I look to check that everyone is working the way I’ve told them to. I watch for any movement in the area around the blockage. I’m even more sure now that the shooting must have caused this fall. Maybe a bullet hit a loose piece of rock and started the slide.
I think of Aires again, wondering what it must have been like for him crouched in his crack with the sound of gunfire so close.
The shooting, I think, with a jump of fright. It has stopped. The men could come back any time now.
“Leave it, there’s no more time,” I tell the others. “The men will be back. We must be gone from this place when they come. We need to be back where Juvenal told us to wait.”
“No, please, Regile!” Taiba is anxious and eager. “Look! See, here is space. I get in.”
And he’s gone, wriggling through a gap just above knee-level. It must be bigger than it looks. Even so, he scrapes himself, forcing his way through. What he’s doing is stupid and dangerous. I hold my breath, thinking he’ll start another fall.
Then he is gone into blackness.
“Stop work. We must go,” I say to the others.
But there’s something wrong with me. I can’t make myself move. I’m crouched here waiting to see what happens, if Taiba comes out with his friend.
A fierce new kind of anger rises up inside me. Damn that boy to hell. It’s as if he has infected me with his hope.
No! I will not share in his stupidity. Aires is dead, and if we don’t move, the men will come and catch us. Faceman will come.
Still I stay crouched, watching and listening. The other boys are silent. All are bigger than Taiba, so it’s useless for anyone else to try going through the gap to see what is happening.
Now I hear a murmur of voices from where Taiba disappeared. Two different voices. I feel myself growing bigger somehow, but it’s a light feeling, as if someone is pumping air into me, like I’m a balloon. How crazy is that?
Now there’s a thin scream, and silence. Next, Taiba’s voice saying something quick and urgent. Finally, a scuffling sound, clumsy and hurried. I stop breathing again. If they start another fall –
Then Taiba backs out of the space in the rubble, clambering blind, dragging something – someone. A few moments later we’re looking at what has become of Aires. A thin shadow-boy, shielding his eyes from our lamps. There’s a bleeding gash on his head, and both legs are bleeding too. So are a lot of other places, but those may come from being dragged through and over the mound of fallen rock and dirt.
“Now go!” I urge everyone, and my voice is higher than it should be because I’m afraid Taiba will have disturbed things with his rough clambering and dragging. “We need to get away.”
“Aires, he cannot walk,” Taiba pants and I see that he is also bleeding. “A big rock hit his legs.”
“It’s your problem,” I tell him. “Come on, move! Hambani! Back!”
The other boys obey, but I see that Taiba is getting ready to drag Aires with him.
“You make trouble for us all,” I snap at him. “You and your friend.”
I mean it, so I don’t know why I stoop and lift Aires. He’s so light it’s easy to throw him over my shoulder, the same as I did with Taiba after Faceman beat him.
“Come on!”
“Thank you, Regile.” Taiba is breathless as we rush after the others.
I think about what’s behind us. The fallen rocks. The men won’t notice anything – the passage we made. They won’t have inspected the fall yet. Not with the security guys in the mine, ready to start shooting again.
That’s what I have to trust in. Usually I’d be expecting the worst. It’s safer that way. You can’t be disappointed.
Back in the stifling place where Juvenal told us to wait, Taiba begs water for Aires from anyone who’s got.
The mine is silent now. No one comes to us. We wait, not working, not resting, just waiting.
I don’t know if it would be safe for us to start working again. I only know that if the men decide the rockfall wasn’t too serious there will be trouble for us, for me especially, if they come and find us not working.
But so soon after the fall, there’s too much risk, I decide. The earth’s interior never sleeps, but when it’s still settling, that’s when it’s angry enough to finish off anyone who survived its fury the first time.
Taiba is tending to Aires, sometimes speaking quietly in their language. Aires doesn’t say anything. Once he gives a shrill scream. Mostly he just catches his breath in pain. I think he slides into unconsciousness a time or two.
The rest of us are silent. We wait. I can’t tell how much time we’ve been waiting. A day?
I start worrying that I was wrong, believing the men would be on their way back as soon as the shooting stopped. They could all have been killed or wounded in the shoot-out. Or maybe the security people have taken them all up for the
police to arrest, or else to negotiate bribes.
I tell the other zama zamas to save their lamps, and to go easy on the water.
“Already water finish,” Taiba tells me. “Why you say so like that, Regile? When the men will come?”
“I don’t know.” I decide to deal him a dose of reality. “They could all be dead or arrested. Could be there’ve been other rockfalls and we’re trapped here.”
He thinks about this for a few seconds. Then he asks, “How long we wait?”
“I don’t know.” This time I raise my voice to say those three words, because it’s my responsibility to decide, although I don’t want it to be. “When I decide. Stop asking me questions.”
“Aires, his one leg, it is bad,” Taiba says. “He need doctor. Maybe there is big hospital? That Barberton town we see when we come to Papa Mavuso?”
“You’re dreaming. Papa doesn’t let his recruits see any sort of doctor. not traditional healers, not hospital doctors. If Papa can’t fix you himself, you just don’t get better. And he only tries to fix you if he thinks it will be worth it to him – if you’re not so sick or hurt that you won’t be able to work again.”
