A Dry White Season (13 page)

A sensation of total strangeness as they reached the first rows of identical brick buildings. Not just another city, but another country, another dimension, a wholly different world. Children playing in the dirty streets. Cars and wrecks of cars in tatty backyards. Barbers plying their trade on street corners. Open spaces devoid of all signs of vegetation, smoking from large rubbish dumps and swarming with boys playing soccer. In many places there were the hideous burnt-out skeletons of buses and buildings. Smaller groups of children running ahead of the white Dodge, laughing and waving, as if the wrecks and ruins didn’t exist and nothing had ever happened. Clusters of policemen in battledress patrolling shopping centres, beer halls, schools.

“Where are we going, Stanley?”

“Nearly there.”

He followed a broken stretch of tarred road down a low bare hill, through an erosion ditch cluttered with rusty tins, cardboard containers, bottles, rags and other unnamable rubbish, and stopped beside a long low whitewashed building resembling a shed and bearing the legend:

From Here to Eternity
FUNERAL PARLOUR

On the stoep an old man was moving about on hands and knees with red polish and brushes and dirty cloths. In a long, narrow, filthy trough of mud and water beside the building a group of children froze like small dusty wooden sculptures when the big car pulled up and the two men got out. Below the steps lay the mangled remains of two bicycles, covered in rust, their wheels missing.

Stanley spoke in Zulu to the old man on the stoep, who pointed towards a gauze door without interrupting his work for a moment. But before they could reach it, the door was opened and a small black man emerged, his limbs thin and stick-like, like a praying mantis; dressed immaculately in white shirt, black tie, black trousers, and black shoes without laces or socks.

“My condolences, sir,” he whispered mechanically, without even looking up.

After a brief discussion with Stanley they were invited inside. Among those cool, stern, white walls the sun outside became a mere memory. The floor was bare, except for two trestles in the centre, obviously intended for the coffin.

“I have not quite finished,” said the undertaker in his hoarse whisper. “But if you will be so kind—”

He led them through to the backyard, a shocking return to the white and blinding sun. There was a lean-to filled with stacks of coffins – most of them in pine, and barely smoothed down, simply hammered together; others, shinier and more expensive, with gleaming handles, were covered by a much too small canvas.

“Inhere.”

The little man opened a metal door in an unplastered brick wall. Icy air struck them as if an invisible cloth had been flapped in their faces. As the door was shut behind them, it was suddenly dark, a single bare, yellowish globe glowing dully and ineffectually against the ceiling, its delicate wires glaring white. There was a low hum from the refrigerator engine. Outside, there would still be sun and children, but distant and improbable.

On either side of the door were metal shelves on which bodies were piled up. Seven altogether, Ben counted, as if it were important to take stock. His stomach turned. But he wouldn’t look away. One pile of three, and another of four. Mouths and nostrils stuffed with cottonwool, dark with blood. All of them naked, except for two wrapped in brown paper: those, said Stanley, had already been identified by relatives.

The rest were still anonymous. An old woman with a gaunt face, a mere skull covered in leather; the breasts reduced to flaps and folds of skin, the nipples large and scaly like the heads
of tortoises. A young man bearing a gaping wound on the side of the head, one eye-socket empty, allowing one to look right into the red inside of the skull. On the top of the pile on the left lay a young girl with an incredibly sweet face, as if in peaceful sleep, one folded arm half-concealing her pubescent breasts; but from the waist down she was crushed, a mass of broken bonesplinters and black coagulated blood. A mountainously obese woman, an axe imbedded in her skull. A frail old man with ludicrous tufts of white wool on his head, copper rings in his ears, an expression of consternation on his face as if the weight of the bodies on top of him was becoming too much to bear.

The coffin stood on the floor. It was one of the more ostentatious coffins, with brass fittings, lined with white satin. In it lay Gordon, incongruous, ludicrous in a black Sunday suit, hands crossed on his chest like the claws of a bird, his face grey. A barely recognisable face, the left side distorted and discoloured, a blackish purple. The rough stitches of the post mortem across his skull, and under his chin, not quite concealed by the high stiff collar.

Now he had to believe it. Now he’d seen it with his own eyes. But it remained ungraspable. He had to force himself, even as he stood there looking down into the coffin, to accept that this was indeed Gordon: this minute round head, this wretched body in the smart suit. He groped for contact, for some memory which would make sense, but he was unable to find anything. And he felt uncomfortable, almost vexed, as he went down on his haunches beside the coffin to touch the body, disturbingly conscious of the old undertaker’s presence, and of Stanley’s.

The sun was blinding when they came outside again. They didn’t talk. After Stanley had thanked the old mantis they went round the narrow whitewashed building to where the children had started cavorting in the mud again. And now it was the turn of the funeral parlour to become an irrational and farfetched memory. At the same time it was inescapable, haunting him like a bad conscience in this explosive sunlight where life was going its bustling and obscenely fertile way. Death, he thought angrily, really had no place here. To be overcome by it on such a summer’s day, when the world was bright and fruitful, was absurd.

Stanley glanced at him as they slammed the car doors shut, but said nothing. The car pulled off again, following once more an intricate route through patterns of identical houses, as if they were passing the same ones over and over again. Brick-walls covered in slogans. Peeling billboards. Boys playing ballgames. The barbers. The wrecks and the charred buildings. Chickens. Rubbish heaps.

Emily’s home looked like all the others in her township, Orlando West, cement and corrugated iron, a small garden obstinately staked off against the dusty road. Inside, a spattering of old calendars and religious pictures on the bare walls; no ceiling to hide the iron roof above; dining table and chairs; a couple of gas lamps; sewing machine; transistor radio. There was a group of friends with her, mainly women, but they parted wordlessly to make way for Ben and Stanley when they arrived. A few small children were playing on the floor, one with a bare bottom.

