Life Times Stories Part 5

Jessica Malherbe smiled, and there was in her smile something of the easy, informal amus.e.m.e.nt with which Afrikaners discount pomposity. 'Mr Dougal, good afternoon. Yes, of course, we know you have to give us official warning. How far do you think we'll get?'

The man's face relaxed. He shrugged and said, 'They're waiting for you.'

And suddenly the girl, Joyce McCoy, felt this the sense of something lying in wait for them. The neat, stereotyped faces of African clerks appeared at the windows of the administrative offices. As the party approached the clinic, the European doctor, in his white coat, looked out; two white nurses and an African nurse came out on to the veranda. And all the patient African women who were sitting about in the sun outside, suckling their babies and gossiping, sat silent while the party walked by sat silent, and had in their eyes something of the look of the Indian grandmother, waiting at home in Fordsburg.

The party walked on up the street, and on either side, in the little houses, which had homemade verandas flanking the strip of worn, unpaved earth that was the pavement, or whose front doors opened straight out on to a foot or two of fenced garden, where hens ran and pumpkins had been put to ripen, doors were open, and men and women stood, their children gathered in around them, as if they sensed the approach of a storm. Yet the sun was hot on the heads of the party, walking slowly up the street. And they were silent, and the watchers were silent, or spoke to one another only in whispers, each bending his head to another's ear but keeping his eyes on the group pa.s.sing up the street. Someone laughed, but it was only a drunk a wizened little old man returning from some shebeen. And ahead, at the corner of a crossroad, stood the police car, a black car, with the aerial from its radio-communication equipment a shining lash against all the shabbiness of the street. The rear doors opened and two heavy, smartly dressed policemen got out and slammed the doors behind them. They approached the party slowly, not hurrying themselves. When they drew abreast, one said, as if in reflex, 'Ah good afternoon.' But the other cut in, in an emotionless official voice, 'You are all under arrest for illegal entry into Lagersdorp Location. If you'll just give us your names . . .'

Joyce stood waiting her turn, and her heart beat slowly and evenly. She thought again, as she had once before how long ago was that party? I feel nothing. It's all right. I feel nothing.

But as the policeman came to her, and she spelled out her name for him, she looked up and saw the faces of the African onlookers who stood nearest her. Two men, a small boy and a woman, dressed in ill-matched cast-offs of European clothing, which hung upon them without meaning, like coats spread on bushes, were looking at her. When she looked back, they met her gaze. And she felt, suddenly, not nothing but what they were feeling, at the sight of her, a white girl, taken incomprehensibly, as they themselves were used to being taken under the force of white men's wills, which dispensed and withdrew life, which imprisoned and set free, fed or starved, like G.o.d himself.

Not for Publication.

Not for Publication.

It is not generally known and it is never mentioned in the official biographies that the Prime Minister spent the first eleven years of his life, as soon as he could be trusted not to get under a car, leading his uncle about the streets. The uncle was not really blind, but nearly, and he was certainly mad. He walked with his right hand on the boy's left shoulder; they kept moving part of the day, but they also had a pitch on the cold side of the street, between the legless man near the post office who sold bootlaces and copper bracelets, and the one with the doll's hand growing out of one elbow, whose pitch was outside the YWCA. That was where Adelaide Graham-Grigg found the boy, and later he explained to her, 'If you sit in the sun they don't give you anything.'

Miss Graham-Grigg was not looking for Praise Basetse. She was in Johannesburg on one of her visits from a British Protectorate, seeing friends, pulling strings, and pursuing, on the side, her private study of following up the fate of those people of the tribe who had crossed the border and lost themselves, sometimes over several generations, in the city. As she felt down through the papers and letters in her bag to find a sixpence for the old man's hat, she heard him mumble something to the boy in the tribe's tongue which was not in itself anything very significant in this city where many African languages could be heard. But these sounds formed in her ear as words: it was the language that she had learnt to understand a little. She asked, in English, using only the traditional form of address in the tribe's tongue, whether the old man was a tribesman? But he was mumbling the blessings that the clink of a coin started up like a kick to a worn and useless mechanism. The boy spoke to him, nudged him; he had already learnt in a rough way to be a businessman. Then the old man protested, no, no, he had come a long time from that tribe. A long, long time. He was Johannesburg. She saw that he confused the question with some routine interrogation at the pa.s.s offices, where a man from another territory was always in danger of being endorsed out to some forgotten 'home'. She spoke to the boy, asking him if he came from the Protectorate. He shook his head terrifiedly; once before he had been ordered off the streets by a welfare organisation. 'But your father? Your mother?' Miss Graham-Grigg said, smiling. She discovered that the old man had come from the Protectorate, from the very village she had made her own, and that his children had pa.s.sed on to their children enough of the language for them all to continue to speak it among themselves down to the second generation born in the alien city.

Now the pair were no longer beggars to be ousted from her conscience by a coin: they were members of the tribe. She found out what township they went to ground in after the day's begging, interviewed the family, established for them the old man's right to a pension in his adopted country, and, above all, did something for the boy. She never succeeded in finding out exactly who he was she gathered he must have been the illegitimate child of one of the girls in the family, his parentage concealed so that she might go on with her schooling. Anyway, he was a descendant of the tribe, a displaced tribesman, and he could not be left to go on begging in the streets. That was as far as Miss Graham-Grigg's thoughts for him went, in the beginning. n.o.body wanted him particularly, and she met with no opposition from the family when she proposed to take him back to the Protectorate and put him to school. He went with her just as he had gone through the streets of Johannesburg each day under the weight of the old man's hand.

