David's Story

by Zoe Wicomb

  As the nineteenth century leaned on tiptoe, poised to somersault into the new, the air was indeed sulphurous with the clashing of centennial hopes. For Le Fleur there could be no doubt about the fruits of his efforts. After the travels across the country, the secret meetings and the spit-flying speeches, the planning with men not fit to lick his boots, it was only right that the land would be restored to those who had been swindled, that the documents would be signed as the bells tolled in a new era of Griqua men and women ready to till their own land. Instead, sentenced to fourteen years of hard labour, he found himself at the Cape, flanked by colonial guards as they set out on the choppy sea for Robben Island. Maintaining an erect if greenish cast, he was prevented by belief from leaning over to vomit into the ocean like his feckless French ancestor. God’s ways were mysterious; the miracle was simply being postponed from his vision of a public land base to doing private time. Thus no one was less surprised than the Paramount Chief when an amnesty released him after only five years of quarrying stones.

  Andrew held her hand tenderly as he told of the triumph: See, Dorie—and he did not stop as she flinched at the name still new to her—I said to the man, just as he turned the key, Only five short years before you unlock to let me out for good; you may as well mark the date in your calendar. In fact—and I asked him for the time—it will be precisely at two in the afternoon.

  I’ll eat my hat, the warden laughed scornfully.

  At the sound of his laugh the mist rolled back and the vision flashed clear as a summer’s day before me.

  Actually, I said—hesitating as humbly as I could—before you eat your hat, you shall have to pay your respects by lifting it to salute me.

  Being a rather coarse man, he laughed uproariously, and on many an occasion taunted me with my own words. Well, my dear, and he rubbed Rachael’s hand vigorously, when the time came it was impossible not to gloat.

  On the sunny afternoon of the third of April 1903 at the precise hour of two, post meridian, I was escorted by the governor, who had brought a personal pardon from the new King Edward. Which only goes to show that our petitions have not been in vain, that the world is not entirely devoid of justice. But the poor warden …

  Then she started as Andrew actually laughed aloud, with a queer, neighing, adolescent sound jerking from his throat.

  Yes, the warden turned puce with disbelief; the poor man had no choice but to salute me smartly, just as I said he would. I shook hands with the governor and turned back to make sure that he would carry out his promise. There he was, a man of honour, from whom the governor could have learnt a thing or two, gagging on the first mouthful of greasy felt, so that, my dear Dorie, I drew the hat out of his mouth and gave it to a beggar at the gate.

  She supposed then that God had a sense of humour after all, but Rachael’s mouth drooped sadly at the paucity of the miracle. The century had, to the sound of fanfares and trumpets—noisy gongs and clanging cymbals, the enraged Chief shouted—crossed over, and still the people crept about their huts, whilst Andrew brooded afresh over land and volk. And what an unhealthy and accommodating business the idea of nation was, she thought—just as well that her husband had given her the new name of Dorie with which to face this idea.

  It was at this stage that some came to speak of her slow sad smile of subterfuge.

  In other parts of South Africa, among the Zulus, the Pondos, the Swazis, the Damaras, and other such tribes, the people were big, and black and vigorous—they had their joys and chances; but here, round about Griqualand West, they were nothing but an untidiness on God’s earth—a mixture of degenerate brown peoples, rotten with sickness, an affront against Nature.

  Sarah Gertrude Millin, God’s Stepchildren

  KOKSTAD 1991

  It is a clear bright winter’s morning. Light streams in through the plate glass, and the reversed gilt letters of The Crown Hotel seem pure gold, even from the inside. From his table David has an unimpeded view of the square, its trees and grass and benches, where a public life even at this early hour begins to murmur. Opposite the hotel, on the other side of the square, are the grand buildings of the courthouse. The blue white and orange of its flag fall into the tranquil folds of a lovely day. There is no evidence of the mental snort, the not-for-much-longer look, on David’s face. On the western side of the square, beyond a screen of oak trees, a bus screeches to a halt and lets off a steady stream of people from the townships and outlying villages who have come to work in town. It is this bustle, this winding up of the Kokstad day, that stirs his reverie.

