Small Circle of Beings (17 page)

I let go. And he lets go of me. Finger by finger, joint by joint, we release one another till we are standing, separate and safe, apart. I rub my arm where he hurt it.

‘Sorry,’ he mutters.

‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

After that we make our way to shore. I wade with heavy steps, as if through sand. By the time I reach the edge and am standing, dripping, beside my clothes, the moon has begun to emerge from
shadow and a little light is falling. The dogs stop howling. I don’t look up as I dress. I put my clothes on just so, over my wet body. They stick to me like mud.

I wait for him to finish dressing. As he ties his shoelaces I say, not even looking at him, ‘What d’you think will happen?’

‘What d’you mean?’ he says.

‘To us,’ I say. ‘D’you think in ten years from now we’re even going to know each other?’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he says.

He sounds irritated as he says this, as if I say a lot of things he doesn’t understand. Maybe I do. I turn away and start to walk back to the bikes.

‘Hey,’ he calls. ‘What you … don’tcha want another smoke or somethin’ before we go?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘Not me.’

I wait for him at the tree where the bikes are leaning. He takes his time. I watch him scoop water over the coals. They make a hissing noise, like an engine beneath the ground. Then he walks up
towards me along the bank, hands in his pockets. The sight of him this way, sulking and slow, rings in me long after we’ve mounted our bikes and started back up the path.

By the time we rejoin the dust road a little way on, the soreness in me is smaller than it was. One of the dogs runs into his way and he swears. At this I even manage to laugh. I look off and up
to the left, at the moon which is becoming rounder by the minute. Its light comes down in soft white flakes, settling on us coldly as we ride.

I stood at the roadside for perhaps half an hour before she stopped for me. I looked around. Countless cars went past. There were pebbles next to my boots. Yellow grasslands
shimmered away on either side. I turned my head once and spat – a little star of gob that began to sizzle gently on the tar.

Then she pulled up. She drove a white Volkswagen beetle. There was a rubber skeleton dangling from the mirror.

‘Where to?’ she said.

‘Where are you going?’ I opened the door before she could answer. I didn’t actually know where I was, what road precisely I had stood beside for a forty-eighth part of a day.
Harrismith was the last town I’d seen. I didn’t know in what direction it now lay. I slid in beside her and closed the door. The window was open, so I rested my arm along it. I stared
straight in front of me.

‘Hey,’ she said. Her voice was furry, the words lifted from her lips like soap-bubbles. I must confess I liked it immediately. ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘You must be going
somewhere
.’

‘Aren’t we all?’ I said. Ever the cynic. I suspect she smiled then, I can’t say for sure; I wasn’t looking at her. But it was then that she put the car in gear and
swung out onto the road. As we gathered speed, warm corrugations of air pushed against my face. On either side of us the landscape spread like a silent yellow foam. I put on my seat-belt.

Much later she confided that she’d been afraid of me. A little, anyway. My browns were filthy, stiff with dew and sap and other excretions that I’d collected nightly in roadside
hollows. It seemed that I was doomed to inhabit the edges of roads until I reached the end of mine. I stank. My hair was unbrushed. Bristles covered my chin. The skin of my hands had been broken by
thorns. But it didn’t occur to me that I may have been frightening to look at. Perhaps it was just that I didn’t care much for the feelings of others after a thousand kilometres of
desert and veld.

‘I thought soldiers were supposed to be neat,’ she said after we’d driven for five minutes in silence. Then: ‘Aren’t they?’ when it became clear I
wasn’t going to agree.

‘I’m not a soldier,’ I said shortly and looked out of the window.

‘No?’ She glanced at my bedraggled uniform and discoloured boots. Then she leaned forward and pressed a tape into the deck below the dashboard. Beethoven. The Moonlight Sonata. Even
in the interior of the Volkswagen those moth-soft notes were perfect enough to be painful. I smiled, not quite at her.

‘You like?’

I nodded and looked in front of me again. In the swift sideways turn of my head I’d caught a peripheral glimpse of white-blonde hair cut raggedly short.

‘What’s your name?’ she said.

‘Guy.’

