African Stories

by Doris Lessing

  Mrs. Kambusi, as calm as if she were grinding meal in her village, is smiling at the policemen. They go round looking at the mugs, but they know they will not find skokiaan for they have raided this place often. It is almost as if old friends enter it. But when they have finished the search for the skokiaan they begin to look for people who have no passes; and it is at this point that two men duck quickly under their arms and out of the door, while Mrs. Kambusi smiles and shrugs as if to say: Well, is it my fault they have no passes?

  When the policemen reach Jabavu he shows them the pass for seeking work and his situpa, and they ask, When did he come to town, and he says: “This morning,” and they look at each other. Then one asks: “Where did you get those smart clothes?” Jabavu’s eyes roll, his feet tense, he is about to spring towards the door in flight when Mrs. Kambusi comes forward and says that she gave him the smart clothes. The policemen shrug, and one says to Jabavu: “You have done well for one day in town.” It is said with unpleasantness, and Jabavu feels Betty’s hand on his arm saying to him: Be quiet, do not speak.

  He remains silent, and when the policemen go they take with them four men and one woman who have not had the right passes. Mrs. Kambusi follows them outside the door and slips a pound into the hand of each; they exchange formalities with good humour, and Mrs. Kambusi returns, smiling.

  For Mrs. Kambusi has run this shebeen so long and so profitably not only because she is clever at arranging that the skokiaan and the large sums of money are never found in the house, but also because of the money she pays the police. And she makes it easy for them to leave her alone. As far as such places can be called orderly, hers is orderly. If the police are searching for a criminal they go first to the other skokiaan queens; and often Mrs. Kambusi sends them a message: You are looking for so-and-so who was fighting last night? Well, you will find him in such a place. This arrangement is helpful for everybody, except perhaps the people who drink the skokiaan, but it is not Mrs. Kambusi’s fault that there are so many fools.

  After a few minutes’ quiet, for the sake of caution, Mrs. Kambusi nods at the band, and the music changes in rhythm and the dancing goes on. But now Jabavu is no longer conscious of what he is doing. Other people see him dancing and shouting and drinking, but he remembers nothing after the police left. When he wakes he is lying on the bed, and it is midday, because the slant and colour of the light says it is. Jabavu moves his head and lets it fall back with a groan that is torn out of him. Never has he felt as he does now. Inside his head there is something heavy and loose which rolls as he moves it, and each movement sends waves of terrible sickness through him. It is as if his very flesh were dissolving, yet struggling not to dissolve, and pain moves through him like knives, and where it moves his limbs hang heavy and powerless. And so he lies, suffering and wishing himself dead, and sometimes darkness comes into his eyes then goes in a dazzle of light, and after a long time he feels there is a heavy weight on his arm and remembers that there is also a girl. And she, too, lies and suffers and groans, and so they remain for a long time. It is late afternoon when they sit up and look at each other. The light still flickers inside their eyes, and so it is not at once that they can see properly. Jabavu thinks: This woman is very ugly. And she thinks the same of him, and staggers off the bed and towards the window where she leans, swaying.

  “Do you often drink this stuff,” asks Jabavu in wonder.

  “You get used to it,” she says, sullenly.

  “But how often?”

  Instead of replying directly, she says: “What are we to do? There is one hall for all of us and there are many thousands of us. Into the hall only perhaps three or four hundred may go. And there they sell bad beer, made by white men, who cannot make our beer. And the police watch us like children. What do they expect?”

  These bitter words do not affect Jabavu at all because they are not what she feels to be true, but are what she had heard people say in speeches. Besides, he is lost in wonder that she often drinks this poison and survives. He leans his head in his hand and rocks back and forth gently, groaning. Then the rocking makes him sick and so he keeps still. Again the time goes past, and the dark begins to settle outside.

  “Let us walk a little,” she says, “it will relieve the sickness.”

