No Time Like the Present: A Novel (35 page)

In the coffee bar they turn to afterwards, restless with their reactions, a young man attached himself, confronting Peter where they sat along the counter.—Man, you one of those educated who want us to stay for ever doing what whites do, all the white shit, let men marry men that’s better custom not circumcision to make men, your brain from the old colonial time, it’s not Africa, for us, now.—

—My brother, that’s not what I said. We keep our ideas, what’s called customs. But we must also keep them
right
, way they were before, you know what that means, they weren’t a way of making money—you hear what I’m saying? Circumcision, always done by our special men—experts, you understand? They knew how to do it and nobody died, no boy had what he was going to be as a man’s body messed up for him? Now anybody with a kitchen knife tries to do it, it’s cheap, you don’t pay much and you’re
finished
, for life.—Peter made a slashing gesture between spread thighs.

—The AmaXhosa do it. If it’s done properly by people who know how, maybe it’s a good custom, helps against HIV and AIDS infection, never mind if or not it makes a man. But our amaZulu killing the bull with your bare hands, such pain, so cruel. Not because you’re hungry. To show you’re strong. And as you really grow up to be a man you’re going to find you have to show other ways to be strong for the trials that come.—The young man didn’t expect to hear from a woman, what do they have to do with male rituals.

Jabu had swung round her stool to recognise a
mfowethu
by his features or his home mannerisms of the language they share. So she takes the challenge rebelliously, personally. Would her Baba believe it had come to this: her sense of a right of leaving all this behind. What has
all this
to do with Baba—but everything was always to do with him—otherwise I wouldn’t be who I am; where I am. Where I’m going. To be.

He, the descendant of colonisation, wouldn’t be here beside her wouldn’t be taking her, no, going with her of her own volition to another country, as if he really understands the brutality. People need symbols.

Yes—oh yes, of their power over nature is it? Over other people or to please the gods? Yes. But they’ve changed since those times haven’t they, the Mexicans don’t sacrifice their people to the gods any more. The bull hasn’t done anything wrong. It hasn’t angered any gods, it’s only an animal. You’d think by now it’d be enough—as a symbol—at least slaughter the bull, eat it, not torture it to death.

Slaughter humanely. To be confronted by her with the obvious—they eat meat, he and she, and there are so many unspeakable happenings skin-to-skin close, human to human, real, not symbolic, around them.

The converted chicken-house isn’t empty.

Lesego is representative of the university’s African Studies in a national association exclusively of black South Africans which attempts no more successfully than Left, Christian or human rights organisations to condemn and halt violence against immigrants in recognition of African brothers. Lesego himself doesn’t accept that the African continent is extended family, for whom space everywhere in the continent must be made as the reason why they should not be rejected. Being Lesego, he goes to meetings of the association as his own-appointed representative of the living conditions of South African black communities so deprived, degraded that their last ragged hold on existence is broken by the invaders.

—That’s why our South Africans turn violent.—Lesego’s angry saliva shines at the corners of his lips as he has the figures coming.—Twenty-three per cent national unemployment, and this when guys whose employment is to wave you into parking space aren’t counted, up to half the children in shacks don’t go to school, parents can’t pay, provide more than a plate of pap a day—it’s poverty, the cause of this violence.—

—What’re any of us, veterans of the Struggle, eh, going to do about it? Zuma was our Head of Intelligence—the
President
, what’s he doing about it. Why don’t you come with me, see ‘on the ground’ one of the settlements where people were beaten up, kicked out—two killed—last week.—

—Jabu and I’ve seen, months ago, the people who had to get out of Alexandra, they’ve made some kind of slum camp for themselves on open ground just across the street from houses of the old and new rich in a security-tight suburb—great indignation from the residents black and white.—

—And what was done about it.—

—I suppose the residents got them cleared out. A threat to safety, the value of property reduced by what was on their doorstep.—

—So Steve we’re sitting around talking…
shocked
…
Eish!
—Lesego dismisses, he’s forgotten for the moment, that Australia is the response for not going to do anything about it.

—‘Xenophobia’, a future no one in the bush the desert thought of.—

—Just a minute, hold, my brother—how could we know then our countries round us would turn their liberation into dirty power struggles with their own people, the Amins the Mobutos and now Mugabe, so their refugees would flood in on us.—

Seen it all before.

In Lesego’s car, it occurs.—Isn’t
umlungu
going to be unwelcome whitey. I don’t want to make them suspicious of you.—

Lesego doesn’t so much as consider this.—They know me, their non-racial frontman. At least I’m a black prof of African Studies at a university where white profs used to study us. They’ll think you’re a journalist I’ve brought to write about what happened to them back home. Not to worry.—

Wasn’t worried about the possibility of being abused, harsh words, anger that might spill over an emigrant from his local white world no, but that people could be offended at being a spectacle for him.

