by Trevor Sacks
‘Ag,’ she said, crossing her arms and bouncing them on her chest.
‘No, what do you mean by there? That I shouldn’t be around black people?’
‘I never said that.’
‘Well, it sounded like it.’
‘I don’t think like that.’
‘Well, I don’t know.’
‘Come on – you know me.’
‘I don’t. I don’t really know you, Marieke. We don’t actually know each other, I mean, really.’
‘Well, maybe we shouldn’t go to The Ranch then. Turn around.’
We sat on the bench seat of the little Nissan, travelling past the old drive-in in silence.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘I’m not my brother. He has his own ideas, which he gets from those idiots. I didn’t mean anything.’
‘I know.’
‘Ja, I suppose we don’t know that much about each other.’
‘Ja, but we’re starting to. And we’ll have all of today and tonight. We’ll wake up together tomorrow, then I’ll head off and be back before you know it.’
‘Can we get room service?’
‘Sure.’
‘Okay. I was just worried, that’s all. You are going to be the only whitey there. You know that, right?’
‘Probably.’
‘So who are you going with?’
‘Shadrack.’
‘Who’s that, your garden boy?’
‘Don’t say “boy”. He’s in his fifties.’
‘He is your garden boy?’
‘He’s not a boy.’
‘But he does your garden?’
‘Used to. Well, more than that. A lot more.’
‘And this is for work?’
‘Shadrack belongs to the church, and I need to have a meeting with someone there. It’s business.’
‘How are you getting there? You can’t take Tjoppa’s bakkie.’
‘A taxi, I guess.’
‘Well, just be careful. You know how many accidents there are when it’s Easter. Ma always says she wonders if they go straight to heaven if they’re in the Easter death toll.’
‘Are you wearing your seatbelt?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she said as she clicked the buckle into its holster.
‘You’re not going to heaven,’ I said.
‘No, I’m staying right here with you.’
We walked into the reception of The Ranch Motel, passing the bar and the dining room. Through the doors of the pub I glimpsed bullfighting posters on the walls and twisted wrought-iron candelabra and wineskins; a similar Spanish theme continued in the dining room, with framed prints of watercolours of semi-nude water carriers and flamenco dancers.
‘Ben?’ said someone from the front desk. She wore a burgundy waistcoat as part of her uniform, on which rested straight black hair with an impressive sheen.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Working,’ she said. ‘Good to see you.’
Georgina Melck came around the counter to kiss me on the cheek. I hadn’t seen her since Standard Seven, when she moved away with her mother.
‘I thought you were in Joburg,’ I said.
‘We moved back here. I’m trying to save some cash to go travelling at the end of the year.’
‘Oh, amazing,’ I said. ‘I’d love to do that.’
I studied her manner, which had changed since I’d last seen her. I suppose she’d softened, or perhaps it was that the years had added a layer of complexity to her. As she spoke, I tried to compare her to how she was before, to somehow gather the information of the subtle changes in her, to discern just what kind of experiences had grown her into the Gina I saw before me.
‘Hi,’ she said to Marieke.
‘Oh, this is Marieke,’ I said. ‘Gina and I were at school together.’
‘Can we check in?’ said Marieke.
‘Sorry,’ said Gina, going back behind the desk. ‘Of course. Hey, great to see you, man. We should have a drink in the bar later, all of us.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Maybe later.’
Marieke pretended to look at the pool with narrowed, myopic eyes.
Gina handed us our room key, which was attached to a large Perspex rectangle with the number 48 branded into its layers of orange and white.
‘Great to see you,’ she said again.
Marieke followed the porter without turning around.
The Ranch had rooms sprawling in clusters around a large swimming pool. Beyond it was a fenced-off bushveld area with buck and giraffe, which you could see through a heat haze off in the distance.
We took to our room, which was air-conditioned against the outside sun and came with a closed-circuit movie channel (no porn, only old episodes of Magnum P.I. and a few Bond movies).
