Life Times Stories Part 26

Frederick surprises his mother by asking if she kept the old attache case a battered black bag, actually where once his father had told him there was stuff about the family they should go through some time; both had forgotten this rendezvous, his father had died before that time came. He did not have much expectation that she still kept the case somewhere, she had moved from what had been the home of marriage and disposed of possessions for which there was no room, no place in her life in a garden complex of elegant contemporary-design cottages. There were some things in a communal storeroom tenants had use of. There he found the bag and squatting among the detritus of other people's pasts he blew away the silverfish moths from letters and sc.r.a.p jottings, copied the facts recorded above. There are also photographs, mounted on board, too tough for whatever serves silverfish as jaws, which he took with him, didn't think his mother would be sufficiently interested in for him to inform her. There is one portrait in an elaborate frame.

The great-grandfather has the same stance in all the photographs whether he is alone beside a photographer's studio palm or among piles of magical dirt, the sieves that would sift from the earth the rough stones that were diamonds within their primitive forms, the expressionless blacks and half-coloured men leaning on spades. Prospectors from London and Paris and Berlin anywhere where there are no diamonds did not themselves race to stake their claims when the starter's gun went off, the hired men who belonged on the land they ran over were swifter than any white foreigner, they staked the foreigners' claims and wielded the picks and spades in the open-cast mining concessions these marked. Even when Ben Morris is photographed sitting in a makeshift overcrowded bar his body, neck tendons, head are upright as if he were standing so immovably confident of what? (Jottings reveal that he unearthed only small stuff. Negligible carats.) Of virility. That's unmistakable, it's untouched by the fickleness of fortune. Others in the picture have become slumped and shabbied by poor luck. The aura of s.e.xual virility in the composure, the dark, bright, on-the-lookout inviting eyes: a call to the other s.e.x as well as elusive diamonds. Women must have heard, read him the way males didn't, weren't meant to. Dates on the sc.r.a.ps of paper made delicately lacy by insects show that he didn't return promptly, he prospected with obstinate faith in his quest, in himself, for five years.

He didn't go home to London, the young wife, he saw the son only once on a single visit when he impregnated the young wife and left her again. He did not make his fortune; but he must have gained some slowly acc.u.mulated profit from the small stones the black men dug for him from their earth, because after five years it appears he went back to London and used his acquired knowledge of the rough stones to establish himself in the gem business, with connections in Amsterdam.

The great-grandfather never returned to Africa. Frederick's mother can at least confirm this, since her son is interested. The later members of the old man's family his fertility produced more sons, from one of whom Frederick is descended came for other reasons, as doctors and lawyers, businessmen, conmen and entertainers, to a level of society created from profit of the hired fast-runners' unearthing of diamonds and gold for those who had come from beyond the seas, another kind of elsewhere.

And that's another story. You're not responsible for your ancestry, are you.

But if that's so, why have you marched under banned slogans, got yourself beaten up by the police, arrested a couple of times; plastered walls with subversive posters. That's also the past. The past is valid only in relation to whether the present recognises it.

How did that handsome man with the beckoning gaze, the characteristic slight flare of the nostrils as if picking up some tempting scent (in every photograph), the strong beringed hands (never touched a spade) splayed on tight-trousered thighs, live without his pretty London bedmate all the nights of prospecting? And the Sunday mornings when you wake, alone, and don't have to get up and get out to educate the students in the biological facts of life behind their condomed cavortings even a diamond prospector must have lain a while longer in his camp bed, Sundays, known those surges of desire, and no woman to turn to. Five years. Impossible that a healthy male, as so evidently this one, went five years without making love except for the brief call on the conjugal bed. Never mind the physical implication; how sad. But of course it wasn't so. He obviously didn't have to write and confess to his young wife that he was having an affair this is the past, not the sophisticated protocol of suburban s.e.xual freedom it's unimaginably makeshift, rough as the diamonds. There were those black girls who came to pick up prospectors' clothes for washing (two in the background of a photograph where, bare-chested, the man has fists up, bunched in a mock fight with a swinging-bellied mate at the diggings) and the half-black girls (two coffee one milk the description at the time) in confusion of a bar-tent caught smiling, pa.s.sing him carrying high their trays of gla.s.ses. Did he have many of these girls over those years of deprived nights and days? Or was there maybe a special one, several special ones, there are no crude circ.u.mstances, Frederick himself has known, when there's not a possibility of tenderness coming uninvited to the straightforward need for a f.u.c.k. And the girls. What happened to the girls if in male urgencies there was conception? The foreigners come to find diamonds came and went, their real lives with women were Elsewhere, intact far away. What happened? Are there children's children of those conceptions on the side engendered by a handsome prospector who went home to his wife and sons and the gem business in London and Amsterdam couldn't they be living where he propagated their predecessors?

