None to Accompany Me (10 page)

 

Driving through an area where her work took her Mrs Stark's attention to the voice beside her and what she was seeing about her kept being diverted, as if by a seized muscle which will not be discernible to any companion. There was, among the documents in that loaded sling bag that was always with her, a letter found in her office mail that morning. Ivan's handwriting on the envelope, not addressed as usual by one of his typists and sent to his childhood home. She had opened it in the awkward privacy granted to the recipient of a letter in the company of others. Hardly taken in any details, any explanation; just the central fact her skimming arrested: Ivan was getting divorced. She folded the letter without reading the last page and thrust it somewhere in the bag.

The undertone of a shy young woman was speaking of brutality. —So you see, Mrs Stark, I mean they's upgraded Phambili Park, sewerage and that, and we all building, but now the men from the hostels is just coming to run all over, the women from the squatters' place is sitting in the veld right there by our houses—what can a person say to them? They frightened. Like
we. We frightened, too. Last week two nights there was shooting, the men from the hostel was chasing someone—

How was it—‘I've got Alice to agree to a divorce.' The sight of his handwriting on the envelope is already a signal of something unusual to be conveyed; a banker so successful that he is going back and forth from London to Poland, Hungary and Russia to negotiate new banking alliances doesn't have time to lick stamps personally. As if she were saying it to Ben now, she heard herself, when Ivan came back to South Africa and married his schooldays girl: He'll stay with her as long as he's not successful.

—so I was scared, I can tell you, I was so scared, and my mom, we just hid there without the lights while there was running and screaming, terrible, and then that noise, that noise! something falling hard, just like that, heavy at the door, so I thought what if it's Colin, he wasn't home yet—

Billboards on bare ground proclaimed the right to shelter elevated to middle-class status. Easy Loans Available, Protea Grove, Blue Horizon, Hill Park, you too can say you live in a place with a beautiful name like a white suburb, you too can feel you are making a claim for yourself when your address is Phambili Park—forward, let us go forward! Now on the horizon, a vast unloading of scrap without any recognizable profile of human habitations, now at the roadside, the jagged tin and tattered plastic sheets that are the architecture of the late twentieth century as marble was the material of the Renaissance, glass and steel that of Mies van der Rohe; the squatter camps, the real Post-Modernism: of the homeless.

—Oh sorry—turn here, no, left, sorry— Such an apologetic young woman, with her oval face, varnished olive by the mixture of races, in its corolla of springy black hair. Is she apologizing
for existing at all, neither white and living far from the wrath that overflows from the black hostels into a fake suburbia nor black and fleeing into the veld from a burning shack? —and I heard someone groaning there outside and what can I do, my mom was trying to stop me, I thought what if it's Colin so even I get killed I must—

Ben was shocked. That's not the kind of attitude you'd expect to have towards young married people. Hurt. Ben, who had been Bennet, the young man who took someone else's wife while the man was away at war, had fear disguised as disapproval in his face, the withdrawal in his eyes in their dark caves. He did not want his son to suffer any complications in the search for sexual fulfilment and companionship that beckons from that other billboard: Happiness.

On a straggle of wire clothes were dripping, a woman flung a basin of water to the ground and looked up, a white flag on a dead-branch pole announced something to the initiated—a healer or some other form of counsel for sale, or maybe mealies to be bought—above a shack leaning like a house of cards. Business going on; straggling letters on board or wavering across the corrugations of tin, New York Gents Tailor, Dry Cleaning Depot, Latest Hairstyle Braiding Afro Relaxing, Mosala Funerals, Beauty Salon, a shutter propping up an eyelid of tin where a handful of cigarettes, a few bottles of bright drinks, twists of snuff and dice of chewing gum were ranged. Store. Coal Wood. Turn here. Turn there.
Oh Mrs Stark.
Combis have widened and channelled the dirt road to the passage of a river in flood, the Legal Foundation station-wagon is carried along, keeping track as the combis draw level so close the elbow of the driver out of his window almost touches the arm of the station-wagon's outside mirror; held back when the combis stop at speed, without warning, to take on or discharge a passenger.

