As is the case for many academics, Lillian’s empathy gland appeared to have been severed at birth. She just didn’t have that thing a person needs to get along with other people. In her pre-life there were plenty of opportunities for her to fall into books and colleges and universities and working groups designed to accommodate such deficiencies. Now, her Achilles heel was painful to us all. We were forced to endure the ongoing pain of her stilted contact, her addiction to factual accuracy and her wont for entering into meaningless verbal conflict. And, she and I were the only whites. The two without a single indigenous tongue. We were thus often circumstantially lumped together on the outskirts of conversations whose meaning we could only guess at.
Over the years at Mlungu’s I had developed my tsotsitaal skills just enough to build the bridges I needed between people and conversations. I could greet and laugh and joke colloquially. I could ask for a rephrase. I could crack a joke at my own expense.
I had, of course, like most whites, lived a full life with people carrying out private conversations in front of me. I knew how to keep a steady face and pretend not to be bothered. In fact, most of the time I truly wasn’t bothered, even when I was clearly the subject. Call it a genetically inherited trait.
Lillian lacked such a fortunate inheritance and her resentment at being cut out of conversations – and, even worse, becoming the subject of them – grew. She fretted constantly: over the quality of the water, over potential snakes in the yard, over the future and the past, over the idea of never being able to return to her homeland. And over language. The conversations drove her a little bit more nutty every time they happened. She launched several formal protests, gathering us together as a group to discuss her grievances and attempting one-on-one interventions with each of us in turn. She never seemed to realise that her attempts merely dribbled steady fuel onto the fire.
‘You seriously want us to stop speaking our language because you can’t follow the conversation?’ Babalwa mocked her openly. ‘Nxa!’ Laughter.
‘But Lillian, look at your fellow mlungu here,’ Fats climbed in. ‘He doesn’t give a shit – and we mock him in front of his face all day!’
‘Hayi suka, you poes.’ I did my best to roll with it. ‘I’m not as clever as I think I am, but I’m not as stupid as I look.’
‘See?’ Javas added, patting Lillian patronisingly on the arm. ‘All you need is to do is hint that you might be picking up a few words. Then everyone will be more careful. It’s a masquerade, darling. Everyone in Africa must play.’
It was a drinks session around the pool. An attempt at normality. Pool furniture and gin and tonics. The booze had blown the seal on Lillian’s pressure cooker and she was taking the fight to Fats via a thinly linked series of bleats about respect and human rights. The backfire was long and painful, but Lillian was nothing if not a fighter; well over an hour passed before she left to cry in her room.
The conversation spilled over as she left, a hodgepodge of tsotsitaal, isiZulu, English, Afrikaans, isiXhosa and Sesotho. I shifted in my pool chair, wishing it would stop.
‘Just for the record, boss.’ Gerald cracked a rare smile. ‘We’re saying that the thing about good mlungus is they know that they don’t know, and will admit it. That’s all anyone wants anyway.’
‘Sho, skhokho. Sho.’ I raised my gin in mock salute.
Andile trotted over drunkenly and gave me a hug, Javas rattled off an incomprehensible insult and we all got drunk while Lillian cried.
I was free.
But only just.
The next day Lillian, puffy-eyed and wary, enlisted Gerald, Teboho and me to make a trip with her to the CSIR in Pretoria in an attempt to leapfrog the stalled flight-simulator/drone mission. Her theory was that somewhere on the CSIR campus we would find the kind of high-end simulator software required for her to get the fuck out of Africa. Something we could either dump onto a hard drive or just bring back in its box. Or, at least, we would locate the silver bullet needed to get the drones going.
The CSIR consisted of acres of carefully cultivated indigenous bush scrub with hints of concrete peeking out at strange, unexpected angles. The front gate was a typically South African façade, ten metres high and made out of the stuff they protect gold with. A face-brick security check-in building on the left held aloft a disproportionately large Council for Industrial and Scientific Research sign, while a smaller guard-point building between the entry and exit gates held up its own sign. While the rest of us tried to plot an entrance strategy, Gerald was circling the complex in a bakkie. He soon skidded back up to the front entrance. ‘Got it,’ he said, leaning out the driver’s window. ‘Two hundred metres up from here. A good spot. We can get the bakkies in. There’s an old path. Take about half an hour to cut.’
Teboho said, ‘Thank God for men who can do shit.’
We scraped noisily through Gerald’s freshly cut fence holes, ripping up the paintwork on the side of the vehicles, and then drove up a small hill into thick bush and out the other side over what used to be a verge surrounding the roads that linked the various CSIR units. We parked facing each other around the main traffic circle. Gerald jumped out of his bakkie, followed by Lillian. Tebza and I just shouted from our driver’s seats.
Lillian took charge. ‘I guess the first thing would be to follow the road signs?’ She issued the command as a question.
‘Anyone see a sign for flight simulators?’ Tebza asked, deadpan.
‘How ’bout Defence, Peace, Safety and Security?’ I asked, only half joking. ‘Buildings 11, 12 and 13.’
‘Biosciences.’
‘Materials Sciences and Manufacturing.’
‘Department of Science and Technology.’
We called them out one by one, in turn, hopefully. As if the answer would echo back to us.
Lacking logical options, we decided on Science and Technology.
Water features, paths, carports, pot plants and building entrances had all been carefully cocooned in trees and flowers and indigenous semi-forest. Each day, no doubt, twenty or thirty gardeners would have set to with their mowers and clippers to keep the frame in place and the buildings functionally foregrounded. Now, a year’s worth of cutting back having gone by, the bush was the foreground. Tendrils and branches and leaves all stretched towards each other, relentless in their quest to convene across the paths, roads and walkways. Grass climbed up the base of the signs, branches reached for windows and doors. The road signs and metal sculptures of miners stood tall, but the revolution grew, unstoppable, at their feet.
‘How long, you think, before everything is gone?’ Tebza asked no one in particular. ‘A year? Two?’
‘About a year,’ offered Lillian authoritatively. ‘Can’t see us being able to hack our way around much after a year. Maybe only the bigger buildings, with enough equipment.’
Gerald grunted and walked to the rusted metal sculptures of Marikana miners, scratching his back awkwardly through his golf shirt. Lillian, Tebza and I stood facing building 52. The Department of Science and Technology.
‘Roy, consider this.’ Gerald was hunched over a miner’s foot, pulling a vine loose from the rusted boot of one the five central figures – a group which watched over a central paved memorial installation of plaques and pictures describing the Marikana killings and how they impacted the South African mining industry and society, details quaintly out of context to us now. He showed me the head of a thick organic rope. It was flat and spiked, each spike potentially a new rope of its own. ‘I’ve always loved this thing, this plant,’ he said. ‘It sends out these shooters, these flat things. They move fast, man, metres in a week. You’ll see, when we come back again this will have moved on and on and on. Maybe to another structure or just around the leg. Whatever’s easiest I suppose. It’s amazing, nè? ’Cause the rest of it, the bush, is not flat like this thing. It’s normal. It’s like this part is a special advanced force. An advancing force. Very similar to the army.’