Frederick knows as everyone in a country of many races does that from such incidents far back there survives proof in the appropriation, here and there, of the name that was all the progenitor left behind him, adopted without his knowledge or consent out of sentiment, resentment, something owed? More historical fall-out. It was not in mind for a while, like the rendezvous with the stuff in the black bag, forgotten with his father. There was a period of renewed disturbances at the university, destruction of equipment within the buildings behind their neo-cla.s.sical columns; not in the Department of Biology, fortunately.

The portrait of his great-grandfather in its oval frame under convex gla.s.s that had survived unbroken for so long stayed propped up where the desk moved to his new apartment was placed when he and his ex-wife divided possessions. Photographs give out less meaning than painted portraits. Open less contemplation. But he is there, he is a statement.

One-sixteenth black.

In the telephone directory for what is now a city where the diamonds were first dug, are there any listings of the name Morris? Of course there will be, it's not uncommon and so has no relevance.

As if he has requested her to reserve cinema tickets with his credit card he asks his secretary to see if she can get hold of a telephone directory for a particular region. There are Morrises and Morrisons. In his apartment he calls up the name on the internet one late night, alone. There's a Morris who is a theatre director now living in Los Angeles and a Morris a champion bridge player in Cape Town. No one of that name in Kimberley worthy of being noted in this infallible source.

Now and then he and black survivors of the street marches of blacks and whites in the past get together for a drink. 'Survivors' because some of the black comrades (comrades because that form of address hadn't been exclusive to the communists among them) had moved on to high circles in cabinet posts and boardrooms. The talk turned to reform of the education system and student action to bring it about. Except for Frederick, in their shared seventies and eighties few of this group of survivors had the chance of a university education. They're not inhibited to be critical of the new regime their kind brought about or of responses to its promises unfulfilled. 'Trashing the campus isn't going to sc.r.a.p tuition fees for our kids too poor to pay. Yelling freedom songs, toyi-toying at the Princ.i.p.al's door isn't going to reach the Minister of Education's big ears. Man! Aren't there other tactics now? They're supposed to be intelligent, getting educated, not so, and all they can think of is use what we had, throw stones, trash the facilities but the buildings and the libraries and laboratories whatnot are theirs now, not whitey's only they're rubbishing what we fought for, for them.'

Someone asks, your department OK, no damage?

Another punctuates with a laugh. 'They wouldn't touch you, no way.'

Frederick doesn't know whether to put the company right, the students don't know and if they do don't care about his actions in the past, why should they, they don't know who he was, the modest claim to be addressed as comrade. But that would bring another whole debate, one focused on himself.

When he got home rather late he was caught under another focus, seemed that of the eyes of the grandfatherly portrait. Or was it the mixture, first beer then whisky, unaccustomedly downed.

The Easter vacation is freedom from both work and the family kind of obligation it brought while there was marriage. Frederick did have children with the second wife but it was not his turn, in the legal conditions of access, to have the boy and girl with him for this school holiday. There were invitations from university colleagues and an attractive Italian woman he'd taken to dinner and a film recently, but he said he was going away for a break. The coast? The mountains? Kimberley.

What on earth would anyone take a break there for. If they asked, he offered, see the Big Hole, and if they didn't remember what that was he'd have reminded it was the great gouged-out mouth of the diamond pipe formation.

He had never been there and knew no one. No one, that was the point, the negative. The man whose eyes, whose energy of form remain open to you under gla.s.s from the generations since he lived five years here, staked his claim. One-sixteenth. There certainly are men and women, children related thicker than that in his descendant's bloodstream. The telephone directory didn't give much clue to where the cousins, collaterals, might be found living on the territory of diamonds; a.s.suming the addresses given with the numbers are white suburban rather than indicating areas designated under the old segregation which everywhere still bear the kind of euphemistic flowery names that disguised them and where most black and colour-mixed people, around the cities, still live. And that a.s.sumption? An old colour/cla.s.s one that the level of people from whom came the girls great-grandpapa used must still be out on the periphery in the new society? Why shouldn't 'Morris, Walter J.S.' of 'Golf Course Place' be a shades-of-black who had become a big businessman owning a house where he was forbidden before and playing the game at a club he was once barred from?