The boy had never been to school before. He could not write, but Miss Graham-Grigg was astonished to discover that he could read quite fluently. Sitting beside her in her little car in the khaki shorts and shirt she had bought him, stripped of the protection of his smelly rags and scrubbed bare to her questions, he told her that he had learnt from the newspaper vendor whose pitch was on the corner; from the posters that changed several times a day, and then from the front pages of the newspapers and magazines spread there. Good G.o.d, what had he not learnt on the street! Everything from his skin out unfamiliar to him, and even that smelling strangely different this detachment, she realised, made the child talk as he could never have done when he was himself. Without differentiation, he related the commonplaces of his life; he had also learnt from the legless copper bracelet man how to make dagga cigarettes and smoke them for a nice feeling. She asked him what he thought he would have done when he got older, if he had had to keep on walking with his uncle, and he said that he had wanted to belong to one of the gangs of boys, some little older than himself, who were very good at making money. They got money from white people's pockets and handbags without them even knowing it, and if the police came they began to play their penny whistles and sing.

She said with a smile, 'Well, you can forget all about the street, now. You don't have to think about it ever again.'

And he said, 'Yes, med-dam' and she knew she had no idea what he was thinking how could she? All she could offer were more unfamiliarities, the unfamiliarities of generalised encouragement, saying, 'And soon you will know how to write.'

She had noticed that he was hatefully ashamed of not being able to write. When he had had to admit it, the face that he turned open and victimised to her every time she spoke had the squinting grimace teeth showing and a grown-up cut between the faint, child's eyebrows of profound humiliation. Humiliation terrified Adelaide Graham-Grigg as the spectacle of savage anger terrifies others. That was one of the things she held against the missionaries: how they stressed Christ's submission to humiliation, and so had conditioned the people of Africa to humiliation by the white man.

Praise went to the secular school that Miss Graham-Grigg's committee of friends of the tribe in London had helped pay to set up in the village in opposition to the mission school. The sole qualified teacher was a young man who had received his training in South Africa and now had been brought back to serve his people; but it was a beginning. As Adelaide Graham-Grigg often said to the Chief, shining-eyed as any proud daughter, 'By the time independence comes we'll be free not only of the British Government, but of the church as well.' And he always giggled a little embarra.s.sedly, although he knew her so well and was old enough to be her father, because her own father was both a former British MP and the son of a bishop.

It was true that everything was a beginning; that was the beauty of it of the smooth mud houses, red earth, flies and heat that visitors from England wondered she could bear to live with for months on end, while their palaces and cathedrals and streets choked on a thousand years of used-up endeavour were an ending. Even Praise was a beginning; one day the tribe would be economically strong enough to gather its exiles home, and it would no longer be necessary for its sons to sell their labour over that border. But it soon became clear that Praise was also exceptional. The business of learning to read from newspaper headlines was not merely a piece of gutter-wit; it proved to have been the irrepressible urge of real intelligence. In six weeks the boy could write, and from the start he could spell perfectly, while boys of sixteen and eighteen never succeeded in mastering English orthography. His arithmetic was so good that he had to be taught with the Standard Three cla.s.s instead of the beginners; he grasped at once what a map was; and in his spare time showed a remarkable apt.i.tude for understanding the workings of various mechanisms, from water pumps to motorcycle engines. In eighteen months he had completed the Standard Five syllabus, only a year behind the average age of a city white child with all the background advantage of a literate home.

There was as yet no other child in the tribe's school who was ready for Standard Six. It was difficult to see what could be done, now, but send Praise back over the border to school. So Miss Graham-Grigg decided it would have to be Father Audry. There was nothing else for it. The only alternative was the mission school, those d.a.m.ned Jesuits who'd been sitting in the Protectorate since the days when the white imperialists were on the grab, taking the tribes under their 'protection' and the children the boy would be in cla.s.s with there wouldn't provide any sort of stimulation, either. So it would have to be Father Audry, and South Africa. He was a priest, too, an Anglican one, but his school was a place where at least, along with the pious pap, a black child could get an education as good as a white child's.

When Praise came out into the veld with the other boys his eyes screwed up, against the size: the land ran away all round, and there was no other side to be seen; only the sudden appearance of the sky, that was even bigger. The wind made him snuff like a dog. He stood helpless as the country men he had seen caught by changing traffic lights in the middle of a street. The bits of s.p.a.ce between buildings came together, ballooned uninterruptedly over him, he was lost; but there were clouds as big as the buildings had been, and even though s.p.a.ce was vaster than any city, it was peopled by birds. If you ran for ten minutes into the veld the village was gone; but down low on the ground thousands of ants knew their way between their hard mounds that stood up endlessly as the land.

He went to herd cattle with the other boys early in the mornings and after school. He taught them some gambling games they had never heard of. He told them about the city they had never seen. The money in the old man's hat seemed a lot to them, who had never got more than a few pennies when the mail train stopped for water at the halt five miles away; so the sum grew in his own estimation, too, and he exaggerated it a bit. In any case, he was forgetting about the city; in a way; not Miss Graham-Grigg's way, but in the manner of a child, who makes, like a wasp building with his own spittle, his private context within the circ.u.mstance of his surroundings, so that the s.p.a.ce around him was reduced to the village, the pan where the cattle were taken to drink, the halt where the train went by; whatever particular patch of sand or rough gra.s.s astir with ants the boys rolled on, heads together, among the white egrets and the cattle. He learnt from the others what roots and leaves were good to chew, and how to set wire traps for spring-hares. Though Miss Graham-Grigg had said he need not, he went to church with the children on Sundays.

He did not live where she did, in one of the Chief's houses, but with the family of one of the other boys; but he was at her house often. She asked him to copy letters for her. She cut things out of the newspapers she got and gave them to him to read; they were about aeroplanes, and dams being built, and the way the people lived in other countries. 'Now you'll be able to tell the boys all about the Volta Dam, that is also in Africa far from here but still, in Africa,' she said, with that sudden smile that reddened her face. She had a gramophone and she played records for him. Not only music, but people reading out poems, so that he knew that the poems in the school reader were not just short lines of words, but more like songs. She gave him tea with plenty of sugar and she asked him to help her to learn the language of the tribe, to talk to her in it. He was not allowed to call her madam or missus, as he did the white women who had put money in the hat, but had to learn to say Miss Graham-Grigg.

