by Wilbur Smith
Masculine strength that was completely devoid of sexuality was what she needed most. She felt it flowing into her like water filling the depleted dam of her courage and fortitude, and she clung to him silently.
After a while, he began to talk. She lay and listened, her ear pressed to his chest so that his voice was a reverberating murmur. He talked of love and suffering, of loneliness and of hope, and at last, of death.
"The true terror of death is its finality. The ending so abrupt, the void beyond so irrevocable. You cannot challenge death, or appeal against it.
You only break your heart if you try." Platitudes, she thought, old clichds, the same ones with which man has tried to console himself for tens of thousands of years. Yet, like most cliches, they were true, and they were the only comfort that she had available to her. More important than the sense of the words, was the soft lulling music of Michael's voice, the warmth and strength of his body, and his love for her.
At last, she fell asleep. z9e She awoke before dawn and was immediately aware that he had lain all night without moving so as not to disturb her, and that he was awake also.
"Thank you, Mickey,'she whispered. 'You'll never know how alone I have been. I needed that badly." 'I do know, Bella. I know what loneliness is.' And she felt her heart go out to him, her own pain temporarily assuaged. She wanted to be there for him now. It was his turn.
"Tell me about your new book, Mickey. I haven't read it yet - I'm sorry." He had sent her a pre-publication copy, lovingly inscribed, but she had been totally engrossed with her own suffering. There had been no time for anybody else, not even Mickey. So this time, while she listened, he talked about the book and then about himself and his view of the world around them.
"I have spoken to Raleigh Tabaka again,' he said suddenly, and she was startled. She had not thought of that name since she left London.
"Where? Where did you meet him?" Michael shook his head. 'I did not meet him. We spoke on the telephone, very briefly. I think he was calling from another country, but he will be here soon. He is a will-o'-the-wisp, a Black Pimpernel. He comes and goes across borders like a shadow." 'You have arranged to meet him?' she asked.
"Yes. He is as good as his word." 'Be careful, Mickey. Please promise me you will be careful. He is a dangerous man." 'There is nothing for you to worry about,' he assured her. 'I'm no hero.
I'm not like Sean or Garry. I'll be careful, very careful, I promise you."
Michael Courtney parked his battered Valiant in the car park of a drive-in restaurant on an off-ramp of the main Johannesburg-to-Durban highway.
He switched off the ignition ' but the engine continued running on pre-ignition for a few unsteady beats. It had been missing badly all the way down from the offices of the Golden City Mail in central Johannesburg.
The car had clocked up over seventy thousand miles and should have been sold two years previously.
As deputy editor his contract stipulated that he was entitled to a new 'luxury' vehicle every twelve months. However, Michael had developed an affection for the old Valiant. All its scars and scrapes had been honourably acquired, while over the years the driver's seat had taken on the contours of his body.
He studied the other vehicles in the car park, but none of them answered the description he had been given. He glanced at his wristwatch, a Japanese digital for which he had paid five dollars on a trip to Tokyo for the newspaper the previous year. He was twenty minutes early at the rendezvous, so he lit a cigarette and slumped down in the comfortable shabby old seat.
Thinking about the car and the watch made him smile. He really was the odd man out in his family. From Nana down to Bella, they were all obsessed with material possessions. Nana had her daffodil-coloured Daimlers; the colour was always the same, although the model changed each year. Pater kept a garage filled with classic cars, mostly British sports-cars like the SS Jaguar and the big six-litre touring Bentley in racing green. Garry had his fancy Italian Maseratis and Ferraris. Sean bolstered his tough-guy image with elaborately outfitted four-wheel-drive hunting vehicles, and even Bella drove a souped-up little thing that cost twice as much as a new Valiant.
Not one of them would have worn a digital wristwatch, not Nana with her diamond Piaget nor Sean with his macho gold Rolex. 'Things.' Michael's smile turned down at the comers of his mouth. 'All they see are things, not people. It's the sickness of our country." There was a tap on the side-window of the Valiant and Michael started and looked round, expecting his contact.
There was nobody there.
He was startled. Then a small black hand with a pink palm came into view and diffidently tapped on the glass with one finger.
Michael rolled down the window and stuck his head out. A black urchin grinned up at him. He could not have been more than five or six years of age. He was barefoot, and his singlet and shorts were ragged. Although his nostrils were crusted with white flakes of dried snot, his smile was radiant.
