“That’s Langa, a black township,” I said. Hundreds of rows of identical square shacks with roofs and walls of corrugated tin that reflected the morning sunlight were separated by unpaved roads and alleyways deserted but for an occasional white van that moved at a patrolling pace. “Almost everyone’s at work in the city,” I said. “The ones who have jobs, anyway. The ones at home stay inside all day this time of year because it’s so hot. All the children are at school. When everyone’s at home, in the evening, they’re out on the streets and in the yards until bedtime, crouching for hours, never sitting down, never standing up. See, there’s a firepit at the end of every row. It’s very close in those houses, especially at night. Fritz says you can hardly breathe, though I’m not sure he’s ever been in one.”
Wade nodded but looked as if he hadn’t heard a word I said.
WADE
There was no bridge from the plane to the terminal. We walked across the tarmac in the morning sunshine toward a squat, temporary-looking white wooden building that, I was surprised to discover, housed all that there was by way of South African customs, at least for those of us who had flown SAA. Two black beret-wearing customs agents in army fatigues and two security guards holding machine guns, muzzles pointed at the floor, were the only officials in sight. The customs area was so small that only about a third of the passengers on our flight could fit in it—the rest of us had to wait on the scorching tarmac. I was dripping sweat by the time we got inside, where anything said above a whisper was audible to everyone.
Hans, Myra, Bethany, Rachel and I approached the customs agent at the same time. “We are all part of one family, except for him,” Hans said, pointing at me. “I will explain.” Hans handed over two customs forms, one that I had filled out and one that he had filled out, naming Myra, Bethany and Rachel as co-travellers. “I am a South African citizen,” Hans said, louder than he needed to. “I am returning to South Africa from Canada, where I lived for fifteen years. I am a university professor, but I have decided to retire and to live out my retirement with my wife, who is also a South African citizen, in the beautiful city of Cape Town.”
There was a smattering of applause from those waiting behind us.
“This is my wife, Myra,” Hans went on, “and these are the youngest two of my four beautiful daughters, Bethany and Rachel. They are unsure how long they will be staying, as they are Canadian citizens, though they were born here.” He pointed again at me. “That is Rachel’s boyfriend. He’s Canadian. Along with Bethany, he and Rachel will be staying in our house, in separate rooms of course.”
There was some laughter from the passengers behind us. Rachel tightened her grip on my arm.
“He will be staying for six months,” Hans said. “He is not bringing any money into the country and he will not be taking any with him when he leaves. He will not be looking for work and will not accept any that may be offered to him. Rachel and I are paying his way, a fact by which he has yet to seem embarrassed.”
More laughter. Much more. I wondered how much of this I would have to endure in the coming months from Hans, who seemed emboldened by his return to Cape Town.
“Welcome home, Professor van Hout,” the agent said, and stamped all our passports.
“He’s just teasing,” Rachel whispered.
“He never has before,” I said.
We waited on the other side for the rest of our party.
Fritz seemed totally relaxed as he presented himself to the customs agent while looking like central casting’s notion of a drug dealer and with a woman on his arm who was obviously as high as a kite. I was surprised when the agent let them through without asking them a question.
After customs, we made our way to the terminal. I tried to take note of everything that was new to me, the sizes and shapes and colours of things, the way people dressed. I had met two black people in my life, both professors at the university. Now blacks were everywhere, pushing trolleys, sweeping floors, polishing countertops. I wasn’t able to take in a fraction of what lay all around me. Men were leading women, and women children, just as Rachel was leading me, the children unfazed by what seemed to me like bedlam.
In the onrush of the crowd, I lost hold of Rachel’s hand and was borne off as if by a riot. By the time I managed to turn about and resist the flow, Rachel had vanished. I was taller than most of those surrounding me. I looked out over their heads in search of Rachel’s bright-blue T-shirt—but it was her face I saw first, her expression as she cast about in search of me as anguished as if she thought I couldn’t breathe the air of this place she’d brought me to unless she was beside me. I watched her, wonderstruck that concern for me could make her look like that. “Rachel,” I shouted, and our eyes met. When I reached her, she was trembling. She clung fiercely to me as I took her in my arms. “Did you think I’d been kidnapped?” I said as she pressed her forehead against my shoulder.
She took a step back and looked up at me. “You should see your face,” she said, and kissed me on the cheek. I fancied that my face registered all the things she’d hoped I’d feel—wonder, amusement, confusion, apprehension, perhaps a touch of dismay. We were on her turf now, that kiss seemed to say, in the greater world, whose marvels she’d been unable to describe.
