A Ripple From the Storm (20 page)

Jimmy felt himself betrayed. Murdoch had left him. One by one, all evening, his friends had left him. Earlier he had been one of fifteen people in a room of comrades – for the purpose of this dream he forgot the tensions and the animosities and remembered only the warmth. Then there had been the group of four RAF – one by one, all gone, now even Murdoch. He thought: There’s only one man in the whole town I like and that’s Elias. I’ll go and see Elias.

Now it was quite easy to decide what to do. He fitted his cap on to his head automatically, and left the hut, feeling that Murdoch was staring after him. He hardened his shoulders against the stare.

There were few people about now; the airmen were in their huts. It was brightly lit, in the centre of the camp. Briefly, Jimmy thought of going to the gate, and trying to slip past the sentries when a group of people from the officers’ mess went out. He had done it before, but it would mean hanging about. Perhaps he could get into a car? He went cautiously to the officers’ mess, and poked about a bit among the cars. Most of them had necking couples inside. Quite likely they’d take him in, since they had been drinking, but again, it would mean hanging about, taking his time and, above all, talking. He did not want to talk.

He went fast through the camp to where some trees had been left standing against the wire, and stood under a tree, the moonlight sifting over him, listening to the dance music from the officers’ mess. A hundred yards off, the great wire fence stood glinting. Some days before he had noticed there was a small depression in the earth at one place, under the wire. One of the African camp guards came strolling down beside the wire. Jimmy stepped out of the shadow towards him. The man recognized him, and said: ‘Comrade Baas?’ Jimmy had fed this man with copies of
The Watchdog
and pamphlets from the South about racial equality. But still he called Jimmy and the other airmen, who, taking their cue from ‘the Reds’, were friendly to him, ‘Comrade Baas’.

Jimmy said fiercely: ‘Hold that wire for me while I get under.’

The man looked frightened. ‘But Comrade Baas, you’ll get into trouble.’ He meant – get me into trouble.

Jimmy said angrily: ‘Go and f—yourself if you’re scared to.’ Then, seeing the alert frightened look on the man’s face, he felt warmth for him, and pity. He said, in the same sentimental tone he had using with Murdoch earlier: ‘Come on, mate, give us a hand, no one’ll see.’ He went straight on beside the fence. The African hesitated, then followed. The lowest strand of wire was six inches from the earth, and Jimmy was a thick man. The guard gave a last despairing look around, saw no one, caught the insistent gleam of Jimmy’s eyes, bent down and heaved at the taut slippery wire with all his strength. ‘No, not there,’ said Jimmy crouching a few yards further down, where the hollow was.

Again the African looked around, very frightened. They were in full view. The moonlight poured down, and between them and the first huts were only a few stunted trees. At this moment a group of officers came out of the mess with some girls, and could have seen them by turning their heads.

‘Come on,’ said Jimmy again. He was lying on the earth beside the fence. The African bent himself and heaved. Jimmy rolled over, under the tight strand. His shoulders stuck. ‘More,’ he said. The man put all his strength into it; the wire quivered and twanged with the quivering of his straining body. Jimmy got his shoulders through, then his body. He lay on the earth on the other side of the fence, then rolled over and over like a bottle into the dark shade under some tall grass.

‘Thanks, mate,’ the African heard.

He said: ‘Good night, Comrade Baas,’ and walked off himself, very fast, shooting frightened glances in every direction. But it seemed no one had noticed.