Scratch a white man, Frederick Morris, and find trace of the serum of induced superiority; history never over. But while he took a good look at himself, pragmatic reasoning set him leaving the chain hotel whose atmosphere confirmed the sense of anonymity of his presence and taking roads to what were the old townships of segregation. A public holiday, so the streets, some tarred and guttered, some unsurfaced dirt with puddles floating beer cans and plastic, were cheerful racetracks of cars, taxis and buses, avoiding skittering children and men and women taking their right and time to cross where they pleased.

No one took much notice of him. His car, on an academic's salary, was neither a newer model nor a more costly make than many of those alongside, and like them being ousted from lane to lane by the occasional Mercedes with darkened windows whose owner surely should have moved by now to somesuch Golf Course Place. And as a man who went climbing at weekends and swam in the university pool early every morning since the divorce, he was sun-pigmented, not much lighter than some of the men who faced him a moment, in pa.s.sing, on the streets where he walked a while as if he had a destination.

Schools were closed for the holidays, as they were for his children; he found himself at a playground. The boys were clambering the structure of the slide instead of taking the ladder, and shouting triumph as they reached the top ahead of conventional users, one lost his toe-hold and fell, howling, while the others laughed. But who could say who could have been this one or that one, give or take a shade, his boy; there's simply the resemblance all boys have in their grimaces of emotion, boastful feats, agile bodies. The girls on the swings clutching younger siblings, even babies; most of them pretty but aren't all girls of the age of his daughter, pretty, though one couldn't imagine her being entrusted with a baby the way the mothers sitting by placidly allowed this. The mothers. The lucky ones (favoured by prospectors?) warm honey-coloured, the others dingy between black and white, as if determined by an under-exposed photograph. Genes the developing agent. Which of these could be a Morris, a long-descended sister-cousin, whatever, alive, we're together here in the present. Could you give me a strand of your hair (his own is lank and straight but that proves nothing after the Caucasian blood mixtures of so many following progenitors) to be matched with my toenail cutting or a shred of my skin in DNA tests. Imagine the reaction when I handed in these to the laboratories at the university. Faculty laughter to cover embarra.s.sment, curiosity. Fred behaving oddly nowadays.

He ate a boerewors roll at a street barrow, asking for it in the language, Afrikaans, that was being spoken all around him. Their mother tongue, the girls who visited the old man spoke (not old then, no, all the vital juices flowing, showing); did he pick it up from them and promptly forget it in London and Amsterdam as he did them, never came back to Africa. He, the descendant, hung on in the township until late afternoon, hardly knowing the object of lingering, or leaving. Then there were bars filling up behind men talking at the entrances against kwaito music. He made his way into one and took a bar stool warm from the backside of the man who swivelled off it. After a beer the voices and laughter, the beat of the music made him feel strangely relaxed on this venture of his he didn't try to explain to himself that began before the convex gla.s.s of the oval-framed photograph. When his neighbour, whose elbow rose and fell in dramatic gestures to accompany a laughing bellowing argument, jolted and spilled the foam of the second beer, the interloper grinned, gave a.s.surances of no offence taken and was drawn into friendly banter with the neighbour and his pals. The argument was about the referee's decision in a soccer game; he'd played when he was a student and could contribute a generalised opinion of the abilities, or lack of, among referees. In the pause when the others called for another round, including him without question, he was able to ask (it was suddenly remembered) did anyone know a Morris family living around? There were self-questioning raised foreheads, they looked to one another: one moved his head slowly side to side, down over the dregs in his gla.s.s; drew up from it, when I was a kid, another kid . . . his people moved to another section, they used to live here by the church.

Alternative townships were suggested. Might be people with that name there. So did he know them from somewhere? Wha'd'you want them for?

It came quite naturally. They're family we've lost touch with.

Oh that's how it is people go all over, you never hear what's with them, these days, it's let's try this place let's try that and you never know they's alive or dead, my brothers gone off to Cape Town they don't know who they are any more . . . so where you from?

From the science faculty of the university with the cla.s.sical columns, the progeny of men and women in the professions, generations of privilege that have made them whatever it is they are. They don't know what they might have been.

Names, unrecorded on birth certificates if there were any such for the issue of foreign prospectors' pa.s.sing s.e.xual relief get lost, don't exist, maybe abandoned as worthless. These bar-room companions buddies comrades, could any one of them be men who should have my family name included in theirs?

So where am I from.

What was it all about.

Dubious. What kind of claim do you need? The standard of privilege changes with each regime. Isn't it a try at privilege. Yes? One up towards the ruling cla.s.s whatever it may happen to be. One-sixteenth. A cousin how many times removed from the projection of your own male needs on to the handsome young buck preserved under gla.s.s. So what's happened to the ideal of the Struggle (the capitalised generic of something else that's never over, never mind history-book victories) for recognition, beginning in the self, that our kind, humankind, doesn't need any distinctions of blood percentage tincture. That f.u.c.ked things up enough in the past. Once there were blacks, poor devils, wanting to claim white. Now there's a white, poor devil, wanting to claim black. It's the same secret.

