He is a teacher, I thought: that is why he speaks so well. What he is doing to me he has practised in the classroom. It is the trick one uses to make one's own answer seem to come from the child. Ventriloquism, the legacy of Socrates, as oppressive in Africa as it was in Athens.
I glanced around the ring of spectators. Were they hostile? There was no hostility I could detect. They were merely waiting for me to say my part.
'There are many things I am sure I could say, Mr Thabane,' I said. 'But then they must truly come from me. When one speaks under duress – you should know this – one rarely speaks thr truth.'
He was going to respond, but I stopped him.
'Wait. Give me a minute. I am not evading your question. There are terrible things going on here. But what I think of them I must say in my own way. '
'Then let us hear what you have to say! We are listening! We are waiting!' He raised his hands for silence. The crowd murmured approval.
'These are terrible sights,' I repeated, faltering. 'They are to be condemned. But I cannot denounce them in other people's words. I must find my own words, from myself. Otherwise it is not the rruth. That is all I can say now.'
'This woman talks shit,' said a man in the crowd. He looked around. 'Shit,' he said. No one contradicted Mm. Already some were drifting away.
'Yes,' I said, speaking directly to him- 'you are right, what you say is true.'
He gave me a look as if I were mad.
'But what do you expect?' I went on. 'To speak of this' -I waved a hand over the bush, the smoke, the filth littering the path – 'you would need the tongue of a god.'
'Shit,' he said again, challenging me.
Mr Thabane turned and walked off. I trailed behind him. The crowd parted. In a minute the boy passed me, hurrying. Then the car came in sight.
'It is a Hillman, your car, isn't it,' said Mr Thabane. 'There can't be many left on the roads.'
I was surprised. After what had passed I thought there was a line drawn between us. But he seemed to bear no grudge.
'From the time when British was Best,' I replied. 'I am sorry if I do not make sense. '
He ignored the apology, if that is what it was. 'Was British ever best?' he asked.
'No, of course not. It was just a slogan for a while after the War. You won't remember, you were too young.'
'I was born in 1943,' he said. 'I'm forty-three. Don't you believe me?' He turned, offering me his neat good looks. Vain; but an appealing vanity.
I pulled the starter. The battery was dead. Mr Thabane and the boy got out and pushed, struggling for a footing in the sand. At last the engine caught. 'Go straight,' said the boy. I obeyed.
'Are you a teacher?' I asked Mr Thabane.
'I was a teacher. But I have left the profession temporarily. Till better times arrive. At present I sell shoes.'
'And you?' I asked the boy.
He mumbled something I did not hear.
'He is an unemployed youth,' said Mr Thabane. 'Are you not?'
The boy smiled selfconsciously. 'Turn here, just after the shops,' he said.
Alone in the wilderness stood a row of three little shops, gutted, scorched.' BHAWOODIEN CASH STORE, said the one sign still legible.
'From long ago,' said Mr Thabane. 'From last year.'
We had come out on a broad dirt road. To our left stood a cluster of houses, proper houses, with brick walls and asbestos roofs and chimneys. Among them, around them, stretching into the distance across the flats, were squatter shacks.
'That building,' said the boy, pointing ahead.
It was a long, low building, a hall or school perhaps, surrounded by a mesh fence. But great lengths of the fence had been trampled down, and of the building itself only the smoke-blackened walls were still standing. In front of it a crowd had gathered. Faces turned to watch the Hillman's approach.
'Shall I switch off?' I said.
'You can switch off, there is nothing to be afraid of,' said Mr Thabane.
'I am not afraid, ' I said. Was it true? In a sense, yes; or at least, after the episode in the bush, I cared less what happened to me.
'There is no need to be afraid anyway,' he continued smoothly: 'your boys are here to protect you.' And he pointed.
I saw them then, further down the road: three khaki-brown troop-carriers almost merging into the trees, and, outlined against the sky, helmeted heads.
'In case you were thinking,' he concluded, 'that this was just a quarrel among blacks, a spot of faction-fighting. Look: there is my sister.'
My sister he called her, not: Florence. Perhaps I alone in all the world called her Florence. Called her by an alias. Now I was on ground where, people were revealed in their true names.
'She stood with her back to the wall, sheltering from the rain: a sober, respectable woman in a burgundy coat and white knitted cap. We threaded our way toward her. Though she gave no sign, I was sure she saw me. ' Florence!' I called. She looked up dully. 'Have you found him?'
She nodded toward the gutted interior, then turned away, not greeting me. Mr Thabane began to push past the throng in the entranceway. Embarrassed, I waited. People milled past, skirting me as though I were bad luck.
A girl in an apple-green school tunic advanced on me, her hand raised as if to give me a slap. I flinched, but it was only in play. Or perhaps I should say: she forbore from actually striking.
'I think you should look too,' said Mr Thabane, re-emerging, breathing fast. He went over to Florence and took her in his arms. Lifting her glasses aside, she put her head on his shoulder and burst into tears.
The inside of the hall was a mess of rubble and charred beams. Against the far wall, shielded from the worst: of the rain, were five bodies neatly laid out. The body in the middle was that of Florence 's Bheki. He still wore the grey flannel trousers, white shirt and maroon pullover of his school, but his feet were bare. His eyes were open and staring, his mouth open too. The rain had been beating on him for hours, on him and his comrades, not only here but wherever they had been when they met their deaths; their clothes, their very hair, had a flattened, dead look. In the corners of his eyes there were grains of sand. There was sand in his mouth.
Someone was tugging my arm. Dazed, I looked down at a little girl with wide, solemn eyes. 'Sister,' she said, 'sister,' but then did not know how to go on.
'She is asking, are you one of the sisters?' explained a woman, smiling benignly.
I did not want to be drawn away, not now. I shook my head.
'She means, are you one of the sisters from the Catholic Church,' said the woman. 'No,' she went on, speaking to the child in English, 'she is not one of the sisters.' Gently she unlocked the child's fingers from my sleeve.
Florence was surrounded by a press of people.
'Must they lie there in the rain?' I asked Mr Thabane.
'Yes, they must lie there. So that everyone can see. '
'But who did it?'
I was shaking: shivers ran up and down my body, my hands trembled. I thought of the boy's open eyes. I thought:
What did he see as his last sight on earth? I thought: This is the worst thing I have witnessed in my life. And I thought: Now my eyes are open and I can never close them again.
'Who did it?' said Mr Thabane. 'If you want to dig the bullets out of their bodies, you are welcome. But I will tell you in advance what you will find. 'Made in South Africa. SABS Approved.' That is what you will find.'
'Please listen to me,' I said. 'I am not indifferent to this… this war. How can I be? No bars are thick enough, to keep it out.' I felt like crying; but here, beside Florence, what right had I? 'It lives inside me and I live inside it,' I whispered.
Mr Thabane shrugged impatiently. His look had grown uglier. No doubt I grow uglier too by the day. Metamorphosis, that thickens our speech, dulls our feelings, turns us into beasts. Where on these shores does the herb grow that will preserve us from it?