David's Story

by Zoe Wicomb

  Saartjie arrived like any other baby born in the airless rhomboid of a coloured house. The same muffled cursing and mewling and heaving behind the unglazed shutters, the same rush of amniotic fluid and Ant Sarie’s final heroic push that propelled her into a recoiling world. And a clutch of anties held her by the ankles to dislodge the last of the foetal phlegm, ascertained that she was a girl, and got ready the nylon stocking to pull over her head, for there was much woolly hair that had to be smoothed and flattened over the pulsating crown. This was the decade of brave baby girls with tightly bound guerrilla heads, which goes some way towards explaining the little-known fact that the Movement managed to recruit so many coloured women.

  Who does not know that resourcefulness and frugality are virtues next to godliness and cleanliness? In the stunning heat it was not surprising that bare-legged young women found a new use for the charity bags of old stockings—We cut them up for pillows, Madam—but they came to serve the sinister function of fighting the curl in the hair of women who found that it took no more than a swift tug to drag the nylon across the face and radically transform their sleek-haired selves into guerillas. Thus killing two birds with one stone, they saw in the Movement a liberation from laying their weary heads on the discarded panty hose of the rich. That Africanisation would at the same time discourage the fight against frizzy hair was an irony which they could not foresee.

  Saartjie, the ten-stones-in-a-hole wizard, turned Sarah at high school, and thereafter, boldly, since recruitment by the ANC, the more distinctly English-sounding Sally, clocked into her first clerical job at Garlicks with the required English accent and sleek hair flicked up at precisely chin level. Thus no one would have recognised her, wearing in broad daylight a stocking on her head like any rough, roesbolling girl, on the afternoon she first met David. It was a minor assignment, in the early days of her training. On a suburban train bound for Simonstown, between Wittebome and Retreat stations, with collar drawn up and a cap turned back to front, he slouched through the third-class carriage and joined her on the wooden seat she had in a sense been reserving for him.

  He said, tugging at the red scarf draped around her neck, Miss Rooi Scarf, hey! seeming to note neither the telltale stocking on her head nor the redundancy of his observation, as she correctly replied, Rooi soes ’n rose—red as a rose—so that he slipped a package deftly into her shopping bag, so deftly that she could not be sure. Then he moved on, teased another young goosie but returned to glance at her, and she looked deeply into his green eyes before he leapt, nimble as any skollie, from the already moving train at Retreat Station. There was no knowing if she would ever see him again. Indeed, she knew nothing of him, could make no enquiries in Cape Town where everyone knew each other because she did not know his real name. But believing in destiny and touching wood whenever an opportunity arose, Sally waited. In the meantime she summoned his face in her mind’s eye as often as possible, not realising that the features blurred and blunted and the lines shifted with the passage of time, so that when she finally met him almost two years later, in the community centre where she was now nominally employed, he only faintly resembled the mental picture she had been carrying around. But the eyes were the same, the very bewitching shade of green.

  As for David, he had no memory of her, retained no image of the woman, although he recalled the event with clarity. When he gave her an awkward long-stemmed red rose and tried to pin it to the red chiffon scarf she had taken to wearing, she spoke of their meeting on the train. Had she been content with the repetition as coincidence or remembered that red roses are routinely given by young men, Sally would never have learnt from his own mouth how he had not recognised her as the girl on the train—a woman now, with all that weight of carrying around an image with which to fall in love. How could he have told, he pleaded, without the stocking on her head, for having not yet been to bed with her, he had not seen her wearing it at night. Then he castigated her for being indiscreet, for speaking, although her words could not have been more carefully chosen, more cryptic. How could she be so sure, what if he were not the man, could he not after all say the same of her? Forgetting the disintegration of features, the shifts in bone structure, the shrinking of his form, she shook her head emphatically and with her hand over his eyes declared that this was not at all possible, that they were who they were.

