Dreaming of Light
Page 9
Now I’m remembering the day she painted her sticks, and thinking about the new paint and sticks I want to get for her.
Then it comes, like a knife. Fear of the sort I haven’t felt since the first time I was sent into the earth. What if I go underground again and don’t come back up? I would miss everything of Katekani, everything of us, the two of us together.
To stop such thoughts I try to concentrate on getting us a lift. While it’s still not properly light, no one even slows down. Later a few drivers turn their heads to look at us when I sign that we want a ride. They don’t stop.
I don’t sign to the big dark-grey car. It’s too clean and shiny. A rich man’s car.
It stops.
The dark-tinted window on our side rolls open silently. The driver leans across, pointing at Taiba but speaking to me.
“That one should be in school. You guys want work? Get in. I can take you to a good place.”
I grab Taiba’s arm to stop him going forward and getting in.
“No! Leave us!” I shout at the driver.
He curses. Another car is coming. The window rolls up and he drives away.
“Why you say no?” Taiba wants to know.
“He wasn’t safe. He could have tried to traffic us.” I can see Taiba doesn’t understand. “I think he wanted to steal us, see? Sell us to the mines, maybe something worse. Especially for you.”
It’s only the second time I’ve thought about how young and small Taiba really is. Most of the time his obstinate wish-believing in happy endings makes him seem like a giant, battering away at me, trampling over my refusals to have anything to do with his crazy dreams.
Yet here we are, nearly at the place where Spike Maphosa lives.
To be stopped now! I don’t think I could bear it. For Taiba. For myself.
“Is good you keep me safe, Regile,” Taiba says, but I pretend not to hear.
The sun gets hotter and cars get less. I have lost count of the days, the way I do underground, but I think it is a weekday. People are at work.
A motorbike rushes past us with a snarl. Two cars, a lorry, a closed truck with a cage full of dirty white chickens on its roof. Except for the bike, I sign to all, but they don’t slow down.
A gap. More trucks and cars. A police car. I dig my hands into my pockets with my heart beating hard and fast, thinking of Papa Mavuso’s police friends, but the man and woman inside don’t even look our way.
At last a small truck slows down. The back is full of rotting, stinking cabbages. Taiba and I squeeze into the front with the driver. I’m in the middle. I try to pull myself in so I don’t have to be touching either of them. The driver looks soft and squashy, a short man.
“Where you want?”
“Kabokweni.”
“Fine. Drop you just before Kabokweni, where I turn off.”
He tells us he’s taking the cabbages to someone who feeds them to cows and pigs. Then he tells us jokes. I can see Taiba doesn’t understand them, but he laughs where I just smile so as not to offend the driver, and I begin to catch his happy, excited feeling.
***
Kabokweni is big, with some smart buildings. Lots of houses have stacks of bricks and piles of sand outside, and we see how much building-on is being done. There are some steep green hills just outside town. We pass another big church, St Mary’s, where I think we might sleep if we don’t find Spike today.
It was too early to buy anything when we left kaNyamazane, so now I get some bananas from a hawker. She hasn’t heard of Spike Maphosa.
I don’t want us to draw the wrong attention, so we can’t go knocking on doors or entering buildings to ask about him. People on the streets are safest – hawkers, beggars, loafers, out-of-works.
No one has heard of Spike Maphosa.
We go to a filling station and ask for the key to the men’s toilet so we can wash our hands and faces.
“For Spike, we must be clean,” Taiba says.
I ask one of the petrol attendants about Spike. He hasn’t heard of him either.
“A man making art,” I try. “He was a mine zama zama.”
“Artist!” The man’s face opens up. “I know him.”
He doesn’t really. He just knows the direction for us to take if we’re looking for the man who makes art about zama zamas and being deep inside the earth.
Now I know the right question to ask. More people point us along. We come to a part of town where I ask the question another time, and the woman I’m asking gives me a fat smile.
“Spike? That way.”
She points the way to a short dirt road with small but nice houses on either side. An old woman sleeps in the shade of a mango tree, and there are chickens pecking around beside the road. No one else seems to be about.
I don’t know why, but Taiba and I just walk to a house near the end of the road. We don’t talk about it or decide anything.
