David's Story

by Zoe Wicomb

  DULCIE is a decoy. She does not exist in the real world; David has invented her in order to cover up aspects of his own story. That is what I suspect. For a day or so, while I believe in her fictionality, I feel a sense of relief. But no, he is genuinely surprised that I should think such a thing, so that he sets about telling me about their first meeting in Kliprand, where the Griquas now live. David is unusually expansive; he insists that I would not understand unless the political background is adequately sketched.

  It was 1983, a good forty years after the death of the Chief, that the Griquas moved away from Beeswater to Kliprand, the location on the edge of the white town. The new generation were tired of travelling all that way to work and spending their weekends in the bundu; they would rather face the Saturday night collisions with sin in the location than the backward tea-meetings in the church hall. By then the white village had expanded into a prosperous wine-growing town, television had arrived, and the Griquas must have grown pretty tired of being Griquas, especially when the new coloured location was built on the hill, even if it was right by the town dump and the sewerage works. But after the hardships of Beeswater it seemed a grand place, with a new clinic, high school, hostel, and, most seductive of all, water—a tap at the end of each lane. The Boers knew that with unrest in the country people had to be properly wooed; a remote settlement of disgruntled, sin-starved people was just an open invitation to terrorists.

  David, however, had not been doing any Congress work in that area, would have been the last one to tackle his own people. They had not forgotten all the teachings of Le Fleur, who from the outset had been hostile towards the ANC. And was the benevolence of the Boers, who were offering safe employment and above all peace, not evidence of the good sense of his separatist teachings? Not even the propaganda machinery could keep news of the troubles away from country people, but the Griquas believed themselves to be nonpolitical and therefore safe from the troubles in the cities.

  Only in the cities did rude kaffirs corrupt coloured people into throwing stones at the police. Although where those skollies found so many stones in Cape Town, with its skyscrapers and tarred roads, had many Griquas shaking their heads. That the hills of Kliprand were encrusted with inviting pebbles was, of course, a source of anxiety. A UDF branch would surely mean that lorries full of city people would invade them. Not that Griquas did not know how to be hospitable to strangers—but these strangers would teach the youth to raid the hills, to stone the nice Sersant Van Graan and his constables, the white people who had trusted them, and so would bring shame on a people who have always been God-fearing, respectful of their betters.

  Not that there have not been some young strangers around of late, people who’ve come to work in the expanding white town, and yes, they muttered and mumbled and spoke the politics, but ag, that was young people now, always complaining and thinking they had all the answers. But at least they were respectable, sober young people who sat around at weekends drinking their Pepsis and luring others into their circle of laughter and jokes and yes, sometimes also the old politics nonsense they learned from the television. Many of the old people felt that they should not have left the land that the Chief had led them to, but what could be done, they sighed, what could be done in these modern times when people will no longer put up with the brackish water of Beeswater and are thirsty for the roar of motorcars and the smell of petrol?

  David did not think the time right, but the young woman from the Cape Town office who was in charge of the project was confident that enough groundwork had been done. It was thought that David, as homeboy, should be around at the time, but that she would be there as official representative. It was at this time that he would publicly declare his allegiance to the Movement and his father would forever turn his back upon him. As for the woman, he had of course known of her legendary activities for some time, and if anything, disapproved—he did not know of what, except perhaps her boldness, what could only be called her immense cheek.

  The atmosphere could have been called electric, although that was not a word that David would have chosen. But he was at a loss; things were no longer the same, as if, like some city slicker, he was viewing the world through sunglasses, its meanings tinted beyond recognition. The old familiar, upright words leaned promiscuously in any old direction, attaching themselves to glossy new contexts. Thus later, sitting with his feet on Ant Mietjie’s hearth, he found himself saying precisely that which he had not chosen to say: The atmosphere in the school hall was electric. Her words, of course, but then Ant Mietjie was hardly likely to question him on a matter of style, indeed, hardly likely to know that they were hers, the new woman’s—Dulcie’s—words. Her words, caught in his cupped hands where his eyes, first, devoured them; he could not remember why his hands were cupped, why he should have been staring at his palms. Now, from his own mouth, wrapping themselves around his own tongue, her words came tumbling into the old-fashioned house to perch on the things he had known all his life, the painted enamel pots and jugs with their sores of chipped old age.

  Ant Mietjie poked the fire, fanned with a newspaper at the billowing smoke, and said hoarsely, Talk about ’lectric, I wouldn’t have a black and crusty throat like a bladdy chimney if there were some of it in this house. So what brought this ’lectric to the hall?

  Well, David said, Oom Paulse did his usual leader of the council talk, explained that we should slow down, be patient,. and allow the government to carry out its reforms at a sensible pace. That, the old man said, was what every Griqua had always known to be a good thing. And then …

  David hesitated, savouring for a moment the memory of the UDF representative. They’d sent a woman, a young woman, for heaven’s sake, in trousers and an oversized jersey and ugly brown shoes like the old-fashioned walkers worn by nurses. Not someone who’d have the respect of the elders. But he said none of that.

