A Change of Climate: A Novel (12 page)

When the new year came, the bus fares went up, and the bus boycott started. Ralph got up at four each morning to pack the mission’s car with more people than it should hold, and to edge the complaining vehicle out of Elim, downhill toward Pretoria. The people who had permits to work in the city needed to keep their jobs; every taxi in Elim was commandeered, but still they passed silent convoys of men and women, walking downhill in the smoky dawn. The headlights of other cars, going uphill, crept by theirs; there was some sympathy in the liberal suburbs of Johannesburg, and there were men and women willing to drive through the night to help the people from the townships. Ralph had his name noted, at roadblocks. He was questioned, roughly, in Afrikaans. His lack of understanding drove the policemen into a fury. “We’ve got your number, man,” they said. “You must be a communist, eh?”

I want, he thought, to put into practice a different kind of Christianity from my father’s: one in which I don’t pass judgment on people. I don’t judge Lucy Moyo, or Koos, or (without evidence) Luke the dispenser whose trade is so dark; I don’t judge the president, or the police sergeant who has just cursed me out. “But if you don’t judge,” Anna said, “you certainly institute some stiff inquiries into people’s motives. I am not sure that is always quite separate from the process of passing judgment.”

She knew him better, by now. That kindness of his, which she had taken so personally, was essentially impersonal, she saw.

That morning at the roadblock, the policeman said to Ralph,
kafifirboetie.
Black man’s brother, or dear friend. “I would like to be,” Ralph said. “But I wouldn’t make the claim.” The policeman spat into the roadway. Only his upbringing prevented him from spitting in Ralph’s face.

On the day of the public meeting, the day of the baton charge, Koos opened his hospital in the nursery school’s hall, rolling up his shocked and bloodied patients in blankets, speaking in five languages to ban the hot sweet tea and ask for water, just water; for bandages—anything, any rags; for anyone with a steady hand to help him swab and clean.

Ralph gave a thought to a dusty office in London, an aerie in Clerkenwell, the headquarters of the organization that had sent him here; and he thought of the churchgoers of Norfolk, passing the collection plate; he heard them say to him, you have no right to misappropriate funds in this way, misuse mission property: to press the blue smock of a nursery school angel to the bleeding mouth of a township whore who has been smashed in the face by a baton. It was the cook, Rosinah, who of all the mission staff had witnessed the police charge; Rosinah, who seemed to have no life outside her dictatorial kitchen practices. Now she rocked herself in a stupor of grief, telling how it was peaceful, baas, hymn singing, a speech, and now the police have chased the young women and beaten them on their breasts, they have done that thing, they know where young women are weak.

Ralph knew that on the scale of atrocity it was small. It was not, for example, Treblinka. Koos showed him what a sjambok cut looked like, administered by an experienced, determined hand. He learned something about himself; that the presence of evil made him shake, like an invalid or octogenarian.

Next day he was able to piece together a little more of the story. It had been a peaceful meeting, as Rosinah said, on a patch of waste ground he knew, a mile away from Flower Street; but this was a typical thing in Elim, that there was no line of communication except an underground one, there was no knowledge, a mile away, of what was occurring on the waste ground; there was no mechanism by which he and Anna could have been warned and told to stand by for casualties. The meeting was to decide strategy for the bus boycott. At the last minute the police had demanded it be called off. A few children had started throwing stones, and the police had charged before the crowd could disperse. A great number of those injured appeared to be passersby. They were dazed and weeping, their shaved and stitched scalps still oozing blood and clear fluid; they said that they had not known anything, not known there was a meeting at all.

Ralph walked over the site of the catastrophe. A few odd shoes had been left behind in the scramble to escape the batons and whips. He saw a straw shopping bag, decorated with a swelling, pink straw rose; it lay on its side, and its contents were by now on someone else’s shelf. The ground had been picked over pretty well, he saw; he thought it was a strange form of looting. It was hard to know who was worse; the policemen who had done what they said was their duty, or the scavengers who had taken from the housemaid’s bag the half loaf, the two ounces of green tripe, perhaps the soap ends or old cardigan some Madam had given, some well-meaning idiot woman down in the white houses, the jacaranda groves.