I suppose it’s the gate in the low wall around it. It’s made of some sort of tin and it’s painted. The picture isn’t of anything you can put into words, but I know what it is. It’s the world you see when you first come out from underground.
Painted on the gate, it doesn’t hurt your eyes.
Past the gate there’s a short, clean-swept beaten-earth path with mealies growing on either side. The door of the house is open.
I look at Taiba and see that he’s shaking. I remember what my mother taught me about not just walking into someone’s house. I knock on the gate with my knuckles.
I call out, “Nco-nco-nco!”
A man appears in the doorway. He’s not old, not young, and he has powerful arm muscles. He’s wearing the same red T-shirt he had on for the newspaper photo.
His very bright eyes seem to close the distance between us. They see us both, Taiba and me, and they know everything about us.
“Zama zamas?” he says, and his face opens up into a smile that’s like arms reaching for us.
“Spike.” It’s Taiba, breathing the name.
I lean over and unlatch the gate as the man steps out of the house. Then I stand back and watch Taiba run to him.
***
Spike Maphosa gives us Oros to drink. He listens carefully to everything Taiba tells him. I mostly just listen too, only helping when Taiba doesn’t know the words. Spike understands both siSwati and English.
When the telling is done, he gets out his cellphone. He’s still talking into it when he gives us striped towels and shows us the shower behind the house.
“You first,” I tell Taiba, who can’t stop smiling.
I wait until Spike has finished talking. I think about the life he has made for himself with his paintings and growing vegetables.
Then I say, “Nkhosi? I need to ask you. I thought I would help Taiba come to you and then go back and be a zama zama again. But now . . . There’s a girl. Papa Mavuso’s daughter. She needs help to walk, but she wants . . . a life, you know? Away from Papa. Can you help her too? Can you help us all?”
He just moves his head once, as if it’s not a big thing I’m asking.
“Sure,” he says.
***
So that’s how we come to ride up into the Barberton mountainlands in Spike’s truck, with two police cars and some other people following in more trucks.
It’s the time of evening when the light is softening and deepening into blue and grey, but I can still see Katekani when she comes to stand outside her father’s house, leaning on her sticks, one plain and the other painted.
I see her edge closer to the wall so she can lean against it for extra support. At first I think it’s because she’s still hurt from the beating so many days ago. Then I see what she’s doing. She’s lifting her flower-painted stick and waving it in the air like a celebration. At the same time I hear Taiba laughing and calling for Aires.
Then the police are running into the house and Katekani is hurrying to unlock the shed while we’re still getting out of the truck.
Taiba is running too now,
so fast, and there’s his friend Aires hobbling out of the shed with Katekani beside him. The other recruits hang back, looking out.
For a moment, the three of them stand together – Katekani, Taiba and Aires. Taiba seems to be holding the other two up, because Katekani is waving her stick, looking at me and smiling.
I don’t know which sight I like best – Katekani smiling at me, Taiba and Aires together again, or Spike Maphosa, who used to be hope.
This book was awarded the 2011 Sanlam Gold Prize for Youth Literature.
“It’s a story like smoke, I think. No one can catch it because there’s nothing there.”
In the heat and darkness underground, Regile Dlamini has stopped believing in anything much. Boys trafficked from their home countries, kept captive and controlled by a man they call Papa Mavuso, forced to work in an illegal gold mine near Barberton: their lives are brutal, terrifying and frequently short.
In contrast to Regile, the young Taiba Nhaca steadfastly believes in the legend of Spike Maphosa, a zama zama who is said to have escaped the horror of life in a mine. The inhumane conditions and savage beatings cannot shake Taiba’s faith, something Regile finds disturbing. Above ground, Papa Mavuso’s daughter Katekani shares Taiba’s belief that their lives can change for the better, but Regile wants nothing to do with their unrealistic dreaming.
Is Katekani right when she tells him the mine has stolen his soul? Or is it his humanity that is lost?
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Copyright © J.M. Bauling 2012
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Cover design by Hanneke du Toit
E-book design by Trace Digital Services
Available in print:
First edition, first impression 2012
ISBN: 978-0-624-05626-3
Epub edition:
First edition 2012
ISBN: 978-0-624-05627-0 (epub)
Mobi edition:
First edition 2013
ISBN: 978-0-624-06238-7 (mobi)