  David started as Ant Mietjie’s questioning hand fell on his shoulders. Yes, electric, he blurted. It was the UDF woman; you should have heard her speak. She said how good it was to be there, how good it was to be among a people who were a real community, principled, reliable—soft-soaping the old man. Then she appealed to reason, to the restlessness of the youth, saying that Oom Paulse should explain why it was a good thing to wait for government reforms, that it was just one point of view and that there were so many points of view that all of them should be considered, so that people could discuss, think about the options, and decide for the good of the Griqua community.

  Heitse! Ant Mietjie crowed. That would not please old Paulse; he won’t be used to anyone asking questions, let alone a young woman. You know how all our problems are sorted out by the big men.

  Exactly. This is it, Ant Mietjie, things are just not the same, David said lamely, for he had not been listening.

  He took the cup of coffee sweetened with condensed milk from her worn old hands. She had always spoilt the child with sweet coffee in a little blue-mottled enamel mug that she said was his very own, and warm roosterbrood at weekends. Now that he was a grand city man, she gave him a pink glass cup. The coffee was no longer piping hot. Ant Mietjie sat down with him, sipping at her own mottled enamel mug, and stretched her legs out to cut across the line of light that shot boldly over the lower door into the dark room. Her ankles were grey and puffy like Ouma Ragel’s.

  Well, he continued, the woman outlined the UDF position very plainly and asked if anyone had any other positions to put forward. Of course no one said a word, even though we know that there are also some kids around who are talking PAC, but no one said a word. She said that people should be allowed to think about the alternatives and come back for another meeting tomorrow. So Ant Mietjie must be there, everybody must come and talk this business through.

  People won’t like it, you know, won’t like a stranger coming to tell them what to do, they won’t listen to a woman. Anyway, we’ve all these years of hardship quite happily been doing things our own way.

  That’s exactly what h
e had said to Dulcie after everyone had gone and they stood in the brutal white light, for all the world as if they were on display. Then her eyes scrambled awkwardly, an inept monkey scrambling up the length of the electric pole, to meet the mechanical eyes of the riot lights glaring fiercely across the township.

  She said, shielding her eyes, still looking up, And this? Is this what you get when you do things your own way?

  He could scarcely contain his irritation. As if they were not on the same side; as if she had no idea what he meant about listening to a woman.

  Who is this woman anyway? Where is she from? Does anyone know her people? Ant Mietjie asked.

  David had little to tell. She was Dulcie Olifant, lived in Town, also spoke fluent Afrikaans, seemed to know everything about all the trade unions in the Western Cape, about the different industries, the labour situation in Kliprand. A single woman, and not so very young, either. That was all. He said nothing about her clothes, her shoes. Ant Mietjie would not expect him, a man, to notice her shoes, and, of course, he never paid attention to what people wore. He recalled a dimple appearing and disappearing on her chin when she was agitated, but he could not very well say that either. He spoke of her quiet, forceful manner, the way in which even the old people echoed her words and nodded. He spoke with unexpected pleasure, like one picking little threads from her jersey, lightly, so that she knew nothing of his fingers landing and lifting repeatedly.

  Perhaps she was related, Ant Mietjie said, to the Malmesbury Olifants, the Mr. Olifant who came to teach in Beeswater, remember, just before we all moved to Kliprand.

  David did not know. And then he mentioned her clothes after all. How she was funnily dressed in corduroy trousers that certainly did not suit her heavy legs. The colours she wore, he just realised, were subtle versions of the banned green, yellow, and black, of which he said nothing. He spoke of her bushy hair, her unfeminine stoop, the ugly nurse’s shoes. A woman to be resisted, and so he spun around her the invisible threads of his voice, looping them round and round the sagging trousers until she was bound into a glittering mummy of his making.

  Ant Mietjie, whose attention had been wandering from this talk about clothes, and who started at the word shoes, slipped her cracked feet back into her own unlaced men’s brogues, long since outgrown by her own grandson.

  My word, I have things to do, and she rose unsteadily in the shoes, their leather cracked like her feet, so that David, transported by the telling, saw a surreal melding of flesh and leather, the solid cap of the shoe separating into five cracked toes.

  So, can we count on Ant Mietjie at the meeting tonight? he asked anxiously.

  My child, if you see me, you see me. She leaned for a moment against the doorpost. I don’t know if I want to hear some grand young thing from Town tell me about the bladdy struggle. I’ve got my own growing wild in this very pondok and it might as well be signposted Private Struggle—Keep Out, for all the help I get from you professional strugglers.

  Not so, he laughed, and gave her his patter about the charter and a future of equal opportunities for all. She would be there alright, vociferous and headstrong but an authority they could not do without. She would see the sense in their arguments; she was one of the few to whom Oom Paulse listened. Ant Mietjie followed David out to attend to the loaves in her outdoor oven.

  Keep your head, Davie, she shouted after him.

  What could she mean? How could she know how disturbing he found things?

  Ant Mietjie’s own head disappeared into the depths of the oven with a shovelful of glowing embers from the feeding fire beside it. Only the printed nylon of her housecoat stretched tight across her rear was visible, and he could not very well address himself to that mute flesh to find out how he had given himself away—although he supposed his agitation to be just professional jealousy, irritation that the young woman should have gone against his recommendation that the time was not right to come to Kliprand.