* * *
—
After we collected our luggage, we said goodbye to her family. We’d arranged to stay with Gloria and her husband until the place we’d rented through a travel agent was available. “They won’t be home for a few hours,” Rachel said. “Just as well. A little decompression time. She means well, but Gloria can be a handful.”
More of a handful than Bethany? I thought but didn’t say.
We took a taxi from the airport to the City Bowl area of Cape Town, which spread out like rubble from the foot of Table Mountain. We passed—what did we pass? The definitions of every word I knew expanded all at once. We passed what I took to be miniature oil derricks see-sawing up and down, seemingly unsupervised, sand as dry and white as salt, red soil that seemed to have been sifted free of the smallest stones. Palm trees that bowed slowly in the wind. I was barely able to take notice of anything that wasn’t within fifty feet of the road on either side. It seemed the sun was not the sun that shone back home. Aside from being much hotter, it felt different in ways I had no words to describe. The smell of the wind, the colour of the sky, for which the word blue no longer seemed quite right—all this I assumed to be as unique to South Africa as Rachel was.
The taxi dropped us off downtown, where we rented a beat-up Citroën for next to nothing. As the steering wheel was on the right side, which had not been the case with any car in which I had even been a passenger, and as the car was a standard stick, unlike Dad’s succession of automatics, I agreed when Rachel said that she and only she would do the driving. “Besides, I sort of know the city. Very sort of. Wish me luck. Some things may have changed since the last time I was here. Traffic lights. Stop signs. Guardrails. One-way streets. Unimportant things like that. You know, in ’75, I used to drive Fritz and Carmen home to Fritz’s place out on the Flats when they were both too stoned.”
* * *
—
We drove to the harbour and parked, and Rachel led me on a walk that, for her, turned into a barefoot run along the seawall at Sea Point, an affluent suburb, the ocean on our left, a high, meandering hedge on our right. “It’s so nice and warm,” she said. “I can’t stand wearing sandals when it’s so warm.” A sandal in each hand, still clad in her blue T-shirt and jeans, she said she’d race me to the next turn in the seawall. Rachel’s running had improved to the point that she could keep up with me while I slowly jogged, which was all I felt like doing in the heat.
As we rounded the turn, we all but ran into an obese black woman and a tall, thin black man, both wearing blue jeans and baggy white T-shirts. They were fighting, grappling in a kind of hug, stabbing and slashing each other with what I thought were kni
ves but turned out to be screwdrivers. Neither of them made a sound as they grimly drove their screwdrivers into each other. They seemed to be bleeding from everywhere, their faces, heads, arms, torsos, legs. Their bloodied T-shirts clung to their skin, fast becoming more red than white. Patches of grass darkened by their blood glistened in the sunlight. “Oh my God, stop, stop!” Rachel shouted. I shouted “Stop!” too, but found I couldn’t make a move toward them.
They stabbed and stabbed until at last they fell, side by side. I was about to go to them when we heard a vehicle behind us and jumped off the path just in time to avoid being run over by a Jeep on which a manned machine gun was mounted. Several white, khaki-clad soldiers sporting black berets and bearing rifles piled out. One of them pointed his gun at me and Rachel. “Don’t move,” he said. His tone was not hostile but like that of a doctor telling you to follow his instructions during some tricky procedure. I’d never had a gun pointed at me, but I told myself that, because I was white, I was safe. I was never so happy to be white. In what seemed like seconds, the soldiers threw the bloodied pair into the back of the Jeep, climbed in and sped off. The only evidence of what had happened were the two blood-smeared screwdrivers lying near each other on the ground, and the black beret of one of the soldiers.
As I put my arm around Rachel, a bareheaded soldier with short blond hair, so pink-cheeked he might have been a teenager, returned to the scene on the run, his shin-high, tightly laced black boots thumping on the path. Without a glance at us, he snatched up the beret and made as if to dash off when he spotted the screwdrivers. He grabbed them and threw them over the seawall, donned the beret and broke into a trot, his face one wide, sheepish smile.
“This is bad,” Rachel said after he had gone. “This is a bad omen. It is. This is bad. A man and a woman.”
“It’s bad for them,” I said.
“I know. I know. I feel so sorry for them, I do. It was horrifying to watch them. And we’ll never know if one or both of them are dead. There’ll be nothing about it in the news. But we are barely off the plane and we run into this. I brought you here to show you where I come from, and this is one of the first things that you see. A man and a woman in some sort of death struggle. I can’t imagine what you think. I’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s not as if it happens every day in South Africa.”
“I know that.”