Jimmy wriggled to a thicker clump of grass and got his back to it and to the camp. He lay on his elbow resting. Save for the thin pulse of music coming from the officers’ mess, he might be miles away from people. The camp held the lives of several thousand men within its tall taut encircling wires; held them close and tidy and confined. Jimmy thought that for all those months he had lived in a simple repetitive cycle of movement: sleep in the hut; work by the air-strip; jaunts into town in the camp bus from the gaunt gates on the main road. Yet here, ten yards from the camp, the trees stood dark and whole under the moon, the grass was tall and unflattened. The wish to move on had ebbed out of him. It was the wire fence he had wished to escape, the eternal pressure of the wire fence, as if steel cobwebs confined him, pressing on his flesh every time he moved out of line. He thought: I’ll stay here until morning, and then walk around the wire through the trees to the main road, and present myself at the gate with my pass. No one’ll know. There’s no harm sleeping out. He settled himself, head back, motionless, moving his eyes only to take in the moon, the trees, the grass, the soft gleaming trash that littered the soil. City boy from blackened, cold streets, he breathed the fresh tart air of the high-veld in and out of tainted lungs, fingered grains of heavy soil that clung to his fingers, frowned at the moonlight about him and thought: This is something like it. Never see a sky like this at home. The grass behind him was a solid wall, grown to its July strength, the sap no longer running, each stem taut and slippery as fine steel, massed together in a resilient antagonist to his back. He swung himself slightly, away from it and back again, and found himself laughing out loud out of a deep startled pleasure because of the toughness of the resisting grass. But the laugh frightened him. He heard it raucous and sudden, not his. Now his ears were opened to sound, and above the whine and distant roaring of engines on the strip in the camp, he heard the soft noises of the night all around him. Grasses, leaves, earth kept up a perpetual soft movement of sound. There was a steady clicking and singing from the grasses. Birds? he wondered, frowning again. Frogs? He listened carefully, and became conscious that the grass smelled sweet. Over his head bent tall soft fronds, feathered like oats, He looked up, seeing the strands clear and individual and black against the silvery star-swarming sky, and thought: Behind my back as tough as – metal. Over my head they bend, separate. Soft. Moving because of the wind. And again his nostrils filled with a sweet sharp breath of scent. His mouth fell open, his eyes stared and glazed a little, his body was tense, trying to absorb noises, scents. He was thinking, I’ll get my fill of this and then I’ll sleep. The sun’ll wake me. The sun comes up hot and sudden and it’ll wake me … His eyes, wide on the black-defined fronds above him, blinked, then again – there was something in his eye. No, he had stared too long at the fine black outline, because it had clotted, on the delicate feather was a black knot. He blinked, hard and sharp, hearing, just above him, a sudden outburst of noise, as loud as machine-gun fire. And from behind his back, in the grass-stems, another. He shifted uneasily, his blood pounding, his nerves tight. He looked and waited. All of a sudden he realized that the black knot was an insect, it was making that noise. And behind him too. He rolled sharply away from the grass-clump and examined it. All over the thick gleaming grass, dark knots. Some moved as he watched. They were silent again, the small machine-gun fire had ceased. My God, he thought, they were making that noise, the insects. His flesh crawled with fear. Looking down at himself, as he crouched in the grass, he saw his legs and body splotched with dark objects. My God, they were all over him, large, horny beetle-insects, clumsily waving their feelers and moving up over him. He let out a yell of fear, and brushed them off with frantic hands. The insects clung, and when they fell off, fell heavily into the grass and lay waving their legs — like some kind of monster, he thought wildly, every particle of his flesh crawling with loathing, Five, six, ten – while he lay there, on the soil, they had been crawling on to him, and had even started to make their noise, as if he had not been there at all. Now as he stood, half-crouched, his eyes moving warily about him, he saw them everywhere in the grass, and half a dozen paces away they were still clicking and singing as if he didn’t exist. But they were everywhere! He let out another yell of pure terror and ran off fast away from the camp into the trees, beating at his legs and body with his hands as if he were on fire and he were beating out the flames.

He ran clumsily, sobbing out his breath and muttering: Filthy, dirty, disgusting … and he glanced continually down at himself, as if he had been soiled and contaminated. He came into a clearing free of grass between trees that made deep dark patterns of shadow. There he stopped. Where was he running to? The veld sloped gently down in front of him. Three miles away the night sky flared up pinky-mauve, the lights of the city, He was running towards the lights. But he wanted to see Elias; and where he lived the sparse light made no glow in the sky. If he headed towards the sky-glow, he would arrive in the white town. He turned himself to the left, thinking: But shall I cross the river?

The river was a dirty little stream, and a dozen medical officers had lectured the men on not letting one drop of that water, or any other wild water touch their flesh. Disease lived in the water, which might keep them under treatment for months.

Jimmy came sharp down into a gully, saw a gleam of wet, and thought: I’ll jump it. The sides of the gully were steep. He jumped and crouched down to the water-level and made a wild leap, landing knee-deep in water, clutching at slippery stiff grasses for support. Here the vegetation was silent, but his flesh was crawling again: Those little buggers are waiting for me in the grass, he thought. I’ve stopped their filthy row, but they are there all right. Still in the water, feeling the sluggish flow of it tug at his legs inside his wet and heavy trousers, he looked up at the steep grass side of the gully, hesitating, not wanting to leave the water because of the insects. At last he pulled himself up and out, and crawled through the grass, crouched double, his arms folded around himself in protection. He came out in low anklelength grass the other side. The moon was lower now, throwing long shadows. Half a mile away were the flanks of the white town, the walls of villas glaring sharp in the moonlight. A few hundreds of yards away on the left, a shamble of tall dark huts or sheds, like sentry-boxes or outdoor lavatories each with its long jagged shadow. He inspected himself loathingly for insects, found one, threw it off, cursing, and moved off towards the dark huts. He was moving through a foul smell; and he turned his head from side to side trying to evade it. He realized the smell came from the grass he was moving through, not from the huts, and moved on tiptoe, clenched in horror. Around the brick huts was a flat ungrassed space. There was a smell of grain, a soft sweet smell. Threads of light around the doors of the huts. A banjo was playing inside one. Jimmy knocked on its door, the banjo at once stopped. He knocked again. The door slightly opened, a dark face looked out, the jaw dropping fast at the sight of a white face.