His colleagues in the faculty coffee room at the university exchange Easter holiday pleasures, mountains climbed, animals in a game reserve, the theatre, concerts and one wryly confessing: trying to catch up with reading for the planning of a new course, sustained by warm beer consumed in the sun.

'Oh and how was the Big Hole?'

'Deep.'

Everyone laughs at witty deadpan brevity.

Stories Since 2007.

Parking Tax.

Round the corner from the bank, a roofless two-sided enclosure on the pavement by sections usefully taken from a cardboard packing case bears a home-drawn sign: Shoe Soles. Within the demarcation a man of indeterminate age has his awl, his rags and pot of treacle-black potion, his small stack of thick plastic material curling up at the edges as if already treading the streets.

Between the supermarket and the intersection where taxi-buses swerve to answer the finger language of people signalling where they want to go, the client of a woman who braids hair with amplifying swathes of other people's hair sits on an upturned fruit box filched from supermarket trash.

At the patch of ground somehow overlooked when the freeway rose at the intersection in the area where panel-beating workshops are the beauty salons for luxury cars, a painted shed has been provided and there are set out oranges, peanuts, cigarettes, jars of Vaseline, packets of condoms and mobile phone batteries.

In the entrance to the enclave between the pharmacy and the liquor store, where there is an ATM dispensing cash, someone has been granted shelter to set up her one-woman craft accommodated on her ample lap. She sits threading necklaces and beading badges, safety-pin backed, which display the red twist emblem of support for people living with HIV Aids.

These are enterprises of the Informal Sector, now a category in the new theory of the economic structure of the country, which declares that the price of the privilege of recognition is a share of the responsibility in reducing unemployment. The unemployed must rouse not arise, in protest against their condition and do something for themselves. The shoe repairer's premises are a Small Business venture as defined within this initiative. The bank belongs to an international consortium which gives modest grants, get-started cash, to encourage such entrepreneurs. He was supplied with his awl, glue and plastic material. The hair artist, with a sum to purchase, as she must know where, from people who grow their hair as a crop. The man in his shed, its array spread on the ground before it, is aware from his own streetwise experience as a customer, what will sell and has had a one-off provision to begin his stock.

The men and women who sleep in the toilet block at the park nearby meant for people who walk their dogs and gays who cruise there, have made it disgustingly unusable, can't be regarded as part of the Informal Sector. Many are illegal immigrants, refugees from the civil wars in neighbouring countries, they're just an inflation of unemployment figures, uncounted, rivals for any work to be come upon.

There are other initiatives that if they may be minimally self-supporting don't seem to qualify for the Informal Sector standard. There's the man who attempts to sell greeting cards mostly for occasions already outdated, Christmas, Valentine's Day, from a tray suspended round his neck. Perhaps people might buy them and paste an Easter message over the greetings? The cards may be charity dumping from the stationer's. Anyway, he is at least in the cla.s.s of economic activity above the one who has no set stand but hawks brooms made of dried gra.s.s-stalks up and down the street.

Beggars have no status whatsoever.

Responsibility, when you operate among others practising the same initiative, implies leadership if you mean to qualify for the collective challenge of the Sector's recognition; that first indication that you're going to be let in to the Formal Economy. Some time. But a leader must have an organisation, and here, coming up with a self-invented occupation, what high-ups call initiative, is the personal property of each one alone; to share it is to risk having it seized away from you. In place of leadership there can only be domination. And that's a matter of discovering something which is inside you. Politicians have it, or they couldn't win elections and recognise, at last, whether for their own purposes or something better, an Informal Sector.

The man who found the something in himself was one of those who wave in a car's path to a vacant parking s.p.a.ce, arms wing-wide, and then perform a repertoire of gestures, warnings, encouragements to the driver successfully to occupy it. Some driver-clients dub the process Parking Tax along with all the other taxes of the Formal Sector they occupy. It's surely some sort of recognition above the patronage of a tip, when they give the Parking Tax man some coins as they drive away.

He is a little older and a little less black than other Parking Tax collectors fulfilling their inventive responsibilities. He probably came from a region of the country where the aboriginal inhabitants, wiped out by darker peoples descended upon them from the west of the African continent, and whites from Europe, have left ancient traces in the brew of DNA. The shopping street is in an old suburb, prosperous, not wealthy; not a mall in the suburbs where blacks of the new Formal Sector live in cla.s.s solidarity with their white equals. The residents of the old suburb, some young, speak of their shopping street as the village.