  Months later, during rush hour, when the old Ford Capri broke down in Long Street, she leapt out of the passenger seat to help him push the car into a side road. Shamed and perplexed at first by such odd behaviour, he thought of her training in the Movement as explanation, and tossing in bed that night decided that a woman who did not sit respectably in the car with head tilted and legs crossed at the ankles while he pushed was perhaps not such a disadvantage; indeed, there was a curious lightness in his heart as he thought of marriage to such a woman, a cadre, a comrade to whom he need not always lie about his activities.

  David Dirkse, alias Dadzo, or rather Comrade Dadzo: Has no illusions about war and so accepts both the acts of glory and the acts of horror, neither of which will be or need be disclosed by anyone.

  Age: 35

  Race: ‘Of no consequence’

  Training: Angola, USSR, Botswana, Cuba, and, of course, sessions within the country, under their very noses, where nothing untoward had happened.

  Only once, recently, in the hills of Natal where the ground gives spongily and the whispered words of the dying lie in scattered syllables on the surface, has he felt his own weight on the earth, on time, on the very murmur of decomposition, until the muffled silencers of the gunshots amplified into thunder in his ears. The doctor called it tinnitus and prescribed a week’s rest, but a day of doing nothing did the trick. Others have lost limbs, but nothing untoward has happened to Comrade Dadzo. Only there were deep scars on the soles of both his feet, and the dislocation of the bone on the ball of the left foot gave him a slight emphasis on the right when walking, a mannerism which both men and women with an eye for detail found attractive.

  As one would expect, Sally asked questions, to which he replied jokingly about initiation rites. David’s discipline and loyalty were legendary among his comrades. No stoic could have imbibed army codes more thoroughly, so that his replies were curt. She knew not to badger him, knew that there were limits to probing.

  To Sally it may have seemed like an adventurous life; he would not have used such a word. Not that he had any replacement. He would never have attempted to find a descriptive word, like the arbitrary names on a Dulux colour chart—personality blue, stratos, sailboard, sea rhythm, or soft rain—names that gave one no idea of the actual shade of blue. No, it was simply his life. To put a name to it would have invited disappointment, would have left him unprepared for the unexpected. So now, with the unbanning of the Movement, he does not lament the lack of adventure, although there is much to do here at home that demands even greater vigilance, greater secrecy. But nowadays there is also more time to think, and turning an eye inward he finds a gash, a festering wound that surprises him, precisely because it is the turning inward that reveals a problem on the surface, something that had stared him in the eye all his life: his very own eyes are a green of sorts—hazel, slate-quarry, parkside, foliage, soft fern, whatever the colour chart may choose to call it, but greenish for God’s sake—and that, to his surprise, he finds distasteful, if not horrible.

  It is, he supposes, unlike the rest of his life, personal, a matter entirely unconnected with the Movement or with the way he relates to his comrades.

  They saw little of each other during their courtship. Only once, at the beginning, they were on a mission together in Gaborone, but the pleasures of combining work and play were limited and laced with guilt. After that, their activities overlapped only here and there, in spite of attempts on Sally’s part to influence locations. Moments stolen from the Movement in unexpected places were like feasting on the sweetest watermelon, but whole, pips, rind, and all, for the next morning as they slipped apart there s
hould be no trace of the fruit. Naturally they never went away together, and naturally months would go by without them knowing of each other’s whereabouts, without knowing whether the other was alive. When they found themselves in Cape Town, David said that they should not be seen together too often, that this made them easy targets, but they met up at night at various safe houses, with their ordinary red stoeps and neat lawns. You must have a wife and two-point-four children hidden somewhere in town, she teased. Sometimes on sultry evenings they sat in cafés to drink coffee without chicory or even a beer, and then in public his hand would linger deliciously on hers. But stranger than the eating places of Harare or Gaborone were the drinks in Stuttafords or on the seafront, under the Apostles—places that still held the taste of the forbidden as black people entered defiantly. Sally felt the chill of discomfort at those tables of trimmed carnations and muted conversations.