  Jabavu staggers off the bed and out into the other room, and she follows. Mrs. Kambusi, hearing them, puts her head through her door and enquires, in a sweet, polite, contemptuous voice: “Well, my fine friend, and how do you like skokiaan?” Jabavu lowers his eyes and says: “My mother, I shall never taste this bad drink again.” She looks at him, as if to say: “We shall see!” and then asks: “Do you wish to eat?” and Jabavu shudders and says, through a wave of sickness: “My mother, I shall never eat again!” But the girl says: “You know nothing. Yes, we shall eat. It will help the sickness.”

  Mrs. Kambusi nods and goes back inside her door; the two go outside to walk, moving like sick hens through the shanties of tin and sacking, and then out to the area of bedraggled and dirty grass.

  “It is a bad drink,” she says, indifferently, “but if you do not drink it every day it does no harm. I have lived here now for four years and I drink perhaps two or three times in a month. I like the white man’s drink, but it is against the law to buy it, for they say it may teach us bad ways, and so we have to pay much money to the coloured people who buy it for us.”

  And now they feel their legs will not go any further, and they stand, while the evening wind sweeps into their faces, coming from far over the bush and the kopjes which can be seen many miles away, massed dark against the young stars. The wind is fresh, the sickness lies quiet in them and so they go back, walking slowly but more strongly. In one of the doorways of the brick sheds a man lies motionless, and now Jabavu does not need to ask what is wrong with him. Yet he halts, in an impulse to help him, for there is blood on his clothes. The girl gives him a quick, anxious look, and says: “Are you crazy? Leave him,” and she pulls him away. Jabavu follows her, looking back at the hurt man, and he says: “In this city it is true that we are all strangers!” His voice is low and troubled, and Betty says quickly, for she knows he is ashamed: “And is it my fault? If we are seen near that man, people may think we hurt him . . .” And then, since Jabavu still looks sullen and unhappy, she says in a changed voice, full of sadness: “Ah, my mother! Sometimes I ask myself what it is I do here, and how my life is running away with fools and skellums. I was educated in a mission with the Roman sisters, and now what is it I am doing?” She glances at Jabavu to see how he takes her sadness, but he is not affected by it. His smile makes anger rise in her and she shouts: “Yes, it is because men are such liars and cheats, every one. Five times has a man promised to marry me so that I may live properly in a house such as they rent to married people. Five times has this man gone away, and after I have bought him clothes and food and spent much money on him.” Jabavu walks quietly along, frowning, and she continues, viciously: “Yes, and you too—you kraal boy, will you marry me? You have slept with me not once, but six, seven times, and in one night, and you have spent not one penny of money, though I see you have a shilling in your pocket, for I looked while you slept, and I have given you food and drink and helped you.” She has come close to him, eyes narrow and black with hate, and now Jabavu’s mouth falls open with surprise, for she has opened her handbag and taken out a knife, and she moves the knife cunningly so that a pale gleam from the sky shows on it. Haul thinks Jabavu, I have lain all night beside a woman who searches my pockets and carries a knife in her handbag. But he remains silent, while she comes so close her shoulders are against his chest and he feels the point of the knife pressing to his stomach. “You will marry me or I kill you,” she says, and Jabavu’s legs go weak. Then the courage comes to him with his contempt for her and he takes her wrist and twists it so that the knife falls to the ground. “You are a bad girl,” he says, “I not marry a bad girl with a knife and ugly tongue.”

  And now she begins to cry while she kne
els and scuffles after the knife in the dust. She rises, putting the knife carefully in her bag, and she says: “This is a bad town and the life here is bad and difficult.” Jabavu does not soften, for inside him is a voice saying the same thing, and he does not want to believe it, since his hunger for the good things of the town is as strong as ever.

  For the second time he sits at Mrs. Kambusi’s table and eats. There are potatoes fried with fat and salt, and then boiled mealies with salt and oil, and then more of the little cakes with pink sugar that he likes so much, and finally cups of the hot, sweet tea. Afterwards he says: “What you say is true—the sickness is gone.”