“Can you do anything, Mr. Eldred?” Lucy Moyo said. “Anything to help us?”

“I can try,” Ralph said.

He went back to his office and rifled through his papers for the list he had been compiling: the names, addresses, telephone numbers of the senior policemen within a hundred miles. He picked up the telephone receiver and began to work his way through the list. These calls did not last long, in most cases; when the policemen heard his English accent, and learned that he lived in Elim, they put the phone down on him.

He sat up for most of the night, writing to the newspapers. “You saw the casualties,” he said to Koos. “You know what happened here, better than anybody. Put your name on these letters with me.”

Koos shook his head. “Better not, Ralph. I have my patients to think about. What would they do without me?” He shrugged. “A lot better, maybe.”

After the baton charge, their situation changed. They were invited to houses in Elim they had never entered before. People who were not churchgoers came to the Mission House. The local organizer of the African National Congress called on them; and on the same day came a man from Sophiatown, a black journalist from
Drum
magazine. He sat leaning back on one of the metal-legged kitchen chairs, so that its front feet were in the air. He found things to laugh about.

Rosinah’s apprentice served him tea in an enamel mug. Anna said sharply, “The cups and saucers, please, Dearie.” Dearie brought a cup and slapped it down on the table. She scowled. Cups were for whites, enamel mugs were for Africans; this Madam had instituted different practices, which proved she knew nothing. She thought this black man was above himself, putting on airs, in his lightweight blue suit with the sharp creases in the trousers. Trouble came of it: in her opinion.

“Pretoria wants to grow, grow, grow,” the handsome boy said, lolling back on his chair. “The Nats want this place cleared. They will find these people somewhere else, some piece of the veld where they can put them and forget them. Some place with no water and no roads. So that their children can grow back into savages.” The young man laughed, a satirical laugh. His eyes were distant already, and it could be seen that he was on his way to a scholarship abroad: Moscow, perhaps, and who could blame him? “I can tell you, Mrs. Eldred,” he said, “it is hardly possible for an African to live and breathe and be on the right side of the law.” He looked deeply into Anna’s eyes; indicating, one, that she attracted him and two, that he would not think to take any trouble over her.

It was after midnight when the handsome boy left. Next afternoon, a white police sergeant sat on the same chair: its legs now foursquare and grounded. “Makes a change, Mr. Eldred, for me to come and see you. Usually it’s you comes to see us.”

The sergeant was fair-haired, meager, not a big man. But he sat like a true Afrikaner: legs splayed, as if to indicate that in no other way could he ease his bull-like endowment. Ralph did not, at once, dislike him, perhaps because he was of the same familiar, freckled, physical type as Koos, and anxious too, nervously smiling; his nails were bitten down to the quick.

The sergeant had not refused tea. Dearie gave him a cup, of course, and a saucer too. He just wanted Ralph to know, he said, as he helped himself to sugar, that the police were aware what kind of visitors he’d been getting. “You’re a stranger here,” the policeman complained. “You’re new to South Africa. You ought to make
nice
friends.”

In passing, Ralph felt sorry for him. He was nervous, a chain-smoker, offering his pack each time to Anna; sometimes a fleeting spasm crossed his face, as if he were in pain.

“I didn’t catch your name,” Ralph said, when the sergeant wiped his mouth and stood up to go. “Why don’t you just call me Quintus,” the man said. “Because I expect we’ll be getting to know each other.”

“I think he must have beetles in the bowels,” Ralph said after he’d gone. “Needs to go to Luke Mbatha for some python fat.”

Ralph told Koos that the more stupid the white policemen were, the worse they treated him—except maybe this Quintus, who was well intentioned in his way.

Koos rubbed his red hands through his scrubby pale hair; and Ralph, who had been learning anatomy among other things, felt he could see afternoon light flash between radius and ulna. “Be over to his braai, soon, Ralphie. You drink his beer, man, you eat up his scorched flesh-meat.”

“No. I don’t see we’ll be on those terms.”