He's a rather small man with limbs and body appearing to be strung taut on wire rather than bone. His voice and movements spark, as that of men of his morphology often do for the lack of the stodgy physical superiority of others, whether Parking Tax brothers or members of the bank's board. His manner of speaking, a personal mixture of the many languages of which one is his mother tongue, makes his communication easy, better than that of some others on the street. He's never bothered to take part in the angry rivalry between his fellow Parking Tax collectors for the right to command this or that vehicle into this or that s.p.a.ce, although a youngster among them would always know to step back if the two hailed at the same time the hesitancy of a driver seeking a bay. It was he who decided that this random situation was nonsense, no good to anyone. The others accepted his capability instinctively, although not proven in any way. It was he who organised them; each man to have his own pitch, reserved in this block or that, so many bays this side or that. Brothers, not street people.

There was some grumbling among themselves after the allocation had been made mutually, but no violence the way things used to be settled. If there was resentment against his taking for himself the pitch he did, no one would challenge him. Not just because of authority; he was so popular.

He chose what he saw had a number of advantages. The pitch begins at a corner, so there are vehicles coming both from the shopping street and from the connecting one. It is close to the supermarket better than directly in front, where there is a loading s.p.a.ce kept clear for delivery trucks and vans. His pitch is before the church, and not only do the Sunday devout come from the service with a conscience towards the less fortunate than themselves that makes them generous, the departing entourages of wedding ceremonies are even more so. The minister allows certain privileges to one of the children of the Lord, not a member of the congregation, who watches over their material possessions their cars.

The man has a wife along with him at his pitch. She sits not on a fruit box but a small st.u.r.dy crate from the liquor store. There is no purpose in her being there. She doesn't thread beads, sell cigarettes or plait hair, somehow incapacitated not by illness but by the natural haze of being at one level or another, drunk. No one objects to her presence, it is part of the privilege he took to himself. She has a kind of clientele of her own for her chaffing and laughter, mostly the homeless of the park, when her level is mild, which he tolerates, the Parking Tax brothers jeer at only privately, and even the white shoppers ignore as at a dinner party one didn't embarra.s.s a man whose wife was a known lush. The church's compa.s.sion allows her, an invalid of sorts, to use the church lavatory in its grounds and her husband to draw water at the garden tap, which permission he has extended for himself to pull off his shirt and take a wash in hot weather. When her level is high and she sags from her seat, someone, usually a woman among her cronies, will support her a short way up the pavement where the gra.s.s has overgrown the paving, and she collapses there as if she's put to bed. He takes no part. On the other hand, he isn't seen to reproach her, beat her up. Simply keeps his busy professional front, as any corporate official must in the event of a problem with a woman. She lies, pa.s.sing people taking suitable avoidance round her, until sobered enough to get herself up, smiling, and totter back to her crate.

Other Parking Tax men either pocket their dues silently or have obeisant gestures to go with thanks. He takes the right of starting up an exchange, based on his observation and memory of his clients. He'd given them his name (or rather a version of it, Lucas, because his African name was too complex) and while accepting they wouldn't be likely to offer theirs, addresses them personally the way he a.s.sesses them. An elderly white man will be greeted as 'Oupa' while he locks his car doors behind him 'Old Papa' in one of the whites' languages and a distinguished-looking woman with the widow's companion, groomed dog on a lead, is met with the feminine equivalent, 'Hi Ouma, so how's it going today?' Young white men are flattered with male bondage in tributes to their prowess: 'Cool, my man! Sharp! You look you dressed for a big night this weekend.' Every young woman, black or white, is indiscriminately 'Sweetie' a driver as she hits the kerb or is nervous about reversing: 'No sweat, Sweetie, I'm looking out for you.' His evident sense of self makes any offence taken, outdated. The familiarity transposes what might have seemed charitable tolerance on these individuals' part, to an obligation of recognition; equality, even of gender as well as race, simply a.s.suming colloquial intimacy of usage in mutual possession.

He's on particularly good terms a calling-out exchange with a young couple who happen to be white, like most of the shoppers. Of course he doesn't know that the husband is a junior partner in an advertising agency, TV and print media, and the wife a lawyer in a legal aid centre for people who can't afford paid representation in the courts, but he recognises the up-and-coming. Their car regularly bypa.s.ses other vacant bays to occupy one of their man's, under his surveillance, as he would expect. Later he uplifts a palm coaxing encouragement as he or she approaches with a burden of shopping achieved, and saunters over his territory to help load the stuff, questioning, commiserating along with them the robbery cost of everything.

