The schoolgirl gave a smile of complicity with the witnesses to her mother’s emotionalism, dealing with it in harmless insolence. — I’ll learn from my gogo. — She giggled at her use of at least one word in a mother tongue, but was too shy or perhaps defiant to admit that she was serious about the intention. It was of her own volition that she left the guest room so well suited to her age and comfort and often went off to stay with her grandmother in Alexandra. After the first duty visit of respect required of a son’s child, Sally had not expected the girl to go back again soon, let alone pack her luminescent duffle bag and spend days and nights there in the house with its broken-pillared stoep and dust-dried pot-plants, battered relic of real bricks and mortar with two diamond-paned rotting windows from the time when Alex was the reflection of out-of-bounds white respectability, yearned for, imitated, now standing alone on ash-coloured earth surrounded by shacks, and what had once been an aspiration to a patch of fenced suburban garden now a pile of rubbish where the street dumped its beer cans and pissed, and the ribcages of scavenging dogs moved like bellows. How could a child brought up with her own bedroom, fresh milk delivered at the front door in Notting Hill Gate every morning, tidy people who sorted their newspapers for recycling, be expected to stand more than one night in such a place, gogo or no gogo? Going out across a yard to a toilet used by everyone round about! Heaven knows what she might pick up there! A return to a level of life to which Sibongile, Didymus, had been condemned when they were their child’s age — what did a sixteen-year-old born in exile know of what it was like when there was no choice?
The distress is something that can be conveyed to someone other — Vera — but a kind of pride or self-protection would prevent Sibongile from acknowledging to the child herself the dismayed humbling of the mother by the worldly child’s innocent level of acceptance: the sense that she knows what home is.
Mpho moved between Alexandra and the house that came from Vera’s divorce settlement with an ease that charmed the Starks. At the Starks’, along with her parents, she met and mingled with the Starks’ friends, Vera’s colleagues from the Foundation, the protégé Oupa and the lawyers. The young people got on well together, Mpho was carried off to parties with these youngsters her relieved parents knew were decent, no drugs or drunkenness; through a contaet of one of the lawyers, the Maqomas found exactly what was needed, a small house in a white suburb near the school where, again with the help of someone met in the Stark circle, the girl was accepted to complete her A-levels. The day after they moved in with nothing but borrowed beds, Sally, taking the car the Movement provided for Didy, drove along the street of local shops to look for secondhand furniture, and reversing into a parking place was held up by a municipal cleaner, a woman sweeping the gutter-muck into a drain. She didn’t know that women did this work, now. Well, any job was better than nothing, these times. It could be that some of those she had known in exile, the fighters in the training camps, might end up sweeping streets; the probability gave her an internal cringe, the drawing in of her stomach muscles that was involuntary when she confronted herself with the responsibility in which she was engaged: she had just been appointed deputy director of the Movement’s regional redeployment programme, at present a collection of research papers emerging at the pace of stuttering faxes. As she locked the car (forewarned since the day of arrival of those for whom theft was better than nothing) she saw that the cleaner had not moved on, was leaning on her broom and looking at her, a woman dressed ridiculously in the handout of bright protective overalls, football stockings rolled round her calves, flat-footed in men’s shoes, a fisherman’s hat complete with slots for flies crammed on her head. Begging? She would give her a greeting, anyway: Sawubona, sisi.
The woman did not approach but spoke excitedly. — Sibongile, when did you come? I’m Sela’s child, your mother’s cousin, you remember? From Sela’s house, you used to see us there, in Witbank.—
Wakened suddenly, shaken alive into another light, another existence. Sally is drawn over to her other self, standing there, the one she started out with, this apparition with a plastic bag tied over the hand with which, deftly, it picks up dirt the broom misses. Home.
In the streets of Johannesburg, on your way around the city, You don’t know who this is?
Even Oupa managed to move into a white suburb.
Why did his white colleagues at the Foundation use, to themselves, the prefix ‘even’? Because once the legal restrictions they campaigned against were lifted there remained an older, even (yes, again) greater restriction to be addressed: poverty. The clerk was decently paid by the decent standards of a Foundation that was non-profit-making not only in the money sense but also the human one, providing the same benefits of medical care and pension fund for all who worked there, from the director to the cleaner. But the rent of apartments in the area where he wanted to live was beyond his means. In one way, he was like any other young man in training for a professional career; a stage when it is assumed the youngster has as yet no responsibilities, has emerged from school, free, to a few years of chasing girls and enjoying himself with his male peers. Starting out in life, the saying goes. But of course this one’s start had been delayed so long, he had queued up unable to get into schools, dropped out into political action, spent four years on Robben Island, that before he could start on the lowest rank of a career he had acquired the responsibilities of maturity. Oupa was a man, not a boy. A burdened man, at the same time as he was the Foundation’s bright protégé. For him the business of growing up had not been, could not be, followed in recognized chronology. Of course Oupa had a wife, somewhere, of course he had children. His decent salary was diminished by the rent, the food, the clothing to be provided out of sight, for the anachronism of his life. The wife and children lived in another part of the country, with relatives who were dumped by the Government in some resettlement area. The eager apprentice was in fact an adult already trapped by adult desires, conflicts and responsibilities.
The Foundation was more than tolerant of the time he took off from work to find a place, a bachelor home among them in what had been the streets where only whites could live. They feared for him on his daily journeys to and from Soweto by train; he could be knifed by gangsters or thrown out of the window to his death by political thugs. Mrs Stark was remiss in being too busy, at the time, to telephone around among friends who might know of vacancies or have influence with estate agents who were wary about letting to blacks; it was someone else in the office who found a lead that resulted in the young colleague getting what he wanted. He was elated, although the rent was too high for him to afford; untroubled, although he had signed a lease restricting occupancy to two people, and he was going to split the rent by sharing the place with a couple and their two children.
Oupa planned a house-warming for everyone from the Foundation. Mrs Stark, to compensate for not having been any help to him in finding somewhere to live, offered to contribute homemade snacks and left with him a little early on a Friday afternoon to help with preparations.