—Oh Mrs Stark, I tell you a person can't go through that, he can't. When I saw it wasn't Colin, when I opened the door just a bit and I saw the head, the black man, blood, and the brains—

Crying, and all she has to deal with the shock and horror come back to her in the telling is a fancy handkerchief patterned with a pierrot's head, his two crystal tears printed tinsel: Mrs Stark sees as she turns in the gesture of acknowledgement that is all Mrs Stark has to deal with it. For the moment; the Foundation must not flounder in effects, it tackles causes.

—like at the butcher's shop, I never knew our brains was like that—

There is no stain on the doorstep. Neither blood nor the red-veined jelled grey displayed in shallow pans. All has been scrubbed away in the desperate upkeep of housewifely standards. A tall woman is waiting, bony in the way that often comes to African fleshiness from the mixture with European blood, and prematurely aged (she could probably give Mrs Stark a year or two) by the determination to defeat poverty by the virtues of fastidious cleanliness and decency believed to belong without effort to people with money, the rewards of being white. The door is not that of a house but the side-door of a garage; a stove, refrigerator, TV, beds, the family is living there. —Colin's doing the house on weekends, oh it's over a year now, a slow business!— The older woman insists on making tea, there's a granadilla cake with yellow icing, she breaks in for emphasis: —His brother-in-law, my other daughter's husband, he's in the trade, and there's others in the family comes to plaster and so on.—

—Sundays it's quite a party!— Distracted from her tears by the comfort of pride, the young one shows Mrs Stark over what will be her house one day, Sunday by Sunday, the breakfast nook, Colin's clever with his hands he's doing the table himself,
the master bedroom (she calls it), the kids here, with an entrance to the yard for them, the living-dining's going to have a hatch counter to the kitchen, ma's room with a separate bathroom and that, this's the foundation for a patio and braai. The visitor is led outside again to admire the façade. There is no roof yet but on the unplastered wall where the window frames are paneless the replica of a brass carriage lamp is in place just as if it were standing to light the pillared entrance to a white man's driveway.

The assertion of this half-built house is so undeniable that both women feel an unreality in returning to the object of Mrs Stark's presence, which was supposed to be an inquiry into what happened in Phambili Park the night a man was murdered on the young woman's doorstep. This sort of investigation was not normally within the purview of the Foundation, but on this occasion, as increasingly lately, the connection between the people who had been removed from a site and squatted near Phambili Park because they had nowhere else to go, and the violence from hostel dwellers they were subject to, pursuing them, the disruption this in turn caused residents in a legally proclaimed, upgraded etc. township, was relevant to the Foundation's case against the removal. The young woman leads Mrs Stark up and down roads in the veld drawn by the rough fingernail of an earth-mover. Woodpecker tapping—building going on wherever you look—the veld an endless offering to the infinity of light that is a clear Transvaal sky, scaffolding standing out in the exaggerated perspective of bareness, de Chirico, Dali, thought they imagined it, Munch saw open-mouthed women fleeing in space from dingy, smoke-smouldering encrustation of shanties, there, over there. But where is Europe, what place has the divorce of a banker in the mind of anyone picking a way over rubble and weeds to the neat hallucination of small houses with their fancy burglar grilles, and flowered bedsheets hung out to dry, someone
speaking to families living in garages while the habitation that has existed over years, in their minds, is slowly materialized in walls rising at the rate at which money is saved and free Sundays are available. The normality in these homes—camping out in the garage is home, because it is the first occupation of what has existed in mind—is also hallucinatory. So what is normality? Isn't it just the way people manage to live under any particular circumstance; the children who are teetering a stolen supermarket trolley under the weight of two drums of water back to the squatter camp (one of the Phambili Park residents' complaints is that the squatters come over to use their taps)—the children are performing a normal task in terms of where and how they live. They yell and pummel one another, tumbling about as they go. A carriage lamp is the blazon of aspiration, fixed to the wall where a mob smashes a man's head in.