‘Want to go to the pool?’ I asked. ‘Sip some cocktails? I heard they’ve got a bar in there.’
‘Get undressed,’ she said, lying back on the motel bed. ‘I want room service.’
8
HOWDY, PILGRIM
On Sunday morning I tried not to disturb Marieke, walked out the door past our room-service trays and down the path to the front desk. I was the only passenger in the motel shuttle and the driver, a black man in his forties who wore the Zion star on his breast, was surprised when I asked him to drop me at the newly refurbished taxi ranks at the south end of town. Here I met Shadrack, as we’d arranged.
A few hundred people waited in collapsed and kinking lines to enter equally crinkled minibus taxis. Shadrack had on the Zion Christian Church’s peaked hat with the silver star badge, and it seemed as if the crowds stiffened his jaw – I imagine it strained him to be there with me, the only white person in all the queues. He kept a smile on his face, spoke little and alternately tried to pretend I wasn’t there and to protect me from the push of chests against us.
As for me, it was, I’ll admit, like being a tourist in my own town. It was a place I’d never come to before and here I witnessed some of the machinery that turned beneath the town I knew. It had taken me eighteen years to see it, or to allow myself to see it, because surely I’d known it was here all along, or something like it?
Where did the maids and gardeners, the road labourers, workshop assistants, office cleaners, messengers, heavy lifters, roofers, bathroom mop operators and kitchen staff come and go from? I registered a spike of shame thinking it had taken me so long to think about it.
That this place, so central to so many lives, could be so marginal to mine that I could live an entire childhood without having to wonder at its existence is a great tragedy of the smallness of whiteness; happy in our apartness, but fearful of it too, because places like this had to exist. In my town, I was a minority within a minority within a minority, but it was Shadrack and these other passengers who were on the margins.
There were eyes on me, to be sure – the only white face there. I heard the odd jovial comment (‘Hey! White guy!’) and saw some pointing and laughing here and there, though I never felt any of it was malevolent. Of course, it’s possible it was my own wish-perception of the experience that filtered the unsavoury flavours from the taxi rank. Either way, the taxi marshals, who wrangled us into awaiting minibuses, couldn’t have cared less who I was; it was only where I was going that mattered to them.
Shadrack sheltered me against the crush in the cage of his arms and torso, and we climbed into the battered, awaiting cab with eleven other passengers. Some were women with their stars affixed to their felt berets and others men in khaki suits and white shoes. All of us were making our way to Zion City Moria.
Shadrack and I were shoulder to shoulder in the back seat with two others. Before we left we handed our money forward to the driver, a yellow-eyed man in a very creased shirt. He started the engine and jerked the gear lever, then jerked the entire minibus into the exit lane of the taxi rank, cutting off two vehicles and bouncing us to a stop millimetres from another taxi’s bumper.
Once out on Vorster Street, the minibus was q
uiet. An old man rustled a packet and pulled out his take-away meal, handing a piece of it to a young girl who seemed to be his granddaughter. The box filled the cabin with the esters of deep-fried food.
Shadrack took out his hankie.
‘Your eye?’ I asked.
‘They must fix it,’ he said. ‘They must give me water.’
‘What does water do?’
‘It’s blessed. It heals.’
We passed the overhead traffic light (amber) that marked the northerly border of town and cruised onto the open road. Here some of the women in the minibus began to sing a song in a warbling moan. The driver expelled a click of annoyance at this music and switched his sound system on to the fat bass of a mbaqanga track on his tape player.
‘How far is it?’ I asked Shadrack.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied. It’s possible he didn’t want to talk to me, a strange white kid, with the others in the taxi listening in, though he must have known just how far it was. Outside, the trees and bushes flowered with discarded plastic bags.
In this direction the land grew greener. It appeared lush, like velvet, although I knew up close the green had gaps in it and the thorns and stones poked through the hard, slender leaves of bushes and acacias.
