Out of Bounds (6 page)

Outside the station Khulu had found heavily armed police ordering people to go straight home and stay inside. A great tank had come roaring down the road and up the hill. Smoke and flames had been rising from the direction of the Rent Offices. Balancing her half-filled box of fruit on her head, Khulu had forced her tired body onward. When finally she had found the house
empty—and no food prepared—anxiety already burning within her had leaped up like a flame. It was true that sometimes Esther came in late, but there would always be some supper waiting in the pot, prepared by Esther earlier on.

Khulu had wanted to go out looking for her grandchild straight away. Was she one of those shot? Had she been hurt or arrested? She would have to find one of Esther’s friends. Yet what if something had happened to them too? Maybe in the end she would have to ask at the police station.

She had just been starting up the road again, when her neighbor’s husband had called out to her. Hadn’t she heard the police message? They were going to shoot anyone on the streets at night. Khulu had halted. She could hear the rumble of tanks, could see smoke rising in different places, could smell burning in the air. She was not young any more and could not have moved quickly to take cover like the youngsters on the street corners. Wearily she had returned to the empty house, to wait till the morning.

All night Khulu had sat up. When the knocking came early in the morning, she hurried to the door. Could it be Esther at last? Instead, there was
Nandi, almost falling on to her and stammering her message.

What happened next was something that remained for a long time in Nandi’s mind like a silent film. Without saying a word, her deeply lined face very grave, Khulu lowered herself with difficulty onto her knees beside the cupboard. Her worn, wrinkled hands passed Nandi two old gray saucepans and a bent frying pan, before the two of them loosened and lifted out the back panel. It was there. Together they pulled out the heavy brown-paper parcel.

“What rubbish can we throw on top?” Nandi whispered.

Khulu signaled for Nandi to wait. She heaved herself up. Then taking the box in which she carried fruit, she tipped out apples, oranges, and bananas onto the bed. Lifting the brown-paper package, she placed it at the bottom of the box and began to pile the fruit on top of it. It was all done in a couple of minutes. There was another small box of fruit on a chair. She pointed to it.

“Bring that!” she said to Nandi.

Nandi was speechless. Whatever was Khulu going to do with the typewriter?

Slowly Khulu raised the large box onto her head, balancing it carefully. Nandi did the same with the small one and followed her grandmother out of the backdoor. Khulu led the way across the small yard to a narrow gap in the back fence. There was a spot in crossing the yard where the men by the car could see them if they were looking in that direction. But there was no sound of footsteps as they reached the back fence. Making their way silently between the opposite houses, they passed out into the next street.

Nandi desperately wanted to ask Khulu what she intended to do, but when she began to speak, Khulu shook her head. So, without knowing where they were going, Nandi followed her grandmother as they walked steadily onward, the boxes swaying gently on their heads.

There were a couple of black policemen standing at the entrance to the station. Nandi’s heart jumped as one of them put out a hand and lifted a bunch of bananas out of her grandmother’s box.

“Thanks, granny!” he said, tearing off a banana and throwing it to his mate. He didn’t offer to pay, but Khulu simply turned to look at him, her grave
face giving a slight nod.

Khulu took her usual route to work. The overcrowded train to Johannesburg, then the overcrowded bus to the white suburb with the tall blocks of flats. For the last thirty years she had come six days a week to sell fruit to people hurrying to and from cooking, cleaning, and serving inside the homes of Masters and Madams.

Nandi had come with Khulu before, standing all day from early in the morning until late in the evening, at the corner of a big block of flats near the bus stop. She had seen white people driving off in smart cars, long after Khulu and the other workers had arrived in the morning. She had seen the same white people driving back home, long before Khulu and the other black people set off on their tiring journey home to Soweto.

Nandi had seen white children in expensive uniforms, complete with hats and caps, walking or being driven to school, and coming home in the middle of the afternoon, licking ice creams, laughing. The white children’s school couldn’t be like her own—of that she was sure, even though she hadn’t seen it. In her school there were so many children that her class finished at eleven o’clock so
that another lot of children could come in.