Although he had never known any white women before except as high-heeled shoes pa.s.sing quickly in the street, he did not think that all white women must be like her; in the light of what he had seen white people, in their cars, their wealth, their distance, to be, he understood nothing that she did. She looked like them, with her blue eyes, blonde hair and skin that was not one colour but many brown where the sun burned it, red when she blushed but she lived here in the Chief's houses, drove him in his car, and sometimes slept out in the fields with the women when they were harvesting kaffircorn far from the village. He did not know why she had brought him there, or why she should be kind to him. But he could not ask her, any more than he would have asked her why she went out and slept in the fields when she had a gramophone and a lovely gas lamp (he had been able to repair it for her) in her room. If when they were talking together, the talk came anywhere near the pitch outside the post office, she became slowly very red, and they went past it, either by falling silent or (on her part) talking and laughing rather fast.

That was why he was amazed the day she told him that he was going back to Johannesburg. As soon as she had said it she blushed darkly for it, her eyes pleading confusion: so it was really from her that the vision of the pitch outside the post office came again. But she was already speaking: '-to school. To a really good boarding school, Father Audry's school, about nine miles from town. You must get your chance at a good school, Praise. We really can't teach you properly any longer. Maybe you'll be the teacher here, yourself, one day. There'll be a high school and you'll be the headmaster.'

She succeeded in making him smile; but she looked sad, uncertain. He went on smiling because he couldn't tell her about the initiation school that he was about to begin with the other boys of his age group. Perhaps someone would tell her. The other women. Even the Chief. But you couldn't fool her with smiling.

'You'll be sorry to leave Tebedi and Joseph and the rest.'

He stood there, smiling.

'Praise, I don't think you understand about yourself about your brain.' She gave a little sobbing giggle, prodded at her own head. 'You've got an awfully good one. More in there than other boys you know? It's something special it would be such a waste. Lots of people would like to be clever like you, but it's not easy, when you are the clever one-?'

He went on smiling. He did not want her face looking into his any more and so he fixed his eyes on her feet, white feet in sandals with the veins standing out over the ankles like the feet of Christ dangling above his head in the church.

Adelaide Graham-Grigg had met Father Audry before, of course. All those white people who do not accept the colour bar in Southern Africa seem to know each other, however different the bases of their rejection. She had sat with him on some committee or other in London a few years earlier, along with a couple of exiled white South African leftists and a black nationalist leader. Anyway, everyone knew him from the newspapers if nowhere else: he had been warned, in a public speech by the Prime Minister of South Africa, Dr Verwoerd, that the interference of a churchman in political matters would not be tolerated. He continued to speak his mind, and (as the newspapers quoted him) 'to obey the commands of G.o.d before the dictates of the State'. He had close friends among African and Indian leaders, and it was said that he even got on well with certain ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church, that, in fact, he was behind some of the dissidents who now and then questioned Divine Sanction for the colour bar such was the presence of his restless, black-ca.s.socked figure, stammering eloquence and jagged handsome face.

He had aged since she saw him last; he was less handsome. But he had still what he would have as long as he lived: the unconscious bearing of a natural prince among men that makes a celebrated actor, a political leader, a successful lover; an object of attraction and envy who, whatever his generosity of spirit, is careless of one cruelty for which other people will never forgive him the distinction, the luck with which he was born.

He was tired and closed his eyes in a grimace straining at concentration when he talked to her, yet in spite of this she felt the dimness of the candle of her being within his radius. Everything was right, with him; nothing was quite right with her. She was only thirty-six but she had never looked any younger. Her eyes were the bright shy eyes of a young woman but her feet and hands with their ridged nails had the look of tension and suffering of extremities that would never caress: she saw it, he saw it, she knew in his presence that they were deprived for ever.

Her humiliation gave her force. She said, 'I must tell you we want him back in the tribe I mean, there are terribly few with enough education even for administration. Within the next few years we'll desperately need more and more educated men . . . We shouldn't want him to be allowed to think of becoming a priest.'

Father Audry smiled at what he knew he was expected to come out with: that if the boy chose the way of the Lord, etc.

He said, 'What you want is someone who will turn out to be an able politician without challenging the tribal system.'

They both laughed, but, again, he had unconsciously taken the advantage of admitting their deeply divergent views; he believed the chiefs must go, while she, of course, saw no reason why Africans shouldn't develop their own tribal democracy instead of taking over the Western pattern.

'Well, he's a little young for us to be worrying about that now, don't you think . . . ?' He smiled. There were a great many papers on his desk and she had the sense of pressure of his preoccupation with other things. 'What about the Lemeribe Mission? What's the teaching like these days I used to know Father Chalmon when he was there-'

'I wouldn't send him to those people,' she said spiritedly, implying that he knew her views on missionaries and their role in Africa. In this atmosphere of candour they discussed Praise's background. Father Audry suggested that the boy should be encouraged to resume relations with his family, once he was back within reach of Johannesburg.

'They're pretty awful.'

'It would be best for him to acknowledge what he was, if he is to accept what he is to become.' He got up with a swish of his black skirts and strode, stooping in the opened door, to call, 'Simon, bring the boy.' Miss Graham-Grigg was smiling excitedly towards the doorway, all the will to love pacing behind the bars of her glance.

Praise entered in the navy-blue shorts and white shirt of his new school uniform. The woman's kindness, the man's attention, got him in the eyes like the sun striking off the pan where the cattle had been taken to drink. Father Audry came from England, Miss Graham-Grigg had told him, like herself. That was what they were, these two white people who were not like any white people he had seen to be. What they were was being English. From far off; six thousand miles from here, as he knew from his geography book.

