When Morning Comes

by Arushi Raina

  “So, your friend,” he said. “He drives you here?”

  “That’s none of your business,” I said.

  He stared at me, then smiled at me like we were sharing a joke. “True.”

  That night I fell asleep, dreaming of the yellow stalks of grass and gravestones, but not of the mlungu.

  Meena

  It looked like Pillay’s All Purpose had added to its list of loyal customers, because the black car came again. This time without passengers. The man with the spotted rash was back. He walked in with that same strange, loose-limbed walk.

  “Sisi,” he said, “how are you?”

  “Lucky Strikes?” I said, trying to sound friendly. I went over to the shelf and got two packs.

  “This time one,” Jonas said.

  “Your baas didn’t come with you?”

  “He came,” the man said. “But I drop him there in the township.”

  I handed over the Lucky Strikes.

  “He is a good man, my baas. He works hard.”

  “For the police?”

  “Yes,” said Jonas. “There’s trouble in the township, people fighting with the government, trying to blow up buildings.” Jonas shook his head. “It’s too much, they must just stop.”

  “You like working for the police?”

  “My baas, he is a very good man,” Jonas said, looking past me at the cigarette packs. I stared at his rash again, wondering what it was. “He gave me this job. This is the best job. He buys me food and a nice place to live. He took me out of the mines. Have you seen the mines?”

  “No,” I said.

  “When he was small, my baas,” Jonas said, lowering his voice, “he was burnt in his own house by the gardener. His mother, his father, his sister, they died.”

  “That sounds—”

  “Even then, even then he helps a black man like me. Takes me away from the mines, gives me clothes.”

  “I see.”

  Ten

  Zanele

  It was five o’clock and dark inside, but light enough to see the curved metal outline of the shacks opposite, the washing lines against the sky. I poured the pot of water I had been heating on the stove into the bath, and stepped in, resting my back against its sloping metal sides.

  The mlungu spoke calmly. He seemed to like me, but he seemed to like everybody. He smiled often, talking as if we had known each other a long time. He had lied to the police casually, like he’d done it many times before. Even if I ignored that he was a mlungu, he still couldn’t be trusted. No matter what Meena said.

  But he did have a car.

  I rubbed the soap against my arms until the skin was raw. I got out and dried my body with a cloth. Then I took buckets of bathwater and threw them out, watching the pools of dirty water stream down the street.

  Jack

  “It’s important to learn how to parallel park,” I said. “So do it again.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s the only way you park cars in Soweto, so you might as well get good at it.”

  “Don’t you have anything better to do?”

  “Yes, but I’m here. So too late for me,” I said.

  She tried again, this time getting a better angle, but still not good enough.

  “Reverse. Again,” I said.

  “Aye, thula wena,” she said, taking the car out again and checking the mirror.

  “And what’s that mean?”

  “It’s shut up. But more polite.”

  “What are you doing now?” I said.

  “I’m driving away, what does it look like? Enough parking.”

  This was the third driving lesson. Each time I waited on the side of the highway that skirted the mounds of mining waste, I was convinced she wouldn’t come. And it was strange that I felt cheated, disappointed in that moment.

  But she did come. Always choosing to ignore any mention of why I was really there. And that was fine—for her I was a new experiment, a mlungu who waited for her by landfills, opened car doors for her.

  It was a sixty-mile speed limit, Zanele was doing maybe seventy. So it was not surprising that we were stopped.

  “Pull over,” I said. “It’ll be worse if you don’t.”

  She didn’t say anything. Like me, she was calculating the probabilities of each move. She pulled over, letting the car take its time to slow down.

  Behind us, a traffic policeman walked up to the car. He stared at Zanele, at her hands on the steering wheel, her long thin fingers. I looked straight ahead.

  “Baas,” Zanele said. “The policeman wants to talk to you.” Her accent had suddenly changed.

  The policeman took off his sunglasses.

  I turned to him. “Hello, officer. What’s the problem?”

  He chewed and then spat out his tobacco on the street.

  “The problem is that I see this car speeding. And then I see a black woman driving with a white man. That’s the problem.”

  The policeman leaned in as Zanele opened the door on him—too fast. It hit his face, hard, and he fell back against the curb. Zanele accelerated, the door hanging open. In the rear-view mirror, the policeman’s body moved. Then he was a speck, gone.

  We came to a dead end, a collection of skips with rubbish spilling out, dogs and little children playing.

  “The policeman is going to have your number plate,” Zanele said, taking the key out of the ignition and holding it out. “You’ll need a story.”

  “Thanks for the advice,” I said.

  She smiled.

  “You knocked him out.”

  “Yes.” She dropped the keys onto the dashboard.

  “Yes?”

  “You shouldn’t be surprised, mlungu. That is the kind of person I am.”

  I tugged at the collar of her black shirt and pulled her close. Her lips grazed mine and I was lost for a moment.

  Then she pulled away. “We cannot see each other again,” she said.

  Which was what I was going to say. “Yes, obviously.”

