by Arushi Raina
It was for Mama and Mankwe’s own good that they knew nothing about what I was doing, what I had already done.
Meena
To make sure no one mistook him for a terrorist or a communist, Papa had a picture of President Vorster in his shop. Vorster had a dreamy look on his face. His eyebrows were thick, his chin lumpy. At the other end of the shop, above the women’s personal care shelf, there was a bad print of a Ganesh painting framed by a garland of fake marigolds. My grandmother had insisted on it.
Papa had not always been so eager to show his support for the government. When he was twenty, he’d been arrested for sitting on a whites-only bench with some of his friends as part of a political protest. They had waited hours for the police to come.
Papa spent two days in jail before his father paid his bail. Then he returned home with his father and went on making shoes as they always had. No more protesting. At least that’s the way my grandmother told it to me. Papa never told me the story himself. My grandmother always ended the story with the admonition she’d given to Papa at that time. “Remember to be grateful for what you have, Meena. You might have been black.”
From the outside, things hadn’t changed much since then. Five minutes in that direction was Soweto, and blacks still came through here to get to the white parts of town. But there was something angry about our black customers now. The way they came in, ignoring the blacks-only entrance and slapping their change on the counter, made Papa nervous. He never said so, but I knew.
It was a few months ago, near Christmas. We were closing up shop and I had gone round the back to check on the rubbish. The water was running down the street, dirty and cold, getting into my shoes. And there was a boy there in a blue coat standing by the gutter and the row of dustbins, smoking.
Then he was gone. I walked over, wondering why he had been standing there like that when it was so wet. I looked down. On the ground, where the boy had dropped his cigarette, there was a pamphlet. I picked it up. On its cover was a black fist. The SASO. When I lifted the lid of our dustbin to throw it away, I saw more pamphlets, from the ANC and PAC—organizations that were banned.
I could have handed them over to the police. But I lifted them out and hid them in the shop.
Papa had opened the store in 1971. To have a shop in this area, he’d had to find a white man to sign that he owned it, a shadowy “Mr Hendriks” who was referred to my father by a friend. This Mr Hendricks would not meet Papa in person, but he’d sign the papers. Apparently he had no problem with Indians, as long as you paid him.
When the signatures had been approved, Papa was overjoyed, the happiest he’d been since Mama died.
The store was five years old now and still smelled of paint even though we’ve been lighting incense every morning since.
Five years, and the first time a policeman came into the store was yesterday, a few weeks after we’d doubled our order of instant coffee and coal. A black Mercedes drove up and the policeman came out while the black driver stayed in the car with a blond man in the back. The policeman stopped at the shop door and the bell rang. He stared at the radio, which was playing a concerto. Then at the garlanded picture of the elephant-headed god.
It was winter, but I could see the sweat on his neck and how his shirt stuck to his body. Slowly, I slid the pamphlets I was reading into my maths book and closed it. The policeman was watching me. I put my fingers over the maths book, and waited.
Papa was upstairs but I didn’t call to him.
The policeman walked up to the counter and put his hands on its plastic surface, first one then the other. Then he sniffed.
“What is this smell, hey?” he said.
“Sorry, Meneer?”
“This smell, this disgusting smell.”
I looked back at the policeman with the blankest expression I had. He leaned down so we were eye-level—I smelled sweat, saw pieces of tobacco in his teeth.
“Get me a packet of Lucky Strikes,” he said.
I turned around, leaving the maths book on the table. Its cover propped open, slightly. Lucky Strikes, he’d said, even though he was a tobacco chewer. Lucky Strikes, I repeated to myself, just so I didn’t panic. It was strange they’d sent the policeman to fetch the cigarettes, and not the black driver. Why had they done that? My hands slipped over the packs, and they tipped off the shelf. They made a soft crackling sound as they dropped to the floor, one after the other.
“What the hell did you do?” the policeman said. “I asked you a very simple thing.”
I stood up with a pack in my hand. He snatched it from me and threw coins that fell onto the floor. Then he left.
“Incense sticks,” I said to the empty shop.
The policeman leaned into the car and passed the cigarettes to the blond man. Then he got into the back seat, and the car slid away from the curb.
Why was there an unmarked police car going through here? I didn’t know then that I’d see the blond man again. But I should have guessed. I had a collection of illegal pamphlets. I was asking for it. The picture of Vorster could only do so much.
Zanele
In the morning, the shacks were wet from the rain. Leftover drops slid from the roof and onto my face. I took my Baba’s old jacket with the number 729 stamped in white on its back. It was the warmest we had. I went outside.
At the shebeen, broken bottles had been swept to the side of the street. The police would leave it alone for another few months, then return. I took the path past the shebeen. As I expected, Thabo’s hand was on my shoulder before I came to the turn. Two boys trailed behind him.
I remembered a time when Thabo was one of the boys for a big tsotsi called Sizwe.
“Suka,” he told his boys.
They ran off a few yards, then stopped, waiting for Thabo. “Two years and now I’m the boss, Zee,” he liked to say.
“Morning, beautiful.” He was wearing a new blazer with a shiny shirt under it.
“Save it,” I said.
