DZEE-zis may COME in de MAW-ning!
DZEE-zis may COME at NOON!
DZEE-zis may COME in de EE-VEH-NING!
So KEEP your HAHT in TYOON!
He wondered what they would do if he joined in the chorus. When they came to the end of the carriage, the blind man croaked, ‘Bliss you! De Lawd God bliss you!’ as he swivelled his head and his gummy, sunken eyes fell on everyone without partiality. Then the younger man transferred the coins to his pockets and they scooted through the doors into the next carriage as if they were walking on the moon.
The screams started in Metro, where the poor, law-abiding people sat. The shrieks mingled with the blind man’s song and the child’s laughter: they rose together in a wave of sound that made Jurie long to join in and howl like a dog so that the pressure in his head found release. He pressed his lips together. The other passengers murmured to one another and half-rose, then sat down again, undecided. Was it better to stay here and take a chance with the certain knifemen, or jump out but have to wait an hour for the next train? The Rwandan woman caught Jurie’s eye – Tutsi? Hutu? – and they looked properly at one another in the hiatus.
The train skidded and stopped dead, banging Jurie’s head hard on the pole behind him. How many times can you be concussed in your life? he wondered. Maybe three. The magic number; the one you can get away with. Jurie rubbed the spongy bit where the bump would rise and imagined the men coming for them, muscled like gladiators, swinging their machetes over their heads. He could see each short pommel, each long blade weighted at the tip for heft; he smelled the blood and rust; he listened for the long whistle of the approach.
The train began rocking as people swarmed up from the Metro section, squeezing through the windows, scrambling over the breaks between the carriages, crashing through the doors. The blind man and his helper had vanished. While his compatriots scattered, Jurie sat: now that the end of the world had come, he was too old to run from it. He would wait by the window for the apocalypse.
There were two other passengers left. The nondescript Rwandan woman hadn’t said a word but was crouched beside him, her fussiness forgotten. The child was still beside her. She was trying to bury her face in the woman’s lap: Jurie could hear her panting breaths. The woman pressed closer. He felt her heartbeat against him: it pattered like a rabbit’s through the cotton of his shirt. Rabbits can die of fright, Jurie thought. He had seen one licked to death by a farm dog. The rabbit had keeled over in fear, suddenly still as a stuffed animal, its fur lapped into wet triangles.
The other travellers hadn’t abandoned the train entirely. Passengers were hanging half-on and half-off the carriages, waiting to see whether the promised carnage would follow. Their faces turned like traffic lights. They peered over each others’ heads, clutched at shirts, stood on their toes so that they could see further into the communal future.
On the platform some people were looking for hiding places – but still they stayed close to the dead train, chancing that none of this was true, that it was a dream – that it must be – that they were in dream-time, and soon the horror would dissipate and they would chug from the station into the long, known weekend. Afterwards it would be a story told from an armchair, beer in hand, family ranked round. What will I say? Jurie wondered.
Through the frame of the train window he saw a police van pull up so fast that it mounted the kerb and left a pair of black treads burned onto the tarmac, like Jacob’s ladder. The policemen jumped clear of it, leaving the doors swinging on their hinges. But the gangsters were already gone, jogging down the road in stiff-kneed formation. LOXION KULA blared the legend on one boy’s top.
They had no machetes. They were not the grinning men from Mail and Guardian photographs. They were only kids, with no face or race. They stopped short when they came to a garden wall and then limbed over, silent as spiders, and the little one at the back dropped a ring or a watch – something that made the sun blink in complicity. This was their homeground, and no one could follow.
Loxion kulca, thought Jurie. Ha. You’ve never been there in your lives.
He sat in the carriage and his rage mounted as the other passengers trickled back, shamefaced and excited. They were panting and grinning, shaky with survival. As the train finally lurched forward they asked each other the same questions. Was it better to sit in Metro Plus, where there were fewer thefts and fewer people? Or did you squash together even though more people meant more danger? The woman with the white path in her hair was getting her theta. Jurie suddenly hated her. He hated the Rwandan woman and her child; he hated the blind man and his clammy assistant; and he hated himself. He thought savagely, The world is divided into people who do bad things and people who do nothing. He felt his face purpling as the pressure grew behind his eyes. He pictured the little arteries bursting with rage, spattering the passengers bloody where they sat.
The woman was still leaning on him. Jurie heaved her weight off him and stood up. He was swaying against the motion of the carriage and had to brace himself, like the blind man. The words came bursting out of him in a spray of spit, leaving him breathless.
‘What’s wrong with all of you? Why didn’t anyone do anything?’
He wanted an answer. He really did. He pivoted from face to startled face, but they only stared at him, helpless as animals, smelling of metal and fright.
‘There were more of us than there were of them!’
No one spoke. They frowned stubbornly, the air of festivity atomised. Jurie could imagine the dialogue: White man, leave us alone. We pay for these seats with our lives.
He shook his head in frustration.
‘You people—’
Still no one spoke, but the mood grew thicker against him. He searched out the eyes of the Rwandan woman, but she refused to meet his angry gaze, busying herself with rearranging her skirt.