  A shaven-headed man in the extravagant red-and-black livery of the hotel has for some time thought of waving his hands to get David’s attention. He may not have wanted to interrupt the thoughts of the earnest young man with close-cropped woolly hair and green eyes set in a matte mahogany face. David is alone in the dining room, the first; not many of his kind come to the Crown. The man starts towards David in a curious gait, almost a dancing shuffle. David, suspecting him of buffoonery, stares at him coldly so that the man is driven to further parodic servility: he doffs an invisible cap, braces his shoulders and coaxes a croaky voice to concertina his Yes Sir No Sirs into a televisual Deep South drawl. So that David resolves to get through his meal quickly, just cereal and toast even though he had planned on a full cooked breakfast. Not only because it is paid for, but just in case, he knows not of what, and now, regretfully, he simply has to get away from this odious man who makes him feel uneasy, reminding him of someone whose image he cannot quite summon.

  He has not managed things as well as he might have done. How good it was after the clandestine trips out of the country to be travelling somewhere of which he could speak freely, but perhaps the request to his unit had been too brief, a symptom of the new slackening of discipline, as someone at the meeting suggested. Was the comrade not perhaps taking for granted the right to go away? He explained that he wanted to go to Kokstad for something of a holiday which he needed badly. Yes, he would stick to Kokstad and its environs, mainly a walking holiday he thought, climb Mount Currie and so on, and yes, he would go to a meeting at Umtata on his way back, suppressing the unreasonable feeling that he would have preferred to keep the trip entirely free of Congress business.

  Why Kokstad?

  He shrugged, just part of the country he’s always planned to get to know.

  He took care not to show his surprise at the next question: Some turmoil in his private life? A woman?

  He hadn’t thought of the stress in such specific terms, but perhaps, yes, things were tense at home, though it was not quite like that, and in his anxiety to reassure them that whatever it was did not have a destabilising influence, he succeeded, he thought, in doing the opposite.

  There was surely mockery in the laughter in that bare room of Comrade Y’s where they huddled over decoy liquor bottles arranged on the table, real enough brandy poured into glasses from which no one was drinking, but which left the aroma of the spirits lingering as they sipped at their Appletisers. Just men drinking and gossiping and telling tall tales. In their cell there was to be no let up of the teetotalism imposed at meetings.

  Well, David carried on, tapping at his glass with embarrassment, he would do some research on the history of Griqualand East, find out about Chief Le Fleur and the Griquas.

  Ethnic identity, someone laughed, a problem for the comrade? And why did he think they moved uneasily, suppressed their sniggers, or something he could not quite put a finger on.

  Winks and nudges. Was there perhaps someone else he might like to talk about, anyone in Cape Town on whom an eye should be kept while he was away?

  Nope, he said, not on my account, as Comrade Dulcie’s name hovered in the air. But the trip was approved and the business in Umtata, fortuitously, could only be entrusted to someone of his rank.

  The day is surprisingly warm. It had been a cold night, just as the girl at reception had said, although one is of course supposed to say woman these days. Why an attractive young thing woul
d want to be called something frumpish like woman is beyond him. But she said in her offhand way, as if addressing the ochre tints of evening, Sunlight’s deceptive, the nights are bitterly cold here.

  Thank you, he replied inappropriately. He could have added that it was hardly warm then; that he expected nothing, certainly not clemency from the weather, which in all his life seemed to offer nothing other than fierce heat or dry, cutting cold. But he smiled and rushed off to eat a sandwich in his room. David spent a comfortless night under heavy covers tossing on a rough sea that flung him repeatedly from the rigid shores into the hollow centre of the bed and back again. So that he groped at the wall, searching for cracks to heave himself out of the tumult. No less bitter than the camps of Angola.