“I talk to him.”
I give it up. This stupid boy still imagines everything will work out fine.
“Stop talking,” I say. “Too much talk makes you thirsty.”
Because now that I know there’s no water left, I’m starting to feel even thirstier than usual in this underground heat that’s not like any heat I’ve known up on the surface.
“You will decide right, Regile.” Taiba sounds as if he really believes it.
But what if I don’t? What if I get it wrong? Wrong for them, wrong for me? Not that I care about any of them, but if I lose Papa Mavuso’s recruits down here, then it’s pointless for me to go up again.
So we wait in the black. I listen to the others breathing. Twice Taiba’s lamp goes on so he can check on Aires.
I can feel I’m getting near to deciding that some of us must go and see what has happened. I want to and don’t want to. I try not to think about how it will be to find there’s no way out. I also try not to think about getting caught by Faceman. He’ll say we should have obeyed Juvenal’s order.
My head aches from thirst and thinking.
I wish I could sleep like some of the other zama zamas. Then I wouldn’t have to think. But even if I could, I must stay awake with my mind worrying away at everything that’s part of this situation, all the dangers from mine and men, thirst, hunger, the possibility that we’re trapped.
I lie listening to the others, some breathing heavily in their sleep, one snoring, the wakeful ones sighing loudly and moving about restlessly, Taiba occasionally murmuring to Aires.
I start imagining things in the dark, voices and other sounds, and sparks of light, bright like how the gold we dig out will look after it has gone from our sight and our hands. After it has gone for processing and sale to the buyers and been worked into whatever it’s mostly used for, jewellery maybe, but I don’t know for sure because we never get told.
Sometimes I pictur
e something beautiful made from gold that looked like dirty lumps of rock when I touched it, now shining around the neck or on the finger of a lovely sweet-smelling girl with a softly smiling mouth.
“Some person come.” Taiba’s voice, lifting full of excitement and hope.
And now I hear a real sound I never let myself wish for down here, even though it’s the sweetest sound ever to enter my ears every time I hear it.
It’s the soft clack and rattle of a bag full of cheap plastic sunglasses.
As I switch on my lamp, I see not Juvenal but Mahlori duck down at the entrance to our low recess.
“Your Mavuso master sent these. It’s time for you to go up. The new zama zamas are waiting to come down. Come, be quick.”
He’s talking about our replacements, recruits I never see except in passing at the beginning or end of our stints underground.
“What these?” Taiba asks as I hand out the sunglasses.
There are exactly the right number of pairs. That means no one has reported Aires missing during the time Taiba was hiding him.
“Your eyes,” I say. “We’re going up, and even late in the day, early in the morning, you need them for the light. Sometimes even if it’s night when we go up.”
He is silent for several seconds, and then he says something to Aires. I can hear the lilt in his voice. The fool is happy. What can he be imagining?
I’m scrabbling around for bits of clothing and tin and plastic containers I’ve brought with me into this hole. The rest I may or may not find on our way out through other places we’ve worked or rested.
Only what’s left of the money I’ve been paid stays on my body when we work, in a bag I wear on a cord. The rest of the money due to me will have been given to Papa Mavuso to hold for me, though the men get everything they’ve earned while they’re down here.
These younger boys get nothing yet.
Mahlori is swearing at us for being too slow. I have to carry Aires again.
“This mine has gone bad,” Mahlori tells me as we make our way into wider, higher tunnels. “That shooting yesterday? You heard? Four dead. The security scum took the bodies up and handed them over to the police. Also the men they took alive. Mostly foreign fools. Faceman won’t pay bribes to get them back. Plenty more to take their place, he says. He has gone up to report to the syndicate.”
No Faceman. That sounds almost as good as the rattle of sunglasses.
The lift cage is the last danger we have to face down here. It hasn’t been officially inspected or repaired since the owning company closed the mine, long before the first illegal zama zamas came and got it working again.
Taiba is singing under his breath. He must believe his nightmare is ending.
Chapter 5
The light hurts. Even with the sunglasses. I hear Taiba Nhaca gasp, see his hands fly upward to give his eyes the extra protection of their cover.
The veld all around looks too bright, catching the light from the sky that we can’t look at yet. There are no security men around. They must think they’ve cleared out the mine for now. There’s a woman arguing with some of the syndicate’s surface men, close to where we’ve come out. She is a Swazi and she is crying.
“I must see the place where my son died,” she pleads. “Where they shot him, the security. I did not even know he was in South Africa, gone for a zama zama. He told me something different. I knew nothing until the Swazi police came to me with the message from this side to say I must come and identify an illegal . . . The police here said I must not come to the mine. It’s dangerous, they said. But someone told me the way.”
“Nothing to see here.” The men threaten her with their sticks and sjamboks. “Go! Hamba!”
“Please, nkhosi? I need to see –”
“You’re lucky there was a body for you to see,” one of them tells her, giving her a push. “Get out of here.”
