They were sitting on their Glengrove Place balcony just after sunset among the racks of child’s clothes draped to dry. A motorbike ripped the street like a sheet of paper roughly torn.
Both looked up from companionable silence, her mouth slewed, the curve of the brows pencilled on her smooth forehead flown up. It was time for the news; the radio lay on the floor with his beer. But instead he spoke.
— We should move. What d’you think. Have a house.—
— Wha’d’ you mean—
He’s smiling almost patronisingly. — What I say. House—
— We don’t have money.—
— I’m not talking about buying. Renting a house somewhere.—
She half-circled her head, trying to follow his thought.
— One of the suburbs where whites have switched to town house enclosures. A few comrades have found places to rent.—
— Who?—
— Peter Mkize, I think. Isa and Jake.—
— Have you been there?—
— Of course not. But Jake was saying when we were at the Commission on Thursday, they’re renting near a good school where their boys could go.—
— Sindiswa doesn’t need a school. — She laughed and as if in a derisive agreement the child hiccupped over the biscuit she was eating.
— He says the streets are quiet.—
So it is the motorbike that has ripped open the thought.
— Old trees there.—
You never know when you’ve rid yourself of the trappings of outdated life, come back subconsciously: it’s some privileges of the white suburb where he grew up that come to her man now. He doesn’t know — she does — lying in his mind it’s the Reed home whose segregation from reality he has left behind for ever. How could she not understand: right there in the midst of enacting her freedom independence, when one of her brothers, the elder of course, dismisses her opinion of some family conduct directed by custom, she finds what her studies by correspondence would call an atavistic voice of submission replacing the one in her throat.
He is saying as he lifts Sindiswa flying high on the way to bedtime (fathering is something the older generation, white and black, segregated themselves from) — She’ll need a good school nearby soon enough.—
In the dark, withheld hours of quiet, two, three, in the morning, you don’t know what is going on in the mind-rhythm of the one breathing beside you. Maybe there tore through the unconscious an echo of what prompted the idea that sunset a week — some days — ago.
Jake Anderson calls to ask whether he and Isa had been forgotten lately, would their comrades come by on Sunday — whether this was prompted by he who slept against her, she wasn’t told. Anyway, it meant that they bundled Sindiswa and a couple of bottles of wine into the car and took the freeway to an exit unfamiliar. It debouched on streets brooded over by straggly pepper trees drooping their age and what must be jacarandas, but not in bloom, whose roots humped the pavements. The houses all revealed somewhere in their improvements their origin: front stoep, room ranged on either side under rigid tin roof, although some had additions, sliding glass-fronted, somehow achieved in the space of each narrow plot within walls or creeper-covered fences defining the limit between neighbours. Apparently following Jake’s directions Steve slowed at what appeared to be a small red-brick church peaking among the houses, but as he drove past to take a left turn, revealed a swimming pool contrived where the church porch must have been, and three or four young men or perhaps determinedly youthful older ones, in G-string swimming briefs were dancing and tackling one another in the water to the sound of loud reggae. In the small gardens of other houses there were the expected bicycles, garden chairs and barbeque jumble. Jake’s was one of them. The standard stoep had been extended by a pergola sheltered by a grape vine. There was a car and a motorbike in the street at the gate, a party evidently. Well, no, just a few comrades remembering to get together, out of the different paths their lives were taking.
They’re all young but it’s as if they are old men living in the past, there everything happened. Their experience of life defined: now is everything after. Detention cells, the anecdotes from camp in Angola, the misunderstanding with the Cubans who came — so determinately, idealistically brave — to support this Struggle at the risk of their own lives, the clash of personalities, personal habits in the isolation of cadres, all contained by comradeship of danger, the presence of death eavesdropping always close by in the desert, the bush. Peter Mkize is at this Sunday gathering, taking a hand at expertly turning chops and sausages on the charcoal grill under the grape vine, a beer in the other hand. His brother was one of those who were captured and killed, their dismembered bodies burned at a braaivleis by drunken white South African soldiers and thrown into the Komati River, a frontier between this country and Mozambique. That history, may it not come back to him as he flips over the spitting sausages for the comrades.
Now everything is after.
Steve feels a breath of rejection lifting his lungs. What they did then, some of those present much braver and enduring hell beyond anything he risked, anything Jabu, herself black, inevitable victim, took on — it can’t be the sum of life experience? To close away from this he tosses a personal distraction. — Jake, where’s the house you were telling me about. Like to have a look at it.—
— Sure, plenty time. Have another glass of this great wine you brought, while the sun goes down.—
Jabulile smiles, the patronage of intimacy. — He has a sudden urge to move.—
Move on. Yes, let’s move on. — Is it in this street?—
— No, but we’ll still be neighbours. It’s a couple of houses down from where you turned to our street.—
— Before that weird-looking place that looks as if it was a church? There were some guys dancing in a mini pool there.—
— Was a church, this is an old ware Boer suburb, no Kaffirs allowed to come to Jesus at the altar of apartheid, blankes alleen.—
Everyone laughing release from the past. Spread hands thrown up and head dropped in mock responsibility for the guilt of the generation of his mother and father, Pierre du Preez is the one who arrived on the caparisoned motorcycle parked outside, as elaborately accoutred as some royal carriage, flashing flanks, sculptured saddle, festooned with flasks and gauges. He’s an Afrikaner who no more takes offence at the gibes than Mkize does at the outlawed word, Kaffir.
— Who are the frolicking owners who’ve taken over?—
Pierre answers whomever’s question. — It’s one of our gay families.—
More laughter — this is the final blasphemy, housed.
Jake signals to Steve, leaving Isa to take care of the comrades. Jabu in turn signals she is enjoying herself and doesn’t want to be interrupted but Steve’s arm goes gently decisive around her and the three move unnoticed to follow past the church swimming pool to the next street to look at the house with FOR SALE TO LET board on the wall.
— Shit, it seems it’s not a show day, usually at weekends…where’s the agent got to? I hope it hasn’t been snapped up since I told you.—
— Live behind a spiked wall. — Steve hasn’t counted on that.
Through the pattern of the wrought-iron gate they saw something of what is behind it. There is a modest representation of the setting of the house he grew up in: a rockery with aloes in flower, a jacaranda tree, a neat mat of lawn either side of a path to steps and the front door. No clue to the previous inhabitants — oh, except a rusted braaivleis grill and a kennel with half the roof missing.