  Nevertheless, today he looks fresh and handsome, a slight puffiness around the eyes giving him the distant look that the young find distinguished in a man. He worried about hanging his clothes in the narrow wardrobe but there are no unsightly creases. David does not know of the pressing service offered by the hotel. To tell the truth, for all his travels this is his first time in a real hotel—that is, not counting the trip to Britain, where his accommodation was called by the discursive name of bed and breakfast, which allowed it to be of dwarfish proportions and where conveniences meant nothing more than a washbasin and somewhere to empty his bowels, and smutty comedy on television in a room with shiny furniture and stony-faced patrons who pretended that he was not there.

  The woman at reception is delighted for him. Her hair is pinned up, allowing her long brown neck to swivel freely. Ooh, she smiles, you’ve got such a nice day. Doing business in town?

  No, he replies, just visiting, and barely glancing at her neck, hurries off.

  She watches the man through the plate glass. A tall, dark, handsome stranger in town, in spite of his frizzy hair, should be seen as a stroke of luck. Class, that’s what he clearly has, not like these cheap white chaps sidling up now that the Immorality Act’s gone, but what a disappointment this one’s turning out to be. Broomstick-up-the-arse sort of chap. She is not fooled by that easy smile. Must be from Cape Town, doesn’t have a Jo’burg accent anyway and certainly doesn’t know how to be friendly, although not for want of trying. Like educated people; that’s what they must learn at universities, how to keep formal. A chap who’d back off from the least bit of fun. What would he know, she thought bitterly, about the loneliness of a dusty town like Kokstad, of how a girl could sit through an entire weekend staring into the blue of Mount Currie. No point in telling him about the dance, and she kicks the rickety swivel chair contemptuously towards a shelf buckling under last year’s box files. Dust flies as she lifts out the September file, so that she falters and jumps down from the unreliable chair. Damn these blinking files, damn the twenty-second and twenty-third, for those are the days that Mr. Ebrahim asked her to find. Barking his orders—find this, do that, and don’t forget the Mister—but she, oh yes, she is to be called just plainly by her first name.

  What for? she asked, but all he said was, Never you mind, and switched his look from the lecherous to the inscrutable while she debated whether to say, If you want to accuse me of cheating you’d better say it out loud. For why should she invite vertigo, snap her own ankles on that crazy chair in order to help along her own death, but it was then that Mr. I’m-So-Serious came through the door and old Ebrahim turned so quickly, as if he didn’t want to be seen by the stranger, that it was best to drop the whole thing. One day, though, she would like just once to make him call her Miss Bezuidenhout. Mister Ebrahim indeed!

  And why in bloody God’s name would the twenty-second and twenty-third, of all the days, be missing? A trick, a trap, or has the silly old fool forgotten that he has removed them himself? She lifts her head, the better to think through what happened yesterday, when a car speeds by and from its mirror flashes a beam of light which, refracted through the plate glass, dazzles her into momentary blindness. A punishment for her blasphemy—the apocalyptic beam, like the Sunday school pictures of a bearded Old Testament God frowning in the forked light. A punishment of complicated calculations since light, she remembers, is refracted through glass. School, she snorts, stuffed with useless information and foolish tasks—calculate the angle of incidence, a skill required by God alone—and she laughs at the silly selectivity of memory. Who would have thought that she’d remember all that nonsense about refraction and incidence? There is, as far as she can see, going to be no bloody incidents at all and she certainly would not be angling for any.

  Men—siss!—always ready to think the worst, to get the wrong idea as if there’s anything wrong in wanting to talk to a stranger in a boring town. No, she would not even mention the dance. And as she settles down in her chair she sees David across the road, turning away from the courthouse. He has no camera and she wonders why, if he is a tourist, he does not photograph the building as tourists do, but then, she supposed, coloured people have only recently become serious tourists. Come to think of it, why does he stay in a hotel; coloured people stay with family or friends of family. If it were not for his stiffness she would invite him to her parents’ home, but then why should she put herself out. Really, she should let the strange young man be.