While talking one Sat.u.r.day he was looking at the young woman's shoes, gave the calculated observation: 'Same size as hers', jerked his head back to his wife and as if at a command, she waved to the couple. 'Haven't you got a pair for her you don't like to wear?' As naturally, in the winter: 'She ought to have a better coat you can see. Maybe you can spare.' If the suggestion was forgotten or overlooked (he never accepted the offence that it was ignored), he gave a reminder: 'What happened to the shoes [coat, sweater] you had for her?'

The wife has never been seen wearing any of these items that were duly supplied. The young lawyer was too respectful of the privacy everyone was ent.i.tled to, to enquire: 'What happened to . . .' Everyone's lives are unpredictable. The predicaments and unheard-of resorts turned to, as related to her at her legal aid desk. How unexpected (he lets her lie drunk on the gra.s.s) that now, a Sat.u.r.day morning, the wife has her lap spread and he's sitting there locked by her crossed arms, her drinking coterie prancing applause around them. The young couple come shopping are drawn in. Their man struggles up and puts an arm on the shoulder of each, sways them into laughter at him, with them: it's not that they're one with the people, the people are one with them.

They don't have to remark upon it to one another, that would be unconscious admittance of what they were before: bleeding heart syndrome, believing they didn't have any cla.s.s, let alone race feelings of superiority. Now this freedom of spirit is coming in its validity, granted, from the most unlikely quarter, on the other side of the divides. Here was a man, Lucas, organising people who have no recognised place, told they're Informal, a definition without function except, of course, expected to create whatever for themselves. In his self-appointed domain of the shopping street, there is something? in him that brings coherence.

'Without property, the principle of ownership?' The lawyer knows the sources of the economy. 'But isn't that just it: they don't have the incentives we have' she tries again.

'Don't have the access.' That's her advertising man's response.

To herself, unspoken: They have found a way, and we haven't.

She sometimes b.u.mped into him along the shops literally, he would be in what was bantering argument or his tutoring advice with a few of his Parking Tax men in the middle of the pavement, a.s.sumed that people would step round them in recognition of their responsibility for the order of the street. He might follow beside her into the supermarket or the liquor store as if he also just happened to be shopping, talking about the new extended shopping hours, row over liquor on sale on Sundays, the church kicking up a fuss, local gossip (did she hear, that old man with the sports car yes the red one bashed into a police patrol car) and loading her shopping cart for her, pushing it before her to her car that was his charge. In his chatter there were threads of reasoning and disciplined logic that made her think no, shamed her that he had no real occupation to draw on what were probably his capabilities and provide remuneration earned, not handouts in small change.

Over Christmas he was seen helping out at the liquor store, on the pavement loading boxes of party supplies into delivery vans. When they exchanged the usual greeting, she called, congratulatory, 'You're working here now?' He grinned vociferously. After New Year he was back outside the church, where one of the residents of the park toilets had been standing in for him. He turned away his head as at an intrusion when she remarked, 'You're not at the bottle store?' (Local jargon on the shopping street.) It seemed he forgave her, and closed the subject. 'They don't know how to treat people.'

She knew what he meant. He's not the proprietor's 'boy'. When she dashed to pick up food at the shops as an unwelcome distraction from her day's absorbed involvement in gaining redress for people whose ignorance of rights complicated their need, she was conscious again, he really ought to have some proper employment. All the prevarication of authorities, and the frightened sycophantic obfuscation of victims she met with at Legal Aid in this street man there's at last found something else; the only principle you can live by, now, another kind of respect. The something can't define, within his presumption, crudity, that she can trust. He lets his woman lie drunk on the pavement. As if he'd just step over her. But drink is her only occupation; he's got nothing else to offer her but tolerance, her only freedom, to do what she's resorted to. He accepts people's laughter at this; it's his share of the informal situation. That's how one must recognise it.

Your Parking Tax pet, the young husband teases, over her concern. A colleague of his own trips from the Olympic level of drinking tolerated among the publicity fraternity, goes into rehab, loses his job and, incidentally, his wife.

One Sat.u.r.day there is no encouraging beckon when she approaches a church bay and no saunter to help load the contents of her week's provisions into the car. The man's preoccupied with some other of his regular shoppers to whom he's pointing out the problem of a flat tyre leaning their station wagon against the kerb.

