by Naomi Holoch
And then: “Mama will make it one of those men who grows fat when he gives up rugby; an army chappie, say, thick as two short planks, a bloke who talks in grunts. He won’t pry into your soul; he won’t notice if you do your nails while he’s screwing you.”
Beatrice’s two great hands, nails earthstained as hooves, would cradle mine. Sometimes he tutted over my nails, bitten to the quick. “Oh poor little claws. Why do women destroy their few weapons? Sharpen them, my angel, like a cat. Then you can teach your soldier to be a good boy. But Mama must choose right. Tell her Auntie Beatrice will advise.”
The thought of Beatrice and my mother talking, even being in the same room, was so shocking that I laughed hard for minutes.
Beatrice, who had been repulsive to me, whom I had feared because I could never tell when he was mocking me, became, in those seven nights, my best friend. He poured his accumulated despair into my ears. He came to my flat, and we slept in the one bed, chaste as nuns. We bumped across town to his smallholding, to see neat rows of winter vegetables and the filthy shack in which he cooked and occasionally washed and bedded his houseboy and his brickies. We drank a lot of brandy together, and I found the sensation of workdays wobbly with hangover disturbingly pleasurable: they distanced me from the granite edifice of work. I grew able to treat the heap of papers on my desk with indifference. Official faces that used to burn into my consciousness faded to ashes. I didn’t eat much, though I had an endless supply of carrots, but got through a pack and a half of untipped Lucky Strikes every day. And the dark and dangerous world he sketched and that I now found myself entering became increasingly fascinating. If I had read Genet, or Colette, if I had read anything at all outside of the syllabus for the Natal Senior Certificate examination or the boneless novels in the public library, I would have been able to define this excitement. Definitionless, I poured all those feelings into the image of a woman with wandering gray eyes.
I devoured every scrap of information about Diana. She came from Cape Town. She believed in God and tore strips off people who teased her about it. She was a theater set designer. The three women with her were freelances, employed by her for one production, a musical based on a story by Alan Paton. She liked spy thrillers. Her lover had gone off to Nyasaland with a liquor-shop owner. She designed her shirts and had them made up by an Indian tailor. She lived alone in Doringbos, a formerly mixed-race area whitened by a Group Areas Act.7 Doringbos was now largely occupied by white railway workers, who had taken over the houses of the evicted colored families. Beatrice didn’t much like Diana. “She’s cold, sweetheart, and a snob, like all cold women.”
All this, even the horrible place she lived, increased her glamor. This was a woman who could unseal the doors of a mind, and she had asked me to dinner.
On Tuesday night, Beatrice, enticingly discouraging, bid me a lugubrious farewell. He warned me that Diana tended to go on about things; if she did, I was to launch into song with “You ain’t nothing but a hound dog,” since Diana loathed pop music. He was sure Diana wasn’t the sort who would ask vulgar questions about butch or femme, but if the subject came up, I was to say that I was absolutely brilliant at both. Then he advised Listerine for the breath and silk knickers for the ass and gave me a bunch of carrots to take as an offering.
I didn’t follow his advice. Wednesday was so crammed with deciding whether or not to wear a bra, what opening remarks to make (and how to get from them to an exploration of psyches), what to do if she fed me soft eggs or bloody steak (things that turn my stomach over) that I forgot Beatrice’s carrots rotting in the sink. I didn’t question, either, what I knew I wanted to do: to go to Doringbos on foot—only some three miles, but absolutely not to be done in a city where every night the streets were emptied of citizens by apartheid’s pass laws.8
It was only when I set out across the tsotsi-infested9 streets of Hillbrow, nerving myself to pass from there through the unlit pool of Berea to Doringbos, where there might still be children playing rounders among the parked cars, that it came to me. I had no offering. Between a beer hall and a filling station huddled a little florist’s shop, its frontage a mist of gypsophila. The night was cold, and the wet streaks that ran from the flower buckets to the gutter glistened with the threat of ice. The smell of vegetation mingled with hops and petrol. I would bring to Diana that musky gray-greenness, armfuls of lace over which her eyes could wander. Inside, there were roses, red, pink, and yellow; there were bold, theatrical strelitzias; yard-long gladioli and canna lilies; there were gray and purple proteas—rolled-up hedgehogs, the national flower. Outside, in the cold, gypsophila stars trembled.
I went in. “How much is the gypsophila?”
His voice was terse: “The baby’s breath? Really? You want those weeds, left over from a First Communion at that Roman place up the road?”
I did.
He sighed. “God strike me, dametjie,10 if I lie to you: it was a First Communion for a bunch of kaffirs. Really, man, all dressed up in white, carrying prayer books and candles!”
Oh, my countrymen! Depression familiar as sin clouded the pretty little shop.
“You don’t want them? Well, they’re clean. I hosed them down. Say twenty cents a bunch.”
Not possible; they were too cheap.
He misread my hesitation. “Aag man, just take the lot.”