Praise did very well at the new school. He sang in the choir in the big church on Sundays; his body, that was to have been made a man's out in the bush, was hidden under the white robes. The boys smoked in the lavatories and once there was a girl who came and lay down for them in a storm-water ditch behind the workshops. He knew all about these things from before, on the streets and in the location where he had slept in one room with a whole family. But he did not tell the boys about the initiation. The women had not said anything to Miss Graham-Grigg. The Chief hadn't, either. Soon when Praise thought about it he realised that by now it must be over. Those boys must have come back from the bush. Miss Graham-Grigg had said that after a year, when Christmas came, she would fetch him for the summer holidays. She did come and see him twice that first year, when she was down in Johannesburg, but he couldn't go back with her at Christmas because Father Audry had him in the Nativity play, and was giving him personal coaching in Latin and algebra. Father Audry didn't actually teach in the school at all it was 'his' school simply because he had begun it, and it was run by the Order of which he was Father Provincial but the reports of the boy's progress were so astonishing that, as he said to Miss Graham-Grigg, one felt one must give him all the mental stimulation one could.

'I begin to believe we may be able to sit him for his matric when he is just sixteen.' Father Audry made the p.r.o.nouncement with the air of doing so at the risk of sounding ridiculous.

Miss Graham-Grigg always had her hair done when she got to Johannesburg, she was looking pretty and optimistic. 'D'you think he could do a Cambridge entrance? My committee in London would set up a scholarship, I'm sure investment in a future Prime Minister for the Chief!'

When Praise was sent for, she said she hardly knew him; he hadn't grown much, but he looked so grown-up, with his long trousers and gla.s.ses. 'You really needn't wear them when you're not working,' said Father Audry. 'Well, I suppose if you take 'em on and off you keep leaving them about, eh?' They both stood back, smiling, letting the phenomenon embody in the boy.

Praise saw that she had never been reminded by anyone about the initiation. She began to give him news of his friends, Tebedi and Joseph and the others, but when he heard their names they seemed to belong to people he couldn't see in his mind.

Father Audry talked to him sometimes about what Father called his 'family', and when first he came to the school he had been told to write to them. It was a well-written, well-spelled letter in English, exactly the letter he presented as a school exercise when one was required in cla.s.s. They didn't answer. Then Father Audry must have made private efforts to get in touch with them, because the old woman, a couple of children who had been babies when he left and one of his grown-up 'sisters' came to the school on a visiting day. They had to be pointed out to him among the other boys' visitors; he would not have known them, nor they him.

He said, 'Where's my uncle?' because he would have known him at once; he had never grown out of the slight stoop of the left shoulder where the weight of the old man's hand had impressed the young bone. But the old man was dead.

Father Audry came up and put a long arm round the bent shoulder and another long arm round one of the small children and said from one to the other: 'Are you going to work hard and learn a lot like your brother?' and the small black child stared up into the nostrils filled with strong hair, the tufted eyebrows, the red mouth surrounded by the pale jowl dark-pored with beard beneath the skin, and then down, torn by fascination, to the string of beads that hung from the leather belt.

They did not come again, but Praise did not much miss visitors because he spent more and more time with Father Audry. When he was not actually being coached, he was set to work to prepare his lessons or do his reading in the Father's study, where he could concentrate as one could not hope to do up at the school. Father Audry taught him chess as a form of mental gymnastics, and was jubilant the first time Praise beat him. Praise went up to the house for a game nearly every evening after supper. He tried to teach the other boys but after the first ten minutes of explanation of moves, someone would bring out the cards or dice and they would all play one of the old games that were played in the streets and yards and locations. Johannesburg was only nine miles away; you could see the lights.

Father Audry rediscovered what Miss Graham-Grigg had found that Praise listened attentively to music, serious music. One day Father Audry handed the boy the flute that had lain for years in its velvet-lined box that bore still the little silver nameplate: Rowland Audry. He watched while Praise gave the preliminary swaying wriggle and a.s.sumed the bent-kneed stance of all the urchin performers Father Audry had seen, and then tried to blow down it in the shy, fierce attack of penny whistle music. Father Audry took it out of his hands. 'It's what you've just heard there.' Bach's unaccompanied flute sonata lay on the record player. Praise smiled and frowned, giving his gla.s.ses a lift with his nose a habit he was developing. 'But you'll soon learn to play it the right way round,' said Father Audry, and with the lack of self-consciousness that comes from the habit of privilege, put the flute to his mouth and played what he remembered after ten years.

He taught Praise not only how to play the flute, but also the elements of musical composition, so that he should not simply play by ear, or simply listen with pleasure, but also understand what it was that he heard. The flute-playing was much more of a success with the boys than the chess had been, and on Sat.u.r.day nights, when they sometimes made up concerts, he was allowed to take it to the hostel and play it for them. Once he played in a show for white people, in Johannesburg; but the boys could not come to that; he could only tell them about the big hall at the university, the jazz band, the African singers and dancers with their red lips and straightened hair, like white women.

The one thing that dissatisfied Father Audry was that the boy had not filled out and grown as much as one would have expected. He made it a rule that Praise must spend more time on physical exercise the school couldn't afford a proper gymnasium, but there was some equipment outdoors. The trouble was that the boy had so little time; even with his exceptional ability, it was not going to be easy for a boy with his lack of background to matriculate at sixteen. Brother George, his form master, was certain he could be made to bring it off; there was a specially strong reason why everyone wanted him to do it since Father Audry had established that he would be eligible for an open scholarship that no black boy had ever won before what a triumph that would be, for the boy, for the school, for all the African boys who were considered fit only for the inferior standard of 'Bantu education'! Perhaps some day this beggar-child from the streets of Johannesburg might even become the first black South African to be a Rhodes Scholar. This was what Father Audry jokingly referred to as Brother George's 'sin of pride'. But who knew? It was not inconceivable. So far as the boy's physique was concerned what Brother George said was probably true: 'You can't feed up for those years in the streets.'