Jurie jammed his thumb hard against the emergency button, jarring the bone in its socket.
The train stopped a second time, abruptly. The doors sucked open and shut, blinking, confused. He yanked at them, banging and kicking the metal until at last they separated enough for him to squeeze though. He scraped his belly as he went. Jurie leaped onto the platform below, bruising his feet through the soles of his shoes, as if he’d jumped off a trampoline.
Before the doors squealed shut he heard – distinctly – the beads on the little girl’s jersey jangling madly. She was laughing. The train pulled out of the station as if nothing had happened, the glass glittering cheery and murderous on the tracks, taking everyone into the future but Jurie, who had only his old life, his small voice, the past.
The Keeper
For Frank Awerbuck
The line of them is long. They tread
on my heart. They walk through my bones.
Their feet pass through my ribs. My head
is as air to them. They walk on stones
beneath me and their limbs are slick with rain.
It is the rain that sent them and their tread comes
on and on. They carry sticks and pain,
skins and bones, and they, the living dead,
walk through my heart. They tread on it as though
I were not there. They are not here for me
but for the fire from the cave, below
the aeons of dust – below, where it burns free of
change. This is why they come. They go
through my heart to the ash hearth below.
– MICHAEL COPE, ‘Ancestors at Wonderwerk’
EVERY PLACE IS THREE PLACES. My ouma liked to say that, and I’m beginning to understand what she meant. For days now the construction workers have been unearthing rusted horseshoes, empty bullets, the bones of animal companions. They are getting closer. Over it all the iron spine of the new framework curves like a memorial: this is what Green Point Stadium will become once the thousands of visitors go back home to Italy, Germany, France, taking their cameras and their sunburn with them as they pass overhead, watching t
hose of us left here reduced to specks of builders’ sand, scattered and stinging in the southeaster.
But that must come later. For the moment we are suspended in the resinous heat of February, with the mountain on fire and everywhere the sound of jackhammers and helicopters, endlessly competing to destroy and remake. There is a fine layer of ash drifting down, turning and turning in the permanent twilight before it comes to rest.
When the men came yesterday their trucks rolled like tanks through that ash, carrying hundreds of rolls of instant lawn. A million tubers trailed as they unloaded the kweek they had severed from somewhere else, square by square, marked for transplantation. It is the only variety that will grow in the summer gale, grow this close to the sea, grow in time over anything.
From the museum window I watch the builders crawl down the girders, dumb insects in their bright overalls. Each man has a red number on his back, like football kit, like road signs, and for each man that number is the same. 10: the yellow-backed army of next year, of hasn’t-happened-yet, of whatmight-be.
From the same window I first saw the earth-crawlers begin the digging; I witnessed the casual horror of excavation, the raw indignity of exposure. If the drivers had looked up they would have seen the white flag of my features through the glass, the lone pale face left there among the staff after 1994. After seeing them turn over the distressed soil, the decision was simple. I took the package.
As it was, I stayed as long as I did in the dry days that came after to watch the men at their work. How certain they are of their destruction. They have bulldozed every structure on the surface of the grounds except for the McDonald’s and a segment of the old stands. The seats wait on one side, stubborn and forlorn, teeth in a hominid jawbone. The men’s machines shake the foundations of neighbouring skyscrapers, the sewage works, the lighthouse. It is not that things fall apart, but that they have always housed their own collapse. I am afraid I will see the insides of the earth: I am afraid that inside there will be nothing to see.
When the construction workers leave this evening it will be just me again, in my pallid shirt, orbiting pointlessly as I wait for the traffic to thin, unmarked by anyone else in the Breakwater Museum or beyond it. I will pace, as I do, the artefact lying hidden against my stomach like a colostomy bag.
It will be easy enough to get onto the grounds: the men on night shift have no one to watch them but me. The bald boss of Hyena Security told his guards – I saw him say so – to stay on the ground level, to use their eyes and not their legs. Work smarter, he said. Work smarter, boys, not harder. When he left the guards laughed. They taunt him cheerfully behind his back. Langneus, one always calls out, as Mister Hyena’s double-cab door slams. Takhaar. They settle on the ziggurat of the old stands and mock him in their own languages, or they doze in the warmth of the booth – a few lazy men, each with the roll of his gut lying patient as a snake around his middle. One studies for his Learner’s licence, teaching himself the K53, frowning down at the random rules of the road. He is preparing himself for some other future.
And it seemed to me that I, instead, had spent my life looking backwards, poring alone over fragments, allocating their exile to lighted cabinets. In times of change there is less distinction between the living and the dead: we are smudged with the rough thumbs of the new dispensation, confused with the old shards of evidence. What right had I to set a single piece apart from its fellows? I began to wonder if I could return just one to its rightful place: a lone, definitive, secret act before I left the museum forever.
The guards are right to relax. Who would break into the half-built stadium? In the months I have been monitoring its progress, the only interested people have been bosses in hard hats, FIFA officials, and street kids wanting a place to play. They think the space is empty. The World Cup is about the visitors who will land, swarming like mosquitoes around a breathing sleeper, migrating by morning. They come to our continent craving the fever of many people with one purpose: the memory of the communal fire, laid down in the marrow and lost in the present. We South Africans wait for their arrival, fingering the past, expecting the panacea. Every place is three places.