  “And now you are ready to drink skokiaan again?” asks Mrs. Kambusi, politely. Jabavu glances quickly at her, for the quality of her politeness has changed. It seems to him that her eyes are very frightening, for now they are saying, in that cool, quietly bitter look: Well, my friend, you may kill yourself with skokiaan, you may spend your strength on this girl until you have none left, and I do not care. You may even learn sense and become one of the men of light—I do not care about that either. I simply do not care. I have seen too much. She rests her bulky body against the back of her chair, stirs her tea round and round with a fine, shiny spoon, and smiles with her cool, shrewd eyes until Jabavu rises and says: “Let us go.” Betty also rises, pays eight shillings as she did the night before and, having said good night, they go out.

  “Not only have I paid much money for your food,” says Betty, bitterly, “but you sleep in my room, and your nice Mrs. Kambusi, who you call your mother, charges me a fine rent for it, I can tell you.”

  “And what do you do in your room?” asks Jabavu, laughing, and Betty hits him. He holds her wrists, but with one hand, and puts his other on her breasts, and she says: “I do not like you,” and he lets her go, laughing, and says: “That I can see.” He goes into her room and lies on her bed as if this were his right, and she comes meekly after him and lies beside him. He is thinking, and besides even his bones are tired and aching, but she wishes to make love and begins to tease him with her hand, but he pushes it away and says: “I wish only to sleep.” At this she rises angrily from beside him and says: “You are a man? No, you are only a kraal boy.” This he cannot bear, so he gets up, throws her down and makes love to her until she no longer moves or speaks; and then he says, with swaggering contempt: “Now you shut up.” But in spite of his pride in his knowledge of the nature of women it is a bad time for Jabavu, and sleep will not come. There is a fight going on inside him. He thinks of the advice Mrs. Kambusi has given him, then, when it seems difficult to follow, he tells himself she is nothing but a skellum and a skokiaan queen. He thinks of Mr. and Mrs. Samu and their friend, and how they liked him and thought him clever, and just as he decides to go to them he groans with the thought of the hardness of their life. He thinks of this girl, and how she is a bad girl, without modesty or even beauty, except what the smart clothes give her, and then the pride rises in him and a song forms itself: I am Jabavu, I have the strength of a bull, I can quieten a noisy woman with my strength, I can . . .

  And then he remembers he has one shilling only and that he must earn some more. For Jabavu still thinks that he will do proper work for his money, he does not think of thieving. And so, though only half an hour before he made the girl sleep, he now shakes her, and she wakes reluctantly, crinkling the skin around her eyes against the glare from the unshaded yellow bulb that hangs from the roof. “I want to know what work is paid best in this city?” he demands.

  At first her face is foolish, then when she understands she laughs derisively, and says: “You still do not know what work pays the best?” She closes her eyes and turns away from him. He shakes her again and now she is angry. “Ah, be still, kraal boy, I will show you in the morning.”

  “Which work is the most money?” he insists. And now she turns back, leans on her elbow and looks at him. Her face is bitter. It is not the truthful bitterness that can be seen on Mrs. Kambusi’s face, but rather the self-pity of a woman. After a while she says: “Well, my big fool, you can work in the white people’s houses, and if you behave well and work many years you may earn two or three pounds a month.” She laughs, because of the smallness of the sum. But Jabavu thinks it is a great deal. For a moment he remembers that the food he has eaten with Mrs. Kambusi cost four shillings, but he thinks: She is a skellum after all, and probably cheats me. His confusion is really because he cannot believe that he, Jabavu, will not have what he wants simply by putting out his hand and taking it. He has dreamed so long and so passionately about this town, and the essence of a dream is that it must come disguised, smiling brightly, its dark side hidden where is written: This is what you must pay—

  “And in the factories?” asks Jabavu.

  “Perhaps one pound a month and your food.”

  “Then tomorrow I shall go to the houses of the white men, three pounds is better than one.”

  “Fool, you have to work months or years to earn three pounds.”