The flat land of town was behind us and the thin ribbon of road drew us up and over hills, past self-built homes where people still cooked outside, past harassed cows, and women walking back from neighbouring hamlets. It was easy to imagine yourself in a different age.
The taxi stopped at the village of Boyne. We looked over a valley where thousands of people were already meandering around a few buildings, great marquees and open fields. High up on the hill opposite us were the whitewashed stones that formed a giant five-pointed star and the words ‘Zion City Moria’. This was not the Zion of Elliot’s protest, or of the Women’s Zionist League raffle.
Shadrack and I walked down the path to the valley below. There were many smiling people, the respectable, dependable, honest people whom household employers knew the ZCC members to be.
How they welcomed me! A white face in the valley of Zion! Perhaps the first white convert of the church, I thought. They wanted to shake my hand, ask me questions (was I from Holland, asked one – my pale skin suggested it, I suppose).
Shadrack led me past them all and wouldn’t allow me to collect their goodwill and curiosity. When one group of women gave a particularly warm welcome, swaying and singing as we neared them, Shadrack said something to them in Northern Sotho and they lifted their heads with a collective, knowing ‘Ohhh.’
We shifted past them. ‘What did you tell them?’ I asked.
‘I said you’re sick.’
People were forming into orderly clumps like regiments in different garb. The women in canary-yellow dresses, black cardigans and forest-green berets, some men in overalls and others in peaked caps like Shadrack’s. Presently we passed a crowd surrounding a line of men in khaki suits and white shoes, dancing. Shadrack didn’t resist this time when I pulled him towards them.
The men in khaki danced, stamping and shuffling in the red dust, churning it into the air. Then, in a line, they sprang up, lifting their white shoes high as they rose, and stomped down again on the earth. Their jumps were gymnastic, leaving spaces beneath them like pauses in time. They brought those white shoes down again and again, always with so much force that I could feel it in my own shins.
At one of the smaller tents a woman was quivering. She snorted, it’s fair to say, like an old bulldog. She was in her fifties and her green jersey met her yellow skirt at the equator of her belly. She was quaking and grunting in my direction and this caused some of the other churchgoers to encourage me to approach her. The woman reached both hands out to me and bleated something. ‘She’s speaking to the holy spirit,’ said Shadrack.
‘She’s going to heal you,’ said someone next to us.
‘She’s a prophet,’ said another.
Shadrack pushed me forward; I could see his jaw was tense like before. We entered the small tent, where a few plastic seats were arranged against the wall. People sat in them, like a doctor’s waiting room. The woman continued to warble and kept her eyes closed. She said something and two men nodded.
‘His knees,’ whispered Shadrack. ‘There’s something wrong with them.’
The round prophetess in yellow and green offered some advice, which Shadrack told me later had to do with river sand and sewing needles; the woman took a curl of white paper and lit it with an ordinary Lion safety match from a large box, then dropped the burning wisp into a man’s cupped hands. Someone else with glasses would have his eyes strengthened with blessed water in a plastic bottle; another was to take tea.
Then the prophetess hummed a note, a growling descending note, and gathered herself for the next cure. If I was growing accustomed to her diagnoses and prescriptions, her next piece of drama came as a shock. She grabbed her guts, bent her head forward and threw it back; she knelt on the ground before me. The prophetess pressed her hand into my own abdomen and twisted it around, forcing an ‘uhh’ out of me and impolite looks from all in the room.
Two men, both in business suits, entered. The one, a bald man, spoke firmly to the prophetess and she unsteadily got to her feet and smoothed her skirt. ‘Come, please,’ said the bald man to me, and Shadrack and I followed them outside.
I smiled at the man, then took in the possibility that Shadrack was explaining to him that there was something terribly wrong with me, and so I tried to make the smile a meek one and sort of lower my head.