This morning as she stood at the same corner, Nandi’s mind was in a turmoil. Whenever Esther had spoken about what was so bad in their country, Khulu had usually remained quiet, getting on with her work. Nandi could remember only once how she had put down her iron and said: “You children always want things to happen so quickly! You think you are the first to fight…and that it’s easy!”

“But, Khulu…” Esther had begun.

“No, it’s no use telling me…. I’m too old!” Their grandmother had shaken her head and started ironing again.

That was why this was so puzzling, startling…. Khulu acting so swiftly and calmly…bringing the typewriter right into the middle of the white people, almost under the noses of the police. Nandi wanted to ask why Khulu was doing this dangerous thing. Wouldn’t it have been so much easier to throw the parcel away into the trash? Each time someone bought an orange, an apple, or a banana, the layer of fruit got less. What did Khulu intend to do now?

Nandi waited for most of the passersby to go into work and the street to quiet down before she
whispered her question.

“Khulu, what are you going to do with it?”

Looking at the young worried face, Khulu smiled a little.

“There’s a place where it will be safe for a while….” she paused, then added softly, “How can I throw it away when the children still need it?”

Nandi moved up close to Khulu, resting against her, not saying anything more. Words were too difficult.

A little later, when the traffic of passing cars had lessened, Khulu left Nandi standing at the corner with the small box of fruit. Having placed the large box once again on her head, she slowly made her way toward the drive-in entrance to the block of flats. All seemed quiet. Just beyond the entrance archway was a row of garages. The nearest one was open. Biting her lip, Nandi edged herself a little way up the road. Nervously she watched as Khulu strolled through the entrance and stopped by the vacant garage. Inside, Nandi glimpsed a shelf cluttered with old cardboard boxes. After a brief glance around her, Khulu entered. She placed the fruit box down on the floor and carefully lifted out the brown-paper parcel.

At that moment a silver car came swerving around the corner of the street. Nandi stared in dismay. The car swung into the driveway and directed itself toward the very garage where Khulu was wedging the package on to the shelf. A white woman flung open the car door, screaming in English.

“What do you think you’re doing? Come in here to steal, have you?” Her fingers pointed like red-tipped missiles.

Khulu shook her head, but didn’t reply.

The screech continued. “What’s that you’ve been meddling with then? Let me see!”

Nandi ran toward the entrance, but stopped short as the white woman strode into the garage, pulled down the parcel on to the garage floor and ripped open the paper. There lay the typewriter, next to the box of oranges, apples, and bananas.

“This isn’t mine! It’s stolen, isn’t it? So you’ve come to hide it in my garage! Well you’ve been caught my girl!”

By now a small crowd of people had gathered near the garage. A large white man made his way through to the screaming woman. Khulu stood still, saying nothing.

“What’s the trouble, Mrs. Laker?”

“It’s this thief here….”

At the word “thief,” Nandi forgot her own terror and ran to Khulu. She sobbed against her.

“You’re not a ‘thief,’ Khulu! You didn’t steal anything! Tell them! Please tell them!”

Khulu’s body heaved as she held her granddaughter tightly for a few seconds. Then, from under her shawl, she slipped her little purse with its few coins into Nandi’s pocket, saying very quietly, “You must go home. The police mustn’t find you here. Go right away…and tell your mama not to worry. You MUST go!”

Nandi felt Khulu push her gently, but firmly, away. Nandi wanted to resist, to stay, but Khulu’s face had such a still, sure look that reluctantly she began to move. The white woman was still going on in her high-pitched voice.

“The police won’t be long now!”

Themba…Zinzi…now Khulu! Angry tears blurred out everything as Nandi slipped through the small crowd and ran down to the corner to collect the remaining box of fruit.

Traveling back alone on the train, Nandi thought about Ma. She wondered what Ma had
made of her note and whether she had still gone to work. She didn’t want to hurt Ma, but Nandi suddenly realized it was no longer a problem what to say, or how to cover up. The typewriter and everything else was now in the open. Searching in her pocket, she pulled out the leaflet from the march—the one she had wanted Esther to hand to Ma. Nandi reread it.

“Parents you should be proud to have children who prefer to die from bullets….”