Once Lesego left the highway there was a jumble of burned tyres on a road to be manoeuvred through. It seems from newspaper pictures and TV coverage there’s an endless source of these, they are the flags, the logos of protest. Lesego, as if remarking on a passing foreign landscape—Must have been cleared from where they barricaded the highway.—The road was a ploughed track of swerving levels, boulders washed up exposed from past rainy seasons, holes to be avoided or if too deep and wide, bumped through in low gear. Taxi buses taking their right of first way somehow missed hitting the car as they aimed for it: Lesego’s experienced with these conditions. There were the remains of vehicle skeletons. A couple of stick-limbed and a lumbering fat boy yelled from the game they were busy with in one of them. (Can paediatricians explain why undernourished children can be either painfully thin or somehow blown up like empty bags.) Now there was the beginning rather than entrance to the place. Men stood about talking each other down and an old woman sat on a packing case before what might have been a house was someone’s life exposed, three walls of the same kind of cardboard she was seated on, one buckled sheet left of a tin roof, the fourth wall missing or never existent, a neatly made bed there with a bright floral cover, shoes, pots, some shirts hanging on a wire, a tin bath, a poster of a football star.

Some man who recognised Lesego gathered him among men telepathic awareness brought from behind what was left of shacks and houses. Nothing appeared intact, not as if explosives had fallen indiscriminately but wrecked by individual intention. This place, invaders have simply moved in on local people living there perhaps years and somehow become settled enough to acquire possessions. Probably gleaned stuff dumped by white suburbans who have too much clutter, or stolen by the jobless turned housebreakers—no refugee could have brought with him the old upright piano lying among its torn-out white keys, a creature that has lost its teeth. A spaza shop which had the enterprise of displaying special offers with grinning client posters as in the supermarkets gaped on empty shelves and the spilling of loot, trampled, apparently not worth taking. Someone was picking over the remains of a TV—no electricity here, but television can be run on a car battery—the few cars were not more damaged than they normally would have been—windscreens one-eyed with patches, autograph dents from daily encounters on that single road; the owners must have driven them off to a safer place when violence began brewing potently.

The Zimbabweans didn’t flee, this time, this place, they resisted the violence of rejection with violence. The men about Lesego indeed must think he’s brought someone who’ll make the world hear their story of invasion, so it has to be told in a language the white man with him will understand; what’s vehement must be sent out in English. The voice fired from the coming and going babble of the group.—Who is give them pangas and guns, where they do get, who give them knives from butcher shop, who paying those people come to kill us, they want this our place.—A woman lifted a wail that drew theirs from under the black shawls of her old women companions. And suddenly a note with the cadence of Afrosoul soared somewhere on the low horizons of destruction. Whose voice. She’s just one of those who’re growing up in this place; an inspiration not interruption—Where’re our jobs they take. There’s jobs at the paint factory, the building going on over there-there Jeppe Street, the cleaners for the hotel—those people they take our jobs, they take any small pay, the bosses don’t want our wages they must pay us the union says—

Lesego breaks away with one of the men and signals.—He asks us to go with him.—The shrug for the man’s privacy. He questions him under his breath.

Too difficult to follow the gist of the isiZulu that follows; so without being able to make out the purpose, just be an appendage of Lesego. Seeing more ‘on the ground’. Women have three-legged pots standing in fires, children are bowling, quarrelling over turns with the wheels of a bicycle corpse. Another woman, backside assertive, is stirring cement rather than food alongside a man patching bricks to close gaps broken in a house that had a luxury of a wall instead of corrugated tin and cardboard. There’s an instinct in human settlement to be aligned as if you were in streets but some shacks are faced away, at the choice of the individual, from what is the rough conformation of a line of occupation; that’s the freedom of destitution. Lesego calls his greeting to men swinging rhythmical hammer blows on what’s left of a scrap-metal roof and they call back cheerful with the acknowledgement. There are everywhere underfoot—kick aside to get along—the twisted plastic containers of whatever, cigarette stubs, crumpled publicity handouts, beer cans—only in greater accumulation than what is shed to the gutters of formal living in the city.

Here at the shacks there’s no municipal service to pick it up. Why should the parents of kids teach them not to throw away trash when their home is made of trash.—So they’re not to be allowed to learn self-respect?—Not even that. She’s not there with him but often when he’s with others it’s as if she’s presenting him with unexpected aspects of himself. And sometimes he’s giving her some of herself she’s not aware of.