  Were they being watched? she whispered. When she looked surreptitiously about the room to identify that Boer, the lone, dark-skinned white man with blunt features, David laughed. The young, flashily dressed black couple behind them were no less suspicious; there was no telling in these days of treachery and flux and things being all mixed up, no telling who was who and where danger might lurk. If it were not for the pleasure of being together in public, the seductive whiff of the illicit, Sally would not have bothered learning to sit around in cafés, spending money, inventing personas that spoke quietly about subjects such as gardening or holiday resorts or even a baby called Tracy, and behaving, except for the customary hushed tones and the eavesdropping, as if there were no one else about. She could not tell whether there were looks and whispers when they entered, or whether she imagined it; she hated the less discreet raising of eyebrows, although such things were of no consequence. David stretched and yawned comfortably, had no difficulty remembering at all times not to raise his voice, and if he knew about the devices she sometimes carried in her handbag to record a muted conversation at a nearby table, he said nothing.

  Sooner or later he would suggest marriage. Sally laughed, It’s all that talk about Tracy and blue kitchen cupboards. But no, he was serious. The struggle had made unprecedented progress; despite the government’s bravado, it would not be long before the country would be free, before democracy would reign; it was only sensible that they should think of the future, of leading normal family lives; they were no longer spring chickens. Sally had not realised the extent of his influence: she was released from her underground work after protracted debriefing and that was that. The so-called part time job in the community centre became real, full-time, and community issues were to be her domain. Which was an important aspect of the struggle, David assured her, but there was an emptiness, a hollowness inside as if she had aborted, no, miscarried, and a rush of unfamiliar hormones left her listless for weeks. It was not surprising, then, that she fell pregnant soon after, vomited for three months after every meal and forgot at night to swirl her hair in a nylon stocking. When the baby came, a healthy boy whom they could not very well call Tracy, Sally was an emaciated scarecrow of a woman with uneven, vegetal tufts of hair and liverish spots on her brown skin.

  A child of the struggle, she sighed, as she turned on the radio to drown the sound of his wailing. President Botha was at that very moment making his tough Rubicon speech. The newsreader called him an invincible crocodile, which made her snort with rage, and pulling herself together, she once again pulled a nylon stocking over her head at night in imitation of her old self. Which signalled that it was a happy marriage and that the struggle was going well.

  David was partial to the sight and smell of the red plastic bucket into which she dropped the nappies. Homely, he thought, and cooed with pride at the boy’s natural functions. The baby was obliging in this respect and on evenings when Sally went to UDF meetings soiled his nappies repeatedly, challenging the most robust plastic pants. David could not pick him up on such occasions for fear of leakage, and his cries after an hour or so tried even that most patient and adoring of fathers. Sally’s return was a relief to both her men, who were unstinting in their appreciation of her skills. The baby gurgled and David ran a meek hand over her groomed hair. Later, exhausted after the washing of nappies, she reported back on the meeting. He asked questions about impossible details, such as the tone of voice in which people delivered their speeches or who faltered when, and advised on what she should say and do. Ag, she didn’t mind. Ventriloquising for him helped her to distance herself from the more unpleasant decisions. Not being at the centre of things, she did not always appreciate the possibility of treachery, the selling of information for a slice of bread, the need to be tolerant of the ways in which the poor would turn a penny.

  In this amalgamation of family life and the struggle she found a pattern, so that when the little girl came there was no hesitation, no search for a new routine. Chores took somewhat longer; she got to bed a good hour later at night but she knew things would become easier. The girl would give up nappies earlier, would learn to speak sooner than the boy, and hardly had the little mite uttered her first word than her hair was pulled tight in preparation for the stocking. It was only as she drew the nylon over the head of the squealing child that Sally thought otherwise. They had been speaking of nothing other than liberation. It would be, they were sure, only months before the overthrow of apartheid, so that the little girl would be no guerrilla, oh no, she would be a doctor, a lawyer, or even a scientist; only months before children would sit in neat rows on their school benches, reciting their multiplication tables rather than running wild and being mown down in the streets; only months before rows of girls would whip the stockings from their heads.