From the beginning of the first term of the year he was fifteen Praise had to be coached, pressed on, and to work as even he had never worked before. His teachers gave him tremendous support; he seemed borne along on it by either arm so that he never looked up from his books. To encourage him, Father Audry arranged for him to compete in certain inter-school scholastic contests that were really intended for the white Anglican schools a spelling team, a debate, a quiz contest. He sat on the platform in the polished halls of huge white schools and gave his correct answers in the African-accented English that the boys who surrounded him knew only as the accent of servants and delivery men.

Brother George often asked him if he were tired. But he was not tired. He only wanted to be left with his books. The boys in the hostel seemed to know this; they never asked him to play cards any more, and even when they shared smokes together in the lavatory, they pa.s.sed him his drag in silence. He specially did not want Father Audry to come in with a gla.s.s of hot milk. He would rest his cheek against the pages of the books, now and then, alone in the study; that was all. The damp stone smell of the books was all he needed. Where he had once had to force himself to return again and again to the pages of things he did not grasp, gazing in blankness at the print until meaning a.s.sembled itself, he now had to force himself when it was necessary to leave the swarming facts, outside which he no longer seemed to understand anything. Sometimes he could not work for minutes at a time because he was thinking that Father Audry would come in with the milk. When he did come, it was never actually so bad. But Praise couldn't look at his face. Once or twice when he had gone out again, Praise shed a few tears. He found himself praying, smiling with the tears and trembling, rubbing at the scalding water that ran down inside his nose and blotched on the books.

One Sat.u.r.day afternoon when Father Audry had been entertaining guests at lunch he came into the study and suggested that the boy should get some fresh air go out and join the football game for an hour or so. But Praise was struggling with geometry problems from the previous year's matriculation paper that, to Brother George's dismay, he had suddenly got all wrong that morning.

Father Audry could imagine what Brother George was thinking: was this an example of the phenomenon he had met with so often with African boys of a lesser calibre the inability, through lack of an a.s.sumed cultural background, to perform a piece of work well known to them, once it was presented in a slightly different manner outside of their own textbooks? Nonsense, of course, in this case; everyone was over-anxious about the boy. Right from the start he'd shown that there was nothing mechanistic about his thought processes; he had a brain, not just a set of conditioned reflexes.

'Off you go. You'll manage better when you've taken a few knocks on the field.'

But desperation had settled on the boy's face like obstinacy. 'I must, I must,' he said, putting his palms down over the books.

'Good. Then let's see if we can tackle it together.'

The black skirt swishing past the shiny shoes brought a smell of cigars. Praise kept his eyes on the black beads; the leather belt they hung from creaked as the big figure sat down. Father Audry took the chair on the opposite side of the table and switched the exercise book round towards himself. He scrubbed at the thick eyebrows till they stood out tangled, drew the hand down over his great nose, and then screwed his eyes closed a moment, mouth strangely open and lips drawn back in a familiar grimace. There was a jump, like a single painful hiccup, in Praise's body. The Father was explaining the problem gently, in his offhand English voice.

He said, 'Praise? D'you follow' the boy seemed sluggish, almost deaf, as if the voice reached him as the light of a star reaches the earth from something already dead.

Father Audry put out his fine hand, in question or compa.s.sion. But the boy leapt up dodging a blow. 'Sir no. Sir no.'

It was clearly hysteria; he had never addressed Father Audry as anything but 'Father'. It was some frightening retrogression, a reversion to the subconscious, a place of symbols and collective memory. He spoke for others, out of another time. Father Audry stood up but saw in alarm that by the boy's retreat he was made his pursuer, and he let him go, blundering in clumsy panic out of the room.

Brother George was sent to comfort the boy. In half an hour he was down on the football field, running and laughing. But Father Audry took some days to get over the incident. He kept thinking how when the boy had backed away he had almost gone after him. The ugliness of the instinct repelled him; who would have thought how, at the mercy of the instinct to prey, the fox, the wild dog long for the innocence of the gentle rabbit and the lamb. No one had shown fear of him ever before in his life. He had never given a thought to the people who were not like himself; those from whom others turn away. He felt at last a repugnant and resentful pity for them, the dripping-jawed hunters. He even thought that he would like to go into retreat for a few days, but it was inconvenient he had so many obligations. Finally, the matter-of-factness of the boy, Praise, was the thing that restored normality. So far as the boy was concerned, one would have thought that nothing had happened. The next day he seemed to have forgotten all about it; a good thing. And so Father Audry's own inner disruption, denied by the boy's calm, sank away. He allowed the whole affair the one acknowledgement of writing to Miss Graham-Grigg surely that was not making too much of it to suggest that the boy was feeling the tension of his final great effort, and that a visit from her, etc.; but she was still away in England some family troubles had kept her there for months, and in fact she had not been to see her protege for more than a year.

Praise worked steadily on the last lap. Brother George and Father Audry watched him continuously. He was doing extremely well and seemed quite overcome with the weight of pride and pleasure when Father Audry presented him with a new black fountain pen: this was the pen with which he was to write the matriculation exam. On a Monday afternoon Father Audry, who had been in conference with the Bishop all morning, looked in on his study, where every afternoon the boy would be seen sitting at the table that had been moved in for him. But there was no one there. The books were on the table. A chute of sunlight landed on the seat of the chair. Praise was not found again. The school was searched; and then the police were informed; the boys questioned; there were special prayers said in the mornings and evenings. He had not taken anything with him except the fountain pen.

