‘We must keep in touch.’
‘Ja, let’s have a dop.’
Producing the old slang like an expired passport.
We became a tourist attraction. An open-top double-decker drew up and the tour guide spoke into her microphone. ‘Over on the right, ladies and gentlemen, one of London’s most enduring monuments, Nelson’s column.’ The cameras popped. ‘And over on the left, one of its newest and most transient attractions: South Africans voting.’
It was a day for making and accepting gestures. I was embraced by strangers, fiercely, as if they meant to squeeze the breath out of the past caught between us, and I held on as if my life depended on it, to say this is not about me, this is your moment. All around us principles I had nearly forgotten, togetherness, solidarity, engagement, glittered in the spring air.
The broken shale of South African English, an abrupt concentration of flat vowels and sharp consonants, was reassuring and threatening all at once. I wondered what my own speech, worn smooth by ten years of English weather, would sound like to an African ear. If I went home – if – would my compatriots think I was a foreigner?
After I’d voted, I joined the tourists under Nelson’s enduring column, where a babble of other tongues could wash the South African silt from my ears. Trafalgar Square has never appealed to me. I don’t care for the excess of paving like pressed grey linen, it’s too proper I think, a city square in a business suit. But on that day it had loosened its buttons. Even the pigeons, flung like scraps of paper over the roof of the National Portrait Gallery, seemed flightier than usual.
I watched the BBC reports on the elections in South Africa the following day, and the long queues of voters in the country districts, bent around thorn trees and thatched huts, looked like lines of print. My eye was drawn to the exclamation mark – the question mark? – of a white face. As the helicopter hovered to get these shots, some people looked up and waved like flood victims hoping to be rescued, while others flung jubilant fists into the air. Every face was turned to the future, but whether they were elated or proud or wary, I couldn’t tell at this distance.
A few weeks later, my mother sent me a little corner-of-the-eye election story about an old woman at a voting station on the East Rand who had refused a ballot paper. Instead, before the surprised officials could stop her, she had thrown a handful of mealie pits into the ballot box. Chicken feed. She had been mistaken for a lunatic and arrested by the police, but she was a poet. Her gesture sowed nothing but questions. Who would squander their vote, this one in particular, to make a point? Had she used the ballot box as a granary or a rubbish bin? Or were the kernels meant to be planted? And if so, were they the seeds of hope or despair?
The poetry of the moment made me long for the prose of Johannesburg. I went to see a travel agent.
I rediscovered my home town in my father’s car, the Mercedes he’d driven to work until a month before he died. It had been parked in the basement of my mother’s flat for a few years. She didn’t like driving it, she said, just fitting it into a parking bay was a mission. I promised to sell it for her as soon as I found something that suited me better, but then I had second thoughts. After a decade of using the tube, it felt good to be pampered. And it worked wonders on clients – it was a huge, glossy business card.
Then again, the car was expensive to run and reminded me constantly of my dad. The first time I drove it, which I had never done while he was alive, I felt him sitting next to me, a reluctant passenger, telling me to watch out and slow down and keep my eye on the road. He was so vividly present, I could smell him. Later I realized it was no illusion: his aftershave was still in the leather steering-wheel cover and the warmth of my own hands had drawn the scent out on the air.
The pressing need when I came back was to set up a business. I am a photographer, fairly independent, strictly commercial. I’d done a bit of everything in London, from catalogues for department stores to property portfolios, but I found my niche in the women’s magazines. No high fashion, just run-of-the-mill advertisements and illustrations for features, those photos that say ‘Re-enacted by models’, the ones that go with a footnote that says ‘Not their real names’. I was – am – the frozen moment guy. I specialize in things falling, spilling, flying apart. Before Photoshop there was some skill in this kind of thing.
Finding work in Johannesburg, going to every crappy shoot that came my way, took me all over the city. I got lost. There were offices and factories where I expected smallholdings or open veld. What had become of the aerodrome? The Snake Park? The new suburbs were not even in my father’s dog-eared book of maps.
I couldn’t stop driving: I had to see everything again. I went looking for my grandparents’ house in Orange Grove. What I wanted to see was the front stoep, a long slab of polished cement like a pool of cold blood. I found the address but the house was gone, devoured by an overgrown double-storey that barely fitted on the stand.
One Sunday afternoon, I drove out to Bramley with Acker Bilk in the tape deck (the soundtrack of my father’s life had turned up in a plastic case under the seat). My mother had warned me to expect some changes in the neighbourhood, but I was not prepared for Villa Veneto. The estate covered a dozen of the old suburban blocks. Matchbox houses for the middle class. I followed the wall to the corner where our house used to be and found the end of the driveway marked by the stump of an oak. The cross section was the size of a dinner table, you could have seated six people there for a country luncheon. Right on cue, the melancholy strains of ‘Stranger on the Shore’ rose like fragrant smoke from the grills in the dash. I drove on to the main entrance. It would have been easy enough to get past the storm trooper at the boom – another reason to keep the Merc – but the rows of tiled roofs and empty balconies were dispiriting.
I went back home.