They talked to Shadrack and barely looked at me. As they spoke I noticed Shadrack’s already squeaky voice become squeakier, and he fumbled with his jacket hem.
The older man, who seemed to be questioning Shadrack quite forcefully, had a perfectly smooth bald head like a chocolate-coated shortcake ball. You could make out reflections in it – the sky lay beautifully blue upon it and the tones complemented each other very well indeed.
‘Is the Bishop here today?’ I asked the bald one.
He looked at me.
‘I’m sick,’ I said. ‘It’s serious. I need to see him, please. Can you arrange it?’
‘The Bishop will be at the service.’ The men turned and walked away.
‘You told them I was sick?’ I asked Shadrack.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The woman there said your insides – they’re twisted.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Is that serious?’
‘It can be a spirit. A bad one inside you.’
‘So if there’s really something serious, do you get to see the Bishop?’
‘You don’t think this is true, Ben.’
‘If I don’t see the Bishop, I’ll lose my job, Shadrack.’
‘You’re a white. You’ll get another one.’
Just like in shul, men and women were separated. We were on a large field with dry, flat grass. To our right was a block of thousands in khaki, opposite us were the women in yellow and, next to them, women in blue dresses, like a rayon sea. An outdoor stage had been set up on the very start of the slope up the hill. We waited there, sitting on the dry grass, for a long time. There were songs from the women and sometimes the men.
To me it was a revelation and I almost totally forgot my mission. How had this existed, these gatherings of multitudes, so close but beyond anything I’d ever experienced? Every cleaner, nanny and gardener I’d ever known in houses throughout town were steeped in it, and none of the homeowners were wise to the power of Zion.
A group climbed onto the stage from somewhere behind it and took up seats in the shade. It began with a prayer. The preacher raised his pleas in Northern Sotho and two men on stage with their own microphones translated it into what I think were Zulu and Venda. While the multilingual echo surged around us, all bowed their heads.
Thereafter they lifted them for a song. Shadrack sang too and we swayed left to right.
The bald-headed man came to the microphone and began to shout aggressive
ly into it, but whatever it was he was saying was greeted with approval. Shadrack nodded vigorously, angrily almost.
The bald man finished his speech and went to the end of the row of seats and sat down. I tried to see the reflection in his head, imagining how marvellous it would be now, more than just the top end of a human but encompassing the whole gathering: tents and pilgrims and baby-blue sky all together.
The groups swelled at different times with the next chorus, a keening hymn that I tried to hum along with. When it ended, a man approached the microphone with his Bible, an ordinary man, too skinny perhaps for his double-breasted brown suit.
‘The Bishop,’ whispered Shadrack to me.
It was clear the Bishop had learnt that, by moving the microphone close to his lips and speaking softly, he could extract all the deepest tones his voice could offer up. While the other preachers had screeched and cracked, he seduced like a late-night DJ. It was his instrument, the microphone, and it even slowed down the panting translators. His sermon was a lullaby or a serenade sung for me, for all of us singly.
The Bishop transfixed us. As he spoke, his Bible was open but never referred to. Some of us wept and others nodded, some stood up and raised their hands, and still others fell on the dirt.
I found myself craning to see the Bishop. I was smiling for no reason, intent, though I could understand none of his language nor those of the translators. Yet it was like a transmission directly to each one of us, intimate though universal.
The spell wasn’t completely broken when the Bishop went to his seat again. The man with the sky in his head came back to the microphone. He spat imprecations at evildoers, and brought down the wrath of the Lord, seeming to pull it from the sky with grabbing hands, and emptying it on the ground, bending at the waist to do so.
All of it was interpreted and acted out in a physical echo by the translators so that thrice the good and the evil were poured down upon us from up there. Then the man closed his eyes and the words spun from his mouth like a fishing reel running and running with a big one on the end of the line. He was down on his knees now, but the translators were standing with eyes wide and mouths wider, trying to keep up with the travelling words.