So this boy who has unreflectingly kept all his life to the path of nature and innocence, who is poor and therefore good, as the poor always are in fairy tales, who is slim as an eel and quick as a hare and would defeat him with ease in any contest of swiftness of foot or skill of hand — this boy, who is a living reproof to him, is nevertheless subjected to him in ways that embarrass him so much that he squirms and wriggles his shoulders and does not want to look at him any longer, despite his beauty.
Yet one cannot dismiss him. One can dismiss the Natives, perhaps, but one cannot dismiss the Coloured people. The Natives can be argued away because they are latecomers, invaders from the north, and have no right to be here. The Natives one sees in Worcester are, for the most part, men dressed in old army coats, smoking hooked pipes, who live in tiny tent-shaped corrugated-iron kennels along the railway line, men whose strength and patience are legendary. They have been brought here because they do not drink, as Coloured men do, because they can do heavy labour under a blazing sun where lighter, more volatile Coloured men would collapse. They are men without women, without children, who arrive from nowhere and can be made to disappear into nowhere.
But against the Coloureds there is no such recourse. The Coloureds were fathered by the whites, by Jan van Riebeeck, upon the Hottentots: that much is plain, even in the veiled language of his school history book. In a bitter way it is even worse than that. For in the Boland the people called Coloured are not the great-great-grandchildren of Jan van Riebeeck or any other Dutchman. He is expert enough in physiognomy, has been expert enough as long as he can remember, to know that there is not a drop of white blood in them. They are Hottentots, pure and uncorrupted. Not only do they come with the land, the land comes with them, is theirs, has always been.
Nine
One of the conveniences of Worcester, one of the reasons, according to his father, why it is better living here than in Cape Town, is that shopping is so much easier. Milk is delivered every morning before dawn; one has only to pick up the telephone and, an hour or two later, the man from Schochat’s will be at the door with one’s meat and groceries. It is as simple as that.
The man from Schochat’s, the delivery boy, is a Native who speaks only a few words of Afrikaans and no English. He wears a clean white shirt, a bow tie, two-tone shoes, and a Bobby Locke cap. His name is Josias. His parents disapprove of him as one of the feckless new generation of Natives who spend all their pay on fancy clothes and give no thought to the future.
When his mother is not at home, he and his brother receive the delivery from the hands of Josias, packing the groceries away on the kitchen shelf and the meat in the refrigerator. If there is condensed milk, they appropriate it as booty. They punch holes in the can and take turns sucking till it is dry. When their mother comes home they pretend that there was no condensed milk, or that Josias stole it.
Whether she believes their lie he is not sure. But this is not a deceit he feels particularly guilty about.
The neighbours on the east side are named Wynstra. They have three sons, an older one with knock knees named Gysbert and twins named Eben and Ezer too young to go to school. He and his brother ridicule Gysbert Wynstra for his funny name and for the soft, helpless way in which he runs. They decide he is an idiot, mentally deficient, and declare war on him. One afternoon they take the half-dozen eggs Schochat’s boy has delivered, hurl them at the roof of the Wynstra house, and hide. The Wynstras do not emerge, but as the sun dries the smashed eggs they turn to ugly splashes of yellow.
The pleasure of throwing an egg, so much smaller and lighter than a cricket ball, of watching it fly through the air, end over end, of hearing the soft crunch of its impact, remains with him, long afterwards. Yet his pleasure is tinged with guilt. He cannot forget that it is food they are playing with. By what right does he use eggs as playthings? What would Schochat’s boy say if he found they were throwing away the eggs he had brought all the way from town on his bicycle? He has a sense that Schochat’s boy, who is in fact not a boy at all but a grown man, would not be so wrapped up in the image of himself in his Bobby Locke cap and bow-tie as to be indifferent. He has a sense that he would disapprove most strongly and would not hesitate to say so. ‘How can you do that when children are hungry?’ he would say in his bad Afrikaans; and there would be no answer. Perhaps elsewhere in the world one can throw eggs (in England, for instance, he knows they throw eggs at people in the stocks); but in this country there are judges who will judge by the standards of righteousness. In this country one cannot be thoughtless about food.
Josias is the fourth Native he has known in his life. The first, whom he remembers only dimly as wearing blue pyjamas all day long, was the boy who used to mop the stairs of the block of flats they lived in in Johannesburg. The second was Fiela in Plettenberg Bay, who took in their washing. Fiela was very black and very old and had no teeth and made long speeches about the past in beautiful, rolling English. She came from St Helena, she said, where she had been a slave. The third was also in Plettenberg Bay. There had been a great storm; a ship had sunk; the wind, which had blown for days and nights, was just beginning to die down. He and his mother and his brother were out on the beach inspecting the mounds of jetsam and seaweed that had been washed up, when an old man with a grey beard and a clerical collar, carrying an umbrella, came up to them and addressed them. ‘Man builds great boats of iron,’ said the old man, ‘but the sea is stronger. The sea is stronger than anything man can build.’
When they were alone again, his mother had said: ‘You must remember what he said. He was a wise old man.’ It is the only time he can remember her using the word wise; in fact it is the only time he can remember anyone using the word outside of books. But it is not just the old-fashioned word that impresses him. It is possible to respect Natives — that is what she is saying. It is a great relief to hear that, to have it confirmed.
In the stories that have left the deepest mark on him, it is the third brother, the humblest and most derided, who, after the first and second brothers have disdainfully passed by, helps the old woman to carry her heavy load or draws the thorn from the lion’s paw. The third brother is kind and honest and courageous while the first and second brothers are boastful, arrogant, uncharitable. At the end of the story the third brother is crowned prince, while the first and second brothers are disgraced and sent packing.
There are white people and Coloured people and Natives, of whom the Natives are the lowest and most derided. The parallel is inescapable: the Natives are the third brother.
At school they learn, over and over again, year after year, about Jan van Riebeeck and Simon van der Stel and Lord Charles Somerset and Piet Retief. After Piet Retief come the Kaffir Wars, when the Kaffirs poured over the borders of the Colony and had to be driven back; but the Kaffir Wars are so many and so confused and so hard to keep apart that they are not required to know them for examinations.
Although, in examinations, he gives the correct answers to the history questions, he does not know, in a way that satisfies his heart, why Jan van Riebeeck and Simon van der Stel were so good while Lord Charles Somerset was so bad. Nor does he like the leaders of the Great Trek as he is supposed to, except perhaps for Piet Retief, who was murdered after Dingaan tricked him into leaving his gun outside the kraal. Andries Pretorius and Gerrit Maritz and the others sound like the teachers in the high school or like Afrikaners on the radio: angry and obdurate and full of menaces and talk about God.