No need to panic. No need to run. The shop was no more horrible than the rest of the world. I looked round for alternatives. Roses—too intimate; strelitzias—ugly; gladioli—common; what? I picked up a protea, two, three. Perhaps they were all right. No scent, no velvet texture, no glow, but they were handsome. And she came from the Cape, where proteas grow on the mountainsides. And they were suitably expensive. They would do. On the way out, I paused again at the gypsophila. Why not? I took as much as I could carry and made up an unlikely bouquet of delicate white points with the three woody desert heads of proteas in the center.
No inconspicuous passage through Berea was now possible; I was lit by a constellation of gypsophila. One curb crawler I escaped by dropping into the vestibule of some flats; another followed for several blocks, waving a ten-rand note out his window, but fortunately not getting out of his car. The third didn’t proposition but drove behind at walking pace, hissing insults about low white women. He seemed to be on his way to Doringbos. Perhaps his daughters were just then playing rounders in the street. I walked fast, stopping only to answer the greeting of two black streetboys strumming a guitar made from a paraffin can. They admired the flowers. They were protection for a few minutes, and they didn’t find it odd that there should be a lone white woman on the street after dark. I gave them a few cents, which they rolled up in tattered handkerchiefs and stuffed into their shorts. Perhaps that night, if the police didn’t pick them up, they would sleep curled round central heating vents.
In Doringbos, there were smells of frying boerewors11 and the yells of children fighting inside the carcasses of wrecked cars. I found Diana’s place, a tall, dark house with sash windows, pressed against the cliff that separated Doringbos from Highlands. Years later, I lived in a house like that in Muswell Hill in London and found it as Gothic and forbidding even though it was on top of the cliff.
I checked my watch. Arrived early, and safe. I took a stroll to the corner and back. I shouldn’t have walked of course. I should have confessed that I had no car and asked Diana to pick me up. Would I ask her to drive me back? Would I have to go back? Perhaps we would talk all night about this city, about this country, and perhaps she would say it could be saved. But perhaps she would lecture me, as she’d lectured her friends at the Pro, but about the foolishness of walking the streets of Johannesburg. If she did, could I say that one tried to make something right by acting as if it were? To Beatrice, to whom nothing and everything was ludicrous, I could have said that I walked because I wanted to strip down, come dressed only in my soul. Could I approximate, say to Diana that I had wanted to endure some ordeal because there was nothing real that was not
plucked from the jaws of a shark? Could I say that I chose to walk in search of the knowledge of good and evil?—not the desiccated wisdom of the catechism but of the living tree, living serpent. What Diana would have made of these observations, I do not know. To me, my shadow looping about me in the car lights, every thought that came was divine revelation. For all that, when once more I faced the shut door, I decided to let her think I’d come in a taxi.
The gypsophila bundle behind my back, I rang the bell. After a long time, the peephole darkened, and the door opened on a colored woman hauling on a dressing gown.
“You’re for Diana?”
She had recognized me as a lesbian as quickly as I had recognized her as black and therefore living in the house illegally. Perhaps she was Diana’s friend; perhaps they were all revolutionaries. My heard leaped with excitement. “Yes, may I come in?”
“The flat round the back.” She gestured.
“Thank you very much. Thank you very …” The door had shut.
With a light heart, I trotted round past the dustbins, stopping to note how the gypsophila reflected the big African moon. The colored woman didn’t look like a theater person; she was curt, almost arrogant; could she be a member of Umkhonto we Siswe12 in hiding? If I could walk the streets of Johannesburg at night, couldn’t I become a runner for them? Would Diana initiate me?
Even in winter, when it doesn’t rain for months, the place, overhung as it was by the cliff, smelled damp, vegetable, tumescent with new life. I felt my way for the last few steps till helped by a light from somewhere inside. The door was open.
“Hello.” I carried the flowers high before me. “Hello, hello, Diana.” A white-painted hall, a living room crammed with books and one of those new reel-to-reel tape recorders, a glimpse of a neat bedroom with a Basuto blanket serving as counterpane. A beautiful place in the midst of the awfulness of Doringbos. “Diana?”
In the kitchen, an African woman was ironing sheets. “The missus is working,” she said in a tired voice. “It’s the dress rehearsal next week.”
“She’s expecting me.”
“You want to wait?”
I did. I sat on soft chairs and hard chairs. I explored the flat. I looked at my watch. I walked to the road. The curtains were drawn upstairs. The children had gone. I walked back. I searched the shelves in vain for banned books. I looked at my watch again. It hadn’t stopped. I examined the tape recorder but didn’t dare to try it. I walked back to the road again. I listened to the iron bumping. I tried not to think it peculiar that a revolutionary should have a maid, and one who called her “missus.” I helped myself to a glass of water. I failed to get a conversation going with the maid.
At nine she said she was going and wanted to lock up. “That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll be off then.” I put the flowers in the butler’s sink, fluffing out the gypsophilia. “Goodnight,” I said, and left.
Her keys jangled. How did she get home, or did she, too, squat illegally on the premises? I walked. I didn’t think about the maid; I didn’t even thing about Diana. All I wanted was to smash my fist into the gob of every curb crawler.
But I didn’t go home. I went to the Pro. “Oh, you appalling creature,” shrieked Beatrice, “what on earth are you doing here?”
I put my arms around his enormous chest.
