We Are Not Such Things (45 page)

For days, Easy had been running madly around the township. He asked me to drive him to a storefront in a Khayelitsha shopping center, where he met with a loan officer at a place called African National Bank, the windows of which displayed larger-than-life pictures of wholesome black people painting their new, high-quality homes, acquired, presumably, with a loan from that very bank. He explained that he needed extra money, but did not elaborate as to why.

A few days later, Easy prepared to take foreigners that he was always toting around for the foundation on one of their township tours. Easy and I planned to meet for lunch in town before the tour. On the phone, he was in good spirits—“fresh like a fish in water,” he said.

But when I arrived, his face was ashen. He sat down next to me on some low steps off the sidewalk, and slumped forward.

“Is a big problem,” he said softly.

“What happened?”

“A big problem, Nomzamo. Remember I told you my house in Khayelitsha is in arrears?”

Easy owned two properties, sort of: the run-down undeveloped plot that Linda had purchased for him in Gugulethu, and the home in Khayelitsha that he rented out. He claimed that Aphiwe’s mother didn’t want to live in Gugulethu so close to Easy’s family, and for this reason he had put a down payment on a house in Khayelitsha. But when he and Aphiwe’s mother broke up, he and Aphiwe moved back to his parents’ and a tenant moved in. Then, for various reasons—including his siphoned-off salary, his hankering for alcohol, a general ability to deny financial realities, and the many demands made upon him by his family and girlfriends—Easy had not, it turned out, paid his mortgage for nearly four years. He had stopped reading the mail and was shocked when the bank called him to demand 42,000 rand (then around $4,200 according to the exchange rate at that time) by the end of the week, or they would take his house from him. He negotiated the amount down to 26,000 rand. Desperate, he dissolved his meager secret savings. The savings contained 22,000 rand, about which he had told no one. He had painstakingly stashed the money, bit by bit, in a bank account over a period of ten years; he had planned to give it all to Aphiwe. He transferred the money immediately to the bank, assuring himself that 22,000 rand was “more or less” 26,000 rand. Meanwhile, he spent the weekend hitting up every person he knew, looking for 4,000 rand to borrow. He had gathered this by the due date, and sent Tiny to wait at the bank.

All morning, he called the loan officer to say the money was coming, but the line was busy. Then, at 12:30, he received a call on his cell: the house had been sold at auction.

“The cutoff time was noon,” the bank employee explained, to Easy’s surprise. And it had sold for 120,000 rand—less than half the price Easy had bought the house for.

“And your 22,000?” I asked.

“Gone,” he said, his head in his hands. He looked terribly small.

“Let’s go to the bank. We need to understand what happened.”

We walked down the street. Easy was breathing heavily. The house, he kept repeating: It was to be Aphiwe’s inheritance, where she could live and raise her family. So she wouldn’t be in a shack, so she wouldn’t depend on a man. He always circled back to his main fear: that Aphiwe would become involved with a man who beat her. He seemed to think that home ownership could somehow prevent this from occurring, and he was not entirely off base: a woman with assets is less likely to be stuck in an abusive relationship.

We trudged to the second floor of the bank, where a neatly put together colored woman sat behind a desk at the center of a dark floor, tending to a variety of people in financial distress. A white man, missing a leg, his face covered in a dark scattering of scabs, sat in a wheelchair, mumbling for help. Next to him, an old black grandmother waited, her face covered with terra-cotta clay to protect her from the sun, her shoulders wrapped in a blue kikoi cloth. I steered Easy up to the woman at the desk. She looked upon our little coupling inquisitively.

“We have a question about a home loan,” I said. “A home loan with a problem.”

“Okay, what happened?”

Easy, entirely undone by the bank and the public, shameful nature of this encounter, panicked.

“They tell me my house is in arrears,” he said to the woman, speaking quickly, gulping. “They say, ‘Easy, the house will go to auction.’ I called Mr. Mohamed and he said that I must ask Mr. Meyer at ABSA…” He went on, his story pouring out of him. The woman’s face followed along, puzzled by the particulars but sure of one thing: this was a man in distress.