‘Don’t you look people in the face, Guy?’

‘No.’

Before us the road ran grey. Hillocks heaved up from the plain here, like mounds covering the mass graves of men killed in fighting.

‘Don’t you want to know
my
name, Guy?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘You’re weird, aren’t you?’

So I looked her in the face. I think it was the first face I’d met with my eyes in more than a month. She smiled at me. Her teeth were uneven. She wore no makeup and the angles of her
cheeks and jaw trapped small smears of shadow in her skin. I smiled thinly back at her.

‘Where are you going?’ The second time I’d asked.

‘I’m going to the mountains,’ she said. ‘To the Drakensberg for a day or two.’

It was agreed between us, though not with words, that I would accompany her. I turned away and looked out of my window again.

As a child I had lived among green hills and like a hummingbird had craved the sweat of flowers. At night I walked through plantations where leaves fell quiet as scent across
the white moon. Now I carried behind my forehead the discord of barbed wire, of boot-battered parade grounds, of human eyes like those of dogs flickering redly from the dark. Flight had promised to
accelerate my descent towards the thrilling detonation of my own extinction. Having begun, one cannot stop. Foot before foot, wrenching the prison of the tattered soul endlessly forward, one
staggers across deserts to get away.

If I had been asked, I would have said that I was raised in Tzaneen and that I had been a boarder at Pretoria Boys’ High School. I was an anonymous boy, one among many. I would have
admitted that my parents were divorced and, if pressed, that my mother had remarried. But that would have been the limit of any confession on my part. To say any more would be against the values
taught me by my father, who is a good man. He allows me to call him by his first name. He is Geoff. Geoff fought in the Second World War and carries a distinctive scar on his back.

Before he left there were many pleasurable evenings when Geoff would play his records. We would sit on the outside stoep and listen. The sweetest voice I’d ever heard came to me through
the open windows and through some more secret opening in the four decades that prised us apart. Geoff told me her name was Vera Lynn. Vera sang to us on those evenings such delicious vows as
‘I know we’ll meet again some sunny day’. I trusted Vera. I believed her. ‘There’ll be peace and laughter,’ she sang, ‘forever after, tomorrow, when we are
free.’

My stepfather is not like Geoff at all. I know from the start that stepfathers are by tradition formidable and cruel and so I try to accommodate this man by saying it is difficult for him and I
must be patient. In reality he is formidable and cruel. He is short and squat with reddish hair. His lips are like pink slugs. Also, I can’t understand him. He speaks Afrikaans and he speaks
it very quickly. His arms are long and his hands are hard. He strikes me often with his fist against my head.

On a certain day, for reasons too complex for me to comprehend, he locks my mother in her room. He stands outside the door and listens to her cries. By now I have run and am sitting on my bed,
shaking. I can feel violence colouring the air. I have seen it growing like this before. My stepfather tolerates nothing and lashes out with his hard fists on their long arms. He has knocked down
our black gardener when he becomes impertinent. I have heard him break my mother’s nose and blacken her eyes. And, as I have said, he strikes me often with his fist against my head. I am
terribly afraid of him.

‘If you don’t let me out,’ my mother says, ‘I’ll break the window.’

He does not reply. But I sense him standing darkly at her door, folding up his thick red fingers into a fist.

‘One, two, three,’ my mother cries.

I hear glass break. Hanging out of my window, I see her lunging with a wooden walking stick. The noise is jagged and harsh. It goes on until she has knocked every last fragment from the frame.
The shards lie jumbled and sharp among the brilliant blooms that blaze like fire outside their room.

Now my stepfather twists the little stub of metal in the lock and swings open the door. ‘Take your son and get out,’ he says.

This is a violence of a different kind. Weeping, my mother stumbles with me to the car. I sit in the back seat, unable to comprehend why she is not as joyful as I am to be leaving. She
doesn’t start the engine. ‘Wait here,’ she says and goes back inside. I am afraid for her, but I do as I am told. I wait. I wait. After an hour has passed I get out and go inside,
expecting death. The house is quiet. I tiptoe to my mother’s room. Through the crack in the door I see them both, side by side on the bed. Their hands are joined. Cold winds blow in through
the broken window, passing over and between them as they lie sleeping.