  But Jabavu, having settled his own mind, falls asleep at once, and now she lies awake, thinking she is a fool to take up with a man from the kraals who knows nothing about the city; then she is sad, with an old sadness, because it is in her nature to love the indifference of men, and it is by no means the first time she has lain awake beside a sleeping man, thinking how he will leave her. Then she is frightened, because soon she must tell her gang about Jabavu, and there is the one man, who calls himself Jerry, clever enough to know that her interest in Jabavu is a good deal more than professional.

  Finally, seeing no way out of her troubles, she drifts into the bitterness which is not her own, but learned from what others say; and she repeats that the white men are wicked and make the black live like pigs, and there is no justice, and it is not her fault she is a bad girl—and many things of this sort, until her mind loses interest in them and she falls asleep at last. She wakes in the morning to see Jabavu combing his hair, looking very handsome in the yellow shirt. She thinks, maliciously: The police will be looking for that shirt, and he will get into trouble. But it appears her desire to hurt him is not as strong as she thinks; for she pulls a suitcase from under the bed, takes out a pink shirt, throws it at him and says: “Wear this, otherwise you will be caught.”

  Jabavu thanks her, but as if he expects such attention, then says: “Now you will show me where to go to find good work.”

  She says: “I will not come with you. I must earn money for myself today. I have spent so much on you I have none left.”

  “I did not ask you to spend money on me,” says Jabavu, cruelly, and she flashes out her knife again, threatening him with it. But he says: “Stop being a stupid woman. I am not afraid of your knife.” So she begins to cry. And now Jabavu’s manhood, which has been fed with pride so much that he feels there is nothing he cannot do, tells him that he should comfort her, so he puts his arm around her and says: “Do not cry,” and “You are a nice girl, though foolish,” and also, “I love you.” And she weeps and says: “I know about men, you will never come back to me,” and he smiles and says: “Perhaps I will, perhaps not.” And saying this, he rises and goes out, and the last thing she sees of him that morning are his white teeth flashing in a gay smile. And so for a while she weeps, then she grows angry, then she goes in search of Jerry and the gang, thinking all the time of that impudent smile and how she may speak to them so that they make Jabavu one of the gang.

  Jabavu goes from the place which is called Poland and Johannesburg, walks through the Native Township, along the busy road to the white man’s city, and so to where the fine houses are. And here he saunters along, choosing which house he likes best. For his success since he came to the city has given him such a swelled head he imagines the first he enters will open its doors saying: Ah, here is Jabavu, I have been waiting for you! When he has made up his mind, he walks in through the gate and stands looking around, and an old white woman who is cutting at some flowers with a shiny pair of scissors says
, in a sharp voice: “What do you want?” He says: “I want work.” She says: “Go to the back of the house. What cheek!” He stands insolently in front of her, till she shouts: “Did you hear? Get to the back; since when do you come to the front of a house asking for work?” And so he walks out of the garden, cursing her to himself, listening to how she grumbles and mutters about spoilt kaffirs, and goes to the back of the house, where a servant tells him that here there is no work for him. Jabavu is angry. He strolls into the sanitary lane, letting his anger make words of hatred: White bitch, filthy woman, white people all pigs. Then he goes to the back part of another house. There is a big garden here, with vegetables, a cat sitting fat and happy on a green lawn, and a baby in a basket under a tree. But there is no one to be seen. He waits, he walks about, he looks through the windows carefully, the baby coos in its basket, waving its legs and arms, and then Jabavu sees there are a row of shoes on the back verandah waiting to be cleaned. He cannot help looking at the shoes. He measures them with his eyes against his feet. He glances around—still no one in sight. He snatches up the biggest pair of shoes and goes into the sanitary lane. He cannot believe it is so easy, his flesh is prickling with fear of hearing angry voices or feet running after him. But nothing happens, so he sits down and puts on the shoes. Since he has never worn any, he does not know whether his discomfort is because they are too small or because his feet are not used to them. He walks on them and his legs make small, mincing steps of pain, but he is very proud. Now he is dressed, even his feet like a white man.