The World Beneath (14 page)

The Madam and the Master are in a wood-paneled room. They have the blinds drawn, and slatted sunlight lies across the dim carpet. He blinks. “Hello.” No, here that sounds wrong. He is not going to say, “Morning, Master; morning, Madam,” as he would have done before. But he is aware that he is standing almost at attention.

Now he’s used to not being black. Or, more accurately, used to not being subservient. This is what exile has done for him. Nevertheless, he ducks his head shyly.

“Please sit down,” says the woman, smiling. He is offered something to drink. They are having black tea in bone-china cups. He asks for a Coke.

He perches on a low wing chair and finds he is transfixed by the sight of two massive stuffed fish in glass cases, high on the wall.

He drags his attention to the couple, who, he finds, are both smiling at him, with kindness and a slight edge of amusement.

“My son and I caught those,” says the man. He looks down. “He lives abroad now. So they remind me of him. Happier times”— and he looks up, directly at Joshua, who catches his breath. He can feel the man’s sorrow from here. And instantly he thinks not of his own father, but of his friend Sindiso. Tears spring to his eyes. Stupid!

He explains what happened to Sindiso. “What a terrible, terrible thing. And you so young,” says Mrs. Brown. She looks at him sympathetically. “So young and so brave.” He shakes his head fiercely. He will not cry. But if he shuts his eyes, he can still see it.

Joshua opens his eyes. The Browns are looking at him. They expect him to say something. He shrugs. “I am all right,” he says.

He hesitates. “There is one thing. I still have the limpet mines.”

H
ow strange, thinks Joshua, that he is staying in the house on the corner that he used to run past in fear of the two Dobermans. They are both dead, gone to chase black people in dog heaven, perhaps. The wrought-iron gates stand shut all the time now, and the new couple have a boxer and a Rhodesian ridgeback. Thankfully, once they are introduced to him, they leave him alone; he is inside the magic circle.

He is to stay in the gardener’s hut; there is no gardener anymore. It’s more comfortable than the one Tsumalo had used. There is a proper bed and an electric light. And he is welcome to use the inside bathroom; he doesn’t have to share a bath with the dogs. He wonders whether Mandisa, their maid, knows about Mr. and Mrs. Brown’s political affiliations. It’s not discussed; she brings his meals with a slight pursing of the lips and doesn’t offer any conversation.

During the day he sits quietly outside the hut on the camp chair they’ve provided. They lend him a book of poems by exiled poets. It’s banned; their son sent it. Inside it he finds the lines:

All our land is scarred with terror,

rendered unlovely and unlovable;

sundered are we and all our passionate surrender,

but somehow tenderness survives.

Does it?
he thinks.
Does tenderness survive?
He thinks of the couple in the house, alone, with their son in America. They had decided to stay. They knew the cost. They could be picked up any day. He wonders about Mandisa. He’s noticed that unlike Mrs. Malherbe, they use her Xhosa name and not an English name. She seems hostile. But it’s hard to tell. Perhaps she is just being careful. He puts his head back and closes his eyes against the sun, then reads on:

I
am
the exile

am the wanderer

the troubadour

(whatever they say)

gentle I am, and calm

and with abstracted pace

absorbed in planning,

courteous to servility

but wailings fill the chambers of my heart

and in my head

behind my quiet eyes

I hear the cries and sirens.

He closes the book. Again he feels the unbearable closeness of number 23. He has walked past it, in the early morning before anyone is up. Who lives there now?

Mr. Malherbe had stayed on, he had heard in the camp. He imagines him, more and more bitter, sitting by the pool, swilling that brandy muck he drank. One day the new maid came in and found him dead. His throat had been cut as he lay in his bed. There had been no dog to raise the alarm; not even a useless basset hound. Nothing had been taken. Not a thing. Not a bottle of whiskey from the bar, none of the silver. Nothing. The side door on the downstairs veranda was standing open, its glass smashed where they had gotten in.

When all is told, he cannot believe that the man who killed Mr. Malherbe would need to account for himself, was doing any more than setting the weights a little straighter in the scales of justice.

As he plans to do himself. He is going to set a limpet mine in the shopping center where Sindiso had planned to do it. Although he does not want to do it.

There is still no news of Sindiso. He imagines him there, sitting on the low stone wall by the shed, with his legs stretched out in front of him in the evening sun. His eyes are locked on Joshua’s, and his gaze is severe.

“You must remember, Joshua,” Sindiso had said, “that this bomb will be very important for us. It will say that even the white areas, the areas where white people go shopping and meet for coffee, the very places they think are the safest, are not safe. There is nowhere that is safe. We don’t want to kill anyone. The shops will be closed. But the message will be strong.”

Joshua wants to argue. What about the night watchman? What about passersby, coming home from the bioscope — the cinema? He tries to answer but can’t; then he wakes, stiff in the canvas chair, his mouth dry. The sun has gone behind the plane trees and he is cold.

The Browns have told him that they would take him there in the station wagon. He would need to lie down in the back, they said, with the rucksack. They would take him near to the place, a turnout on the national road, and leave him there. That would be the safest thing.

He knows the city. He will get back on his own, hitchhiking like last time. It will be harder without Sindiso. They had looked like a father and son, he’d thought. People were more likely to stop for them and less likely to be suspicious.