“D’you know what you’ve done to me, you dreadful woman? You’ve ruined my best fantasy—of taking creamcakes to you and Diana in bed.” I had my face flat against Beatrice’s egg-stained shirt and was sobbing.
“Oh sweetheart,” he said, dropping cigarette ash in my hair. “If you only knew how much I love women who can still cry. Now I’m crying too, and it’s utterly delicious. In my next life, they’re gonna have to let me be born a lesbian.”
I don’t know how I got home that night. I was certainly very drunk.
I didn’t go to the bar the next evening. If I was too sick to go to work, I was too sick for that. I cleaned the flat, though it was already very clean. There was no way out. Diana had forgotten. My odyssey was a very small show when there were dress rehearsals. I took off my clothes to look at myself in the mirror and saw one of twenty million bodies bred in a poisoned soil. If I could be allowed no inner life, perhaps at least I could pledge this body to freedom, fight and follow the leaders—Mandela, Sisulu, Mbeki, Slovo13—follow them to prison. I had lived two decades in the world of apartheid and done nothing to change the ugliness. I’d hardly thought about it except as a reflection of my own discontent. Perhaps the revolution would not be too proud to accept a lesbian. I looked at my mirror image again: I had thought Diana might like that little triangle of dark hair. I ran my fingers through it, and it sprang back into curls, so gutsy, even on me, someone with head hair as straight and lifeless as nylon thread. I looked harder still at the mirror and flexed my skimpy biceps. If fate was going to deny me love, I could at least demand drama. I’d join the revolution as a kamikaze bomber. The eyes in the mirror welled up with the rich sense of tragedy.
The doorbell screeched. The peephole showed Diana. I scuttled off to scrub my face and find some clothes.
“Beatrice sent me.” She came in grumpily. “Why did you rush away like that last night? Couldn’t you wait a few minutes? There was a lot of traffic.” She stood with her hands in her pockets. Her eyes were fixed on the blackened window. She did not bow, elegantly, from the neck. Her leather jacket was buttoned tight across her breast.
We were on her Lambretta, charging through Hillbrow, Berea; we flashed past the two streetboys; we swung round the cliff to Doringbos. We were parked deep into the hedge, with the scooter triple-locked against the attentions of children. We felt our way round to the back. She was banging pans in the kitchen, throwing together a meal. It seemed very probable that I would sleep that night under the Basuto blanket and equally probable that I would be very nervous and wholly inadequate.
She kept breaking off to answer the phone: people wanting changes made to the backdrop, a door to hang the other way, different lighting at the end of the overture. Nothing about Umkhonto.
I didn’t take any phone messages; I didn’t lift pans starting to burn in the kitchen. I was feeling the rugged sepals of the proteas, thrust into a thick brown earthenware jug. They hadn’t opened any further, but then they unravel very slowly. Proteas last for weeks—forever, if you like dried flowers. There was no sign of the gypsophila.
Perhaps the seeds of this brilliant constellation of gypsophila were scattered in the same Big Bang that made the other, older galaxy, I thought, as I stood in the doorway of a room in London, looking at flowers brought home by my lover, more than twenty years later.
Many things have scattered. Even apartheid has fragmented. A new order prevails, which prescribes equality for blacks, queers, and all the other persecuted people. I hope the young man in the coral necklace has found a better refuge than the Pro, but law alone does not bring liberation. The black gays and the white gays have no common language until they reach under the blanket, and Johannesburg’s gay bars have exchanged fear of the police for a greater fear of tsotsis. Now London jostles with exiles, among them Diana, among them me, and here we have found a world where we can be human. Beatrice didn’t escape; nor, I suppose, did the Afrikaans dykes. Perhaps they still drink at some anonymous club, whispering fearfully of the unknown that follows the brutal and doomed order that had given them, and me, a gangster protection. The world has widened, but they were not on an ascending curve, and the new freedom is not for them. Perhaps they live with ferocious dogs behind high walls; perhaps they are old and ill, or mad; perhaps they are dead.
Certainly many things have died. But there is still the Roman church where gypsophila flowered at First Communion ceremonies. The white people have abandoned it for their exclusive chapels in the suburbs and all the prayer books there are held in black hands. Would Diana remember that church? Would she remember if I asked her what became of that other First Communion gypsophila, if she gave it to the maid?
> 1 Boer: literally, a farmer; in the English slang of the time, an Afrikaner peasant
2 “BM”: a straight; literally “bloody moron”
3 “Priscilla”: the police; “doing a Dora”: staging a heavy drama
4 “Brickie”: rough trade, literally a bricklayer
5 “laager”: armed enclosure of ox wagons
6 “meisietjie”: little-little girl
7 An apartheid law excluding blacks from any parts of town worth living in
8 Under the pass laws blacks needed a permit to be outside the townships or bantustans and could be arrested if they didn’t go back to these ghettos after working hours
9 “tsotsi”: out-of-school youths who mug and rob
10 “dametjie”: Afrikaans for “little lady”
11 “boerewors”: coarse beef sausage
12 “Umkhonto we Siswe”: Spear of the Nation, the military wing of the ANC, then committed to a program of sabotage against state infrastructure
