Pauline’s eyes were searching her invisible audience, her judges. — You must take some risks.—
— Not this particular one. With a child who’s a minor. It isn’t worth it.—
Mandy von Herz’s removal to another school and the parental ban on her association with her friend Hillela made no difference, for a few months: they continued to spend most of their time together. The friendship ended of itself. Hillela’s friend left school and took courses in beauty culture and modelling; she was a very pretty girl, her parents approved of her planning a future through the marketable assets of her face and body, so long as this was done in good taste. She went to country club dances with young men in velvet butterfly ties and white dinner jackets, instead of roaming away from the white suburbs. Hillela had moved on with friends-of-friends out of the group Mandy von Herz abandoned; she played her guitar on Sunday nights in a disused warehouse taken over by young people in the decaying end of town and, crammed into the cars of people she didn’t know, went to parties that came about in Fordsburg and Pageview, areas Pauline had never taken her to because the people who lived there were not white and had no vote to canvass. She brought to Pauline and Joe’s house one day someone introduced as Gert. Joe asked for the surname and Hillela turned to its owner. Prinslop, he said. Not coloured, but an Afrikaans boy: he seemed unable to put a sentence together — whether in his own language or English — in the company of Pauline, Joe, Carole, and Sasha back for the holidays, but he was offered supper. Pauline and Joe encouraged the young people to bring home their friends; the only way to know with whom they were mixing. Perhaps the boy was overwhelmed by the fluency of this highly articulate and talkative family. He looked like any bullet-headed blue-eyed son of a railway worker from Brixton or miner from a Reef dorp, the half-educated whites who were also the master race.
Hillela took Sasha along to the warehouse with Gert Prinsloo an evening soon after.
Indians and coloureds among the white boys and girls there are no shock to him; he doesn’t go to a segregated school as his sister and cousin do. But Gert Prinsloo; the black boys at school call that kind ‘the Boere’: in a year or two he’ll be a foreman yelling at black workers or a security policeman interrogating political prisoners.
Hillela has come to look for Sasha, missing in the herd-laughter of young males with newly-broken uncontrolled voices. — D’you want to go home? — She picks up her guitar; she is going to stay, anyway.
— What does that chap do? He looks like a cop.—
She gestures: he’s just one of the people who turn up here. — I think works in a shop that sells tape-recorders and things. Radios. Or repairs them. But what he really does is play weird instruments — the homemade ones Africans play. It’s fantastic, wait till you hear.—
She sits down on the floor beside Sasha, cross-legged, the guitar on her lap. She slips her hand over his forearm and opens her palm against his; their fingers interlace and close. As she has gestured: here, he and Hillela are just people who have turned up among others, known only by first names, there is no familial identity.
After a lot of noisy confusion, records set playing and taken off, girls shrilling and boys braying, this Gert Prinsloo settles himself in a space with two oxhide drums, a wooden xylophone and the little instrument of which out-of-tune reproductions are sold in every tourist shop. (Sasha has an mbira on the wall of his cubicle in Swaziland.) The son of the Boere has begun to drum. The girls and boys begin to clap and sway and stamp. They, crowd round him so that, from the sitting level, the player cannot be seen any more. But Hillela has pressed Sasha’s hand down on the boards to show he and she will not get up. She is smiling, with her body swaying from the waist (like a snake rising from the charmer’s basket, he was to remember, or like one of those nature films shown at school, where the expansion of a flower from its calyx is speeded up). This happens to the sound of Gert Prinsloo’s drumming that makes of the walls of that place one huge distended eardrum, and to the flying notes, hollow and gentle, that he hammers out all over from the anvil of the wooden xylophone; but the rain-drop music of the mbira is lost in the beat of the crowd’s blood, they overwhelm it with their own noise.
He comes over sniffing gutturally and making awkward genteel gestures to wipe the sweat off the back of his neck. His mouth is pegged down in bashful happiness.
— Where’d you learn?—
He laughs and hunches. — No, well, I just picked it up. First from listening, you know, watching. Then having a go myself. I’d always played guitar and that.—
But where? Someone must have taught you the music — it’s not written down, is it? It’s traditional African stuff.—
He moves his hands about, begins to speak and stops; he is embarrassed by and will only embarrass by what he has to tell. — We had a fish and chips shop. My mother, after my pa passed away. One of the boys that worked in the kitchen, he used to play these things. I got my guitar when I was about fourteen, and we both used to play it. He first taught me guitar.—
— He sings in their languages, too. Come on Gert, one of their songs. Come on. Please.—
It is always difficult for anyone to refuse Hillela; even people who don’t have, like Pauline and Olga and the family, a duty towards her. She butts the boy with her guitar. He takes it with lowered head but when he begins to sing, in the black man’s voice and cadence, in the black man’s language — as white people hear work-gangs sing in the street, only their song making them present among the whites driving by — his inarticulacy, his fumbling self is broken away. That he is singing against the sobbing beat of a pop singer does not matter; a song that is not his own sings through him.
Hillela asks him to tell what he’s singing about; producing him for Sasha; she knows the sort of thing Sasha likes to know.
At once there is difficulty, again, finding words. — Not really a song. Not really. It’s like, you know, it’s a native boy who’s come here to town to work. He’s singing, saying, we come to Jo’burg because we hoping we get something nice, but now we don’t get it. That’s all it’s about.—
When the joint comes round Sasha feels her — Hillela — look to him before she takes a draw. But she needn’t have worried, the weed has been smoked traditionally, long before white kids discovered it, by the local people in the country where he goes to school; he hasn’t ever brought any home only because he doesn’t want to be the one to be blamed for corrupting the two girls. And Hillela doesn’t drink; he sees that.
Hillela was all right that night;—a member of the family, after all, was keeping an eye on her. Sasha had his mother’s car to take her home in. First they delivered a lot of other people to various parts of town. It was late. Pauline was away at the All In African Conference in Maritzburg. Joe and Carole were so deep in the hibernation of the small hours that the house seemed empty; without Pauline all the watchtowers of the spirit were unattended, its drawbridges down. Anything could be let in, nothing would be recorded. Hillela fell asleep in Sasha’s bed, this bed which his cousin and sister used to raid, beating him with pillows. There had been a coup; he had usurped and was on guard in place of his mother. He kept himself awake and measured the passing of darkness by the soft sensation of the girl’s breath spreading on his neck and then drawing back like breath clouding and disappearing on a window pane. When he gauged he must, he separated her warmth from his own, so that once again she became herself, he became himself.