— It’s only a few months to November.—
He’s waiting.
— We don’t have to say… — She cups a hand on his arm, a little pressure on the biceps. — Goodbyes would be so disturbing for them eih, and Baba doesn’t like emotional things. I always had to make the partings with mama, and then he’d put me on the bus or train whatever with that sort of salute he has — you know.—
Yes, he sees it; commending the daughter to God, her father has this authority conferred by belief — she’s wrong, there, it’s surely the highest emotion there is, something genuine about it even while you don’t believe in its reality.
— Baba’s got the privilege to buy advance tickets for the World Cup match that will open the stadium that’s going up, great coup for KwaZulu — tickets for the boys’ football team and it’s somehow understood we’ll be there with Gary Elias, make a visit next year.—
He’s drawn a slow breath of time for comprehension.
— I don’t think I have to go back. Before we leave. — She is smiling almost with anticipation that seems to have come, as a gift to her, from her father.
Arm around his neck bending his head to her, breasts nudging, mouth on his. Embracing Australia with him. He knows as the kind of total sense of being which is happiness, that what he has not been quite sure of: he has not forced her against some instinct in her, she is an African as he after all can never be, to become an immigrant in someone else’s country.
The municipal cleaners’ strike had lasted so long the rat guerrillas who exist holed up in every city had multiplied on the abundance, resource of rotting trash in the streets and when the strike ended and the feast was cleared away they began to appear scavenging in the suburbs. In the Suburb. Blessing screamed high and shrill at confrontation with one in her kitchen, Peter thought she was being attacked by a thief who’d somehow breached the electrified security system and he grabbed the Peace handgun as he would his AK-47 back in the Struggle.
On the first day of August telecommunications workers began a strike of 40,000 union members. The workers at the zoo in the capital city Pretoria were on strike; local animal lovers called upon themselves to help feed the animals and clean cages. A metropolitan railway strike continues. The union says the offer they’ve rejected would have resulted in members losing pay because overtime would be cut. In some provinces no trains to get other workers to their work; where there are a few manned by scabs a commuter has died and four were injured, falling in the crush from packed trains.
As if turning momentarily in the subconscious away from all this — the Suburb’s place in citizenship responsibility, comradely identification with workers existing on no-work-no-pay; and unexpected new middle-class frustration felt at disruption of telecommunications — Marc suddenly tells what’s come up. The sale of the house arrangement. He’s speaking as if from a lost note scribbled during an unwelcome interruption. — The guy’s chickened out. Our deal’s off, I’m sure he’s lying about a change in his life, the partner, some hint — he’s pissed off and he’s going to forget the idea of a move to the Suburb.—
What can he say — giving her the news, such as it is in comparison with the news within which, still here, they are living. A house to vacate. Sell. The shacks of how many homeless thousands: no market value upfront. You don’t have to say it — her brisk silence, getting up, jutting the chair from her, the pause with which she stays herself as she strides to the door, turns to him with a lift of shoulders, is admission and defiance for them both. The TV screen is filled with footage that could have been that night’s or last night’s reportage, same thing, heaving arms thrust as weapons of bone and flesh against batons and guns.
Later she is her pragmatic self: the house must go public, handled by an estate agent for possession after they are in Australia. No rent-paying clauses. There will be a board outside, now, For Sale. She’s right. Departure. It can’t be a Suburb comrades matter.
While he shaves and she’s in the bath next morning he, also, is practical. — What about the money. You know we can’t transfer the lot.—
She bloats a sponge with suds and draws it the length of her lovely thigh, bends the knee up out of the water and carries the gesture down the muscle of her calf. — The Centre could administer it with my father. I think they’d do that, for me…One of my comrades. For use when Gary Elias comes. When there’s a visit…any of us.—
Zuma on the poster.
KwaZulu. The man standing apart, at the entrance to the house unlike any in the community of the Elder of the church where the Gumede clan have served and been honoured for generations, the headmaster whose faith in education, achieved under strict discipline the best results in the province against a national record of dropouts and failures. — He’d be willing? — He’ll take it on. — Although he hasn’t been asked: she is the daughter.
She is right, her Baba doesn’t oppose, no matter how much he must be in pain against it within the fundament of his being, his identity, ancestral and present — that she is through her identity with her generation’s experience of Struggle, and her educational opportunities bringing understanding of the existence of Struggle throughout the world — a free citizen of the world. She fought for liberation of her people. It must be granted as earned that she does not have to take on the present Struggle, in place of promises, promises, the better life for all.
Experience in the world outside may make her think differently. White kept choice to itself, Black has choice now.
They don’t make love much these days — or rather nights, too many things to complete, do. It’s not premature, what they decide must be taken has to be set aside in the mind, from what is left behind. The bulk of their lives, what they decide must be taken will have to go by sea and that means well in advance, the road transport to port in Durban, the ship in a time warp of one of Captain Cook’s voyages, crossing the Indian Ocean. What each of the four — Jabu, Steve, Sindi, Gary Elias — find can’t be left behind is an insight to what they don’t know about each other. Gary Elias doesn’t want to take his racing bicycle, pride of his last birthday, where somehow has he got the idea that there’ll be a better model waiting Over There? Sindiswa insists that the version of the ancient Greek statue of Antigone, high and heavy, carved by the art students at Aristotle and presented to her in honour of the performance, must be cargo, and Jabu for some reason that doesn’t match her lack of attachments to objects so easy to transport, such as elegant KwaZulu baskets, includes a hairdryer — must be a special type? He and she go through the shelves of their books (there’s the shelf where she came upon his cuttings, Australia) setting aside the essential while dumping others to be given to the university libraries. There was the sacrifice of some law volumes, apocryphal here, famous so-and-so against such-and-such, but unlikely to be of interest anywhere else, and education reports in the same category. Before throwing away: a last look at reports of a university where white students pissed in a stew and forced four black women and a black man, cleaners at the student hostel, to eat it. They’ve apologised since. What’s left behind is that no one so far has brought to the courts the case of the cleaners to receive justice as victims.
There was nothing, nothing he wanted that it is possible to transport.
‘Our members are determined as hell. End apartheid wage gap, black workers are still earning lowest pay.’ Now the post offices stay-away, that euphemism for strike.
Who cares, everybody has email, SMS, Facebook, who needs some face behind the post-office counter. Metro rail not running, clinics closed, patients not receiving their HIV and AIDS antiretrovirals, threat of darkness as the National Treasury refuses to give money to meet claims of electricity workers: people live with all that. The newspaper falls and slides rustling under the bed.