  “And don’t be angry, mlungu. It doesn’t suit you,” she said, stepping out of the car. “Remember. Your story.”

  Ricky pushed the whisky bottle into my chest. “Come, Jacky, another one.” He was acting drunker than he was. Oliver poked at the last lot of meat on the braai.

  Megan, in her best black dress, was smoking a cigarette on the other side of the porch pillar.

  Ricky rocked on his heels and stared at her bare back. “Don’t know how you do it, Jack.”

  “Do what?”

  “Get someone like that to stick around. Where have you been these last few days? Oliver thinks you’re planning another jol for us.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “You’re messing around.”

  “You got that in one,” I said.

  Ricky sat back against the table and looked at me. “Tell me, Jacky.”

  “Sometimes you get bored, and you do stupid things,” I said. “There’s nothing to tell.”

  Megan leaned down and put her cigarette into the ashtray next to me. Then she took another one out of the pack. I ground her stub into the ashtray.

  “More like you’re telling me nothing.”

  “Try not to get into the kind of trouble I got into, Ricky. I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  I left them on the porch, stepping on the dead crickets scattered on the tiles. Suddenly I thought of Zanele’s shoulders, her collarbones against the red dress straps in the dim streetlight, the first time I’d seen her. And the way she held my shirt in her hands, so angry.

  Zanele

  I was sitting in the long yellow grass telling the other students about the protest, like Vusi asked. He called this “making student cells.” All his talk of shadows, a secret army, and I was sitting out in the sun with Soweto’
s loudest grade twelves, arguing with them. Cars passed by on the highway. Some seemed to slow near us. Some were red. But it was not the mlungu’s.

  The students were from Orlando West, Jabavu, Naledi and Phefeni. Most of them I’d either seen in debates or hanging around the shebeen. Some of them were the kind who picked fights with other students, tsotsis or whoever they could find. And some were the ones who started fights and then stood back, watched. I needed the troublemakers.

  “So you say all this. How you going to do it?” one of them asked. The others stuck their faces closer.

  “We’re going to have a meeting—”

  “Meetings, meetings, meetings, suka wena, that’s all you people say,” Winston, from Naledi, said, getting up to leave. I put my hand on his shoulder, felt his muscles tighten. It would be easy for him to throw me off, like throwing off a fly. The other students watched. If Winston left, they’d leave too.

  Slowly, Winston sat down again. But he was angry. I dropped my hand.

  “This meeting, it’s not like any of the others,” I said. “It’s the meeting before the strike. So you better believe it’s happening.”

  “There was a strike in Phefeni last month,” Winston said. “And nothing is better. So what do you expect now? Just because Zanele decides there’s a protest, the Boers will say, ‘Sorry, sorry, Zanele. We will change the baas law, just for you.’”

  “At least we tried at Phefeni,” a boy interrupted.

  “So what?” a boy from Orlando West shouted. “You wrote some signs and walked around the school.”

  “We chased the principal out of school.”

  “Ja, looking at your principal, it’s not a hard thing to do.”

  “This time everyone is coming,” I said, shouting over them. “All the schools. Too many to ignore.”

  “Which ones?” Winston said.

  I turned my arm over and showed him the signatures there, of the student representatives from all the different schools.

  They ran their fingers over the names. There was Masi’s, a bit bigger than the others. And Themba’s. And Vusi’s, which was small, almost invisible in black ink near my elbow.

  “June 13th,” I said.

  “June 13th. Amandla!” someone shouted, and the boy from Phefeni raised his fist. It stuck out, black against the yellow grass. Then there were other fists up against the grass.

  And then I went home and washed the names off my arm.

  Meena

  “Last time I came, you were not here,” said Jonas. The Mercedes waited at the curb, dirtier than usual, and no blond man in sight.

  “I have school,” I said, putting tuna cans up on our tinned-food shelf.

  “School,” said the man. “That is very good. You must keep studying.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What do you study?”

  “What other students study.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Maths. Physics. Biology. You don’t have any children?”

  “I did, wena, but that was a long time ago.”

  I finished stacking the cans and moved to the counter. Jonas sat on Papa’s stool and looked absently at the ceiling. I rang up two packs of Lucky Strikes. The longer Jonas stayed, sat on the stool, talked to me about random things, the more I wanted him to leave. There was only so much talking you want to do with a policeman’s driver who loves his baas.

  “Your father, he plays too much of that Indian music,” Jonas said. “You must tell him it’s too much.”

  “Your baas, he’s not here today?” I fidgeted with the packs, slid them across the counter. But Jonas didn’t take them.

  “He is here, in the township, working. You know, he does the difficult work. He has to find the troublemakers, the ones who cause all the problems, want to put bombs in the trains, eish, last month it was the power station.” Jonas shook his head. “Eish, it’s not good.”

  “They are angry at the government.”

  “Me, I was angry at the government. At white people,” said Jonas. “But I didn’t blow things up. I listened. I did my job. And my baas, he helped me.” He coughed. Small tears escaped his lids, and streamed down his marked face.