On another weekend, I drove around Yeoville and Berea, looking for my old hang-outs down Minors and Yeo and Honey, wondering if any of them were still occupied by students. Everyone said Joburg was too expensive and unsafe for student communes now. More and more young people were living at home until they got married. A generation of Peter Pans. Their poor parents couldn’t get rid of them.
A few months after I came home, I bumped into Sabine at the Rosebank Mall. We met on the escalators – I was going down to the movie houses and she was coming up – and we fumbled a greeting as we passed. Then I looked back and saw her waiting for me at the top, so I went up again and we had coffee at that place next to the information kiosk.
She’d been to some festival of apartheid films. ‘Dry White Season,’ she said when I asked. ‘I watched it on video once when it was still banned, but it was amazing to see it on the big screen. Especially now when the past is becoming visible in a new way.’
‘You mean it’s coming back to haunt us.’
‘Well, not just that. It will heal us too, I hope.’
‘It’s a pity the past hasn’t mastered a South African accent,’ I said. ‘Sgt Oddball wasn’t up to it, as I recall.’
‘They should have sacked the voice coach.’ She gave the throaty, late-night laugh every man in her circle had found so seductive. ‘He sounded like a Dutchman who’s lived in Moscow for ten years.’ While I was imagining this combination and wondering whether she was sending me up, making a point about my own accent, she spread the festival programme out on the table and showed me the other films she wanted to see, documentaries about the struggle and the history of African jazz, a couple of dramas that had just been unbanned.
She looked good. I’d told her so as she kissed me on both cheeks like a European, and I meant it. Her features had sharpened with age, the baby fat had melted away, and it suited her. Although she still wore her hair long, the hippie style was gone too, the baggy dresses of the Honey Street days replaced by designer jeans and stiletto heels. How old was she? I’d read somewhere that women look their best at thirty-two. Or they think so, anyway.
‘What have you been up to?’ I asked while s
he was sprinkling a sachet of sugar substitute through the foam on her cappuccino. I wanted to get in first.
‘Where shall I start? … Name an era.’
The laugh was not as enticing as it had once been. Was she putting it on a bit? As I get older, I’m discovering how hard it is not to start playing yourself. ‘What did you do after varsity?’ I asked.
‘I taught for a while, at King David Victory Park, of all places. I wasn’t really qualified to do anything else with my BA.’
‘Sure, Dad was right, it stands for Bugger All.’
‘How are your parents?’
‘My dad passed away a while ago. My mom’s going strong.’
‘I’m sorry to hear it – the first part I mean.’
Before she could take this further, I prompted her: ‘And after the schoolteaching? I gather you moved on.’
‘Fast. I had to do something meaningful, politically speaking, so I got involved in ELP, you know, the English Language Project. We were teaching teachers in the Vaal Triangle. It was quite something. We went into the townships a lot. This was during the state of emergency, remember.’
Actually, I didn’t know and I didn’t remember. The grainy footage on the editing screens in production offices where my work sometimes took me, and the scraps of news on the BBC that I watched with one eye, scarcely qualified as memories. You could say the worst years of apartheid passed me by.
‘It must have been rough,’ I said.
‘It had its moments. The boere thought nothing of chasing kids into the classrooms. Some teachers kept a bucket of water in the corner in case teargas blew in through the windows. Ordinary people were so brave. To go on teaching in those circumstances – it was heroic.’
‘You must have been brave too.’
‘It’s always easier with a white skin, you know, it’s like a flak jacket. Of course, we weren’t supposed to be in the townships at all. Once they had to smuggle me out of Evaton on the floor of someone’s car, with a blanket over my head. Can you believe it? Me. Like a sack of potatoes. Playing hide-and-seek with the boere.’
She did it again: she gave the boo in boere a peculiar, ghostly inflection.
Later she’d worked for an NGO, researching and writing the new history that would be taught in the schools after liberation – ‘We knew it would come!’ – and still found time to get involved in worker education for the unions. I noticed that she used the word ‘worker’ mainly as an adjective – worker plays, worker poets, worker publications. Along the way she’d joined the UDF.
‘I became radicalized,’ she said with a snort. ‘Imagine, we called ourselves radicals without a blush. It was appropriate too. If things hadn’t changed when they did, I’d have gone underground. I was angry enough for armed struggle.’
‘Each one teach one’, ‘Liberation before education’, ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’. The catchphrases were familiar, but I was sure they didn’t mean the same thing to both of us. It felt like we were playing broken telephone.
‘And you, Nev?’ she said eventually. ‘Where have you been hiding?’
‘Well, you know I went to London to avoid the army.’ It was the only flag I could wave to show that I also had principles. I told her about my brief career as a waiter, my lucky break in advertising. Probably I made it sound more trivial than it was. My self-deprecation irritated me, but I couldn’t stop it. In those days (this is one of the lines I use too much) I was overly impressed by people like Sabine. I’ve learned to take their stories with a little paper sachet of salt. Now that it was safe to do so, every second person was joining the struggle, and backdating the membership form too. In retrospect, everyone had done their bit.
And who could blame them. Even the leading lights of apartheid, the men who had made and enforced the laws, were starting to come clean, not just recanting but voicing the doubts they claimed to have been harbouring all along. If the social engineers had never really believed, why should the fitters and turners keep the faith? Soon there would be no believers left.
