A Change of Climate: A Novel (9 page)

The Mission House stood on Flower Street. It was set back from the road, in a kitchen garden in which grew mealies, potatoes, cabbage, pumpkins, and carrots. There were three steps up to the veranda, which was netted in against flies. There had been shade at one time, but the big trees had been cut down. Inside the rooms were small and hot.

Everything had been refurbished, Lucy Moyo said, refurbished in anticipation of their arrival. The linoleum on the floor, polished till it gleamed, was offensively vivid: irrepressibly jazzy, zigzagged, sick making. No expense had been spared—or so Lucy claimed— on providing for the sitting room nylon-fur cushions with buttoned centers, and a coffee table which splayed its legs, like a bitch passing water. With all the vicarious pride of careful stewardship, Lucy showed off a magazine rack of bent gold wire, tapping with the cushion of her finger at its little rubber feet. In the kitchen was an acid-yellow table with a chromium trim and white tubular legs. There were chairs to match.

The town was set on a height; every day there was a breeze. On clear days you could see the prosperous suburbs of Pretoria—white houses sprawling across green lawns, avenues lined with jacaranda trees. Down there, public monuments, Boer pride: up here,
swart gevaar,
the black peril. Yet what unfolded to the view, at Elim’s center, but a vision of clipped, cold-water respectability: wide roads on a grid plan, well-fenced playing fields, neat brick houses? The houses, true, differed as to the state of their repair. The best were freshly painted; and outside them, in regular rows, grew pot-plants in old paint tins. They were not exactly pot-plants, not strictly. They were things that would have grown just as well, and more naturally, in the soil. But these sprigs had been singled out for special treatment. They bespoke ownership. They were nature tamed. They were a form of civic pride. Everyone seemed proud in Elim. “We live here as neighbors,” Lucy explained. “Not as tribes-people. We all agree together.” This was not quite true, of course. But it was a pleasant idea, and could be entertained for some of the time.

In their first few days they were shepherded from house to house, welcomed in the homes of churchgoers and parish workers. Cups of tea were provided; there were needlepoint footstools, framed photos, lace curtains. There was no artifact that did not rest upon its little crocheted mat.

The price of this fussiness, in labor, was clear at once. Water was fetched in buckets, cement floors scrubbed every day on hands and knees. By a servant, perhaps; even the poverty stricken can afford to employ the destitute. Every morning, in the backyards, clothes were slapped and wrung in tin tubs.

But on the fringes of Elim the houses were overflowing. There were families living in sheds, in less space than a farmer would give an animal. Lucy explained all this; rents were high in the neighboring locations and when families could not pay them and were turned out they came to Elim. And then, relatives came from the bundu all the time, and you couldn’t turn them away, people had to live somehow; perhaps you might build a lean-to at the back, with whatever came to hand, and hope it would withstand the wind and rain; if not, build it again. She indicated dwellings constructed of sheets of tin leaning against a wall. Naked children—naked except for a string of beads around the waist—played in the dust. Lucy stood before them, cajoling till they answered her, her bag matching her shoes, and her Sunday petal hat planted on her close-curled head. Sanitary arrangements? Better not to think about them. Even the Mission House, after all, had only its huts and buckets, emptied every day by Jakob Malajane, also employed as the gardener.

The Indian and Chinese shops were well stocked and orderly, Lucy pointed out. There were several where she knew the proprietors, they were not bad types all of them, they would sometimes put things under the counter for you till you could pay. Every so often, though, the bad boys with knives and coshes came in, left the proprietor bleeding and took what they wanted. “Not all these tsotsis are boys whom you can discipline,” Lucy said. “Some of them are grown men.” She shrugged; she wanted to warn the Eldreds, whom she thought pitiful children, but she did not want to dwell upon this side of life. There was no need either to mention brothels and shebeens. After all, Mr. and Mrs. Standish had got by without talking about them.

So she marched them off to meet church-choir contraltos, a saxophonist in Elim’s jazz band, a neat-waisted colored woman who ran a Girl Guide troop: all good people, she said, all family people. Down the road walked a stately, very black man, robed and bearing a crozier. His wife walked arm in arm with him, her purple frock sweeping the dust; she wore a necklace of bones. “Oh, Mr. and Mrs. Bishop Kwakwa,” Lucy said. “Zionist Mount Carmel Gospel of Africa. Not at all a real church.”

The day in Flower Street began at six o’clock; but they woke earlier. The bedroom curtains were thin. Their background color was tan, with a design of purple sunbursts. They did not quite meet across the glass. Each morning a shaft of sunlight, thin as an axe blade, struck across their pillows and their eyes.

Already the kitchen was busy, the mealie-porridge bubbling on the range. Jakob chopped the wood, then ambled to his garden duties. He was a country boy: his face was battered like a boxer’s. He had, Lucy told them, the falling sickness. The people of his village used to throw stones at him when he fell down in a fit, to drive the devil out. They were illiterate people, Lucy explained, in her lofty way.

They would walk to Matins: the church was five minutes away. Father Alfred would shake their hands, though he would be seeing them perhaps twice before lunch, most days, and twice after lunch, and whenever he felt the need. Father Alfred was a little, anxious man. He smiled perpetually. His eyes in his brown face had an air of faded surprise.

After Matins it was time for Anna to talk to the cook, Rosinah, about the day’s meals. Quantities must be approximate, they must stretch to accommodate whomever might come by. No one could say what the day would bring.

