I said, ‘But this is Africa. It’s so far from Lithuania. You could have gone to Britain.’
‘The weather sucks there.’
Sniffing at Britain’s quality of life the climate-conscious Lithuanian émigrés had landed in Johannesburg.
‘My father is Jewish, my mother is Lithuanian,’ Edward said. ‘I would not go to Israel with all their problems, but even if I could they wouldn’t want me. In Israel I’m a Lithuanian, everywhere else I’m a Jew. Jewishness comes from your mother. Ha! My mother is nothing!’
I still didn’t understand why they had chosen South Africa. He explained that it took ten years to get a US visa, but they found it very easy to secure visas and work permits for South Africa. ‘And here if you work you can make money, You can buy things. I want to own things.’
‘Such as?’
‘Clothes. A car. A stereo.’
South Africa, for many people a wilderness of wild animals and high desert and nationalistic Africans, represented to Edward the Lithuanian a modern world of accessible material culture. As others traveled to South Africa to see gnus, he had come for the stereo systems. A hominid in search of glittery objects.
‘I do day trading on the stock market in the day. I drive a cab at night. Okay, the market is down right now but for three years we made money. The Nasdaq people who are complaining should shut up — they made a lot of money.’
Edward, who was unmarried, said he had no African friends, did not speak Afrikaans or any African language. There are eleven official languages in South Africa.
The Bulgarian whom I met in Johannesburg — Dave the electronics expert — was in his mid-thirties and small and pale; and he too had Edward’s look of suspicion. He had come from Sofia in 1991 and had a similar story to telclass="underline" two jobs, his main one fixing and reconditioning electronic contraptions, like TVs and VCRs. He spoke only English and Bulgarian, had not been outside of Johannesburg and knew no Africans well. His two kids went to a private school in which there were a few African students. He said with satisfaction, ‘The school fees keep most blacks out.’
Like Edward he liked the South African weather, but he wasn’t happy about the economy.
‘It’s going to get worse here, sure,’ Dave said. ‘I think I have a hundred thousand in US dollars — my flat, my car, my things. When the rand gets to ten to the dollar I will go away. I don’t know where. Not Canada — I don’t like the weather. Maybe the States, if I can live in California.’
He had no notion of South African history, not even recent events. He shook his head doubtfully when I talked about it. When I mentioned that the fiercest and most successful of the South African political activists had been Communists he began to rave.
‘Ha! They must have had mental instability!’ Dave said. ‘If you live in a democratic country and you are a communist there is something wrong with your mind. You have to be crazy.’
I said, ‘But this wasn’t a democratic country before 1994. That’s when they had their first free election.’
‘It was all right before — everyone says so.’
That cynical view, that apartheid was preferable to a multi-racial society, was still held by some skeptics, even Africans. But on the whole they tended to be marginalized people, the Boers, the Khoisan, or the mixed-race people known as ‘coloreds’, or migrants from nearby countries.
One Suthu, Solly from Lesotho, said, ‘My parents came here from Maseru. My father worked on farms. Sometimes he had work, sometimes none. He went from farm to farm. It was not an easy life, but it was better than this.’
I questioned this: The life of a migrant farm laborer under apartheid was better than a worker with a secure job in free South Africa?
‘It was better,’ Solly said in a don’t-argue-with-me tone. ‘There is too much crime. I see it every day. I would like to go, but where? The white government was better!’
‘In what way?’
‘Not as much crime. Not as much litter,’ Solly said. ‘I am not saying this because you have a white face. It is true — the white government was better. Now I don’t know what to do.’
Speaking to people at random I was constantly meeting strangers and émigrés, people who regarded Johannesburg with a mixture of disgust and wonderment. Nearly all of them had come to make money, and now that the work had begun to dry up they were seriously questioning whether to stay. But even to many of the whites who were old-timers living here seemed to them like living in a foreign country. I had the notion that for many whites black South Africa was a foreign land that they had only recently begun to inhabit, and that it took some getting used to.
‘We’re economic prisoners,’ one white man told me. He owned his own small business. ‘We can’t afford to go anywhere else.’
But when I pressed him, he said that he really didn’t want to go anywhere else. He was shocked, he said, by how little the white government had done over many decades to educate Africans. Like everyone else he said that crime was South Africa’s worst problem. And the police were part of the problem.
‘During the apartheid era the police were horrible,’ he said. ‘They arrested people for no reason — for being in a white area, for not having an ID card. They killed people, they tortured people, they were unfair. No one respected them. Now this whole past of theirs has come back to bite them on the ass.’
One of my taxi drivers was a Portuguese man who had fled to Spain from Portugal in the 1960s, to Mozambique from Spain in the 1970s, then to South Africa from Mozambique in the 1980s. He had run out of countries to flee to. ‘Because of the EU, Portugal is full of foreigners.’ He said he thought South Africa had become a dismal place.
I said, ‘This isn’t a Third World country.’
‘Not yet,’ he said, and winked at me in the rear-view mirror.
We were rolling down a tree-lined street in a pretty part of Johannesburg, known as Parktown West. The garden walls were whitewashed and high, concealing each premises, though inside each one a big solid house loomed. On most gates, with the house number was the name of an alarm company and the words Armed Response. It could have been Bel-Air or Malibu.
‘But if you live on this street you never have worries,’ the driver said.
That was presumptuous, because Nadine Gordimer lived here, and she had known plenty of anxiety in her seventy-seven years in South Africa. She was a Johannesburger to her fingertips having been born in Springs, a mining town, only twenty-five miles from this pretty house in Parktown. She was of Latvian descent, through her father, who had left Riga and come to South Africa at the age of thirteen — alone — to escape Tsarist pogroms in an earlier wave of immigration. That boy, her father, had come to find his brother. He had no trade. He became a watch-mender, he went from town to town in the Transvaal tinkering with watches. Later he set up business selling watches and ultimately trinkets, gee-gaws, wedding rings, and jewelry in the gold-mining town of Springs. Nadine had written about her father in ‘My Father Leaves Home,’ a story in Jump.
I had valued her writing from my first reading, but I had discovered her only in the 1960s and she had been writing since the late 1940s. She had begun writing at the age of fifteen; as a 24-year-old she had begun publishing in The New Yorker. Her first story, ‘A Watcher of the Dead,’ is a beautifully observed tale of the conflict between the impulses of a daughter’s love and the demands of ritual, in this case a Jewish funeral in Johannesburg.
Very early in her writing career, Nadine had marked out her emotional territory — the passionate relations between men and women; and her geography — settlers’ South Africa, Mozambique, and Rhodesia, as well as the much more foreign and forbidden territory of the African village and the black township. She had never ceased to be political in a wide sense. In her first collection of stories, The Soft Voice of the Serpent (1952), these territories were represented, the lovers traveling on the road to Lourenco Marques in ‘The End of the Tunnel,’ the mismatched couple in ‘The Train from Rhodesia,’ the woman in ‘The Defeated,’ who begins her story, ‘My mother did not want me to go near the Concession stores because they smelled, and were dirty, and the natives spat tuberculosis germs into the dust. She said it was no place for little girls/.’ In that last story, the little girl goes to the African store and discovers vitality and sadness.