People were not lying either: they were merely inventing. Perhaps the freight of the past had to be lightened if the flimsy walls of the new South Africa were not to buckle. How much past can the present bear? There was already talk of a Truth Commission. But people are constitutionally unmade for the truth. Good, reliable fictions, that’s what the doctor ordered.
We did not talk about this. We talked about mutual friends.
Had I heard about Penny Levine? She’d gone swimming on Mykonos and simply disappeared. They never found the body, just a towel and a pair of sunglasses at the water’s edge. Her mother thinks she’s in the witness protection programme. Don’t ask. And Geraldine, do you remember Geraldine de Gouveia with the motorbike? She bought a house in Coffee Bay. She was always a bit of a dropout. Benjy is still around, subbing on the Weekly Mail.
‘You should give him a call,’ she said, ‘he’ll be glad to hear from you.’
‘Sure.’
‘What are you doing now?’
‘I’m taking photographs.’
‘Really? I don’t remember that.’
‘A new interest. I sort of fell into it.’ I told her about my little stagings for Fairlady.
‘You must give me your card.’ I could swear there was a sceptical undertone. ‘Maybe I can make use of your services.’
‘How so?’
‘I’ve just gone out on my own,’ she explained, foraging for the last of the foam with a long-handled spoon and then scratching through her bag for her purse. ‘I was involved in voter education before the election. Remember Bob Heartfield?’
I did. He wore a ponytail before it was fashionable and always took his shirt off when we kicked a soccer ball around on the library lawns.
‘He’s my husband actually, and my business partner. We had this NGO teaching people about the electoral process, what a ballot box is, where to put the cross and so on. Now the election’s out of the way, we’ve set up a small agency, my first cc. Educational development. The new government will be pouring resources into education. They need people to grease the wheels, brokers, middlemen, middlepersons.’
This time the laugh really did grate on my nerves. I remembered Eich. It was Sabine who introduced me to him. Be sand, not oil. Nein, schlaft nicht, während die Ordner der Welt geschaftig sind! Don’t sleep while the filing clerks of the world are busy!
I did not have a business card, but I wrote my number on the back of one of hers.
I was glad when she didn’t call. Our friendly little chat unnerved me. It wasn’t her really, it was me. I had failed a test, worse, I had flunked it deliberately, spoilt my vote.
I needed to get out more and Benjy was a phone call away. But what if the dog of the past woke up hungry? Let it lie.
Choices. I had misgivings to spare about Sabine’s, but what about my own? Even as I tried to remake my life in Joburg, I was preoccupied with the time ten years earlier when I had to find a place for myself in London. The more I tried to focus on the present, the more my questions dragged me back into the past. How do you know what you need when you’re young and everything seems redeemable? How can you decide what to keep and what to let go if you have all the time in the world?
When I first got to England, I meant to stay informed about my homeland. I subscribed to newsletters, went to rallies, joined a march or two. I came across a war resisters’ organization and put my name on their mailing list – I had left the country to avoid conscription, after all. In the booklets they sent, I saw the photos of dead guerrillas tied to the mudguards of troop carriers, and the white boys who all looked familiar, full of bravado under their Beetle Bailey helmets, and I counted myself lucky. I went to hear Dennis Brutus read his poems and marvelled that he was so much like a priest. I made a special trip to a shop in Hackney to get something for my bare walls, considered the posters of heads in the shape of Africa and fists clutching pens in the shape of spears, and came away instead with a length of Malian mudc
loth to string across my bedroom window.
I couldn’t keep it up. After a while, I started avoiding the news: when they showed another political documentary on television, another uprising, another funeral, I changed the channel. I’d had enough of apartheid to last me a lifetime. I hoped the system would collapse, of course, and I fretted over what might happen to my family and friends if it did, but I no longer felt responsible. History would have to get by without me.
The country kept its shape in my heart for one reason: my mother’s letters. More precisely, her enclosures. Every now and then, between the carefully folded sheets of onion-skin paper, among brisk accounts of engagement parties and kitchen teas, there would be something else. A recipe for breyani, which I’d mentioned in my last letter. A Polaroid of Paulina at the wheel of my old Datsun, the hand-me-down car, on the day she got her driver’s licence. A shopping list she’d found in the bottom of a basket at the Hypermarket: mealie meal, pilchards, sticky tape, Doom – with the last item crossed out. Occasionally, a cutting from the newspaper, some small story most people would have read past. These days the papers, even the serious ones, are awash with trivia, and there’s nothing so strange it won’t be syndicated. Back then, the ordinary oddities were harder to spot. It took a sensibility rather than a search engine.
This ragbag of fragments, collected over a decade, finally held me together. It became the jagged seam where the ill-fitting halves of my life touched. One evening, I was in Finsbury Park unpinning papers from the notice board above my desk and packing them in a Black Magic chocolate box, finally convinced I was going ‘home’. And the next thing – it was months later, actually, but it felt like hours – I was in my new flat in Killarney with the box open on the kitchen table and the familiar scraps between my fingers. It was September 1994.
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