A Dry White Season Read online

  “I wish I’d taken my own children away from here when they were small,” said Ben passionately. “They would have had a different sort of life then.”

  “Why?” asked Stanley. “This is your place, isn’t it? It’s your city. You made it.”

  Ben shook his head. For a long time he sat staring at his pipe-smoke in silence. “No, it’s not my place. Where I grew up”-he smiled briefly –” you know, I was fourteen years old before I put shoes on my feet. Except for church. You should have seen my soles, thick and hard from walking in the veld watching the sheep.”

  “I looked after the cattle when I was small.” Stanley grinned, revealing his strong white teeth. “We used to have great fights with kieries down at the water.”

  “We fought with clay-sticks.”

  “And made clay oxen. And roasted tortoises.”

  “And robbed birds’ nests and caught snakes.”

  They both burst out laughing, without really knowing why. Something had changed, in a manner inconceivable only a few minutes earlier.

  “Well, at least we both managed to survive in the city,” Stanley said at last.

  “You probably succeeded better than I did.”

  “You kidding?”

  “I mean it,” said Ben. “You think I found it easy to adapt?”

  Stanley’s sardonic grin stopped him. Concealing the sudden pang of embarrassment Ben said: “Would you like some coffee?”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “No, don’t bother. You stay here.” (Thinking: Susan …) “I won’t be long.” Without waiting he went out. The grass was soft and springy under his feet; it had been cut that afternoon and the green smell lay heavily on the night breeze. To his relief he heard Susan in the bathroom, safely out of the way.

  When the kettle started boiling he had a moment of uncertainty. Should he offer Stanley one of the new cups Susan used for guests, or an old one? It was the first time in his life he had to entertain a black visitor. Annoyed by his own indecision he opened and shut the cupboard doors aimlessly. In the end, picking two old, unmatched cups and saucers no longer in use, he measured out the teaspoons of instant coffee and poured boiling water into the cups. He put milk and sugar on the tray and, almost guiltily, hurried out of the kitchen.

  Stanley was standing in front of a bookshelf, his back turned to the door.

  “So you’re a history man?”

  “In a way, yes.” He put the tray on a corner of the desk. “Help yourself.”

  “Ta.” Then, laughing, with what seemed to be deliberate provocation: “And what has all your history taught you?”

  Ben shrugged.

  “Fuck-all,” Stanley replied on his behalf, returning to his chair. “You want to know why? Because you lanies keep thinking history is made right here where you are and noplace else. Why don’t you come with me one day, I’ll show you what history really looks like. Bare-arsed history, stinking with life. Over at my place, in Sofasonke City.”

  “I want to, Stanley,” Ben said gravely. “I must see Gordon before he’s buried.”

  “No ways.”

  “Don’t back out now. You’ve just said I should go. And I’ve got to see Gordon.”

  “He won’t be a pretty sight. What with the post mortem and everything.”

  “Please, Stanley!”

  The big man stared at him intently for a moment, then leaned over to take one of the cups, adding four teaspoons of sugar. “Thanks,” he said evasively, beginning to stir his coffee. Adding in a mocking voice: “You know, your wife didn’t even want to open the door for me.”

  “Well, it was very late. She’s never seen you before. You must realise—”

  “Don’t apologise, man.” Stanley laughed, spilling some of his coffee into the saucer. “You think my wife would have opened this time of the night?” He made a slurping sound as he tested the heat of his cup on his lips. “Except for the gattes, of course. The cops.”

  “Surely you’re not bothered by the police?”

  “Why not?” He laughed again. “Never a dull moment, take it from me. I know how to handle them. But that doesn’t mean they leave me in peace. All hours of the night, man. Sometimes for the pure hell of it. I’m not complaining, mind you. Actually” –a broad smile – “actually, every time I see them, I feel a great relief in my guts. Real gratitude, man. I mean, hell: it’s only because they’re so considerate that the lot of us, me, my wife, my kids, aren’t in jail.” He was silent for sometime, gazing through the open door as if he saw something amusing outside in the dark. At last he looked back at Ben. “Years ago, when I was still a youngster, it was touch and go. You know what it’s like when you got a widow for a mother, your father is dead, your sister lines with the rawurawu, the gangsters, and your brother – “ He took a big gulp. “That bra of mine was a real tsotsi, man. He was my hero, I tell you. I wanted to do everything Shorty and his gang did. But then they caught him. Zap, one time.”

  “What for?”

  “You name it. The works, left, right and centre. Robbery. Assault. Rape. Even murder. He was a roerie guluva, I tell you, lanie.”

  Ben avoided his eyes and stared into the night; but what he saw there, he felt, was different from what Stanley had imagined.

  “And then?” he asked.

  “Got the rope, what else?”

  “You mean—?”

  “Ja. Round his neck.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Stanley guffawed. “What the hell for?” He removed the dark glasses from his forehead to wipe the tears of laughter from his eyes. “What’s it to you?”

  Ben leaned over to replace his cup on the tray.

  “I went to see him, you know,” Stanley resumed, unexpectedly. “A week before he got the rope. Just to say good-bye and happy landings and so on. We had a good chat. Funny thing, man. You see, Shorty never was a talkative sort. But that day it was a proper spring-cleaning. More than twenty years ago, but I still remember it. Snot and tears. About life in jail. And being scared of dying. That tough bra of mine who’d never feared hell or high water. Told me about the way the condemns would sing before they were hanged. Non-stop all through the last week, day and night. Even on the very last morning as they went out to the gallows. Shitting in their pants. But singing.” Stanley suddenly appeared embarrassed by his own frankness. “Ag, fuck it,” he said. “Let bygones be bygones, man. Anyway, I went home to my mother to tell her about my talk with Shorty. She was standing there in the mbawula, in the goddam little shack we were living in those days, the whole place filled with smoke, and she coughing as she stood there making porridge. I can still see it as I sit here. The paraffin box covered with newsprint, and the primus, and the bucket standing on the floor, and a photo of our kraal’s chief on the wall. And the boxes and suitcases under the bed, high up on its bricks. She said: ‘Is it all right with Shorty?’ And I said: ‘He’s all right, Ma. He’s just fine.’ How could I tell her he was condemned for the next week?”

  After that they didn’t speak for several minutes.

  “Some more coffee?” Ben finally asked.

  “No, thanks. I got to go.” Stanley got up.

  “Will you let me know when Gordon’s body is released?”

  “If you want to.”

  “And then you’ll take me to Soweto?”

  “I told you it’s no use, man. There were riots all over the place, you forgot? Don’t look for trouble. You’re out of it, so why don’t you stay out?”

  “Don’t you understand I’ve got to go?”

  “I warned you, lanie”

  “I’ll be all right. With you.”

  For a long time Stanley stared fiercely into his eyes. Then, brusquely, he said: “All right then.”

  That had been two nights ago. And now they were on their way. Soon after they’d passed the old Crown Mines, near the power station, Stanley turned off the main road and started picking his way through a maze of dusty tracks running through a wasteland of eroded mine-dump
s. (“Keep your eyes open for the vans. They’re patrolling all the time.”)

  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 ki
nd 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.”