The police had taken her friends, and now her granny. Her cousin Esther may have escaped, perhaps to carry on fighting…Well, she was proud of them! She would tell Ma all about it and give her the leaflet herself.

Eight months later there was a small item in a national newspaper:

1985

For years it had been kept carefully secured on a rack above the bed, just beneath the thatch, inside “Boss” Mackay’s hut. The long, black barrel pointed toward a prize pair of spiraling kudu horns, fixed to the whitewashed wall along with other trophies from the surrounding bush of Mackay’s game farm.

Esi had always been fascinated by the gun’s silence and its power. Ever since an early memory of the great lifeless body of a leopard stretched out in the dusty yard—so much bigger than himself. Papa, his father, had been asked to tell the story many times, how during a terrible drought a male leopard had made its way between the huts early one morning, intent upon the enclosure for goats and chickens. Esi’s father had managed to rouse Mackay who had grabbed his gun, firing a shot over the animal’s head. But instead of bolting away, the creature had rushed at his attacker. The
following shot brought the famished beast crashing, almost at Mackay’s feet.

“Such is the desperation of hunger…” was how Papa would always end.

As a little boy, Esi had sat cross-legged on the leopard-skin mat, gazing up at the gun, while his father cleaned and polished Mackay’s room. When he was a few years older, and his father’s back was turned, Esi would stand by the bed, quickly stretching as tall as he could, to run his hand along the hard metal and smooth wood. He had longed to be taller, to let his hand explore the gun more fully. What would it feel like to let his finger curl gently around the strong metal of the trigger? Of course he had known that the bolt and bullets were always removed, locked away separately in a drawer of the desk.

Now at fifteen, the rack within easy reach, he had been assigned the task of cleaning the room. But the gun was no longer above the bed. Ever since the police had come to warn about “terrorists,” Mackay had failed to follow the ritual of replacing the gun on its rack. Instead, he locked it in his cupboard.

The square shape and veranda of Mackay’s hut (his “bed-sitter in the bush” as he called it to his friends) distinguished it from the other round huts of the camp. It was mostly shut up for weeks at a time while he was away in Jo’burg, always taking the gun with him. A director of a large mining company, he lived in the city, only coming to his game farm at intervals for a break.

“Too much work, too much noise!” he would say to Esi’s father.

Sometimes he came for a couple of days, sometimes more. No one knew when he would arrive…alone, with his grown-up daughter, or with friends, intending to watch the wildlife from the camouflaged hideout at the water hole, or to track and, when circumstance allowed, to shoot. Nowadays animals were only shot when necessary. As Mackay would tell visitors, his aim was preservation. Indeed wildlife flourished: impalas, zebras, wilde-beasts—to name but a few of the herds preyed on by lions, sometimes leopards, with their persistent hangers-on, the hyenas and jackals. Even elephants made their way across the territory from time to time.

It was simply by custom that it was called a
“farm,” because apart from the small area in which a few crops were cultivated by Esi’s family, it was entirely covered in age-old rough grass; stunted, tangled trees; and bush. Close to the National Game Reserve and adjoining the Hendriks’ game farm, it could take you a day to walk across it from one end to the other.

Esi’s father looked after the farm when Mackay was away, his main work being to stop poachers. As a child, Esi had found the constant dangers of following Papa through tall grass and rough bush thrilling and exciting. Poachers could be armed, while his father had only his short cutting knife. But Papa could tell so much from noticing a broken twig, a flattened patch of grass, a piece of missing bark, vultures circling. If there was any trouble, he had to notify the white neighbor Hendriks, who would come with his gun and contact the police. Hendriks also made a point of coming over once a week to check all was in order.

However, even when Mackay was there, Esi noticed how his father was able to advise Mackay and answer his questions. Papa knew all about the movement and numbers of animals. If an animal was to be shot, it was Papa who quietly led the
tracking to bring Mackay into the right position for shooting. It was always Papa who knew if poachers had set a trap, laying in turn one of his own. It was Papa who would shout the order for the poachers to put up their hands. While Mackay or Hendriks pointed the gun, it was Papa who would approach the trapped men to remove their belts, causing their trousers to fall to their ankles. It was Papa who would interpret for Mackay when the poachers spoke. Mackay depended almost totally on Papa. Indeed Esi had once overheard him saying as much to a visitor:

“You know I couldn’t live in the city and run this place if it wasn’t for my boss-boy Isaac.”