She looked up. Perhaps she didn’t recognise Ben against the glare of the sun outside; perhaps she simply hadn’t expected him at all. Expressionless, she stared at him.

“Oh, my Baas,” she said at last.

“I’ve been to the undertaker’s to see him, Emily,” he said, standing clumsily erect, not knowing what to do with his hands.

“It is good.” She looked down at her lap, the black headscarf obscuring her face. When she looked up again, her features were as expressionless as before. “Why did they kill him?” she asked. “He didn’t do them nothing. You knew Gordon, Baas.”

Ben turned to Stanley as if to ask for help, but the big man was standing in the doorway whispering to one of the women.

“They said he hanged himself,” Emily went on in her low droning voice drained of all emotion. “But when they brought his body this morning I went to wash him. I washed his whole body, Baas, for he was my husband. And I know a man who hanged himself he don’t look like that.” A pause. “He is broken, Baas. He is like a man knocked down by a lorry.”

As he numbly stared at her some of the other women started talking too:

“Master mustn’t take offence from Emily, she’s still raw inside. What can we say, we who stand here with her today?
We’re still lucky. They picked up my husband too, last year, but they only kept him thirty days. The police were kind to us.”

And another woman, with the body and the breasts of an earth-mother: “I had seven sons, sir, but five of them are no longer with me. They were taken one after the other. One was killed by the tsotsis. One was knifed at a soccer match. One was a staffrider on a train and he fell down and the wheels went over him. One died in the mines. The police took one. But I have two sons left. And so I say to Emily she must be happy for the children she has with her today. Death is always with us.”

There was a brief eruption when a young boy came bursting into the little house. He was already inside before he noticed the strangers and stopped in his tracks.

“Robert, say good day to the baas,” Emily ordered, her voice unchanged. “He came for your father.” Turning briefly to Ben: “He is Robert, he is my eldest. First it was Jonathan, but now it is he.”

Robert drew back, his face blunt with resentment.

“Robert, say good day to the baas,” she repeated.

“I won’t say good day to a fucking
boer!
” he exploded, swinging round viciously to escape into the angry light outside.

“Robert, I’d like to help you,” Ben stammered wretchedly.

“Go to hell! First you kill him, now you want to help.” He stood swaying like a snake ready to strike, overcome by all the hopeless, melodramatic rage of his sixteen years.

“But I had nothing to do with his death.”

“What’s the difference?”

An old black priest, who had been keeping his peace in the background until Robert exploded, now pushed through the women and gently took the boy by one of his thin arms. But with surprising strength Robert tore himself loose and burst through the crowd of mourners, disappearing into the street. All that could be heard in the shocked silence inside was the high, monotonous buzzing of a wasp against a window-pane.

“Morena
,” said the old priest, clicking his tongue, “don’t be angry with the boy. Our children do not understand. They see what is happening in this place and they are like that wasp when you burn its nest. But we who are old are glad that you have come. We see you.”

Ben’s ears were ringing. It was a curious experience: his senses were taking in acutely what was happening, yet he didn’t seem to be there. Disoriented, a total foreigner to the scene, an intruder in their grief which, nevertheless, he wanted so desperately to share, he looked at the woman in the middle of the room.

“Emily,” he said, startled by his own voice in the silence – only the wasp was still buzzing, separated by the pane from its element outside – “you must let me know if you need anything. Please, you must promise me.”

She stared at him as if she hadn’t heard.

“Morena,
you are kind to us, “said the priest.

Automatically, without really meaning to, Ben put his hand in his trouser pocket and took out a ten rand note. He laid it on the table in front of her. They were all staring at him, all the mourning women, as if deliberately trying to ignore the green note on the checkered plastic cloth. And after he’d said goodbye, when he looked back at them from the door, almost in supplication, they were still standing like that, utterly immobile, like a family portrait.

The big Dodge was like an oven after standing in the glaring sun for so long, but Ben barely noticed it. Even the group of youngsters further down the street, shouting at him and raising clenched fists as he emerged from the house, hardly registered in his mind. He slammed the car door and remained staring fixedly ahead, through the windscreen, at the innumerable rows of houses trembling and rippling in the heat. Stanley moved in beside him.

“Well,
lanie?”
he said loudly.

Ben clenched his jaws.

“We going home now?” asked Stanley. The question sounded more like an accusation.

Unable to explain his reaction, with a hint of panic at the thought of everything ending so abruptly and pointlessly, Ben said: “Do you think we could go somewhere and just sit quietly for a while?”

“Sure, if you want to go. But we’d better get a move on from here, before that crowd starts stoning my car.” He motioned towards the youngsters approaching down the street in a slow,
menacing phalanx. Without waiting, he started the car, reversed into the nearest side street and drove off, tyres skidding. Distant, isolated voices called out after them; in the rear-view-mirror one could see them dancing oddly in the dust, arms outstretched. A squealing, squawking chicken fluttered past the car, feathers flying, missed by inches. Stanley shook with laughter.

Outside, Stanley’s house differed in no way from all the others in his street. Perhaps he deliberately didn’t want to attract attention. Inside, it was better furnished than Emily’s, with something of a flashy flair, but in no way remarkable. Bright linoleum on the floor, furniture from Lewis Stores, an ostentatious display cabinet filled with plates and shiny objects; on the sideboard a large tray covered with multicoloured birds; a record-rack with the empty sleeve of an Aretha Franklin record on top of it.

“Whisky?”

“I don’t really like such strong stuff.”