When Laurie and I got to the township entrance, there was no official in sight. Laurie slowed the car, swaying to the side of the sandy road which had no curb. “Do we go straight through?”
“No, we might get stopped farther on, and I want to be able to say we’ve got permission to be here.” I knew the native policemen who did duty at the entrance; I might not know those whom we were likely to meet inside. Laurie hooted, a serene, smoothly accented bleat that was what one would have expected to come from a car like his, and the familiar, fat, light-colored police boy came out of the administrative building with a sort of slow-motion skipping movement, exaggerating his concern at being found absent from his post. He greeted me, grinning with excitement. “We’re a bit out of order here today,” he said, proud of his English. “May we go in?” I said. His eyes took up the reflection of the car lights, which, with the smokiness of the location atmosphere added to the gathering darkness, Laurie had suddenly found it necessary to switch on. “Well—you’re from the Welfare, isn’t it? Mr. Clark, he’s nearly a resident here!”—he was delighted with his own humor. “Of course, we’ve got instructions, no Europeans, and so on. … But for you it’s all right.” “We’re going straight to the Center, Mr. Clark’s there waiting for us,” I agreed, and he saluted us on.
It is always surprising to find how much darker an African township is at night; far darker than anywhere else where there are houses, and people are living. In a European quarter, even if there is a street where the lamps are sparse and most of the houses happen to be in darkness, there is a general lightening diffusion from all the other lights in the city, so that you forget how thick darkness really is. Already that thick dark was curling up and wrapping about the small low houses; lighted windows showed irregularly on either side like cigarette tips glowing. The first street we drove along seemed quieter than was usual at this hour, but when we turned left again into another street as dim and quiet, I noticed a paraffin-tin fire outside one of the houses. The cooking pot on it was boiling over and over, bubbling and streaming down into the coals. The house was closed and quite dark; a fan of red light from the fire wavered over it. Farther on there was a strange pale low light that seemed to breathe rather than burn. When we drew level, it was a candle alight behind a rag of curtain in another dark closed house. As I looked at it with a momentary pleasure—the light of a candle was something else one didn’t really know—a corner of the rag was looped back by a very small black hand and the faces of two African children watched us go past.
When we came to the Apostolic Faith church, we seemed to have reached the normal evening location clamor, the rising, muffled blare of shouts, talk, yells and laughter which was faded and far off above the streets we had left.
And then we were in the heart of it. That is the only way I can describe it, the way I shall always remember it. Shocking, splitting, like the explosion of maniacal loudness that assaults you when you turn a radio volume full on by mistake. The awful heart of that endless shout which rises from the throat of a location at night.
Not thirty yards away a crowd was bellowing round a telephone booth, the only telephone booth in the whole township. They butted and screamed, the whole solid wall of their bodies—solid and writhing as a bank of fish in a net—caving forward. Seconds before I saw, before I understood, at the instant at which that sound smashed on our heads, I snatched at Laurie’s arm with such clawing horror that the car swerved to the side and stalled. He turned on me, astonished. My roughness seemed to have startled him more than what was happening. “What are you doing, what are you doing?” he shouted, but his voice was faint against the din. Above the mass of the crowd things were waving, poles or bars, I shall never know, but heavy things that were being held upright with difficulty, drunkenly, and that fisted down on the little conical tin roof of the booth so that it tore and fell in like a piece of silver paper. The crowd seized on the booth as if it could be shaken into speech. A high-pitched yell sent them back; something that might have been a railway sleeper heaved into the air and then bricks and plaster gave way and fell into the bellowing. The telephone box with the receiver swinging flew out over heads. Part of the door—some of the glass panes must still have been unbroken because in the instant of its passage through the air, I saw a watery zigzag—broke up as it hit the wall of a house. And then a short man in big white shoes (I can see those shoes now, I could almost describe the shape, the rather pointed toes, though I know it seems impossible that I really could have seen them so clearly) shot out of the crowd and picked up the telephone. Yelling, he held it aloft like a head on a pike and he raced over to the small municipal building—it was the depot where milk was sold at special rates—and smashed it against the wall. An accolade of stones followed his action in horrible applause. The windows of the place smashed, the door was kicked in. At the same time one of the stones missed its mark and pricked the bubble of the only street light.