“I am just trying to think where I should put this gentleman,” she said to her colleague, and then led us to her own private office, where she sat Easy before a smudged beige phone. I knew that, per some office policies, employees in South Africa often paid for such calls on their own dime, but she dialed a main number anyway, and the phone began to ring.

Easy then tried to talk with the bank officials, but whenever someone was rude or dismissive, as they initially were, he backed off. His voice was soft and uncertain and he thanked everyone. He didn’t know how to reach the right department or to demand respect. Because Easy had little formal education, and because he had been steeped in a lifetime of suspicious glances cast his way and small humiliations, he had never learned to speak up to intimidating bank officials. He had not learned to ask relevant questions because he usually didn’t know what questions to ask. Plus, he was afraid to expose his own inadequacies.

For some time, I sat in the corner, watching Easy meekly hang up as he was continuously dismissed, until I couldn’t bear it any longer. I took the phone and demanded to be put through to Mr. Meyer. The people suddenly snapped to. I had questions and they answered them. Within moments, Mr. Meyer was on the line. Easy sat, sweating, to the side.

I asked Mr. Meyer for an explanation of what had happened. I asked if Easy could get his 22,000 rand back.

“He owes for forty months,” Mr. Meyer said in his clipped Afrikaans-inflected accent. “The bank won’t give him anything back.”

“He was unaware that the cutoff was noon.”

“I don’t know what to tell you.” I imagined Mr. Meyer in some skyscraper up north, his feet on his desk, twirling a pencil. “What is the big deal with the twenty-two thousand anyway?”

I looked over at Easy. He was biting his nails.

“It’s all he had saved up,” I said. “It’s for his children.”

“Look, I feel bad for the guy, but didn’t he live at the house?”

“No, he was renting it out and living at his parents’.”

“But if he had at least lived at the house, he would have had free rent for years, which is not such a bad deal.”

“All right,” I said. “Isn’t there anything he can do now?”

“You can write a letter pleading hardship, I guess. It probably won’t work, but it’s worth a shot.” He gave me the address and we hung up.

“Sorry, Easy,” I said. He nodded.

“Is okay, Justice.”

We passed the lady who had lent us her office.

“I hope you get it worked out,” she said to Easy. “It’s your property and you should really fight for it.”

We walked back to the Amy Biehl offices. Easy vacillated between blaming his ex Lucretia, with whom he’d co-signed on the loan, blaming the bank, and blaming the loan officer. He never blamed himself, at least out loud, for the years of unpaid mortgage bills. He shook his head miserably all the way down the street and then collected himself.

“Everything will come right,” he said. “Steady, strong.”

Then he went into the building and made his way up to the seventh floor, where he would lead a group of camera-toting tourists into a van and drive them around Gugulethu, pointing out sites relevant in the history of the Struggle. Ever since Ntobeko had stopped talking about the Amy Biehl story unless he was compensated, the foundation depended on Easy to act as the personification of a new, reconciled South Africa.

I started to wake regularly at 5
A
.
M
. Sometimes the mournful sounds of the foghorn down on the water had me up at four, and I could never go back to sleep. On trash mornings, I peered out the front window at the band of scavengers who roamed the streets. They were homeless, most of them colored, with a few blacks and whites thrown in, their faces ragged from drink and drug. Also in the mix were some sober orphans and some hard-up refugees. In my early days, I ran from these people, terrified to be confronted by their destitution. I remember, in my first months, ducking down, slapstick-style, on a balcony as I heard the clip-clop of a man approaching my trash can on crutches. But now I merely kept reading, or watching a movie, or baking a cake. The scavengers knew the trash collection mornings in each neighborhood, and woke at dawn for the best goodies, before the big trucks powered by. Like some of my neighbors, I put my castoffs on top of the bin: flat Coke in a liter bottle, bruised fruit, stale bread, unclaimed leftovers, old T-shirts. By 6
A
.
M
., anything I’d left out would be taken.

