faces, so I force myself to lie quietly and start breathing slowly and silently, before my lungs explode, compromising us. The truck has sagged under the weight of someone stepping inside, followed by a rummaging sound, and bags have bounced around us, but thankfully not away from us. Twice the truck bounces up again, as someone steps off and the door slams and the truck revs up again, matching my racing heart.

  The third stop follows after an interminable range of sways and bumps, as if we have left the main road. This time the back door opens and the whistle of ‘all clear’ slices through the bags on our wet faces. I slap the bags away, gulping air with relief, feeling like I’ve sweated the entire Indian Ocean out of my body on the journey. Numbers hauls me to my feet with a powerful right arm, seemingly none the worse for wear, although masking his mouth with his left hand as he yawns. I have the idea this is far from his first time on such a trip.

  The driver is a tall, gangly Indian man, who is relatively fluent in isiZulu. (Numbers had told me he was a recent recruit through the CDF, the recently banned Combined Democratic Front.) He does not want to hang around, though.

  “My number plate is still clean to the cops, so I’m going to have to drive like fuck to get my delivery in, before any eyebrows are raised. Salani kale.”

  He runs around to the front of the truck, without waiting for us to reply.

  I double over from cramps in my legs, but Numbers pulls me clear from the road, which is part tarred and potted, part gravel. The truck spins away in a spray of stone and I yelp as one catches me on the shin.

  I stand up and think – what – the – hell?

  The road winds close to the coast and we are in a small isolated bay, waves washing in with small ‘whooshes’, which I’d not heard over the engine. The
cove is rocky, bleak and not a place to swim it seems, shark-warning sign staked into the ground near what looks like the easiest route into the sea. The sky is darkening as dusk settles in and I see no one else around.

  My uncle took us once to the black beach south of Durban, but I’d never made it in further than my ankles. But Numbers strides towards the beach, bag under arm, waving me to follow on behind. I wonder whether he had ever been able to learn to swim, he certainly seems fearless enough.

  I swing the bag onto my back via the straps and hobble over the rocks, much more slowly and cautiously behind Numbers, who bounds around the cove to make the way towards a prominent boulder far out on the right.

  I keep a respectful eye on the sea and my feet, as the bag swings a scary degree of uncertainty into my balance. My legs are also tingling with their lengthy inactivity, but at least my sweaty body is drying in the day’s dying heat. I treat each rock with separate respect.

  The last boulder is huge, but Numbers reaches down to grab my arms and pull me on top, my feet scrabbling briefly on its slippery side surface. There is a wide, flatter surface on top, on which a green plastic tarpaulin has been laid, with a torch, set of binoculars and several crumbling sandwiches and bottle of water.

  “Fancy a picnic, Sibusiso?” he grins at me.

  I sit cross-legged and swig the water first, before devouring the beef sandwich – manna from heaven.

  Numbers sits long-legged facing the sea, scouring the horizon with his binoculars. I want to ask whether I can have his sandwich too, but know better than to do so. As the eldest son, I have also known how to sleep with a rumbling belly when required.

  “Do you have a cell phone?” he asks me, swinging left with his binoculars again, staring at the horizon. It is getting too dark to see and I feel my fear rising, even though the sea seems to be falling away.

  “Yes,” I say, hauling it out of my pocket and switching it on.

  Numbers snatches it from me with his left hand, holding his binoculars steady with his right hand, cursing briefly. With a flick of his wrist, he flings my phone into the sea.