Then Papa Mavuso’s own men are among us zama zamas, drowning out her crying, shouting at us to get on to the back of the truck and collecting the recruits’ lamps to give to the new team. I’m allowed to keep mine. Papa gave it to me when he put me in charge. These men, too, have sjamboks. One of them pulls Aires away from me and throws him into the truck. He screams.
Taiba jumps in after him. I relax because I know he won’t be trying to escape, getting me into trouble. Not now. Not without Aires, and Aires is fit for nothing.
I see Papa talking to Mahlori, and the replacement zama zamas are being herded together by Takunda and some others.
The back of the truck is so crowded we all have to stand. Taiba needs to pull Aires up and hold him like that, wedged between himself and the other boys around him. Their tightly packed bodies keep him upright. Otherwise he would be crushed or smothered.
I think from the feel of the sun on my head and shoulders and the way it lies on the long grass that it is late afternoon, but I can’t look anywhere near the sun. I asked Mahlori the date on our way up. He says it’s the end of September; he doesn’t know the exact date.
Three months then we’ve been inside the earth.
The beginning of summer, but its heat will be nothing like the mine’s heat.
Underground you get used to each other’s stink, but somehow up here in the air and daylight it hits you again. It’s mixed with the smell of diesel from the truck’s exhaust. The driver keeps the engine running, revving every time it looks like Papa might be finished with handing over the other recruits to Mahlori.
That woman crying is not what I needed to see coming out of the mine. Now I can’t stop thinking about how some day it could be me, shot or my body broken in an accident, and my mother getting the message and finding out that I lied to her.
I wonder, if the man was an illegal, will the police let his mother take his body home with her? They’d have thrown him back over the border fast enough if they’d caught him alive.
That’s what I should be thinking about, not that woman. Now that I’m up, I need to get my head geared to new dangers, like drawing the attention of people who might want to know too much about me. The authorities. I mustn’t get deported.
“Papa? Papa?”
I hear Taiba’s voice calling and see that Papa Mavuso is coming towards the truck. He has a strange, uneven way of walking, hurrying along with his shoulders hunched round as if he’s trying to hide something in front of him. His patchy beard has grey in it, so I suppose he is quite old, even though his daughter is so young. Perhaps she was his youngest and he kept her at home to look after him.
“What are you troubling him for?” I shout at Taiba in my roughest voice so Papa knows I’m doing the job he gave me.
“Aires – he must help him,” Taiba insists. “Take him to doctor –”
“Don’t be stupid. I told you, he’ll fix him himself. But you must wait! What do you expect him to do out here?”
“Maybe Aires go in front?”
Taiba clearly thinks it’s a real possibility. His face is shining, but not only with the tears of light-agony that have run from under his sunglasses. It’s shining with something else that comes from inside him – belief or something like that.
I laugh. Then I make myself stop. I realise that in a time I can’t measure, the only occasions I’ve laughed have been at Taiba. It hasn’t been good laughter, though. I know that.
It gives me a bad feeling about myself. I feel wrong.
That makes me angry with Taiba, but I don’t say anything. I’m not sure if Papa Mavuso has heard what we were saying. He hasn’t even glanced at us, and now he’s climbing into the truck’s cab.
The road quickly becomes a rough dirt track. My head feels light, full of white mist, and every bump jars my body. I don’t think Aires will be alive at the end of this ride.
This has been the pattern – going to the mine, coming away from it – ever since I was first sent underground. We have to keep away from town and main roads. Overloaded like this, we’d be pulled over.
We’re climbing upward, he
ading for Papa’s place. Barberton lies below, looking as if it’s resting in the bottom of a basin formed by the mountains surrounding it.
The Barberton mountainlands, I’ve learned that they call this area. The mountains cast shadows down over themselves and hide old mine entrances, Papa’s house and I don’t know what else – anything or anyone needing to be hidden, I suppose.
It’s always a surprise to come to the house because it’s concealed until the last minute, when the truck swings out past rocks jutting out from the mountainside like a mighty
nose.
Then it swings in again, and there’s the house. I don’t know how much the syndicate pays Papa for providing boys to do the most dangerous, difficult work in the earth’s tightest, most unstable holes and deepest levels. The talk is that he has a fat bank account stuffed with money from the syndicate. His house doesn’t look like a rich man’s, though. It’s small and square. Behind it is the long shed where the recruits have to sleep. Leaning against one end of the shed is the corrugated iron room he built long ago for whichever older boy he puts over the others. Me now, and Januario before me, and the replacement team’s Regile or Januario – I don’t know his name.
The driver and I help Papa herd the boys into the shed. When Taiba realises what is happening he turns to Papa, opening his mouth to speak.
“Wait!” I say quickly, giving him a push so he knows I’m talking to him. “Papa will come. I’ll tell him about Aires.”
Why should I want to spare him blows from Papa’s big, bony fists that still hit and hurt, even if he is an old man? Taiba is nothing to me. I should just leave him to the trouble he keeps inviting for himself.
“You eat in one hour,” Papa tells the boys just before he closes the shed door and locks it.
He and the driver and I go into the house. The first room is for cooking and eating. Papa’s daughter is making tea. I think she’s about sixteen. Katekani. I never think of her by her name underground, only when I’m on the surface.
Dreaming of Light Page 4