  Not long now, Ant Mietjie muttered, withdrawing from the oven and putting one more log on the fire, just in case. And when the embers died down, she would put on the grid for roosterbrood and then she would send for him, like in the old days when she always sent for Davie—her own children scattered across the Cape—and together they would eat the warm, blistered roosterbrood, dripping with grainy sheep’s fat.

  Oom Paulse was in a fighting mood. He started, as usual, at the beginning, where any Griqua would start. There was no other place from which to speak, he said, than from the beginning, when God spoke to His servant, Chief le Fleur, and showed him the lost mules so that the people could be led out of the wilderness and turned into the proud Griquas they were today. Not a cobbled together, raggle-taggle group of coloureds who do not know where they belong, but a real volk, a nation who had no need to claim kin with either whites or blacks.

  Ja, he said—thumping the table proudly, smoothing his hands over the starched cloth embroidered with their emblem, the kanniedood aloe of Namaqualand with its stacked triangular leaves—we are a nation. And the Chief struck bargains for the Griquas with the government of the time. That clever man ruined his wrists signing papers, making treaties, and getting the stubborn Boers to see them as a nation, treaties which he, Oom Paulse, would not dare to renege on, and it behoved any self-respecting Griqua to stand by those bargains, for they were no less than bargains made with God. And if Satan came dangling a rosy-cheeked apple before them, they would cry, Get thee hence Satan, for we are not a hungry, needy people. In the very desert where Chief le Fleur rubbed together two sticks to produce the miracle of fire, he sacrificed a goat, which, like the loaves and fishes of old, fed the entire people. Thorn sticks, Oom Paulse bellowed—and then his sticks got tangled with the thorn tree of Boer mythology—from crushed thorn sticks came the miracle of leaf because thorn trees are like the Griquas themselves. They may have been no more than a bundle of dry sticks, but they could withstand anything, even the crushing wheels of an ox wagon, for with the rain of Le Fleur’s prayer the thornbush sprouts leaves and shakes free her sweet yellow mimosa balls, but now once more, and the old man’s voice grew vengeful as he beat his fists on the table, now some of us, some of our own sons and daughters want to revert to a scattering of dead thorn sticks.

  Lost in his account of cyclical sin and regeneration, he launched a fresh attack on Satan, who came in unlikely guises, at which point Ant Mietjie pounced on his falling intonation and in strong soprano fed into the meeting the opening bars of Juig aarden juig, using the convention of being moved to singing during a church service. And whether it was an interruption or an endorsement of the old man, the hymn had to be taken up by the rest. But the room was thick with tension and uncertainty, so that for several intolerable seconds no one joined her. It was unthinkable. Her lone voice, having reached the second line, began to flutter like a trapped insect, careened around the room, stumbled and lost volume on Dien God met blydskap, before someone—and, shocked, David noted that it was the new young woman—in a clear, strong voice lifted the dying one, Gee Hom eer, so that the room was driven into doing the decent and customary thing.

  Voices wove into harmony, and they sang lustily until the end of the third verse, when old Paulse, in the split second of silence before the next, seized the opportunity to boom out as if there had been no interruption: In many guises comes Satan, singing promises of a better life, making seductive offers, but hark at the hiss in that buttery voice. Let us not forget the Breakwater where the unbelievers threw him into prison, or Robben Island, where Chief le Fleur broke his back for us in stone quarries so that we would have a place to call our own. There, in solitude, he prepared the way to lead us out of oppression into Klein Namaqualand, where we have settled as a volk, at peace with our fellow volk the Boers. Do we not have our own church, our own flag, our own emblem, the aloe that lives forever through years of drought? Have we not kept our houses clean, our children God-fearing, and even now that we have left Beeswater, do we not grow some food in the gardens given
to us by the Boers? Do we not see every year how the dead vine bursts into green without winter rains? Do we now say, yes, it is good to bite the hand that feeds us? What kind of trouble and plagues are we about to bring upon ourselves?

  Here he foolishly allowed his audience a second for the weighty words to sink in, which allowed the young woman time to leap to her feet. At first, in her characteristic stance of hands in trouser pockets, she made David wince at how surely she identified herself as Satan, but then, clasping her hands piously on her chest, she took up Oom Paulse’s words, endorsed his reading, appealed to his God, to his Chief who had taught all black people what political sacrifice meant, praised the community values of respect for the elders, and then herself, in that clear and powerful voice introduced the fourth verse of Juig aarden juig to Rachael’s famous tune. Thereafter it was plain sailing; she had them eating out of her hand. David admired the thoroughness of her homework.

  Had the government not abused and maligned the Chief, called his appeals for justice sedition, thrown him into prisons? And had he not fought back? she declaimed.

  Slowly she gathered them into her aura as she spoke of what the Movement could learn from the Griquas’ faith and determination to control their own destiny. She praised the elders, appealed to the desires of the youth for change, and then called on David to speak as one of them. When she had brought them to the point of establishing a committee—there was no need, she said, to be calling themselves anything other than Griquas—Oom Paulse himself invited the women and the militant youth to join him, while she listened in humble silence.