Meanwhile a tenant of the toilets in the park belays her insistently, desolately, old, unshaven, dirty in worn cast-offs those people beg from the church. He doesn't ask for money: 'Please, please just buy me tin of sardines. Please.' He sticks a forefinger down a toothless mouth. 'Just one tin. Sardines.' She has tuna in her trolley load. She's fumbling in a carrier bag when he breaks away from his other regular clientele and thrusts between her and the imploring man. Ignoring her, he's shouting at the bowed head, words are blows in a language she doesn't know. Battered to less than a man, the other cringes, presses arms to his body, bends with knees locked, disowning himself. The ruthless debas.e.m.e.nt sets a shudder through her, the tin she's found drops from her hand. He, more than a man, an elect, among the rulers of the world, swiftly bends to retrieve the tin and toss it back to the trolley.

'He's hungry, what are you doing!'

'Hungry? don't give him anything. Nothing. He doesn't eat it, he takes it to the park and sells it to get money to buy drink.' A hand of dismissal gestured not as at anyone worth threatening, but chasing a dog out of the way. He takes a deep chest-raising breath, snorts to clear his head of the interruption, and smiles. He's there to protect her from exploitation by the Informal Sector.

In her car driving away she sees she's got it all wrong there's no new way. Nothing's changed. He's fitting himself for the Formal Sector. Some day.

Second Coming.

Christians await the return that will raise the dead from the grave as He was raised. They rehea.r.s.e this each Easter. Kafka records in his diaries 'On Friday evening two angels accompany each pious man from the synagogue to his home; the master of the house stands while he greets them in the dining room.' Every Friday night Seder an extra place is laid at table. Maybe the one the Jews are expecting is not an angel but the Messiah, the lost son. Muslims don't antic.i.p.ate the final physical presence of the Prophet Mohammed, they bless his name as if he were always among them.

He was clothed like any other man in the rough denim jeans that were the garb of men of any age in the era of the twenty-first millennium. No robes provided. And the return to the mortal state meant that the weals of nail-driven wounds came back, were there scarred under the shirt, and on the feet and hands. It's of no account where he arrived. Apparently no one was about to claim a vision, now that there was a reality. Many over centuries had been sanctified for declaring a manifestation of him or his mother, celebrated in more recent times graphically, digitally, by all the successive technological means of disseminating announcement of miracles, or were exposed as fraudulent hysterical girls and adults in a dubious mental condition of religious exaltation. The sandals that he wore in the carpenter's shop were the same as, himself ageless, he set out in now, the same as any young man might have been wearing if there were to have been any young men around. But no disciples appeared. No Romans manifest in their mutation as riot police with AK-47s, out to deal with suspicious immigrants of rebel reputation.

His sandalled feet took him along the ways he had to go, some of which had a surface hard and blue-black glinting, exploded, strange to the soles, and others receiving them sinking into familiar sand, the feel of the desert land come to be known as Holy, because of him. There were hulks of what must be some kind of chariot, unlike the ones the Romans used, but anyway too buckled and contorted to form a coherent image; a ma.s.s of sword-sharp gla.s.s shards, peeling colours, bent plates like some form of shielding, and hubs that must have held wheels as such objects have served since the power of the rolling circle was discovered, these in rounds of a black substance that had apparently disintegrated viscid, and set. He looked to someone to be regarding this a consequence of what as he did. But he was alone.

He found himself entering a city, recognisable as one because of the layout for human concourse that he had known, has existed in some design or another, in one era back behind another. Streets. Jerusalem. Streets; his way was barred by tumbles of rubble risen against great blocks of stone and brick conglomerates thrust about together. Lifted to his eyes he followed constructions that must have been the containments of this time he had come to in fulfilment of faith: fallen, half-fallen under some sort of quake (what evil power has challenged his Father's Creation). As once there had been a flood on earth. Disaster. Cosmic; or some unthinkable disintegration, brought about by human acts, attrition beyond the wars they had sinned against their own kind?

The Romans had constructions, palaces, barracks, great walls, temples of the G.o.ds, tall premises of power. Here were premises evidently once so aspiring as to be lost in the sky. Fallen into the shaft of such a ruin, its empty stagger to heaven, there was something part never-covered grave pit, part ordure heap. A confusion cast without respect. Sc.r.a.ps of unrecognisable coded script: Gordon's Dry, Dom Perignon: needles carrying no thread but pointing from small containers reduced to shapes of gla.s.s dust, from which, picked up, there is sensed a faint trace of something that was there, transporting essence, an agent of ecstasy not of the transports of the Faith. Where are the people to whom all this belongs, on whose possessions this disrespect was performed?

There are towers and steeples toppled, cast from what were his homes, each one his Father's house. The cross on which his First Coming ended in agony yes, reproduced in dirt-smeared trinket gold, in rusted iron, and the sacrilege of the cruciform hideously distorted, the arms twisted, wrenched at the ends into an emblem of atrocities. Wherever they were, the people who awaited him, what desecrated heritage had they left as the detritus of their years?