Jimmy said: ‘Here, mate, let me in,’ He stopped, because the dark face stared and was frightened. The white eyeballs glistened in the moonlight.

Jimmy said: ‘Listen, mate, I just want to ask you something, that’s all.’

The door shut. The light vanished. In the other dozen or so huts that stood up tall under the moon the lights went out. They might all have been deserted.

Jimmy thought wildly, incredulous: He was scared of me! Of
me.
Then – poor buggers! Then, muck them, muck the lot of them, muck all these white bastards.

Jimmy the social being had been revived. He stood humped up, frowning, thinking, outside the door that had been closed in his face: I must be off my chump, knocking at doors like that in this bloody fascist dump – could get them into trouble – if I go and see Elias like this, he might get properly into trouble too.

He stripped off his jacket. But even so, with his shirt and trousers he was, at one glance, from the camp. He was shivering. It was cold now. The cold lay heavily around him all over the grass, a thin moving mist. He put on his jacket again, and moved forward towards the Location thinking: I’ll be careful, and it’ll be all right.

Again he moved through foul-smelling grass, found a hard-beaten path and followed it. Meandering, it led towards the Location. A mile further on and he was on the outskirts of the place. There was a wire fence confining the Location, but these thousands of people, too swarming for the amount of earth allotted to them, overflowed out over the fence into hundreds of ugly little shacks and boxes. They were all dark and silent. He walked through them, Gulliver in Lilliput, for he was taller than some of these houses. Inside each, he knew, a dozen people might be sleeping: this was one of the shanty-towns, he had heard about them from Elias. He came up against the fence. It was low and rusted. He thought ironically: We airforce types rate a ten-foot fence. Comrade Baas, that’s us, with a fine fence. He saluted himself, the comrade baas. Fences, fences, everywhere you look, concentration camps everywhere and fences. He thought of the concentration camps in Europe and without any feeling of being alien. He felt identified with them, and with the people sleeping all around him in their little boxes and shacks. If we got to the moon, he thought, we’d put up fences and keep people inside them. He was looking up at the moon, now at eye-level, a small silver-bright disc. Standing just inside the fence he saluted the moon, derisively, thinking: Well, mate? We’ll have you nice and tidy before you know it.

Inside the fence there was order, of a kind. Streets there were none: they were tracks of dust between lines of houses, unsurfaced and badly potholed. Dozens of minute houses, dolls’ houses, stretched around him. He moved through them, unconsciously trying to make himself smaller, for he felt enormous in this clear shallow night. Now he knew where he was going. Last time he entered the Location, selling
Watchdogs,
he had found a warm and accepting comradeship in a certain building that could not be far from here. City boy with tidy numbered streets, he moved his big face this way and that like a dog sniffing, and moved off, certain of his direction, into a part of the Location that consisted of parallel brick lines, rooms built side by side under a long single tin roof. He moved, crouched low, breathing hard. There was not a light anywhere. On his own flesh he felt the pressure of the people sleeping massed along the brick lines. The memories of his own flesh shared their experience. Now he came to a building that was like the smaller courts of the Coloured Quarter, built in a square, with a gap in front like a missing tooth. Each side consisted of a dozen rooms. He moved into the court which smelled thick of vegetables and grains, for in the day it was a market. The room he was looking for showed a thin light below the door. He heard, very soft, the beat of drums. He knocked. The drum-beat stopped. The door opened and a face he knew appeared and instantly showed fear. ‘Let me in, mate,’ said Jimmy urgently, and the door opened and he was inside. The room was about twelve feet square. It was low, and its ceiling and walls were white-washed but stained. The floor was of rough red brick. Half a dozen young men sat on the floor, leaning their backs against the walls. They had mouth organs, a banjo, a guitar, a native-style tom-tom, One young man sat on the only chair. He had a set of drums, old and battered, but real drums and he was playing them softly, watching Jimmy; another had a trumpet, but he was fingering and loving it with his hands, silently playing it. Sometimes he lifted it to make a long soft note under cover of the music, but it was too loud to play safely. Jimmy stood there smiling, feeling warmed because this door had opened to admit him; and looked on while the young men smiled white teeth at him out of dark shining faces, and continued to play, soft, softly, a breath of music, because this was long after hours, long after the time when regulations said lights out, no more music, sleep now so that you will be fresh for the white man’s work in the morning.