Laurie was sitting with his great heavy arm stretched out pressed back against me like a barrier, as if he were restraining me from jumping out of the car. Behind it I breathed like an animal that has been caught and is being held down for branding. I thought I should burst with horror. I do not think I was afraid, I had no room for fear because I was so mad with horror. Again I was overwhelmed by an emotion whose existence I had not ever thought about, every bursting blood vessel pushed full with a racing blood I had not counted in the emotional scope of my life. Everyone fears fear; but horror—that belongs to second-hand experience, through books and films.
Even while the darkness doused the crowd a new light came up, and with it an ecstatic shrill scream, a note out of the normal range of the human voice. The crowd drowned it hoarsely, cutting across it with rasping throats: the municipal office was burning. People were running past us all the time now, summoned by the success and passion of the flames. The firelight ran excitedly all over them. And I saw that the owner of the scream was a woman who stood out in the road apart, a woman with a hump that must be a baby tied on her back. She leaned forward with her hands on her thighs and sometimes the scream was only a contortion of her face, sometimes it jetted out against the massive bellowing. Other sounds, too, came in flashes of lucidity out of the confusion. The deep panting of the shapes which ran past us. I felt a cringed stiffening in Laurie’s arm and the side of his body that was pressed against my side, every time this sound was flung to us—so personal as opposed to the anonymity of the bellowing, in passing. Laurie was afraid. He was not horrified, he was only terribly afraid. I do not mean that he was cowardly, but that he had been in a war, he knew what men were like, and it was not what was shown to be in them that affected him, but the practical calculation and fear of what this might threaten toward others. “All right. It’s all right,” I remember he kept saying. “All right. It’s all right.”
I don’t know which way they came, whether it was from behind the crowd or from behind us—it is strange how in confusion a large, important happening, that you must have seen clearly, is sometimes impossible to remember, while a minute detail survives perfectly, like a tiny ornament left standing after an earthquake—but suddenly the police were there. They came like a tidal wave churning through the crowd. And the crowd smashed and boiled back against them. The woman was screaming without stopping now; I heard her distinctly. Stones hailed down. A man wriggled out of the turmoil of the crowd and darted waveringly across the road, pausing every now and then to snatch up a stone. I saw him clearly for a moment, isolated, his collection of stones held in the pouch he had made of the corner of his jacket, his face at the downward, intent angle of a child on a beach gathering shells. Just at that instant there was a kind of scuffle in the midst of the struggling mass of people; a shot cracked like a whip above their heads. There were more shots, shots and their echo, clearing a split second of silence in the space of the retort. The man with the stones looked up with a movement of surprise, as if someone had tapped him on the shoulder. Then he fell, the stones sp
illing before him. I knew I had never seen anyone fall like that before.
That was the last thing I saw. All that happened from that moment on—the police who came angrily to the car and questioned us, escorted us out of the location; the screams, the running, shouting, gaping people; the way Laurie tried and tried to start the car, the engine leaping into life and dying out again—all this was a dragging backward from the sight of the man in the road. I was pulled away with my eyes still fixed on the only thing that I saw: the man lying in the road. Perhaps they picked him up, perhaps they took him away, perhaps they trampled him where he lay; for me he will remain forever, quite still in the midst of them, lying in the road.
And that was all. The whole thing couldn’t have taken more than fifteen minutes. We were out on the road back to the city, we were still in the big English car, we were unhurt. Not even the dust raised by the feet of the rioters or the flying ashes from the burning building had touched us, protected by the closed windows of the car. We drove straight to the nearest hotel, and sitting in a close, dingy bar lounge, with a dry old palm crackling in the draft every time the door opened, we smiled at each other with a ghastly strangeness, like people who have just been dragged up out of the water.
