The couple giving the dinner were Americans, decent people teaching on local contract — which is not munificent — at the university. He was biology and Margaret was setting up a pharmacy curriculum, if I remember. They had been there a few years. They had two junior high age boys in a boarding school in Johannesburg. They felt suitably guilty about it, but they had looked at the alternatives in Botswana and decided it was the only fair choice they could make for the boys, who would be going on in science back home someday, the usual.
Dinner was virtually served. Several of us were commiserating Margaret, who was upset. A couple of days earlier she had picked up the Rand Daily Mail and lo there was a story about St. Stithian’s, the boarding school, to wit, the police had organized a ratissage to drive some squatters out of a wooded area on the school property, with dogs and clubs and all the standard paraphernalia, and they had included boys from the upper forms, including the sons of our hosts. So it had been a tear-stained couple of days and there had been violent phone calls to the school, and so on. It would never happen again. But the boys were going to stay at St. Stithian’s.
Hereupon Martin joined us, a samoosa half-raised to his mouth. He hadn’t heard about the incident. He put the samoosa down.
I admired the way he approached the thing. First he made sure he had all the details right, and in particular that the boys were not going to be withdrawn. Then he said You will have to excuse me. The maid came in to say dinner was served just as he walked out. Margaret’s husband tried to fix things by saying they might do something next term, if they could think of something, and reminded us how impossible it had been when they tried correspondence school for the boys. But Martin had picked up his daypack and was gone.
The only scene like it I had been through involved a dinner destroyed when a guy left abruptly as some veterans of therapy were all agreeing how much they hated their parents. He was European and had apparently never mentioned to anyone present that his parents had died in a concentration camp. It was no help, but anyway I followed Martin out into the street. May I stride with you? I asked him when I caught up with him.
So then we began bantering. He was very cockney, to my ear. I told him that as a South African male he was better off avoiding a meal that was too fatty anyway. They’re at hugely high risk for heart attack, genetically. He said he knew that South African males up to age forty-five had the world’s highest coronary rate but that his explanation was different to mine, as he put it, he would bet. He said Did you know the rate in South African men is the same to the second decimal as the rate for prison guards as a class around the world, and what does that say to you? I said I wouldn’t deign to reply, it was so obvious. Then I asked him if he knew that the best gene pool against coronaries was living right next door to the Boers in the form of the Bantus and especially the southern Sotho. I mentioned studies showing that a tendency to early coronaries had been concentrated in the Boers by inbreeding but that all around, you had the Bantu tribes, with the lowest coronary rates in the world. Only apartheid stood between them. We agreed on the irony of it alclass="underline" Boer and Bantu, made for each other. I can eat anything, he said, not being a Boer. He was from Natal. His position was that he was responsible for my leaving the dinner, so he would take me to his place and feed me. He knew I entirely understood why he’d felt he had had to leave.
His place, his one-room cement hut, was in a poor neighborhood but not the worst. He had his own standpipe in the yard and his own outhouse. He had a paraffin stove, used mainly to burn letters and documents. He had almost no chattels. Everything had to be kept to the minimum, so that he could decamp instantly and so that there would be nothing in the place he would ever have to come back for. This was another world to me. He was a musicologist. He had taken up the recorder, but only because it was portable. He could play beautifully. His real instrument was the viola da gamba. This whole time we were getting acquainted he was looking for food to serve us, including stepping out to check with his impoverished neighbors to see if they could lend him something when he discovered he had nothing except an ancient orange and two cans of pilchards. This was a man who loved to talk. We fascinated each other. Finally he permitted me to take him to a restaurant — only the most nominal, poorest, most working-class restaurant would do — where we talked endlessly some more. It emerged that he had conflicted feelings toward Americans, which I discovered my working-class origins had a slightly mollifying effect on. I highlighted them and it was all right. He came back with me to my place.
My Mortal Life
I could never get a coherent relationship going with Martin. I wanted to. I tried different modes with him. I tried just making his life more normal and less protean. He would stay over with me sometimes for as long as three days. But even then the clandestine side of his life would superpose itself and he would have to slip off to meet someone in the dead of night or go somewhere. I was helpful to him in small ways. For instance, right away I discovered he was afraid he was losing his hearing, a tragedy for somebody who expects to be second viola in the All Races National Symphony someday in a reborn South Africa. It occurred to me that he was having an earwax buildup, which is mostly a thing of the past for people who regularly take hot baths and showers. But in Bontleng he was essentially reduced to sponge baths, even though he was methodical about them. I purged his ears with Debrox and he was overcome with the result.
We could have been serious. It was seductive that he enjoyed sex with me so much. He could be lyrical about my breasts. He was not widely experienced. If he ever got to a normal weight he was going to be striking rather than alarming. We were both starved for talk. I admired him for what he was doing. He was enrolled in a war against something that was totally evil, and he was fighting in a disinterested way — because he was doing it all for his black countrymen, a third party. He thought of himself as a realist and was the first to say he expected that even the whites with the best credentials would go into a period of eclipse once there was majority rule. The question of what I was doing with my life kept coming up by implication more and more overtly.
This reminds me that later Denoon would say there were only two completely self-justifying occupations in the contemporary world that he had personally run into: one was fighting the Christian fascists of South Africa and the other was being a fireman, because you can never have the slightest doubt that you’re doing something totally socially valuable by pulling people out of burning buildings. Medicine he excluded because people got rich doing it, and anybody who lived a life of service to the church — say in a ghetto or medical mission — also got excluded because ultimately their work was acquisitive and inwardly intended to increase the temporal power of their particular denomination. He said firemen were the only people he knew with no self-doubt and that they went into their vocation knowing they had a thirty percent likelihood of ending up with a damaged spinal column.