“You don’t get that many compliments that you can turn them down, Zee.” He took a packet of chewing gum from his pocket, a brand I didn’t know, and offered me some.
“No?” He put a piece in his mouth, letting the silver wrapper fall to the ground. “Going to school?” he asked.
“Ja, so?”
“Zee, I didn’t call the police to come to the shebeen. You sang and I didn’t make jokes. And I did not invite the mlungu or the children for your solo performance. So don’t be angry at me.”
“You sure about that?” I said.
We walked up the hill and this time Thabo took the turning with me onto Mputhi Road. Three years ago, we’d part here to go to our different schools. Back then, Thabo dirtied his school shirts and shouted every stupid thing that came into his head. But after joining the Black Berets he started to dress like a clever. He still talked a lot, but there were some things he wouldn’t tell me. Like whether he’d killed anyone yet.
After Thabo had joined the Berets, Mankwe and I told each other he was just playing around. It was not hard to believe. Thabo had a kind face. He still sometimes laughed like a child.
I had known Thabo for most of my life. He always said that I liked to act as if I were better than him, than everyone in Soweto.
“So, what about school?” he said.
“Why do you always ask me that?”
Thabo spat his chewing gum into the rubbish bin outside Winnie’s house and opened a pack of Camels. “I’ve been hearing rumours about you people at Isaacson.” He took out a cigarette and fished in his other pocket for a lighter.
“What does that mean?”
“Your friends are trouble.”
“Friends?”
“Vusi, Billy. Masi,” he said, as if those names were enough. “You like going around with them because they like you, say nice things. I understand—”
&n
bsp; “No, you don’t, wena.”
Thabo waved his hands, ignored me. “They give you cigarettes when they’re sitting in the bushes during school. They say they will protest against Baas Education, stop this mess the government is making. You think they are just talking. But you have no idea what trouble they’re going to get you in. Just because Mankwe doesn’t notice doesn’t mean I don’t have eyes.”
“I have eyes too. For all the wallets you steal from people on the train.”
“Billy talked rubbish, and now he’s in jail.”
“Thula about Billy.”
“Don’t be one of those fools.” Thabo leaned forward. “Keep your head down.”
“You’re not my baba, tsotsi.”
“No. Yours ran away, fast as he could.”
I pushed past him to the school gate and walked through.
Then I heard his footsteps behind me.
“Sorry, Zee,” he said.
“You think you’re going to upset me by reminding me Baba left? That’s old, old news.”
“I’m looking out for you. And Mankwe and Mama Lillian. Just don’t get into the kind of trouble you don’t understand.”
As if he understood anything about what we had been doing, Billy, Phelele and I. “Suka wena,” I said. I kept walking.
Mr Mamphile, the history teacher, was leaning against the wall, watching Thabo, like most people watched tsotsis. “The school inspector is coming in today and you’re late.”
The Starlite Cinema on President Street was easy to slip into. Vusi often told me to meet him there. I ducked past the ticket window. This time I wasn’t caught by the usher. I walked into the middle of the three o’clock movie and sank into a seat. In front of me was a row of men and women, the light of the movie on their faces. On the screen, a black man played the piano and a blonde woman cried. Casablanca, again.
A boy in a gabardine coat and sunglasses sat next to me, a cigarette tucked behind his ear.
I hadn’t seen Vusi since that day in front of the courthouse. He hadn’t shaved since. “You need a haircut. And you should get rid of the sunglasses,” I whispered.
After a while, his eyes fixed on the screen, Vusi said, “Zanele, I told you to wait, do nothing.”
“That’s what I’m doing,” I said.
“Then why did I hear your tsotsi’s shebeen was raided last night? That all the abantwana were running around at two in the morning with stones?” he asked in his soft, precise voice.
“I don’t know why the children came.”
“But they came, didn’t they?” he said. “They listen to you. They know you sing at the shebeen.” He put something in his mouth. “Zanele, remember how careful Billy was. And now he is in jail. And Phelele? We don’t even know where they’ll take her. We’ll be lucky if we get the chance to go to her funeral.”
“I’m being careful.”
“It seems you sometimes forget.”
“I haven’t forgotten Billy. I think of him everyday.”
“Masi is our face for the crowds. The police are already watching him. But you—” Vusi leaned closer. “—you are in the shadows. Like me. You get things done.”
We’d come to the part in the movie where all the people in the bar stand up and sing some anthem with trumpets. Everyone except Ilsa, who does nothing. The sound was bad. I couldn’t even hear the trumpets. We watched in silence.
Vusi took off his sunglasses. “You don’t like the sunglasses.”
“No one wears sunglasses to the movies,” I replied.
He laughed. The old woman in front of us turned around and rapped him with a rolled-up newspaper. “Thula, we are watching a movie. Go make trouble somewhere else.”
Vusi slid farther down in his seat and rubbed his knee. “Anyway, I have a job for you.”
“What?”
“You need to find the ones in each school who will help us to organize this protest against Afrikaans. We want all the abantwana out on that day. All of them.”
“What about Billy? Phelele?”
Vusi turned away from the screen. “You tell me.” Then he turned back to the screen, took another sweet from his pocket. I heard it cracking between his teeth. “They are gone now. We turn our attention—”
“Turn our attention?”