Yet Papa was never allowed to handle the gun.

Some forty kilometers from the farm was the village of Mapoteng, “the place you get to in a round about way.” The land was poor and the people were poor. Even poorer since the white authorities had declared Mapoteng part of a “homeland,” to which black people had been sent in their thousands when their homes were not wanted close to the towns and cities of whites. Whole families had found themselves cleared off white-owned farms
and “black spots” their homes bulldozed to the ground; themselves with their few possessions forced on to great khaki government trucks, the “GGs,” and dumped in the dust of Mapoteng—to start life again. Here in this unknown place the government called their “home,” they found the earth hard and dry, cracked with overuse and drought. Here they found hunger. In desperation, some sought food in forbidden places.

It was when he was thirteen that Esi had been sent to stay with an aunt in Mapoteng, so he could attend the primary school. There he had begun to learn not only to read but also what it was to eat only a few handfuls of
pap
a day and little else. Although Papa would bring a large bag of mealie meal and some money for his sister (she was looking after another brother’s family as well as her own), with ten hungry children in the house, food was often scarce.

In Mapoteng, Esi found people who became silent on hearing who he was. They would look strangely at him, keeping their distance. He soon discovered that there were those who despised his father’s job. In fact, it was stronger than that with some. It was hate. To them, his father was simply
another detested policeman, protecting the white man’s land and a source of food they sorely needed.

At first, Esi had been hurt and confused. Although he had said nothing, he wanted to defend Papa. However as his own stomach learned to know the nagging ache of emptiness, he began to understand something of what people felt. Memories of the childish thrill and excitement of accompanying his father in the bush turned into an inner dread, fed by the troubled thought:
If I had to live always in this place without food, I would also hunt.

It was not the slow grip of hunger alone, however, that changed Esi….

From time to time news would somehow filter through to Mapoteng about an explosion, a protest, people shot by police. Most of this had seemed very far away to Esi, used to his small world around the camp. However, while others talked, he listened. There were men who lived apart from their families for most of the year, working deep down in the mines near the city. In hoarse voices (as if the dust had stuck in their
throats) they spoke of meetings broken up by police with dogs, gas that burned your eyes—and bullets. Some people had been moved from places where there had been boycotts and mass arrests, and where those who disappeared were sometimes rumored to have escaped over the border to join the “MKs.” Gradually he gathered that these MKs were people like themselves. But they had resisted the trap of being pushed around and now lived outside the white man’s law, prepared to fight to be free of it—even die, to overthrow it. It was plainly a dangerous matter, this fighting for freedom.

Esi’s familiar world was overturned finally by the events on one particular day. Without any warning, a line of army trucks had come roaring, hurtling down, dust flying, through the rows of mud and iron huts. Soldiers smashed open doors, wheeling their guns and forcing people outside. The soldier who had barged into his aunty’s house had deftly swept her few treasured pieces of crockery off the shelf with his rifle.

Horrified, shocked, they had been herded like cattle to be inspected by the white army chief. But most of the soldiers were black, like themselves. Why were they doing this?

“Don’t think you can hide anything from us! If you want to help terrorists you know what you can expect!” the white officer had grimly sneered, his words translated by the black soldier at his side.

As Esi had watched these soldiers shoving and prodding their young suspects with loaded guns, he had felt so angry—and so helpless. They were all so helpless. If only
he
had a gun….

Shortly afterward Esi had become very ill with a fever. Lack of food had made him weak. When his father got word of this, that was the end of schooling for Esi. Papa brought him home, saying there was no point in going to school if it meant starving first. Instead he would begin seriously teaching his son his own work on the game farm.