There were a large number of servants at the mission, none of them overworked. They were people with spectacular bad-luck stories, and they were engaged on the basis of these, rather than of any aptitude or proficiency for their work. Jakob, who slept under a tree for most of the day, had an assistant, a young boy with no parents, seemingly no kin of any kind except some shadowy relatives in Durban who could not be traced. He passed his day listlessly raking the ground, and manufacturing elaborate besoms. He was permanently in rags, a disgrace to the mission. Whenever Ralph gave him any clothes, he would sell them. It seemed that his ambition was to be a walking sign, a symbol of wretchedness.

The cook Rosinah sat with her chair wedged into a corner near the stove. The back door was always open, so that her cronies could drift in and out. There was a constant procession of them, rolling through the kitchen and out again, squatting on the floor to exchange gossip. When Anna passed, she smiled and greeted them, but she could not help noticing that they were usually eating something. It disturbed her that the half of Elim that claimed acquaintance with Rosinah was better fed than the half that did not.

Rosinah had been known to chase people out of the kitchen and across the yard, with some offensive kitchen weapon: sometimes a thing so relatively benign as a wooden spoon, but once at least a small meat cleaver. There seemed no reason for these outbursts of hers, nothing especially which brought them on. The victims would be back after a few days, squatting nervously on the threshold, drawn by the chance of a handout of a bowl of porridge or the heel of a loaf.

No one knew Rosinah’s own particular bad-luck story. She never spoke of her past, but something must have soured her temper, something out of the ordinary run of fire and disease and sudden death. Day to day the chief victim of her wrath was a girl called Dearie, her assistant. Dearie was a frail young woman with rickety legs; pregnant, and with a sick baby bound always on her back.

Dearie’s babies died, Anna was told. This was the third or maybe the fourth, and each one was weaker than the last. Anna decided that this current infant would not die on her; she would fathom the mystery, she would keep Dearie under her eye. She suggested the doctor; Dearie, head bowed, suggested in her monosyllabic way that she saw a doctor of her own.

Anna did not dare insist. She provided powdered milk and rusks, peered anxiously at the small wizened face. The babies slipped away in the night, breathed out the last of their lives while everyone else slept. At least, that was how it appeared to be; Rosinah, in her rages, suggested that Dearie murdered them. There was no husband, and it seemed there never had been. Lucy Moyo said, for one slip you can forgive a girl, but that Dearie, she is a walking outrage. Anna said, I thought we were supposed to forgive seventy times seven? Lucy glared at her. Anna thought, perhaps I have got my Scripture wrong. Perhaps it is God who does that.

A woman called Clara cleaned the house and washed the clothes. She was a mission girl, had passed her junior certificate. She was ashamed to do such work, and Ralph and Anna saw that it was demeaning for her. Whenever she asked them, they wrote her a glowing reference, recommending her for some job in a store, or a post as a hospital orderly. But employers turned her away. She came back to the house, stony-eyed, and picked up her brush to sweep the rooms out.

Clara had once had a husband, but he had disappeared, leaving her with four small children. Her expectations of these mild babies were ferociously high: silence, industry, a useful occupation at all times. Each evening she called them to recite Bible verses; if they failed, she told them to bring her the cane. Their little cries, like the mewing of cats, punctuated the evenings. But who could tell Clara not to do it? They must not be like their father; and she believed that only the weals on their legs stood between them and a life of drink and misery, with hell at the end of it.

It was not difficult to understand why employers turned Clara away, but it was difficult to put into words. She had some quality that stirred unease. It was not an overt violence, as in Rosinah’s case. It was an emptiness; you did not care to think how it might be filled up.

Each morning at Flower Street, Ralph went into the cubbyhole he called his office to deal with letters and the accounts—recording minutely, faithfully, the futile expenditure of tiny sums. Anna went to the nursery school to supervise the local helpers. It was not a small enterprise; there were a hundred and fifty children, organized by twenty or thirty volunteers, who came and went by some bewil-dering rota that they understood and Anna did not.

Each morning they put the children into their blue overalls, smocks which fastened at the backs of their necks; this was the day’s first task, feeding squirming arms into sleeves. They employed two women to wash the overalls at the end of the week, and another woman to make the mealie-porridge for midday. The children had to have their porridge scooped into their mouths; they had to be put down for an afternoon rest, supervised on the swings, slides, and climbing frames; they had to be weighed and measured and told stories. There was a waiting list, bigger by far than the current enrollment.

Once the children were seven they could not keep them at the nursery. They sent them into the dangerous world, for the two and a half hours of education that the new laws allowed them. This period over, the children were at the mercy of circumstance. If their mothers managed to find any kind of work, they took it, leaving the children to the fitful and reluctant supervision of relatives, of older brothers and sisters. Where the supervision failed, they were out on the streets.

For a few of these outcasts, the mission ran what they called a “play group.” They gave the children soup and bread, and fruit when they could get it. They didn’t give them books because that would have been breaking the law. They tried to keep them amused with games and handicrafts, making sure they did not set their feet on any path that could lead anywhere.

And were they enforced, these absurd laws? Oh yes. “This town is full of people who will run to the police,” Lucy said calmly. “They will do it for a few pennies. Mrs. Eldred, you must understand that.”

Anna would ask for nothing for herself, but the sight of the children made her bold. She pleaded with shopkeepers in the white suburbs to help them eke out the daily ration; she petitioned vegetable stores for bruised apples, and bakers for yesterday’s bread. She searched for donors to support children whose parents couldn’t afford the small monthly fee. Every day she set herself a target: so many pieces of effrontery, so many crude demands. She found it hard to work in the house because people were constantly walking in from the stoep, coming to ask her foolish questions or use the telephone; an hour could go by with nothing accomplished.

One of the nursery classrooms had a storeroom—a large broom cupboard really. She took it over. She had to edge around the trestle table that formed her desk, ease herself behind the table, squeeze her narrow body against the wall. She stabbed with two fingers at a rusty typewriter: stabbed out her begging letters.