The old woman turned around again now to glare at me, newspaper still in her hand.
Vusi waited until she had turned back around. “Yes.” He rose and dropped the bag of sweets on my lap. “Enjoy the movie. And remember, you are in the shadows.”
Just before Ilsa left Bogart, I walked out of the cinema and crossed the street into a store called Pillay’s All Purpose. Vusi said it was safer to leave a meeting place at different times and stop at different places along the way back.
I pushed open the door and the bell made a tired sound. I had never been in there before. My sister said that the owner was grumpy and always cheated. From the radio, a concerto played. The violin, muffled but determined, rose with the piano to a crescendo. There were crates of spices, dried fruit packets, mealie meal. Incense sticks.
“Can I help you?” There was a thin Indian girl at the counter with long black hair in a plait. She watched me walk past the shelves. Above her head, Vorster in a frame.
“I’m just looking. Don’t worry. I have money to pay,” I said, looking up at Vorster.
“I never said that,” she said.
I walked down the makeup aisle.
“I wouldn’t advise buying that face cream. It’s not good.”
I put the cream onto the counter. “You sell things you know aren’t good?”
“Where do you go to school?” she asked me.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“Sometimes.” She closed the cash register. “So, which part of Soweto are you from?”
“I’m not here to answer your questions.” I turned to leave.
“You’re not going to school because of the baas laws?”
“What do you know about that?”
“I read some things.”
“What things?”
“And I’ve seen you walking up and down this road for a few weeks now.”
“You’ve been watching me?”
The girl tried to avoid my eyes and said nothing. On the radio, the last strains of the violin dimmed, and the announcer’s voice came on and told us we’d just listened to Dittersdorf’s Concerto in C major. On the shelf behind the counter, there were piles of newspapers, yellowed and years old. The Rand Daily Mail and The Star. A few copies of The World, The Sowetan, Drum.
“No—” Her eyes widened, looking at something behind me. I heard a door open and close upstairs—I turned and looked outside, saw nothing but the same pavement, the same traffic, some black car against the pavement, a cigarette butt dropped on the ground.
“Take it. It’s more yours than mine anyway.”
Something hard and square under my hands, like a box. Footsteps on the stairs.
A man appeared at the stairs. He stopped when he saw me opposite the register.
“Meena, why did you leave the counter?” he called.
The Indian girl had slipped past him, her braid swinging behind her. Her eyes darted from the window. Then fixed on my hands. A book. Grade 12 Pre-calculus. Her lips tightened.
“It’s not—”
“I’m sorry we can’t help you,” she said in a different voice, but her eyes were scared.
Her father took a step closer to me, like he was going to drive me out the shop.
I shrugged and left.
Outside, I opened the book. Definitely not my book, or a book anyone in Soweto had. Too new. Folded inside it an ANC flyer about a meeting. Slipped in between the pages more ANC notices. One was for a SASO meeting next week.
Through the shop wind
ow, I saw the Indian man at the counter watching me.
How had that Indian girl got hold of the pamphlets?
Three
Thabo
My favourite nights were the ones when Mankwe was sick and Zanele had to do the show instead. It was not that I wanted Mankwe sick. No.
When Zanele came instead of Mankwe, the regulars weren’t happy, but who cared about them? I chose who played at the shebeen, because Sizwe had made me manager.
And sometimes Zanele came to play the piano when Solly was not in town. Then it was both of them, Mankwe at the microphone and Zanele at the piano. Solly had taught her some chords last year near Christmas. Zanele loved the blues and her piano playing was much better than her singing. But when Zanele was playing, all she could see was her sister. She never looked at me.
Of course, in my business, it was stupid to put the one thing that mattered to you on stage in a red dress for everyone to see. Even back then I knew that.
I’d been running after Zanele for years, and because she ignored rather than laughed at me, like she did when some of those other bafana chased her, we just carried on doing the same thing. Which was nothing. Like she said. Old news.
What was new was Zanele hanging around President Street after school. Where Billy, Vusi and the rest smoked other people’s cigarettes and talked about fighting the government, revolution, all that kak. But Billy was in jail now. Not my problem.
I didn’t exactly tell the policemen about Billy. What kind of fool gets caught talking to abo gata? There was a local informant, and he wasn’t hard to find. There was only one man who wasn’t a tsotsi who tried to dress as nicely as me around here, Sam Shenge. He spent the money the police gave him on blue and orange bow ties. Everyone knew the money for his bow ties didn’t come from the wages he earned taking pictures for any newspaper that would take them. Any fool could see that, but they chose not to.
The wisest thing Sizwe had ever told me was: be nice to your friends, nice to your mama, and nicest of all to the abo gata. But Sizwe didn’t know that I earned a little something on the side from telling Sam about the boys and their stupid plans. When I heard the rumour about Billy planning to blow up the power station, I got five rand for passing along rubbish about something that was less likely to happen than the sun falling on our heads. The abo gata actually believed the crazy stories about Billy, because next thing I know Billy’s arrested and there’s a big court trial for him and that pretty girlfriend of his.