Mrs Stark put her notes into the sling bag, assuring that she would find her way back to the city. Without the face of a resident in black areas as escort beside her, she took the precaution of locking the car doors and closing the windows. Moving in a capsule; neither what usefulness her notes will be to the case nor the letter lying beneath the notebook dispelled the unreality of the place just left behind. She was accustomed to squatter camps, slum townships, levels of existence of which white people were not aware; the sudden illusion of suburbia, dropped here and there, standing up stranded on the veld between the vast undergrowth of tin and sacking and plastic and cardboard that was the natural terrain, was something still to be placed.

She had an urge to pull over to the roadside and read the letter.

But it was a resort to distraction; just as having to go about her business to somewhere named Phambili Park had served as
a reason to thrust the letter half-read into her catch-all bag. And you don't stop for any reason or anyone on roads these days. With one hand on the wheel, she delved into the bag to feel for the envelope.
Ivan a frowning child her own frown of attention always looking back at her from him his habit of fingering his nose while he talked (don't do it, it's ugly) at the butcher's I never knew our brains was like that a carriage lamp to shine out over the grey spill—

She found she was at the turn-off to the hospital where the soft-voiced witness had said people from the squatter camp had taken refuge. So she drove into the hospital grounds, waved on by security guards, and brought the car to a standstill. But not to read a letter.

She trudged over raked gravel between beds of regimented marigolds towards the wings of the hospital, dodging the hiss of the sprinkler system. Pigeons waddled to drink from the spray; a two-metre-high security fence under the hooded eyes of stadium lights surrounded this provincial administration's hallucination of undisturbed ordinance. All along the standard red-brick and green-painted walls of the hospital people were collected as if blown there as plastic bags and paper were blown against the fence. Women sat on the ground with their legs folded under skirts and aprons, small children clinging and climbing about them. Men hunched with heads down on their knees, in a dangling hand a cigarette stub, or stood against the walls; looked up from staring at feet in broken track shoes advertised for the pleasures of sport. She greeted some groups; they blinked listlessly past her. She made a pretext for her approach, Were there people living in the hospital? An old woman took a pinch of snuff and pointed while she drew it up her nostrils. Are you sleeping there? A woman tugged at the blanket tied cutting into the shape
of her sturdy breasts, needing to accuse anyone who would listen. —They tell us no more place. Here! We sleeping here!—

Out of the stasis others were attracted. They didn't seem to understand questions in English or Afrikaans—Mrs Stark knew from experience how people in shock and bewilderment lose their responses in confusion, anyway—but the woman in the blanket spoke for them. —Five days I been here. What can I do? That night those shit take eveything, they kill—look at this old man, no blanket, nothing, the hospital give him blanket, when he's run those men catch his brother, TV, bicycle, everything is gone from his place—shit!—

The man was coughing, his knees pressed together and shoulders narrowed over his chest, folding himself out of the danger of existence; the babies sucked at breasts, greedily taking it on.

—And this woman, she try to go to her home yesterday, in the night she come back again. No good, terrible—

The woman had the serene broad face that at the end of the twentieth century is seen only on young peasants and nuns, she will have followed her man from some Bantustan to the city that had no place for her, but neither the squatter camp nor the flight from it had had time to redraw the anachronism of her face in conformation with her place and time. She didn't yet have the tough grimace pleated round the eyes and the stiff distended nostrils of the woman, a creature of prey, who was displaying her.

She prepared herself obediently to speak. A hump under cloth on her back was a baby. A small girl hid against her thick calves. —Friday there by Phambili where we living they come to get my husband. We run away but there's plenty people running, night-time, and I don't see where is my two children, the
boys children, I was running with the small ones like this— (raised hands towards her back, carrying the weight)—now I don't see my two children when I'm come to this hospital. Now yesterday I think I must go back to my house and see where is my children, my boys children, but when I come in the veld I see those men again they by my place—