I suddenly began to shudder as I drank my brandy. I shuddered so violently that I could not swallow. “Violence”—the word burst upon my mind like a shell—“Violence.” “Laurie, it’s the most terrible thing in the whole world. Nothing, nothing like it. …” All at once I was terrified, I was chattering with fear.
“Come. I’ll hold it for you, you drink.” Laurie did not look at me, but kept his eyes lowered down his heavy face as he held the glass to my lips.
Chapter 33
Paul spoke about it afterward as my “adventure.” “Helen’s adventure at the barricades,” he called it. Laurie and I were in considerable demand at the homes of our friends; people saw to it that we were invited at the same time so that we both might be present when the tale was told; and told it always was. Laurie developed quite a technique in the telling; I got to know the exact points at which he would drop his voice, “throw away” an aside, pause, and place the emphasis of hesitancy on a particular sentence. After the first two or three times the progression of the story came to me to be the unvarying order of this delivery; it was his technique only that I heard. Had he related some other incident in its place, but raised and lowered, quickened and slowed his voice at the same intervals, I should not have noticed the difference.
One night when Paul said again something about Laurie’s having told someone “your adventure,” I said, after a little while: “I don’t know why you always say that.—It wasn’t. I feel as if I never was there at all. Only that I saw a man killed. And what was real about that was only the unreality.” At the mention of a man killed, there came a look into Paul’s face that made me feel, more than ever, isolated; even that real death, dropping on its victim before my eyes, seemed unreal to me because it was not my idea of death; even in the midst of a brutal reality, I was not involved, I remained lost, attached to the string of a vanished idea. I looked at Paul out of this lostness, like someone who is too far away to make himself heard and must rely on the mute appeal of his tense body. But he only nodded, as if to say: “That’s reasonable enough”—feeling along the rim of his ear with absent fingers.
On the night of the riots he had not come home at all. The anxiety for him which had flooded into me after the relaxation into fear in the hotel lounge had not waited long for reassurance. When Laurie and I walked into the flat the telephone was ringing. It was Paul, speaking from the Mission School near the Richardson Center, and he had been ringing and ringing for me, at Isa’s and at the flat. He was breathless, only his voice was there, and he did not give me time to explain. “Someone’s hurt,” he said, “There’s been some trouble. I’m going along to Baragwanath.”
He telephoned again later, from the Baragwanath Native Hospital, but he did not come in until nearly seven the next morning. It was raining softly. I got up when I heard him at the door, but he walked slowly, quietly, almost awkwardly past me, standing there in my thin rumpled nightgown, and lay down on the bed, where the covers were still flung back from where I had risen. After a moment he sat up, pulled off his shoes, and lay back again. His eyes closed, flickered, closed again. In his stillness, they would not be still.
I could not lie down on that bed. He was alone there. He said, putting his hand over his eyes: “I heard about you.” He shook his head slowly. I stood there. After a while, I said: “Are you terribly tired …?” His mouth looked weary, sulky, set; even under the haggardness of the beard which painted it with dirty shadows, his face had its peculiar beauty; it will have it always, I suppose, even when he is old.
“How did he get on?” I said, remembering.
“He’s dead,” said the voice from the bed. “He died at ten-to-six.”
Paul had spent that night at the hospital with Sipho. Sometimes he sat beside his bed and sometimes he stood outside in the hospital corridor. Sipho had a bullet in his hip but he was dying from the fractured skull he had got when he fell; from the increasing pressure of blood that was flooding his brain and making his breathing slower and more porcine all night, until at last, it ceased altogether.