“I wonder who called the police. Someone must have, though I bet they didn’t give their name. There’ll be no taking of statements, not from whoever called, not from us. Nothing more will be made of it than if they were a pair of dogs.”
“What do you think they were fighting about?”
“Drugs, maybe? A few rands’ worth of drugs. Maybe one of them cheated on the other, informed on the other. Some kind of betrayal. A lovers’ quarrel, maybe. I don’t know. I don’t know how the blacks live. I don’t know what our maids did after Mom and Dad drove them to the train station on Friday afternoons. We had a maid named Elsie. I don’t know what she saw when she got off the train that took her home. I never rode the bus that goes from the train station to the township. I’ve never seen the township except from a plane.”
“Let’s sit on a bench and catch our breath,” I said. She nodded, and we walked over to a concrete bench and sat facing the water. I tried to think of something to say but couldn’t. When I closed my eyes, I saw the big woman and the thin man, embracing in their strange struggle. Only two people who had known each other for a long time would fight like that. A married couple. A brother and sister. Lifetime friends.
“I’ve never seen anyone die,” Rachel said.
“They might not be dead.”
“I think they are. Or will be soon. They won’t get prompt medical help. They must work in this neighbourhood. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been allowed to be here. It says on their identity cards where they can be and when they can be there, and why. They might have been servants in some nearby house. The names of their masters and madams would have been on their cards.”
I thought of the boy soldier who came back for his beret and wondered if he would wake from bad dreams tonight or if he would even get to sleep, for I doubted that I would.
“Let’s go to Gloria’s,” Rachel said at last. “I don’t think I’ll ever stop shaking without a drink.”
From The Ballad of the Clan van Hout
GLORIA (1975)
(Addressed to her but never read
to her upon the Ballad Bed.)
There really wasn’t much to say
when Gloria was on the way
except “I do.” My said it too
and we were three because of you.
Not that you had anything to do
with what we did when we were two—
I won’t start this by blaming you:
it’s not as if you told us to
get up to doing what we did
before we even thought of kids.
I try to laugh it all away.
To think two almost died the day
that Gloria van Hout was born
because you were untimely torn
from Her. You left Her with a scar,
a pale reminder that you are,
that you could just as easily
not be, you and My, the other three,
that I could have another life
with other children and a wife
that isn’t Her, some other we
that isn’t us: a memory
is all you’d be, the other three
undreamed of by a single soul.
The six of us came through that hole,
the six of us came out of My,
our entire family.
Six weeks in that incubator,
six weeks in your second mother,
you fought for every inch of room
in that artificial womb.
Had you shared it with another,
a combative baby brother
who knew there wasn’t room for two,
I’d still have placed my bet on you—
a fighter struck by many blows
your face so red, eyes swollen closed.
I felt your every punch and kick
until I was so stomach sick
I couldn’t stand it any longer—
though they said, “She’s getting stronger.”
They said there’d be no second child
because of what they did to My.
(They were also blaming me.)
The one who almost died would be
the first and last, an only child.
Though sad sometimes, I reconciled
myself to having you and having Her—
and being three and nothing more.
We raised you in the Land of Hout
which I began to write about
when you were hushed and She was out.
At first, The Ballad was for you—
you looked at me as if you knew
you were what I wrote about,
as if you thought I thought about
the one child in the Land of Hout
throughout the day, throughout the night,
when it was dark or it was light.
The world existed for we two—
all things were newborn just like you.
The second that you came to be
was not Day One of History.
You’re nineteen and you still don’t see
your world is here because of me.
A girl raised in the proper way
grows more improper every day.
You’re all perverse—it’s like a curse:
You just keep getting worse and worse.
You don’t care what you grow to be
as long as it displeases me.
The night that I first read to you
from the book, you weren’t yet two.
Though you couldn’t understand it,
you seemed to like it just a bit,
the sounds, I mean, as if they were
the ones that you were hoping for.
I’d never read the book out loud—
my voice surprised me. I was proud
of what I’d done. I also vowed
no one but us must know about
the book, not even my Right Hand,
who’d be the last to understand
the point of writing such things down:
The Ballad of the Clan van Hout
(or what on earth it was about).
They called you Glory Hole van Hout.
Boys going past the house sung out
all sorts of filthy things that you
had done with more than one or two,
or so they said—who knows what’s true?
My reputation follows you,
the things that I was forced to do
when Amsterdam was occupied—
if not for me, more would have died…
Once you have defamed the father,
you may as well defame the daughter.
What sort of girl could he beget
The Mystery of Right and Wrong Page 15