I took my dog—glossy, fed on imported, award-winning Canadian kibble—to the rugby field where she chased birds while a community of street people watched. The field sat directly below Signal Hill, a hill upon which the “noon gun” was traditionally fired at twelve by the South African Navy. Once in a while, one of the homeless got particularly inebriated and berated the others. They admired the dog. Sometimes, especially when the cold swept in, one of them would ask me if I might bring them an old blanket or some socks. Sometimes I did, and sometimes I didn’t.

A black groundskeeper drove by on a golf cart. He asked for money. “I am desperate,” he said. I didn’t give him money but we got to talking. He’d come to Cape Town from a small coastal city on the Eastern Cape, hoping for better opportunities, “but there is nothing.” He worked for a pittance on a three-year contract. He couldn’t unionize on the short-term contract, and the lack of job security ate at him.

“The years go fast,” he said. “At least before, the people who had jobs had proper jobs.” When he said “before,” he meant during apartheid.

He had a wife, two kids, and a 1998 Toyota Corolla. He was loyal to the white-led Democratic Alliance party, and he hoped they would take over the country. A strong opposition party, that was the key to the future, he said. As long as the ANC had no real competition, the country would continue to collapse in on itself. I was surprised that the man admitted to voting DA. It wasn’t unusual for poor black people to express anger at the ANC, but they kept voting for them, or perhaps abstained, at a loss as to a better option, as if locked in a cycle of love and abuse. An inebriated retired principal whom I’d met in a shack one afternoon had told me, swaying in his oversized peacoat: “The ANC can go to hell in a nutshell. Zuma is a fuckup, drying up our funds, our taxes, fucking up the country. ANC making shit. Still I will always vote for ANC because only one movement liberate us.” An old man who had lived his whole life in an old company hostel in Gugulethu—first as a laborer and later, once the companies had fled the township, as a squatter in a single, squalid room with his family and a rotting refrigerator—told me, “Must be, I vote. But for nothing. Yes, I can vote now. For nothing. How many years I vote for nothing? Where’s the promise? For nothing.”

The groundskeeper wanted to know what I did for a living. “Oh, a writer? Can you make money doing that?” I told him I could not, and he asked if at least my husband had a good job. He did, I answered, and this satisfied the groundskeeper.

“The wife must stay and make the home, that is what the Bible says, and that is why I soldier on to provide.”

“I disagree, but then again, I’m not religious.”

“Where are you from?”

“America.”

“Ah, you are foreign. That is why you are talking to me. White South Africans, they think we are nothing, not even a dog, they think we are baboons. And they will never talk to us. But you are talking to me, like I am a man, and so I feel honored. Tell me, what is the landscape in America? Are there black people there?”

I went to the gourmet supermarket, situated in an upscale mall. A white man asked the attendant for a slice of lemon meringue pie. The black woman behind the counter was new, and unfamiliar with the appearance of meringue.

“Which is it, sir?” she asked.

“She doesn’t know anything!” the customer said to me loudly, rolling his eyes.
What is this country coming to?

I had become ill-tempered and easily cross, worn down by the in-your-face inequality and the general impossibility of the country. The compassion I’d once nurtured curdled and turned to irritation: irritation that I could not stop at a light without at least one hand knocking on my window. That I could not park my car without somebody in a smudged yellow vest standing by it, expecting a dollar for his troubles. When I’d first arrived, I had gasped at the sight of so many white people contained within their little pod cars, windows rolled up, refusing to acknowledge the brown-skinned unlucky ones peering in. The beggars were missing legs or their faces were bloated from alcohol or illness. They were on crutches, or they were blind, or they were mad. One woman walked on her tiptoes and hid her arm, quite obviously, inside her T-shirt so that it would appear mangled. A teenage junkie had a seizure on the sidewalk as people ambled by. Grandmothers and grandfathers hawked little pamphlets with funny facts, made by a charity to help the homeless. The people were desperate. They used lines like, “My children have got nothing to eat.” They wore rainbow-colored wigs to get attention. They were pushy and obnoxious, or they were sweet and gentle; they were scammers and grifters or honestly needy or all three. I used to look them in the eye.