Esi remembered trying to talk to his father about what was troubling him. But Papa had stopped him short, speaking forcefully. He knew all about the raid on Mapoteng. Police had also visited the farm to tell them about the “terrorists” and how they must report anything unusual. Papa had promised to do so. Esi had to understand that he did his job as “boss-boy” well so that Mackay would depend on him. In return the family got
land, water, food. Indeed they were lucky. Couldn’t Esi see how foolish it was to question this? They might end up like the people of Mapoteng, with nothing, and Esi would have to join the queue for work on the mines.

Papa’s voice softened.

“Listen, Esi…. This land was taken from our parents with guns. Those with guns can do what they please. You had better be very careful before you say no to a man with a gun. Can you stop a bullet with bare hands?”

Esi had shaken his head and kept quiet, his stomach knotted. He couldn’t talk to his father, and he had begun to dread the day when the poachers would be people he knew. How could he look them in the eye?

Now, some months later, Mackay was on one of his visits. Esi was performing his daily chore of collecting and chopping firewood, when Hendriks drove up in his truck. He seemed agitated, calling loudly to Esi:

“Waar’s die baas?”

Almost before Esi put down the ax, Mackay appeared from his hut. Hendriks lowered his voice
as he spoke, but Esi could still make out some words. Hendriks was saying something about “terrorists” and an “attack on a police station” and “no white man on the farm.” Then the two men went inside the hut for a drink.

When they came out again, Hendriks looked more relaxed, and it seemed they had agreed on something. As they shook hands Hendriks said, “Don’t worry. He’ll have your boss-boy, and I’ll give him a hand if he needs it. He’ll soon get the hang of the place.”

“Well he just hasn’t settled to anything since the army. Sometimes you wonder what happens to our boys in there. Those ‘terrs’ keep them tense, you know….” Mackay paused. “Perhaps this is what he needs…sort himself out. I’ll get him up here as soon as I can. Thanks for the warning!”

Mackay stood shading his eyes against the sun, watching Hendriks’s truck maneuver through the narrow camp gate and bump its way up along the dirt road. When the rumbling had faded away into the bush, Mackay called over to Esi.

“That’s enough wood for now, Esi…I won’t need it tonight. Go and call you father. Tell him I’m leaving very soon.”

Papa didn’t say anything until that night when they were eating by the fire and Esi’s mother raised the question.

“Why did he go like that?”

She had a way of saying “he” that indicated that she was talking about Mackay.

“He’s bringing someone….”

Papa paused and gave a wry, hoarse laugh.

“They want a white in charge…to stay. I think it’s the one who is going to marry his daughter.”

Everyone was silent until Esi’s mother clicked.

“That one’s mouth is too big.”

Esi knew just what his mother meant. When the daughter’s boyfriend had visited the farm once before, they were all relieved when he had left, even Papa who never showed his feelings much. At that time the young white man was doing his service in the army and had been on leave. But by now he must have finished his army service.

Esi was wondering whether to intervene in the conversation to report what Hendriks had said about “terrorists,” when Papa’s cousin spoke. He had cycled over to Mapoteng during the day. Outside the shop he had heard people discussing
news of a gun battle between three armed men and police at a place only a hundred kilometers south of Mapoteng. Apparently one man had been killed but two had gotten away. Some youngsters outside the shop had broken into song about MKs. Others, however, were worried there might be another house-to-house search in Mapoteng.

Early the following afternoon, there was the familiar sound of Mackay’s Land Rover entering the camp. Esi saw immediately that it was being driven by the young man Williams—and he was alone. When he jumped down from the driver’s seat, he was carrying Mackay’s gun. Although he could only be a few years older than Esi, there was something in his manner that reminded Esi of the sneering officer in the Mapoteng raid. His bush-green eyes narrowed on their target.

“What’re you staring at? You’ve seen me before, haven’t you? Go get your boss-boy for me. Be quick about it,
jong!
”

Esi could feel his face going hot, but he turned rapidly and sprinted off. Even Mackay never spoke to him like that, always calling him by his name.

Esi accompanied his father as he walked forward
to greet the white man. He wanted to see how Papa would react.

“You remember me?…Boss Williams. Boss Mackay has asked me to come and look after his place, so we better get on, you and me. I don’t want any trouble from the other boys either, OK?” He turned to Esi.