A shebeen coterie although they’re in what are obviously rescued chairs from somewhere, each different with a lopsided leg or a seat replaced by double cardboard, drink beers from the bottle, maybe this battered shed is or was a shebeen, it’s withdrawn, can’t say protected from whatever’s happened to it, by a tarpaulin as a devout Muslim woman hides behind a veil the compensatory visions for the ugliness of life. Children rat-scatter; and there are a few hens, not much shattered glass you’d expect of violence, because shacks generally don’t have windows but there are shard reflections from smashed mirrors, whatever else people can’t have, it’s clear from mirrors seen still to survive in wrecked shelters, hung up somehow, men and women must have their image, to shave and (young Afrosoul voice) make up; have sight of themselves not just as others choose to see them.

The man stops evidently come to what he’s making for. It’s a shack like any other but iron railing, the kind of screen put up to protect a store front in a risky street stands propped over what would be the entrance, and some piece of broken furniture hung with a cloth image of the President in leopard-skin regalia blinds anyone from being able to see inside. A woman with the facial bone structure recording she was once beautiful (as Jabu the lawyer is beautiful) interferes with Lesego’s man shaking the bars for attention.—They say there’s somebody very sick, that’s why you mustn’t worry the people—The man jerks a shoulder to back her off in reproaches. A voice comes from in there, questions, and gets an answer in their shared language that satisfies identity. A man pregnant with a belly that means his belt only just holds up his pants below it at the crotch appears round the side of the curtain. He signs to approach and heaves the iron screen sideways, it’s not flab, that belly, at an angle for the arrivals to push in.

There’s a double bed with nobody lying in it. A young woman tending a baby among jars, mugs and a head of cabbage on the table. Confusion. A shack is a dwelling-place all purpose in one, a motorbike, piled clothing, mobile phone, stroller strung with limp toys, a car seat has two neat white pillows on it, must double as a bed.

Lesego was introduced to the man who bore his belly so confidently, names, elaborate greeting exchanged. And Lesego presents:—Steve, my good friend.—The man might or might not have been reassured by what came from a white, the traditional handshake—forearm grasp. The young woman with the baby on her hip drew up: and as if now remembered—My daughter.—Lesego asked the name as he greeted her and touched the baby in salute.—This’s Steve. We teach at the university together.—

—Oh great, that’s nice.—

What to say.—Are you all right? It must have been terrible for you.—

—They were trying to get in but that iron—they tried and tried and there was such fighting in the street they got mixed up in it and went to another place, a woman we know just near us, she was killed.—

Her father is impatient with the platitudes of circumstance. He swings the belly to a stained blanket hanging from where the tin sheet of wall meets the tin roof and lifts it enough for the three men to see—a gap there; it’s open on a lean-to shed made of whatever, propped to the battered relic of a truck door. There’s a man standing. Looking straight at them, where he would have been thrust before they were let in past the storefront guard.

He’s a young man and he’s wearing one of those bold bright-patterned topknot balaclavas women sell among sweets and single cigarettes on city pavements this year. It crowns and covers—his identity?—over the ears and down to join under the jawbone.

There is close and intermittently argumentative exchange between Lesego, the master of the shack and the man who led to this confrontation with what has become circumstance rather than a crisis. It’s the dialogue all over the country.

What purpose in being here with them. What are any of us veterans of the Struggle doing about it. (Sitting around…
shocked…Eish.
)

The exchange has ended in abrupt conclusive silence. Lesego turns from it.—We have to get him out of here.—

The company stoops back under the cloth of the shed, hidden man follows. The girl looks about with random instinctive foresight, taking up this and that, the foresight of what can’t be done without anywhere, piece of soap, razor, into a plastic bag, underpants and small towel, chemist-labelled pill bottle along with a leather lumber jacket folded into a carryall she empties of baby clothes.

He doesn’t take off the elaborate headgear that surely will draw attention; he’ll be exposed a moment when he comes out from behind the storefront guard to Lesego’s car. But no—of course the thing is what every young black is buying this winter for warmth—shows you’re cool, man.

The young man is talkative in the back of the car beside the one who led the way to the hideout. In the rear-view mirror see the topknot bobbing with nervous loquacity. He speaks English with more confidence than many South African brothers although obviously he isn’t one of the class of some immigrant Zimbabweans, teachers and doctors—reminder that Mugabe started off well, reforming and advancing education out of its colonial limits.—I can’t follow what’s got into them, the people around Josiah’s place, we were good mates, we worked in the same kinds of jobs we could get, Nomsa and I, we all partied together I was best man at the wedding of one of her friends—that I have to be afraid when I’m living with her…Some of the others, Somalis with their shops, they think a lot of themselves, annoy people, but most of us in those shacks, we give each other a hand. I couldn’t believe Joseph first when he told—I mean even the people next door, round about, we drink and dance together between our shacks, we did, this Christmas even—now they’re after
me
! All of us! Out! Out! They think if we’re thrown out, they kill us, they’ll be rich in our jobs can you believe it, the pay we get? They’ll stay poor like we are—