And Green Point has been many more than three places in its time: Van Riebeeck’s Eden; the Dutch foreshore; the first permanent lighthouse; a seasonal vlei where boats proudly raced; a racetrack when dry land remained.
And a prisoner-of-war camp.
It was in that camp of white tents that Boer families found their memories. My people remembered their trades with their fingers: there were men who sewed clothes and sculpted toys, men who printed newspapers and currency, educated men who taught the others mathematics and calligraphy in defiance of the British.
And there were the men who one morning rolled a pitch in the bare patch between the tents, smoothing the original racetrack until it was hard-packed, half-waiting for the rain that would turn it back to mud. They kept a captive’s eye on the firmament and named the place Skyview, a sweet-sour joke flavoured with the expectation of disappointment. They knew what it was to be looking out over a homeland where they were not welcome.
Within a year the Boer undesirables and irreconcilables would be dispersed in their thousands – to India and Portugal; St Helena, Bermuda and Ceylon – and when they went into exile they would take voetbal with them, or the memory of it, where it would be translated by the feet of foreign men into the separate and idiosyncratic games it became, into other centuries, into the World Cup itself. When the visitors start pouring in next year, time will reverse with the return of the lost souls. Every place is three places.
But we are not there yet. Before the exile that was and the return that will be, there was just voetbal. My ouma used to speak of my oupa before he was my grandfather, how shiny his hair was even in the camp, slicked back with grease, so shiny it matched his boots when he ran onto the field. The prisoners in their tight clothes came to watch him and his loose five-a-side teams. They had played ball games all through their dusty Free State boyhoods – before they were thrown together, before Association Football, before they knew they would go to war. In that camp the spectators learned the rules of the game despite themselves, leaning into the southeaster when it blew their thin sternums against the white tents, the canvas flapping at them like the hands of women attending the sick. They watched the games on days even when the wind died and the heat brought with it mosquitoes and starvation and disease. Some of them gave in to blackwater fever or influenza or broken hearts: civilian curses fell indiscriminately on people who so far had survived British shelling, survived burned farms and smashed pianos, survived the loss of everything they knew.
A few men defied the curse. They waited until late afternoon, when the sun was low but the light was good, waited until my shining grandfather gave the sign.
And the games began – scruffy, scuffling matches that drew shouts from the spectators who surprised themselves with the store of joy still lodged in them, the joy like a fever that enervated the players in their mismatched clothing, their heels without boots hard as hooves. The air was so hot that they did not scrum or tackle: they could not bear the human contact. The men were content to use only their feet, moving quickly, reclaiming their bodies for pleasure instead of the terror of the last year, running towards something instead of away.
One day, said my ouma – I saw it, I was there – the ball just exploded from the friction and the heat. The bladder burst, and the string and leather unravelled in the air against the black mountain. It fell back to earth with a sigh. While the players waited, one of the Jew tailors replaced the bladder and stitched it quickly back together like the skin it was. It lasted until the end of the game, and was abandoned.
She gathered it up, my grandmother the keeper, when the crowds were dispersing to their own low pots to chew over what they had seen. She hid it in her skirts, the evidence that anything can be repaired.
After the war the deflated ball rested quietly in her cabinet, year after year, marking time for
the men in the tropics who first prospered and then died far from home, or came back to find that they could not start over. The bladder was the lone survivor of the camp, flat as a collapsed lung, unrecognisable behind its glass.
When I came to live with her I imagined another organ, a second liver, a spare and crippled heart. I would wait for her to take to her sighing bed in the afternoons and then I crept to the clawed cabinet, familiar with every squeak of the hinges, every mark on the glass. When the door swung towards me the smell rose up from its confines – not rot but trespass and preservation. Daily I opened the tomb of the pharaoh.
The ball itself felt dry and papery and irritable, like nostrils after a nosebleed; it required breath to be what it was. Through the long, blonde years of adolescence I kept watch, ticking. It belonged to me – it was my inheritance – but I made myself wait before I took it away. I fetched it from the cabinet on the day that she died.
But after that it confounded me, this flaking undead thing the colour of rust. It waited all the numb months I sat at my curator’s desk. In the conferences with the new board of directors I shouted above the noise of the machines next door: their growls interrupted negotiations; their reverberations jarred the ear. Through it all the ball pulsed beneath my shirt; it was permanent, snug, bound by my belt like a talisman.
During those meetings, the idea came to me intact. My people would not end up another atrophied artefact. For better or worse, they have made me what I am: a deflated bladder after the end of apartheid, a thin man with permanent windburn, a spectator squinting from the sidelines as the world moves on. I cannot disappoint them, the stiff-necked ones who lost the war and were scattered over the earth like weeds, the ones who found themselves transformed into poor whites, the ones who survived to return and take their revenge. There was the chance at last for restitution: I myself would hold them in the cradle of my skull – and I would take the ball back where it belonged. I would return it to the earth.
Cabin Fever Page 12
