Age of Iron

No mercy, I thought: a war without mercy, without limits. A good war to miss.

'And when they grow up one day,' I said softly, 'do you think the cruelty will leave them? What kind of parents will they become who were taught that the time of parents is over? Can parents be recreated once the idea of parents has been destroyed within us? They kick and beat a man because he drinks. They set people on fire and laugh while they burn to death. How will they treat their own children? What love will they be capable of? Their hearts are turning to stone before our eyes, and what: do you say? You say, 'This is not my child, this is the white man's child, this is the monster made by the white man.' Is that all you can say? Are you going to blame them on the whites and turn your back?'

'No,' said Florence. 'That is not true. I do not turn my back on my children.' She folded the sheet crosswise and lengthwise, crosswise and lengthwise, the corners falling together neatly, decisively. 'These are good children, they are like iron, we are proud of them.' On the board she spread the first of the pillowslips. I waited for her to say more. But there was no more. She was not interested in debating with me.

Children of iron, I thought. Florence herself, too, not unlike iron. The age of iron. After which conies the age of bronze. How long, how long before the softer ages return in their cycle, the age of clay, the age of earth? A Spartan matron, iron-hearted, bearing warrior-sons for the nation. 'We are proud of them.' We. Come home either with your shield or on your shield.

And I? Where is my heart in all of this? My only child is thousands of miles away, safe; soon I will be smoke and ash; so what is it to me that a time has come when childhood is despised, when children school each other never to smile, never to cry, to raise fists in the air like hammers? Is it truly a time out of time, heaved up out of the earth, misbegotten, monstrous? What, after all, gave birth to the age of iron but the age of granite? Did we not have Voortrekkers, generation after generation of Voortrekkers, grim-faced, tight-lipped Afrikaner children, marching, singing their patriotic hymns, saluting their flag, vowing to die for their fatherland? Ons sal lewe, ons sal sterwe. Are there not still white zealots preaching the old regime of discipline, work, obedience, self-sacrifice, a regime of death, to children some too young to tie their own shoelaces? What a nightmare from beginning to end! The spirit of Geneva triumphant in Africa. Calvin, black-robed, thin-blooded, forever cold, rubbing his hands in the after-world, smiling his wintry smile. Calvin victorious, reborn in the dogmatists and witch-hunters of both armies. How fortunate you are to have put all this behind you!

The other boy, Bheki's friend, arrived on a red bicycle with fat sky-blue tyres. When I went to bed last night the bicycle was in the courtyard, glistening wet in the moonlight. At seven this morning, when I looked out of the window, it was still there. I took the morning pills and had another hour's sleep. I dreamed I was trapped in a crowd. Shapes pushed at me, hit at me, swore in words I could not make out, filthy, full of menace. I hit back, but my arms were a child's arms: foo, foo went my blows, like puffs of air.

I awoke to the sound of raised voices, Florence 's and someone else's. I rang the bell once, twice, three times, four times. At last Florence came.

'Is there someone at the door, Florence?'

Florence picked up the quilt from the floor and folded it over the foot of the bed. 'It is nobody,' she said.

'Did your son's friend stay here last night?'

'Yes. He cannot ride a bicycle in the dark, it is too dangerous. '

'And where did he sleep?'

Florence drew herself up. 'In the garage. Bheki and he slept in the garage.'

'But how did they get into the garage?'

'They opened the window.'

'Can't they ask me before they do something like that?'

A silence. Florence picked up the tray.

'Is this boy going to be living here too, in the garage? Are they sleeping in my car, Florence?'

Florence shook her head. 'I do not know. You must ask them yourself.'

Midday, and the bicycle was still here. Of the boys themselves no sign. But when I went out to the mailbox there was a yellow police van parked across the street with two uniformed men in it, the one on the near side asleep, his cheek against the glass.

I beckoned to the man behind the wheel. The engine came to life, the sleeper sat: up, the van climbed the sidewalk, made a brisk U-turn, and pulled up beside me.

I expected them to get out. But no, there they sat without a word, waiting for me to speak. A cold north-wester was blowing. 1 held my dressing-gown closed at my throat. The radio in the van crackled. ' Vier-drie-agt, ' said a woman's voice. They ignored it. Two young men in blue.

'Can I help you?' I said. 'Are you waiting for someone?'

'Can you help us? I don't know, lady. You tell us, can you help us.'

In my day, I thought, policemen spoke respectfully to ladies. In my day children did not set fire to schools. In my day: a phrase one came across in this day only in Letters to the Editor. Old men and women, trembling with just fury, taking up the pen, weapon of last resort. In my day, now over; in my life, now past.

'If you are looking for those boys, I want you to know they have my permission to be here.'

'Which boys, lady?'

'The boys who are visiting here. The boys from Guguletu. The schoolboys.'

There was a burst of noise from the radio.

'No, lady, I don't know anything about boys from Guguletu. Do you want us to look out for them?'

A glance passed between the two of them, a glance of merriment. I gripped the bar of the gate. The dressing-gown gaped, I felt the cold wind on my throat, my chest. 'In my day,' I said, enunciating clearly each old, discredited, comical word, 'a policeman did not speak to a lady like that.' And I turned my back on them.

The radio squawked like a parrot behind me; or perhaps they made the sound come from it, I would not put it past them. An hour later the yellow van was still outside the gate.

'I really think you should send this other bay home,' I told Florence. 'He is going to get your son into trouble.'

'I cannot send him home,' said Florence. 'If he goes Bheki will go with him. They are like this.' She held up a hand, two fingers intertwined. 'It is safer for them here. In Guguletu there is trouble all the time, and then the police come in and shoot.'

Shooting in Guguletu: whatever Florence knows about it, whatever you know ten thousand miles away, I do not know. In the news that reaches me there is no mention of trouble, of shooting. The land that is presented to me is a land of smiling neighbours.

'If they are here to get away from the fighting then why are the police after them?'

Florence drew a deep breath. Since the birth of the baby there has been an air of barely contained outrage about her. 'You must not ask me, madam,' she declared, 'why the police are coming after the children and chasing them and shooting them and putting them in jail. You must not ask me.'

'Very well,' I said, 'I will not make that mistake again. But I cannot turn my home into a haven for all the children running away from the townships.'

'But why not?' asked Florence, leaning forward: 'Why not?'

I ran a hot bath, undressed, and painfully lowered myself into the water. Why not? I hung my head; the ends of my hair, falling over my face, touched the water; my legs, mottled, blue-veined, stuck out like sticks before me. An old woman, sick and ugly, clawing on to what she has left. The living, impatient of long dyings; the dying, envious of the living. An unsavoury spectacle: may it be over soon.

No bell in the bathroom. I cleared my throat and called: ' Florence!' Bare pipes and white walls gave back a hollow sound. Absurd to imagine that Florence would hear me. And if she heard, why should she come?