Someone must have survived to bear witness. Surely he would come upon some of his Father's flock, hidden in the countryside.

There was the beginning of open s.p.a.ces near the streets he had quit. No ruins but fallen icons flung supine or poking up, 7TH HOLE, 18TH HOLE; dead bushes, roots in the air, the condition of growth reversed, from under which he took a hard small object, a dimpled ball, it fits in his cupped palm on the scars. Dead trees, as beggar figures arrested against the line of sky, but then the fragile intricacy of beak-woven bird nests suggests there will be calls to be heard although there are no children playing whom he can tenderly summon.

The wind brings no cry, only stirs rasping branches in a movement he's alert to as that of a bird; no bird hiding from him. But on a measured stretch of open land there are what must be gigantic birds of inconceivable size, outside his Father's Creation, without bones, flesh and feathers, lying in the charred deformation of some self-consuming violent end, fires of h.e.l.l. The broken skeletons of a kind of throne they evidently had inside them in place of the vital organs of birds and beasts lie within and spewed about them.

On and on. Where are fields of grain, terrace of vines?

The straps of the sandals curl worn, dragging between the toes, abrading the skin. No matter. There must be an encounter soon with the people of G.o.d who have waited so long. Everywhere animal and human bones the feet stop, of their own volition, at the sight the relics of life are indistinguishable except for the rise of hope that is faith, for here is a jaw that could only belong to one who could speak, and the wonder of a skull so magnificent it must testify to the continual resumption of life in that of a pachyderm mutated through the millennia, survived until what? What catastrophe?

O Lord have you forsaken them? What have your people done to the beautiful earthly abode you gave them, that you have forsaken them?

Where are they, his Father's people to whom He has sent his son, come at last to save from the death sentence of Time itself; to save them from themselves? Always there have been some survivors. Receiving manna in the form of a plague of locusts become sustenance, consumed as food. Men, women, children, animals somehow clinging to a rock on Ararat. The Flood. Water: yes, he must direct himself to the waters, the sea, fishermen use an element of his Father's Creation other than earth, from which to take and sustain life. In this Coming as again a mortal, the paths he makes for himself, the mountain pa.s.s he climbs and descends are of a long duration, maybe more than two risings and fallings of the light and day ordained in the Beginning. Emptiness. Still no one, nothing walking, grazing, crawling, flying, scuttling from his footsteps, no one hearing his weary intake and release of breath, no face to meet with the sweat bleeding down his brow, the scars wakening under the sweat-soaked shirt. His thick-tongued thirst. The pools where he stumbled to quench it are so putrid they hold no reflected image of what bent to them and the swallows he took were vomited in rejection from his body. The pains the flesh is heir to that he took on for himself with human existence, the first Coming.

And here they are, the waters. The sea spread in peace down there. Certainly soon, the scent of it to pa.s.s a cool tongue over the sweat. The seas of the world, of Creation. The sandals slipped and slid taking him to fisherfolk, that steadfast flock who master the wild elements, land, wind and water as everyday circ.u.mstance; they would be there for him as they had been since he was among them and in what has been measured while awaiting him. Whatever had befallen, they would be there to begin again, with life netted from the sea.

There are no huts, no boats, no spread nets. Scatters and heaps of what once were these, half-buried by the smoothing hands of sand dunes, half-fumbled through by water along with bones of rotted men, sea creatures on a piled tideline.

He wades in, the sandals which have brought him so far from so long ago are hooked off his feet by the vast decay that clutches at him, thrusts at him. Breast heaves; no cleansing smell of salt to draw into it. Through the shallows, up to his waist, his armpits, and to rocks where mussel and sea urchin sh.e.l.ls are fallen choking pools where fingerlings should find shelter from predators. The decomposed corpses of seals buffet against him. No salt scent but a suffocating charnelhouse stink of decay, putrescence.

This was where he achieved the miracle of loaves and fishes.

This water, the day of his Coming, has no properties of transfiguration.

He brings himself in desperate desolation even to consider the heresy (may he be forgiven), the possibilities of the theory which denies the Creation of human life formed divinely in the image of the Father; a belief that a fish struggled out of this element, the waters, to learn to breathe in another, and transform fins into legs that propelled, to walk on earth. But there is no life in the seas. No fish to come a second time, begin again evolution, become human, on one of the planets of the six-day Creation.

The sea is dead.

AVAILABLE FROM PENGUIN.

BY NADINE GORDIMER.