  I hesitated, then took the bottle I’d taken from Dr A.’s last week and passed it over. “This might help for the cough.”

  Jonas picked it up and tipped it so that the light caught the liquid. He smiled.

  From the symptoms I’d described, Dr A. had guessed that it was miliary tuberculosis. A common strain among miners. Dr A. told me that if the symptoms where as bad as I was describing them, and the man was that far gone, he had little chance of living past the year.

  Under the microscope, he said, miliary TB showed itself by small light and dark spots indented in the lungs. Some of the cuts would grow longer, deeper, over time. It was probably already happening.

  I wondered about the family he’d not mentioned. The children that had been. And about his baas he never failed to praise. I wondered if they’d grieve for Jonas.

  Thabo

  I remembered the first time I did a big job for my gang. It was in a parking lot near Orlando West, where we dropped the dagga for Sammy to collect. This man I’d come for was stealing from us.

  He was thin, light brown. Probably more coloured than black. His eyes never looked straight.

  I strangled him, my hands on his throat, his back pressed against a car. At the last moment before he stopped breathing, I let go and walked away.

  I don’t know why I thought about it today, but it just came. Sizwe had told me to think of it as giving back a life. I let him live, that snake of a man. And then Sizwe spat on my new shoes, missing the floor. But I didn’t say anything. You don’t tell Sizwe he dirtied your shoes. Never.

  We spent the morning cleaning the bar, preparing the line-up, and then I told the boys their route for the day, gave them the dagga. There was still a bandage on my hand from that Indian girl and her blunt knife.

  Later in the morning, Zanele visited me. I knew she wanted something.

  So I waited for her to stop looking at the floor.

  “Something happened,” she said.

  “Ja, so what is it.”

  “In Houghton.”

  When she said Houghton, I knew there was something more to it.

  “Number plates. On a car.”

  I looked at her. “Number plates, a car, Houghton. So?”

  “The policeman was chasing us, we got away. Now the policeman has the licence plate number. Thabo, what can I do?”

  I shook my head at Nkosi. He was putting the glass in the wrong place. And it had a big thumbprint on it. I took it down. “Do it properly,” I said. “I want to see my face in it.”

  Zanele grabbed my shoulder. “You’re not telling me what to do.”

  “Whose car are you talking about? Whose plates?”

  I had to have a long conversation with Mankwe to find out the mlungu’s address. Finding out things from her these days was easier because her mind stayed with Professor. All her songs had become sad, and some of the regulars were starting to complain. But I didn’t say anything. I left her alone.

  Then, after seeing Mankwe, I had to steal some old man’s pass into Houghton.

  I took Nkosi with me into town. The bus took the bridge over the train tracks that connected downtown to where the mlungus lived. As the bus came onto the bridge, the five o’clock trains came in under it, their yellow-striped faces taking turns to stop at the station, long rust-coloured carriages going on and on till your eyes got tired of looking at them. People flooded from the third-class carriages, so many men in their ugly blue and green overalls.

  To the tsotsi, the train is a blood vessel, you can say. The easiest place to take a wallet or a watch when you’re running out of a rand, fifty cents. When a tsotsi gets more experienced, h
e prefers to go across the bridge on a fake or stolen pass, and steal from mlungus. It’s easy to steal from mlungus. Above everything, they hate being touched by blacks. So you touch the mlungu on the chin, he becomes so angry, he doesn’t notice you’ve taken his wallet. A few of you take him on all sides, take him down quickly. His watch, his wallet. Cufflinks.

  I turned away from the window as the boy stared at the trains. You couldn’t blame him, he’d spent more than half his life in Transkei, where you are lucky if you see something move faster than a goat. We crossed the bridge, came closer to Houghton.

  After a while, Zanele understood that there was nothing she could do. Just wait, see, hope. A policeman hit by a black girl is not going to forget it. She wanted me to tell her it wasn’t anything to worry about, but I didn’t. Zanele didn’t like people telling her lies. She blamed you later.

  She told me not to be stupid, not to try anything. I didn’t agree or disagree. Like I said, no lies with Zanele. But I’d decided from the time she mentioned the abo gata that I was going to have to do something.

  And it wouldn’t be such a hard job for me to make sure the mlungu didn’t tell the police who she was. Even if the mlungu gave a different name for Zanele that would be enough. The police couldn’t find a black without a passbook number and a name.

  All the way to the mlungu’s house, I was trying to figure out how the mlungu and Zanele ended up in his car together. I don’t take so long to understand things, usually.

  The Ford Mustang was parked outside the gate. Nkosi whistled when he saw it. When I came closer, I knew it was very old and had a light broken.

  There was no guard in the guardhouse.

  I waited by the curb and told Nkosi to walk up to the gate, see if he saw anybody inside. He came back, shook his head. I handed him a screwdriver.

  “You use it on the car,” I said, pointing. “There, on the side.”

  The boy just looked at me.

  “When I tell you something, you do it, wena,” I said, taking the screwdriver from him and making a nice clean line through the red paint.