  David, gazing up towards the metallic purple of Mount Currie, its slopes green with trees, starts at a voice by his side, a tap on his elbow.

  That’s Mount Currie, the toothless man who greeted him earlier on the square announces. He smiles a slow generous smile, the pink gums parted to suggest that teeth may be nothing but a barrier to genuine smiling, that as targets of toothpaste advertisements we have foolishly come to associate smiling with a display of teeth. Offering an unimpeded view of the interior, the toothless version insists at once on the boldness and the vulnerability of deep smiling, its origins in the solar plexus, its projection up through the alimentary canal, inviting another to the warmth of what is known as communication. Ice cold by comparison is the enigmatic, thin-lipped smile of the Mona Lisa. Or that of a seal that lifts its sleek body out of the water to flash an idiotic and patently insincere smile at its viewers. But this open-mouthed smile of brotherhood reaches out to make human contact with a stranger in town, David, singled out by one of its residents, even though he be unemployed, toothless, and nosey.

  Gradually swallowing the smile, but with its influence still visible around the eyes and the lines of the mouth, he launches into conversation: Are you visiting, my bra? This place is now made for visitors and tourists, full of history man, jeez-like, chockablock full of history. Now take the Cape. Mister is mos from the Cape, hey? He pauses for David to nod. You can tell; all the classy people come from the Cape. Now everybody thinks the Cape is where it all happened but I’m telling you, for action, for real bladdy action, you should’ve been at this place. Right here in Kokstad.

  The man sucks his gums then, spreading his palms on his thighs, sinks to his haunches. His right hand gestures an invitation to sit, but David hesitates. It is not that he cannot bring himself to squat on the grass where barefooted women rest with their bundles, it’s just that he thinks it, well, unwise to encourage the man, or rather, to draw attention to himself in such a public place. He pats the briefcase under his arm by way of announcing that he has to go, but the man laughs it off.

  The battles man, he continues, ignoring the discomfort of the man whose embarrassed eyes swoop and dart about the speaker’s raised face.

  David asks politely, Which battles d’you mean, although he has not given up all hope of getting away.

  For the land, of course. This is a helluva piece of land with rivers and mountains all round and good grass for grazing, not like those dry parts of the West. Everybody wanted it but, of course, it belonged to us Griquas. Yirrer, there were some battles here ou pal; too hot for Captain Kok to handle so he just had to up and die. And then all hell broke loose. Between the English, the Griquas, the Boers, and the kaffirs.

  Africans, David says.

  What? No it wasn’t just that lo
t.

  No, Africans, not kaffirs, that’s what decent people say, and in the heat of the moment, without realising, he sinks to his haunches in order to deliver the word directly to the man’s face. Delighted with the gesture, the man flashes him a conciliatory smile.

  Okay then, Africans, but, he warns, you should be careful of those people, man. You defend them, you treat them good, and they shit on your head.

  David explains. (He believes that you should not leave things because they are incidental, that every instance of ugly speech should be challenged. He takes the opportunity to lecture me on the matter.) The man listens, nodding impatiently, then he takes David by the elbow and points to Mount Currie.

  Look, that’s where our Griqua history starts, man. Through that tooth-gap in the mountain the oxen stumbled—imagine, drenched with sweat and tossing their horns—and Captain Adam Kok, sitting bolt upright on the first wagon, cracked his whip, and the valley, rumbling with the echo, replied, Welcome Home. ’Strue man, take it from me, Thomas. They all heard it: old Mr. Le Fleur, the big Chief’s father, who checked out the land beforehand, all the big men. You ask any old people here and they’ll tell you how their forefathers told them. This valley spoke to those Griquas tired of trekking all the way from Griqualand West, ’strue’s God. God’s sigh of relief that they made that helluva journey came through the echo of his whip, Welcome Home. The captain saw it all, the new world, lying before him.