Chapter 34
At seven o’clock on Tuesday morning, long queues stood in the rain at every location bus terminus, waiting to go back to work. Within days, hours almost, the happening of the riots was absorbed into the life of the city again; the dead were buried, the wounded healed, and the hearings of those cases in which employers had arrested natives for striking went on in the abstract atmosphere of the courts. Paul pursued what he called the “lily-livered path” of the Department during his official working hours, worked (now that Sipho was dead) with Fanyana on the activities of the African Nationalists; and believed in the worth of neither. I do not think he could ever bring himself to forgive Fanyana for living while Sipho died; Fanyana who should have attracted violence because it was in him to mete it out; who was the opponent for a bullet, a man its own size—and Sipho, the man of peace, the disciple of Gandhi. But Sipho, without fear, in the knowledge of his own lack of threat toward anyone, had gone out to Alexandra on the night of May first, while Fanyana took care to stay at home. I think that the whole purpose of African Nationalism took on the twist of this incident, for Paul. He saw that in this incipient revolutionary movement, as in all others, the wrong people would die, the wrong people would be blamed, perhaps even the wrong people would inherit the reign of the ear of corn, when it came. Of course, he had accepted this always, in dialectic. What he did not know was that he had not accepted, and would never accept it in the real, the personal realm in which life is lived.
I stayed alone in the flat, most days. It was a beautiful May, that year, and though you could not see much sign of the lovely autumn that lingered, in the suburbs of the gardens farther out, and in the Magaliesburg hills still farther, you could smell it in the air of the city. Up on the little balcony, I could smell it, that rich cool autumn. Most days I did not go out at all, and I got up later and later. I gave Paul breakfast in my dressing gown, and sometimes at ten o’clock I still was not dressed. I spent a great deal of time on the balcony, smoking and watching the building opposite going up, or not watching. Whether I looked or not, whether I saw or not, it went on getting itself finished. The white workmen shouted and twitted one another in a mixture of Afrikaans and English, as they worked; the Africans sang or laughed when they worked beside one another, were silent when they worked beside a white man, handing him up bricks to lay or mixing plaster for him to slap on. When the bell clanged for lunch hour, the scraping and hammering sounds stopped suddenly, and the voices were very clear, as if I were standing among them. The white men hung over the flat roof top, eating out of newspaper and drinking out of beer bottles from which the labels had been washed. One day one of them had a little mirror, which he used to flash the sun over into my face.
When the break was over the bell would clang again, and the white men would start shouting over the parapet to the Africans squatting below: “Come on, you bastards! Come on, what you think you doing down there!” And grumbling, sullen, laughing in unconscious imitation of the white men’s raucous laughter, they would swarm up toward those grinning faces waiting, indolent and masterful.
I would go inside quickly, close the door, and lie down.
I slept a great deal. It did not seem to matter how late I got up; in the afternoon I would sleep again. And when I woke sometimes I would not bother to get up. Paul would come home and find me, still lying there. “Aren’t you well?” he asked. But although I could not measure it, because I had no sense of well-being, I knew I was not ill. “Well, if you’re sure …,” he said. “Oh, I’m not worried about that!” I understood suddenly what was in his mind. But although I reassured him at once, smiled even, the occurrence of the thought in his mind later began to take hold in my own. Suppose I am pregnant? Nothing had gone wrong, I had no known cause to fear this rather than any other month, and I had never feared before. But now I began to be obsessed with the idea, to fear that by some devilish miracle it had happened, and for several days went about in that peculiar state of female dread which always had rather disgusted me in others. When a denial, irrefutable, unperturbed, the turn of a cycle, came from my body, and brought with it the immediate dissolution of the dread, I understood the nature of what I had felt. The dread of cheap little sensual innocents, who are afraid the casual eye that was attracted by them may “let them down”; the dread of women to whom love is an entertainment, like a visit to a cinema, and who do not want to be hampered in the pursuit of fresh entertainments.
The dread of an attachment to a man that can never be broken, by a woman who wants to be free of him.
The Lying Days Page 39