My first impression of those mountains was not overwhelming. Dusk was already falling as we approached along abominable dust roads, following obscure signposts on either side.
I’d never been to the Drakensberg before, though I’d heard of them. They were a part of our history. The Boers, I knew, had crossed them on their trek into the interior. I looked
forward to seeing them, I was ready to be impressed. But there was nothing to see. After a while I gave up straining my eyes.

Far more arresting on either side was the presence of a million tiny hovels, built from tin and mud and broken stones. There did truly seem to be millions of them, going on and on as far as the
eye could see. I could make out patterns on the walls. The torn roofs and windows suggested that this ugly city was in fact a ruin. I was prepared to accept, with relief, that people didn’t
live here. But there were fires, enormous, ghostlike and soundless, inside these buildings. The red light from the flames sketched on the twilight the outlines of doorways and openings. ‘My
God,’ I said. ‘Who lives here?’

As I spoke, two figures came into the yellow beam of the headlamps. She braked and the car slid across the thick dust surface of the road. The instant we came to a halt the figures were at
either window, craning in, holding objects of dried clay in their dust-reddened hands. I saw only figures reaching for me, savage motion blurred by dark. I was afraid. I cried:

‘What is it? What do they want?’

Their jabbering was shrill. I couldn’t make it out.

‘They’re selling oxen,’ she said. ‘Clay oxen.’

Her voice calmed me. It made me feel foolish. There was a moment, then, in which I saw with complete detachment the little ox lying on its side on the palm stretched out to me. It was indeed
made and baked from clay. It had horns. It had eyes scratched out with the end of a twig. The clay was reddish-brown and had in it the marks of thumbs that had tamped it into shape.

‘How much?’ I said.

‘One cent, one cent,’ screamed the voice in my left ear.

I looked from the ox to the hand that held it. I moved my eyes from the hand up the arm to the face at the window. We stared at each other.

‘Children,’ I observed stupidly. There didn’t seem to be anything else to say. They were indeed children. But they were children dressed in the rags of an unutterable poverty.
Shoeless and shivering, they stood like me at forsaken roadsides, crying for a single cent to weigh down their pockets or hands with something – anything – of substance.

‘My God,’ I said again. ‘Buy one. Buy an ox.’

‘No,’ she said.

‘A cent!’ I shouted. ‘Look at them, they’re starving! What’s a cent to you?’

‘No,’ she repeated, staring out at the tiny black faces peering with furious hope into the car.

With knotted fingers I pulled a five rand note from my pocket and pushed it out the window. It was all the money I had. In a violent scrambling the two children leaped at it and at each other.
They fell to the ground at the edge of sight, tearing at and beating one another for possession of the grubby rectangle of paper. It was only as she pulled away that I realised I did not have even
a clay ox to show for my impulsive charity. We bumped along the road now at reckless speed, jarring from side to side.

‘Don’t you care?’ I said.

She said to me: ‘Every cent you give them takes them further from desperation. They must be desperate,’ she said, ‘before the revolution will begin.’

We drove on for a little way in silence before she said, more softly than before, ‘Five rand. You bastard.’

I’m not in search of a better world. How could I be when I run from things? I’m not crazy with dreams of progress and brotherhood and peace. People speak a great deal these days of
The Struggle. What Struggle is this? I want no part in struggle. I understand only simple ideas. The most terrible thing about the Nazi era was that it made no exceptions. Not even for children. We
must
allow children to believe in things like happiness. If not in happiness, then in the
possibility
of happiness. I can put it no bettter than this (I don’t want to grow old).
Desperation should be reserved for old age. And what’s five rand to me anyway?

She’d been there before, she knew the road. The campsite was a level field of lawn, hemmed in with tall fragrant trees. A short slope went down to a stream at the bottom edge of the grass.
On all other sides one felt a brooding immensity indistinguishable from the darkness of the night. It was out of season and no other campers were there, but through the leaning trunks of trees one
glimpsed still the trembling of the fires we had passed on the road. It was a clear night.