Joshua catches sight of himself in the scratched mirror on the shed wall. His eyes look a little wild. His face has broadened, the chin has gained definition, but it’s still a narrow face, an anxious face, he thinks, a face that already bears the marks of his life. He closes his eyes and takes three deep breaths. Is this the right thing to do? It is designed to frighten, not to kill. But still . . .

Then he thinks again of Sipho. Tsumalo. Biko. And now Sindiso. And his shoulders straighten. He stands tall. He opens his eyes and stares into the mirror again. He is a man now. He will avenge them all.

A
hand on his shoulder. “Time to get up.” It’s Mr. Brown.

Joshua is awake instantly. He has slept with the rucksack beside him. He’s dressed beneath the sheet. “I am ready,” he says, and jumps up.

He doesn’t feel ready. There is a dream that is disappearing, though he wants to hold on to it: he is in a big crowd in a city square, and above him on a balcony there is a man. The cheering stops and the man begins to speak —
“It is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

Then — no, it’s gone. All that remains is the roar of the crowd and the elation that had flooded through his body. Where was it? Who was it? There is a name they were chanting over and over:
Mandela. Mandela.

“Nelson Mandela!” he says to himself. “Of course!” But he is in prison, on an island five miles out in Table Bay.

There’s no time to think of this now. He bends awkwardly and pulls up the sheet. “Don’t worry about it; please, Joshua, we’ll do it.”

In the back of the station wagon is a blanket. It is navy blue, soft, and smells of Omo washing powder. He climbs beneath it, stowing the rucksack behind the front seat. It will be OK. Limpet mines are quite stable, Sindiso said.

Mr. Brown gives him a wristwatch. It has a scratched face and a worn chestnut leather strap. “You’ll need this,” he says. Mrs. Brown smiles at him from the front seat.

She has a kind face, with a faint tracery of lines across it that appear when she smiles, which she does a lot; pale blue-gray eyes and faded blond hair. What if he killed someone like her?

He feels sick and dizzy. He smiles wanly at her, pulls the blanket over his head, and closes his eyes.

On the way into the shopping center, he walks by a group of children. They must be on a nursery school outing. They are crowded around their teacher, shouting and calling. He keeps his head down. He has his overalls on and a cap pulled low, a disguise he hopes renders him invisible.

He glances at them just once and catches the gaze of a blue-eyed boy with straight white-blond hair. The child frowns at him for a moment, as if he recognizes him, then turns away and places his hand in the hand of his teacher. As they pass out of sight, he turns again and looks directly at Joshua.

It is only a glimpse, but it stays with him.

A limpet mine is an awkward, heavy thing. He is in a toilet cubicle, a tight fit even without a rucksack that has two of the metal spheres packed into it. He almost wishes that someone had stopped him. Then he wouldn’t be climbing onto the toilet seat and fishing around behind the high old-fashioned cistern for a spot to attach it by its two big magnets.

As he struggles to fix the heavy thing in place, he struggles to remember where he has seen that steady gaze before. Of course. Robert. The boy looked like Robert.

Joshua shakes his head, clearing his vision.

He stops dead, leaning on the wall, the mine cold and metallic against his hands where he is holding it against the cistern. For a swift moment, he is a small boy too, in the dust of his own backyard, floating paper boats in the little stream of water he had made by the tap, his mother in the kitchen, Goodman edging the lawn. This whole world, this difficult, dangerous, cruel world, is waiting for him — waiting to pounce like a leopard from a tree in the veld on the tiny, big-eyed
duiker
that tiptoes by on its delicate legs.

He can still hear the explosion of the policeman’s gun and see Tsumalo being shot and falling, being shot and falling, again and again. The shower of glass, the opening flower of blood, the spreading red on his mother’s white apron.

But he can see, too, the dust of the camp, the bowed head of the prisoner, the commandant’s eyes locked on his, and he can hear his own words: “If we kill him, we are no better than them.”

And he sees again the sky-blue eyes of the boy, fixed on his.

No. He can’t do it.

He climbs down, wrestles the heavy thing off the cistern and back into his rucksack, and leaves the stall. As luck would have it, he sees a mop standing in a bucket of dirty water, catches it up, and begins wiping the floor with it just as a white man comes in, glances incuriously at him, and goes to the urinals on the end wall.

Joshua ducks his head in the direction of the man’s back and walks out carrying the bucket and mop, which he leaves at the end of the hallway. He doesn’t want to be accused of stealing anything. Not even a bucket of dirty water.

He leaves the shopping center behind him. He is dizzy and sick; he trips over a paving stone, losing his footing for a moment, and draws a sharp look from a sour-faced white woman passing by.

On the national road, he doesn’t have long to wait. A cream Mercedes stops for him, one of the really old ones with tan leather seats whose diesel engines go
tick-tick-tick
. “Where to?” asks the driver. He’s elderly, English-sounding, trim, upright, wearing his seat belt fastened tight across his white shirt and maroon tie. A navy blazer with a badge on the pocket is hanging up behind him.

“Rondebosch Common,” mutters Joshua. “Please.” He sits with his hands clenched between his knees to stop them shaking.

They drive in silence. The man pulls over into the bus stop. “So. Here we are, then,” he says. He looks curiously at Joshua, who is leaning back against the seat with his eyes closed. “This is where you need to get out.” Joshua opens his eyes. The man looks concerned. “Are you OK? You don’t look well.” It’s six o’clock, still light.