When everything had been done there was nothing but silence; n.o.body mentioned the boy's name. But Father Audry was conducting investigations on his own. Every now and then he would get an idea that would bring a sudden hopeful relief. He wrote to Adelaide Graham-Grigg'. . . what worries me I believe the boy may have been on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I am hunting everywhere . . .'; was it possible that he might make his way to the Protectorate? She was acting as confidential secretary to the Chief, now, but she wrote to say that if the boy turned up she would try to make time to deal with the situation. Father Audry even sought out, at last, the 'family' the people with whom Miss Graham-Grigg had discovered Praise living as a beggar. They had been moved to a new township and it took some time to trace them. He found No. 28b, Block E, in the appropriate ethnic group. He was accustomed to going in and out of African homes and he explained his visit to the old woman in matter-of-fact terms at once, since he knew how suspicious of questioning the people would be. There were no interior doors in these houses and a woman in the inner room who was dressing moved out of the visitor's line of vision as he sat down. She heard all that pa.s.sed between Father Audry and the old woman and presently she came in with mild interest.

Out of a silence the old woman was saying 'My-my-my-my!' shaking her head down into her bosom in a stylised expression of commiseration; they had not seen the boy. 'And he spoke so nice, everything was so nice in the school.' But they knew nothing about the boy, nothing at all.

The younger woman remarked, 'Maybe he's with those boys who sleep in the old empty cars there in town you know? there by the beer-hall?'

Through Time and Distance They had been on the road together seven or eight years, Mondays to Fridays. They did the Free State one week, the northern and eastern Transvaal the next, Natal and Zululand a third. Now and then they did Bechua.n.a.land and Southern Rhodesia and were gone for a month. They sat side by side, for thousands of miles and thousands of hours, the commercial traveller, Hirsch, and his boy. The boy was a youngster when Hirsch took him on, with one pair of grey flannels, a clean shirt and a nervous sniff; he said he'd been a lorry driver, and at least he didn't stink 'When you're shut up with them in a car all day, believe me, you want to find a native who doesn't stink.' Now the boy wore, like Hirsch, the line of American-cut suits that Hirsch carried, and fancy socks, suede shoes and an anti-magnetic watch with a strap of thick gilt links, all bought wholesale. He had an ear of white handkerchief always showing in his breast pocket, though he still economically blew his nose in his fingers when they made a stop out in the veld.

He drove, and Hirsch sat beside him, peeling back the pages of paperbacks, jerking slowly in and out of sleep, or scribbling in his order books. They did not speak. When the car flourished to a stop outside the verandah of some country store, Hirsch got out without haste and went in ahead he hated to 'make an impression like a hawker', coming into a store with his goods behind him. When he had exchanged greetings with the storekeeper and leant on the counter chatting for a minute or two, as if he had nothing to do but enjoy the dimness of the interior, he would stir with a good-humoured sigh: 'I'd better show you what I've got. It's a shame to drag such lovely stuff about in this dust. Phillip!' his face loomed in the doorway a moment 'get a move on there.'

So long as it was not raining, Phillip kept one elbow on the rolled-down window, the long forearm reaching up to where his slender hand, shaded like the coat of some rare animal from tea-rose pink on the palm to dark matt brown on the back, appeared to support the car's gleaming roof like a caryatid. The hand would withdraw, he would swing out of the car on to his feet, he would carry into the store the cardboard boxes, suitcases, and, if the store carried what Hirsch called 'high-cla.s.s goods' as well, the special stand of men's suits hanging on a rail that was made to fit into the back of the car. Then he would saunter out into the street again, giving his tall shoulders a cat's pleasurable movement under fur a movement that conveyed to him the excellent drape of his jacket. He would take cigarettes out of his pocket and lean, smoking, against the car's warm flank.

Sometimes he held court; like Hirsch, he had become well known on the regular routes. The country people were not exactly shy of him and his kind, but his clothes and his air of city knowhow imposed a certain admiring constraint on them, even if, as in the case of some of the older men and women, they disapproved of the city and the aping of the white man's ways. He was not above playing a game of mora-baraba , an ancient African kind of draughts, with the blacks from the grain and feed store in a dorp on the Free State run. Hirsch was always a long time in the general store next door, and, meanwhile, Phillip pulled up the perfect creases of his trousers and squatted over the lines of the board drawn with a stone in the dust, ready to show them that you couldn't beat a chap who had got his training in the big lunch-hour games that are played every day outside the wholesale houses in Johannesburg. At one or two garages, where the petrol attendants in foam-rubber baseball caps given by Sh.e.l.l had picked up a lick of pa.s.sing sophistication, he sometimes got a poker game. The first time his boss, Hirsch, discovered him at this (Phillip had overestimated the time Hirsch would spend over the quick hand of Klabberyas he was obliged to take, in the way of business, with a local storekeeper), Hirsch's anger at being kept waiting vanished in a kind of amused and grudging pride. 'You're a big fella, now, eh, Phillip? I've made a man of you. When you came to me you were a real piccanin. Now you've been around so much, you're taking the boys' money off them on the road. Did you win?'

'Ah, no, sir,' Phillip suddenly lied, with a grin.

'Ah-h-h, what's the matter with you? You didn't win?' For a moment Hirsch looked almost as if he were about to give him a few tips. After that, he always pa.s.sed his worn packs of cards on to his boy.

And Phillip learned, as time went by, to say, 'I don't like the sound of the engine, boss. There's something loose there. I'm going to get underneath and have a look while I'm down at the garage taking petrol.'

It was true that Hirsch had taught his boy everything the boy knew, although the years of silence between them in the car had never been broken by conversation or an exchange of ideas. Hirsch was one of those pale, plump, freckled Jews, with pale blue eyes, a thick snub nose and the remains of curly blond hair that had begun to fall out before he was twenty. A number of his best stories depended for their denouement on the fact that somebody or other had not realised that he was a Jew. His pride in this belief that n.o.body would take him for one was not conventionally anti-Semitic, but based on the reasoning that it was a matter of pride, on the part of the Jewish people, that they could count him among them while he was fitted by nature with the distinguishing characteristics of a more privileged race. Another of his advantages was that he spoke Afrikaans as fluently and idiomatically as any Afrikaner. This, as his boy had heard him explain time and again to English-speaking people, was essential, because, low and ignorant as these back-veld Afrikaners were hardly better than the natives, most of them they knew that they had their government up there in power now, and they wouldn't buy a sixpenny line from you if you spoke the language of the rooineks the red-neck English.

