Jabu appeared with bedding under her arm. — Steve’ll show where you’ll sleep, it’s not part of the house but there’s a bathroom and so on. If you need anything…Supper’ll be late we don’t hurry when there’s no school next day.—
In the brief argot of domestic intimacy — That camp bed, when we went with the Dolphins to the Drakensberg — oh Gary Elias knows where you put it, Gary?—
And then as he leads the stranger out to Wethu’s chicken-house cottage. — Shouldn’t you slip him some clothes, your jeans’ll be best, he’s smaller than you but you wear them tight they won’t be much too big…that shopping bag all he has with him.—
Gary Elias and Njabulo are rounded up by her to find the dismantled camp bed, release its bandy wooden legs in flourishing style and stretch the canvas its length. Gary Elias is roused to a grievance — When can we go camping again, we never go any more. — Any more. Not the distracted moment for a father to remind him what he’s been told, there’s another wilderness of bush Over There; just as the bush that has been his adventure holiday place here is not the Angolan desert, bush, where his mother and father were in the Struggle. So what. That the boy, their boy, my boy, knows the bush as happy adventure, that’s a small gain — in the better life that hasn’t reached people in the shacks, so that they need to defend with fire and panga possession of the scraps of the survival they can’t share.
Over supper for which Wethu had been chopping carrots and celery for the salad everyone listened to stories, accounts of Zimbabwe. When you are twice displaced — first the long rough trial of escape from conflict and hunger bringing your country to ruin, then rejection in a brother country — perhaps it’s a need of unconscious return to sanity symbolic of what was at home — before. What doesn’t exist. Any more. There was the dragged-on palaver over independence and then the fighting years, the battle of the Smith imperialists (that’s the label for them freedom fighters learned) against the African people. But always there was the village with the Christian Brothers school, good teachers, there was the river where the uncles and grandfathers taught you to fish, there was the stick-fighting contest to make men of you, there were the drinking parties and the very old men who told of fighting lions way back. Before, before. There’s the motorbike bought from the white farmer with cash saved, two years’ work on the cattle farm — that’s another skill along with the variety of employments; he’s expert at culling. And he’s explicit, for Gary Elias, on what this means. Wethu ignored him, the Suburb is a place where many friends from the working lives of Baba’s educated daughter, a lawyer, and Steve, a teacher at a university, are brought to this house from time to time. Sindi was spending the night with a schoolfriend, she’d be given the news of the arrival if Wethu could get in first, Sunday morning on return from early church service. Jabu: responsive to the man as if taking part in village occasions he described; and when he spoke of Mugabe, asking pointed questions he evaded. Her lawyerly habit of going into areas of witness confusion between — fear? Residual loyalty in the victim to the power that had turned against its own constituency flesh? She is matter-of-fact. As the meal ended she asked whether the guest wanted to call anyone, perhaps a cell phone was missing in the essentials of the shopping bag and — as her man would be expected to assure — was the geyser in Wethu’s place functioning, hot water for the bath. There was a cheerful goodnight exchange, now in isiZulu, she chanced apparently rightly that in three years the man would have picked up enough of that most widely spoken of many languages in his workplace.
He glances about and picks up the headgear, puts it on his head.
In that place of discarding the happenings of a day along with jeans and underwear. — He said nothing to you about what he left behind in the shack.—
— What d’you mean.—
— There’s a girl with a baby, she suddenly found a photograph pushed it at him for the bag, in tears.—
— Her father’ll take care of them. Her, the baby. — She knows that. He knows that. It’s the circumstances of generations in KwaZulu, Baba’s village and thousands of villages, the eternity of colonialism, doesn’t matter whose, the recency of its apartheid evolution, Bantustans, and its circumstance now in freedom. You have to eat. The men go off to the industries, the factory farms of chickens, wine, and Baba and magogo are left with care of the wives and children conceived when the men come home on leave, with money. It’s their emigration. She’s known it; this form, all through her childhood, her companions grew up in the absence of fathers. Even though she was by chance the exception, her father: the headmaster, in place.
The present is a consequence of the past.
Including the newspaper cuttings she found.
She and he have the same intense conception of horror at the degradation to violence people have descended against Zimbabweans. She, he — poverty is what it’s about, again and again, reality that’s avoided under the useful ‘xenophobia’. If they didn’t share this as they do within them their lives in the Struggle, their ultimate relation in love with one another wouldn’t remain intact.
He sees now with this disaster come indoors to them right in the Suburb, enclave of human variety where at last race, colour, gender are simply communal, that she has an ancestral surety he hasn’t, never will. They—hers—have known and know how to survive what his antecedents never experienced.
The end product of colonial masters in Africa even if he’s redeemed himself in Umkhonto.
If he’d been born a generation earlier and in Europe, that capillary thread of Jewish blood from — a maternal grandmother was it — could have resulted for him in that other kind of ancestral surety, known and knowing how to survive escape extinction, Holocaust.
All this crowds, remote, out of mind, what is going to happen is happening in the present to everyone everywhere, the whole planet. Nature’s holocaust coming with the effects of pollution. And the result of this human self-destruction, or — some scientists/philosophers say, a recurring phenomenon over the existence of planet Earth — climate change to destroy the resources of life.
The man in Wethu’s chicken-coop cottage is also of course a ward of Suburb comrades — some answer against the inevitable shame and revulsion the impact of ‘xenophobia’ his situation brings among them. At least the humiliation of charity can be relieved while he is there — the idea Blessing might give him some sort of job in her catering venture, which is doing rather well, was offered — and then realised by everyone as unsafe for him, among her staff there could be resentment at a Zimbabwean being employed when they had brothers and sisters out of work. The Dolphins while assuring him he’d be welcome to swim but brrr water was still too early spring cold, asked if he would be willing to help with the clean-out of the pool they did at this time of year, and he was enabled to earn something from joining this task with them. Isa had put off the need to have two shabby rooms painted and here was the opportunity of employing someone to do it. No one wanted shelter to be a handout; though when Jabu passed Albert a clip of banknotes in concern of needs of the baby whose photograph he had among his few essentials, he took the money with a curt thank you of something owed. Wethu did not object to his occupying, for the time being, her cottage, while keeping him aware that this was by her permission; although—that night — she hadn’t been asked by Jabu. She took for granted he’d take his evening meal with him from the kitchen to his borrowed quarters although he had his mealie-meal, bread and tea with her in that kitchen when the family had gone to work and school; but Jabu made the statement of laying a sixth place at table while she and Wethu prepared dinner.