"Please, Baas,' he piped, and cupped his hands in a beggar's gesture. "Me hungry. Please give one cent, Baas!" Michael opened the door, and the child backed away uncertainly. Michael picked up his cardigan which he had thrown on the seat beside him and slipped it over the child's head. It hung down almost to his ankles, and the sleeves drooped a foot beyond his fingertips. Michael rolled them up for hint and said in fluent Xhosa: 'Where do you live, little one?" The boy was obviously flabbergasted, not only by this attention but also to hear a white man speak Xhosa. Six years before, Michael had realized that it was impossible to understand a man unless you spoke his language. He had been studying and practising since then. Not one white in a thousand went to those lengths. All blacks were expected to learn either English or Afrikaans; otherwise they were virtually unemployable. Now Michael spoke both Xhosa and Zulu. These languages were closely related and between them covered the vast majority of the black population of southern Africa.
"I live at Drake's Farm, Nkosi." Drake's Farm was the sprawling black township which almost a million souls called home. From here it was out of view to the east of the highway, but the smoke from the thousands of cooking-fires hazed the sky to a dirty leaden grey. The wage-earners of Drake's Farm commuted daily by train or bus to their work-places in the homes and factories and businesses of the white areas of the Witwatersrand.
The huge commercial and mining complex of greater Johannesburg was surrounded by these dormitory townships, Drake's Farm and Soweto and Alexandria. Under the bizarre conditions of the Group Areas Act, the entire country was divided up into areas reserved for each of the racial groups.
"When did you last eat?' Michael asked the child gently.
"I ate yesterday, in the morning, great chief." Michael took a five-rand banknote from his wallet. The child's eyes seemed to expand into a pair of luminous pools as he stared at it. He had almost certainly never possessed so much money at one time in his short life.
Michael proffered the note. The child snatched it and turned and ran, tripping over the skirts of the dangling cardigan. He gave no thanks, and his expression was one of desperate terror lest the gift be taken back from him before he could escape.
Michael laughed with delight at his antics and then suddenly his amusement turned to outrage. Was there another country in the modern First World, he wondered, where little children were still forced to beg upon the streets?
Then mingled with his anger was a sense of utter hopelessness.
Was there any other country that embraced both the members of the First World, like his own family with its vast estates and stunning collection of treasures, and the desperate poverty of the Third World epitomized here in the townships? The contrast was all the crueller for being so closely juxtaposed.
"If only there was something I could do,' he lamented, and drew so hard on his cigarette that a full inch of ash glowed and a spark fell unnoticed on to his tie and scorched a spot the size of a pinhead. It did not make much difference to the general appearance of his attire.
A small bl
ue delivery-van turned off the main highway into the car park. It was driven by a young black man in a peaked cap. The sign-writing on the body read: 'Phuza Muhle Butchery. I 2th Avenue, Drake's Farm.' The name promised 'good eating'.
Michael flashed his lights as he had been instructed to do. The van pulled into the parking-bay directly in front of him. Michael climbed out and locked the Valiant before he crossed to the blue van. The rear doors were unlocked. Michael climbed in and slammed them behind him. The body of the van was more than half-filled with baskets containing packages of raw meat, and the skinned carcasses of a number of sheep hung from hooks in the roof.
"Come this way,' the driver called to him in Zulu, and Michael crawled down the length of the body. The hanging carcasses brushed against him, and the drippings stained the knees of his corduroy bags. The driver had prepared a niche for him between two of the meat-baskets where he would be hidden from casual inspection.
"There will be no trouble,' the driver assured him in cheerful Zulu.
"Nobody ever stops this van." He pulled away, and Michael settled down on the grubby floor. These theatrical precautions were annoying but necessary. No white was allowed into the township without a permit issued by the local police station in consultation with the township management council.
In the ordinary course of events this permit was not difficult to obtain.
However, Michael Courtney was a marked man. He had three previous convictions for contravention of the Publications Control Act for which he and his newspaper had been heavily fined.
Under the Act, the government censors had been given almost unlimited powers of banning and suppression of any material or publication, and they were encouraged by the full caucus of the ruling National Party not to flinch from exercising those powers to uphold the Calvinistic moral views of the Dutch Reformed Church and to protect the political status quo.
What chance, then, did Michael's writings have against their vigilance? Michael's application for a permit to enter Drake's Farm township had been summarily rejected.
The blue van entered the main gates of the township without a check, and the indolent uniformed black guards did not even glance up from their game of African Ludo, played with Coca-Cola crown tops on a carved wooden board.
"You can come up front now,' the driver called, and Michael clambered over the meat-baskets to reach the passenger-seat in the cab.
The township always fascinated him. It was almost like visiting an alien planet.