With the Jewish shopkeepers, he showed that he was quite at home, because, as Phillip, unpacking the sample range, had overheard him admit a thousand times, he was Jewish born and bred why, his mother's brother was a rabbi even though he knew he didn't look it for a minute. Many of these shops were husband-and-wife affairs, and Hirsch knew how to make himself pleasant to the wives as well. In his chaff with them, the phrases 'the old country' and 'my father, G.o.d rest his soul' were recurrent. There was also an earnest conversation that began: 'If you want to meet a character, I wish you could see my mother. What a spirit. She's seventy-five, she's got sugar and she's just been operated for cataract, but I'm telling you, there's more go in her than-'

Every now and then there would be a store with a daughter, as well: not very young, not very beautiful, a worry to the mother who stood with her hands folded under her ap.r.o.n, hoping the girl would slim down and make the best of herself, and to the father, who wasn't getting any younger and would like to see her settled. Hirsch had an opening for this subject, too, tested and tried. 'Not much life for a girl in a place like this, eh? It's a pity. But some of the town girls are such rubbish, perhaps it's better to marry some nice girl from the country. Such rubbish the Jewish girls, too; oh, yes, they're just as bad as the rest these days. I wouldn't mind settling down with a decent girl who hasn't run around so much. If she's not so smart, if she doesn't get herself up like a film star, well, isn't it better?'

Phillip thought that his boss was married in some places, at any rate, he talked about 'the wife' but perhaps it was only that he had once been married, and, anyway, what was the difference when you were on the road? The fat, ugly white girl at the store went and hid herself among the biscuit tins, the mother, half daring to hope, became vivacious by proxy, and the father suddenly began to talk to the traveller intimately about business affairs.

Phillip found he could make the same kind of stir among country blacks. Hirsch had a permit to enter certain African reserves in his rounds, and there, in the humble little shops owned by Africans shanties, with the inevitable man at work on a treadle sewing machine outside he used his boy to do business with them in their own lingo. The boy wasn't half bad at it, either. He caught on so quick, he was often the one to suggest that a line that was unpopular in the white dorps could be got rid of in the reserves. He would palm off the stuff like a real showman.

'They can be glad to get anything, boss,' he said, with a grin. 'They can't take a bus to town and look in the shops.' In spite of his city clothes and his signet ring and all, the boy was exactly as simple as they were, underneath, and he got on with them like a house on fire. Many's the time some old woman or little kid came running up to the car when it was all packed to go on again and gave him a few eggs or a couple of roasted mealies in a bit of newspaper.

Early on in his job driving for Hirsch, Phillip had run into a calf; it did not stir on the deserted red-earth road between walls of mealie fields that creaked in a breeze. 'Go on,' said his boss, with the authority of one who knows what he is doing, who has learned in a hard school. 'Go on, it's dead, there's nothing to do.' The young man hesitated, appalled by the soft thump of the impact with which he had given his first death-dealing blow. 'Go on. There could have been a terrible accident. We could have turned over. These farmers should be prosecuted, the way they don't look after the cattle.'

Phillip reversed quickly, avoided the body in a wide curve and drove on. That was what made life on the road; whatever it was, soft touch or hard going, lie or truth, it was left behind. By the time you came by again in a month or two months, things had changed, forgotten and forgiven, and whatever you got yourself into this time, you had always the secret a.s.surance that there would be another breathing s.p.a.ce before you could be got at again.

Phillip had married after he had been travelling with Hirsch for a couple of years; the girl had had a baby by him earlier, but they had waited, as Africans sometimes do, until he could get a house for her before they actually got married. They had two more children, and he kept them pretty well he wasn't too badly paid, and of course he could get things wholesale, like the stove for the house. But up Piet Retief way, on one of the routes they took every month, there was a girl he had been sleeping with regularly for years. She swept up the hair cuttings in the local barbershop, where Hirsch sometimes went for a trim if he hadn't had a chance over the weekend in Johannesburg. That was how Phillip had met her; he was waiting in the car for Hirsch one day, and the girl came out to sweep the step at the shop's entrance. 'Hi, wena sisi. I wish you would come and sweep my house for me,' he called out drowsily.

For a long time now she had worn a signet ring, nine carats, engraved with his first name and hers; Hirsch did not carry anything in the jewellery line, but of course Phillip, in the fraternity of the road, knew the boys of other travellers who did. She was a plump, hysterical little thing, with very large eyes that could accommodate unshed tears for minutes on end, and something unusual for black women a faint moustache outlining her top lip. She would have been a shrew to live with, but it was pleasant to see how she awaited him every month with coy, bridling pa.s.sion. When she pressed him to settle the date when they might marry, he filched some minor item from the extensive women's range that Hirsch carried, and that kept her quiet until next time. Phillip did not consider this as stealing, but as part of the running expenses of the road to which he was ent.i.tled, and he was trustworthy with his boss's money or goods in all other circ.u.mstances.

In fact, if he had known it and if Hirsch had known it, his filching fell below the margin for dishonesty that Hirsch, in his reckoning of the running expenses of the road, allowed: 'They all steal, what's the good of worrying about it? You change one, you get a worse thief, that's all.' It was one of Hirsch's maxims in the philosophy of the road.