“Ah,” Koos said. “But you soon learn to like those motherfuckers. You like me, don’t you? And I’m one of them. Something sweet and simple about us, isn’t there? Something pathetic? Always trying to be liked. Well, there’s this thing we have, a kind of-— hospitality. If a man comes by you make him comfortable; it’s an African thing, the blacks have it and so do we. Do you think that while you’ve been in this township you have learned anything at all about what goes on here? Because if you do, man, you’re more imbecilic than I took you for.”

Later, in a more sober mood, Koos said: “You have to try to understand these—my lot, I mean. The British put their women and children in concentration camps. The Zulu smashed the skulls of their babies against their waggon wheels. They have long memories, Afrikaners. Memory is their specialty.”

Ralph was struck by how he said “these people.” Just as Lucy Moyo did, when she talked about her friends and neighbors.

“All I hope,” Ralph said, “and it’s a fairly faint hope, I know— is that the country will grind to a halt under the weight of its own ludicrous bureaucracy. You can hardly see a gap where a man can slip though.”

“There’s no slipping through,” Koos said. “Everybody’s watching everyone else. This country is like that. My hometown, my people—Jesus, man, you can’t imagine.”

“I think I can,” Ralph said.

“My father believes the world was made in seven days. It’s in the Bible, he says.” Koos laughed.

In the new year the early-morning raids began. They happened over three days. On the first morning, the police entered the township at five o’clock. They had armored vehicles, and they came in force. They cordoned off the area they had chosen and went from house to house, kicking in the doors. Next day, when people came down to the mission to give their accounts, this as much as anything gave rise to indignation: that they had shouted out that they were police, that the doors must be opened, but then they had given no time for the householders to obey them. “As if we were animals,” a woman said, “who would not understand.”

They were looking for liquor, the police said, for evidence of illicit stills. They were also looking for arms; there was a rumor current, which Ralph wished he had not heard, that materiel had been brought into Elim by night, and stowed away against a braver age.

Since the riot—the so-called riot—the atmosphere had been restless and strained, and the corner boys had a sullen, knowing look. He no longer allowed Anna to go out alone. Where people knew them, they were safe enough. Where they were unknown, a white face had become a provocation.

Those nights of the raids, Ralph found it impossible to sleep. There was the fear that some wider kind of trouble would blow up; that forewarned of the police action a crowd would gather, young boys heedless of the consequences, with sticks and bottles and, God knows, perhaps these mysterious arms; then there would be a replay of the baton charge, or perhaps much worse, perhaps bullets. He felt foolish, helpless, inconsequential, as he lay on his back staring up at the ceiling, an orange light insinuating itself through the gap in the curtains.

It had become necessary to fix these lights around the mission compound. A week ago, the nursery school had been broken into. There was no money for the thieves to take, no food; they had kicked the little tables about, torn up some books, ransacked Anna’s broom-cupboard office and made a small fire in there. It could, of course, have burned down the building, if Father Alfred had not seen the flames from his bedroom window.

Then, on Sunday, when the mission workers were at their various services, a sneak thief had entered Rosinah’s single-room house, taken her clothing, including a woolen hat which belonged to Dearie and which Rosinah had extracted from her on a forced loan. The cook’s retching sobs had been out of all proportion to the loss. They had—himself and Anna, Dearie, the gardeners—spent an hour trying to coax her to stop crying. Clara, the educated washerwoman, stood by the door not speaking. There was no expression on her face. She looked like a woman who might have lost everything, many times over.

Hence the security lights. Their sleep had been broken since. His wife’s tension seemed to communicate itself to Ralph through the sagging springs of the bed. Toward dawn he dozed. Phrases ran through his head, the phrases that he lived with each day:
Thirty shillings or ten days. My husband, baas, is whereabouts unknown.

And toward dawn on the third day the police came to the mission. It was almost a relief to hear them pounding at the door. He and Anna were both out of bed in a moment; their faces peaked in the gray light, they understood the extent of each other’s wakeful-ness. Ralph pulled on the trousers and shirt he had left folded by the bed. Anna belted her dressing gown over her long nightdress. What was the point of rushing? The police would break the door down anyway.