It was back in igeo, almost eleven years ago, that he had last visited Drake's Farm. At that time, he had been a cub reporter for the Mail. That was the year in which he had written the "Rage' series of articles that were the foundation on which his journalistic reputation was built, and incidentally the grounds for his first conviction under the Publications Control Act.
He smiled at the memory and looked around him with interest as they drove through the old section of the town ship. This dated from the previous century, the Victorian era during which the fabulous golden reefs of the Witwatersrand had first been discovered close by.
The old section was a maze of lanes and alleys and higgledy-piggledy buildings, shacks and shanties of unburnt brick and cracked plaster, of corrugated-iron roofs painted all the shades of an artist's palette. Most of the original colours had faded and were running with the red leprosy of rust.
The narrow streets were rutted and studded with potholes and puddles of indeterminate liquid. Scrawny chickens scurried and scratched in the litter of rubbish. A huge sow with a pink hide that looked as though it had been parboiled wallowed in one of the puddles and grunted irritably as the van passed. The stink was wondrous. The sour stench of ripening garbage mingled with that of the 2W open drains and the earthen toilets that stood like sentryboxes behind each of the hovels.
The government health inspector had long ago abandoned all hope of ever regulating the old section of Drake's Farm. One day the bulldozers would arrive and the Mail would run front-page photographs of the distraught black families crouching on the pathetic piles of their worldly possessions, watching the brutal machines demolishing their homes. A white civil servant in a dark suit would make a statement on the state television network about 'this festering health hazard making way for comfortable modem bungalows'. The anticipation of that day made Michael angry all over again.
The blue van bumped and weaved over the rutted lanes, passing the dismal shebeens and whorehouses, and then crossed the invisible line from the old into the new section that the same civil servant would describe as comfortable modem bungalows. Thousands of identical brick boxes with grey corrugated-asbestos roofs stood in endless lines upon the treeless veld.
They reminded Michael of the rows of white wooden crosses that he had seen in the military cemeteries of France.
Yet, somehow, the black residents had managed to imprint their character and individuality upon this forbidding townscape. Here and there a house had been repainted a startling colour in the monotonous grubby white lines.
Pink or sky blue or vivid orange, they bore witness to the African love of bright colour. Michael noticed one that had been beautifully decorated in the traditional geometric designs of the Ndebele tribe from the north.
The tiny front gardens were a mirror of the personal style of the occupants. One was a square of dusty bare earth; another was planted with rows of maize plants and had a milking goat tethered at the front door; yet another boasted a garden of straggly geranium plants in old five-gallon paint-tins; while still another was fenced with high barbed wire and the weed-clogged yard was patrolled by a bony but ferocious mongrel guard-dog.
2.Some of the plots were separated from each other by ornamental walls of concrete breeze blocks or old truck tyres painted gaudy colours and half-buried in the brickhard earth. Most of the cottages had extraneous additions tacked on to them, usually a lean-to of salvaged lumber and rusty corrugated iron into which a family of the owners' relatives had overflowed. There were abandoned motorvehicles, sans engine or wheels, parked at the kerb. Hillocks of old mattresses, disintegrating cardboard boxes and other discarded rubbish which the refuse removal service had overlooked stood on the street-corners.
Across this stage moved the people of the townships. These were the people whom Michael loved more than his own race or class, the people with whom he empathized and for whom he agonized. They delighted him endlessly. They amazed him endlessly with their strength and fortitude and will to survive.
The children were everywhere he looked, the crawlers and totterers and squawkers who rolled and roistered in the streets like litters of glossy black Labrador puppies or rode high, strapped to their mothers' backs in the traditional style. The older children played their simple games with wire and empty beer-cans which they had fashioned into toy automobiles. The little girls played with skippingropes in the middle of the road, or imitated the games of hopscotch and catch that they had seen the white children play. They were tardy and reluctant to give way and clear the roadway when the driver of the blue van hooted at them.
When they saw Michael's white face they danced beside the slow-moving van with cries of 'Sweetie! Sweetiep Michael had come prepared and he tossed them the hard sugar candy with which he had stuffed his pockets.
Though most of the adult population had made the long daily journey to their work-place in the city, the mothers and the old people and the unemployed had been left behind.
Gangs of street-youths stared at him expressionlessly as 2,he passed, gathered in idle groups on the littered streetcomers. Though he knew that these teenagers were the jackals of the townships who preyed upon their own kind, Michael's sympathy went out to them. He understood their despair. He knew that even before they had fairly embarked on life's journey they were aware that it held nothing for them, no expectation or hope of better. things or kinder times.