  She remembered her first day as a sleek-haired filing clerk at Garlicks department store. How proud her mother was to have a daughter who worked in an office, and in Adderley Street too. So that she never spoke of the sneering voice of Mrs. Upton, who flung across the desk the customers’ dockets, the MacKeowns, McKeowns, and McKeoghnies: Do you not know your alphabet? I demand strict alphabetical order. Which made her stutter in up-country English before all the Town girls in the office, Yes, please, Mrs. Upton, it won’t happen again. She’d since taught herself to type, had been running the community centre for some time, but no, her little Chantal would never work in an office. Neither, for that matter, would she ever marry and have children.

  The house on the sandy Cape Flats was comfortable. Sally did not understand the lowered eyes of white comrades who tutted and shook their heads in sympathy. Perhaps not lovely, as she would have liked it to be, but that was no doubt her own fault, her own lack of resourcefulness. She had once found a beautifully carved wooden crow in the gutter, had taken it home and painted it black, which David called a waste of time and Mrs. January swore would bring bad luck. Why one bird should be better than another she did not know, but nowadays it was the guinea fowl with its white and black speckles that was in fashion. A garden would have been nice, but she soon gave up on that strip of coarse sand where marigold seedlings would wobble for a day or two like undernourished toddlers before keeling over for good. Instead, there were her curtains which she had sewn by hand, had saved up and waited for Zhauns’s buy-one-get-one-free offer—and what a picture it was, that deep green foliage, the posies of rich red roses and baskets of velvet-cheeked fruit tumbling into the green and transporting her into a fairy-tale world of certainty and abundance. She could have done with a television—she liked to hear others discuss the goings on in the American and Australian soap stories, and the children would be still in front of a screen—but she did not mind. She could always go next door if she really wanted to, Mrs. January loved people coming to watch, but there just was no time. They were really quite fortunate; so many had lost their lives or had watched their children scatter and fall before the Casspirs, yet so far, touch wood, they were all still alive, her entire little family. Yes, she had much to be thankful for.

  Steatopygous Sally, turning to the tune of the collapsed sp
rings of the mattress, presses a buttock into David’s thin hip, and offering warmth and well-being that brings a sleep-smile to his lips, does not as yet know of the epithet or its meaning. Neither does she know of the queens of steatopygia, the Griqua Lady Kok and Saartje Baartman, the Hottentot Venus displayed in Europe whose private scientist, Georges Cuvier, gave to the world those spectacular parts. Which makes her a comfortable wife to whom all will no doubt be unfolded in due time, but more importantly, an appealing character: innocent, naive, a woman who responds artlessly and whose feet, exquisite in spite of their childhood buffetting in the stony karroo, are kept firmly on the ground; a character who will arouse sympathy across oceans and landmasses as she lies tossing and turning in her Soweto bed on the Cape Flats.

  It is, however, not to her credit that she lies awake in the clutches of an unprepossessing insomnia, finding the ceiling oppressively low, when not so many years ago she, Saartjie, had stepped out of a crooked raw-brick coloured house in the veld where the bandy-legged walls threatened to cave in and the roof brushed against the thatch of her hair. Resilience: that is surely what such walls had taught her, would have taught any human subject, but they had not prepared her for the convulsive horror of jealousy. Poison fountains from the pit of her stomach as she thinks of Dulcie, but if she is not all sweetness and light so much the better, for one soon tires of a good woman. Besides, David would like his wife to be something of a character; steatopygia, being a given, is not enough.

  David falters over the word that has fired his imagination, that has set the story on its course so to speak, for he is anxious, having found the fancy name, that it will not be understood simply as natural fat padding of the buttocks but rather might be read in white people’s pathological terms. A pity, for he loves new words, loves flicking through a thesaurus and finding one that captures precisely a meaning, which cuts down on explanations, on ambiguity and argument, on the struggle through forests of words and the attendant meandering of the mind. It is due to this precision that David has done so well in MK, the Movement’s military wing—has risen so fast, as they say also in the corporate business world. In any case, no good starting with a woman’s two eyes, nose, and mouth, although these features, even in her sleep, are distorted with jealousy. He knows that she is suspicious about the trip he is planning to Kokstad, but he does not yet know that Dulcie is the source of her anguish. Silly girl, and he smiles affectionately, for her tossing and turning has woken him up.