The morning they left on the Bechua.n.a.land run, Hirsch looked up from the newspaper and said to his boy, 'You've got your pa.s.sbook, eh?' There was the slightest emphasis on the 'you've', an emphasis confident rather than questioning. Hirsch was well aware that, although the blurred front-page picture before him showed black faces open-mouthed, black hands flung up triumphant around a bonfire of pa.s.sbooks, Phillip was not the type to look for trouble.

'Yes, sir, I've got it,' said Phillip, overtaking, as the traffic lights changed, a row of cars driven by white men; he had driven so much and so well that there was a certain beauty in his performance he might have been skiing, or jumping hurdles.

Hirsch went back to the paper; there was nothing in it but reports of this anti-pa.s.s campaign that the natives had started up. He read them all with a deep distrust of the amorphous threat that he thought of as 'trouble', taking on any particular form. Trouble was always there, hanging over every human head, of course; it was only when it drew near, 'came down', that it took on a specific guise: illness, a drop in business, the blacks wanting to live like white men. Anyway, he himself had nothing to worry about: his boy knew his job, and he knew he must have his pa.s.s on him in case, in a routine demand in the streets of any of the villages they pa.s.sed through, a policeman should ask him to show it.

Phillip was not worried, either. When the men in the location came to the door to urge him to destroy his pa.s.s, he was away on the road, and only his wife was at home to a.s.sure them that he had done so; when some policeman in a dorp stopped him to see it, there it was, in the inner pocket of the rayon lining of his jacket. And one day, when this campaign or another was successful, he would never need to carry it again.

At every call they made on that trip, people were eager for news of what was happening in Johannesburg. Old barefoot men in the dignity of battered hats came from the yards behind the stores, trembling with dread and wild hope. Was it true that so many people were burning their pa.s.ses that the police couldn't arrest them all? Was it true that in such-and-such a location people had gone to the police station and left pa.s.ses in a pile in front of the door? Was it the wild young men who called themselves Africanists who were doing this? Or did Congress want it, did the old Chief, Luthuli, call for it too?

'We are going to free you all of the pa.s.s,' Phillip found himself declaiming. Children, hanging about, gave the Congress raised-thumb salute. 'The white man won't bend our backs like yours, old man.' They could see for themselves how much he had already taken from the white man, wearing the same clothes as the white man, driving the white man's big car an emissary from the knowledgeable, political world of the city, where black men were learning to be masters. Even Hirsch's cry, 'Phillip, get a move on there!', came as an insignificant interruption, a relic of the present almost become the past.

Over the border, in the British protectorate, Bechua.n.a.land, the interest was just as high. Phillip found it remarkably easy to talk to the little groups of men who approached him in the luxurious dust that surrounded village buildings, the kitchen boys who gathered in country hotel yards where cats fought beside glittering mounds of empty beer bottles. 'We are going to see that this is the end of the pa.s.s. The struggle for freedom the white man won't stand on our backs '

It was a long, hot trip. Hirsch, pale and exhausted, dozed and twitched in his sleep between one dorp and the next. For the last few months he had been putting pills instead of sugar into his tea, and he no longer drank the endless bottles of lemonade and ginger beer that he had sent the boy to buy at every stop for as long as he could remember. There was a strange, sweetish smell that seemed to follow Hirsch around these days; it settled in the car on that long trip and was there even when Hirsch wasn't; but Phillip, who, like most travellers' boys, slept in the car at night, soon got used to it.

They went as far as Francistown, where, all day, while they were in and out of the long line of stores facing the railway station, a truckload of Herero women from further north in the Kalahari Desert sat beside the road in their Victorian dress, turbaned, unsmiling, stiff and voluminous, like a row of tea cosies. The travelling salesmen did not go on to Rhodesia. From Francistown they turned back for Johannesburg, with a stop overnight at Palapye Road, so that they could make a detour to Serowe, an African town of round mud houses, dark euphorbia hedges and tinkling goat bells, where the deposed chief and his English wife lived on a hill in a large house with many bathrooms, but there was no hotel. The hotel in Palapye Road was a fly-screened box on the railway station, and Hirsch spent a bad night amid the huffing and blowing of trains taking water and the bursts of stamping a gigantic Spanish dance of shunting trains.

They left for home early on Friday morning. By half-past five in the afternoon they were flying along towards the outskirts of Johannesburg, with the weary heat of the day blowing out of the windows in whiffs of high land and the sweat suddenly deliciously cool on their hands and foreheads. The row of suits on the rack behind them slid obediently down and up again with each rise and dip accomplished in the turn of the road. The usual landmarks, all in their places, pa.s.sed unlooked at: straggling, small-enterprise factories, a brickfield, a chicken farm, the rose nursery with the toy Dutch windmill, various gatherings of low, patchy huts and sagging houses small locations where the blacks who worked round about lived. At one point, the road closely skirted one of these places; the children would wave and shout from where they played in the dirt. Today, quite suddenly, a shower of stones came from them. For a moment Hirsch truly thought that he had become aware of a sudden summer hailstorm; he was always so totally enclosed by the car it would not have been unusual for him not to have noticed a storm rising. He put his hand on the handle that raised the window; instantly, a sharp grey chip pitted the fold of flesh between thumb and first finger.

'Drive on,' he yelled, putting the blood to his mouth. 'Drive on!' But his boy, Phillip, had at the same moment seen what they had blundered into. Fifty yards ahead a labouring green bus, its windows, under flapping canvas, crammed with black heads, had lurched to a stop. It appeared to burst as people jumped out at doors and windows; from the houses, a jagged rush of more people met them and spread around the bus over the road.

Phillip stopped the car so fiercely that Hirsch was nearly pitched through the windscreen. With a roar the car reversed, swinging off the road sideways on to the veld, and then swung wildly around on to the road again, facing where it had come from. The steering wheel spun in the ferocious, urgent skill of the pink-and-brown hands. Hirsch understood and anxiously trusted; at the feel of the car righting itself, a grin broke through in his boy's face.