Читать книгу The Year of Facing Fire - Helena Kriel - Страница 10

CHAPTER 4

Jungle Beyond the Border

Vadim directs us to a Buddhist nun.

We take Evan out to Roodepoort, the other side of the city where the mostly flat land of Johannesburg buckles up into a rocky ridge.

My mother drives. “You know there are black eagles in the Roodepoort Ridge?”

I sit in the passenger seat, window open, my arm making snake shapes as we drive. “Yes, you tell me every time.”

There are white beggars at all the lights, toothless, leathered from highveld sun, their skin hanging in folds, hacking out some meagre life. This is new. There were never white beggars before, but South Africa is a country in transition. The ANC is in power and we have democracy now. It is twenty years since the black students walked from their schools in Soweto, across the smoky township, to protest having to take their exams in Afrikaans, the “language of the oppressor”. The riots that followed intensified the country’s march to end apartheid, with innocent black students who – on the instructions of their teachers – had intended to be peaceful and respectful, waving placards above their heads: Down with Afrikaans, making their peaceful way, singing, Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika, God Bless Africa. But they encountered the South African Police in their massive metal tanks, like they were lumbering into serious wars with unseen enemies in the thousands, not unarmed school children. They meant business, shouldered automatic rifles, stun guns and gas canisters.

I was a student then myself, safe in the leafy-green suburbs of South Africa, taking my exams in my own language at a private girls’ school, rising to the level of my potential with nothing in the way of my future; I was going to be a film star and marry Timothy Dalton, who I’d seen smouldering on the moors as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights at least fifteen times at the whites-only cinema, because as a white child growing up in South Africa you could truly imagine and invent your future without anything getting in the way except, perhaps, the vagaries of your own destiny.

The day the riots started it all seemed remote to us in the northern suburbs of the city. The activities of black students were so far removed, they might as well have been in another country. And their problems, the notion that all the future held for them were jobs as nannies, cooks, gardeners, miners, were not issues we wrestled with, not to speak of having to write exams in a foreign language. But that was the success of apartheid. We were simply kept separate from the rest of our countrymen, detached from their struggles. We sat, listening to my father who stood, just returned from town early, on account of the riots, newspaper in hand, saying: It’s all going to blow up. He could see it coming because he taught teenagers and he knew well the high-octane voltage of being that age. He read the newspaper report on the riots out loud. I imagined those innocent students stopped, to seethe in one big brown body, waiting peacefully and singing God Bless Africa, when a lone shark took a shot; that policeman couldn’t help himself, his hand just squeezed down on the cold trigger. The large simmering brown body broke up into pieces, like shards that explode outwards from a central point, ricocheting in all directions. The students had only stones, which must have simply pinged against the side of the armour of the Casspirs, ineffective as popcorn. All hell broke loose in the streets of Soweto that afternoon: more shots, more cops, more guns, more gas; black kids running, white cops firing. Till one body dropped, a nameless black child collapsed at the side of the road, lying there dead. He was reported as a statistic only. But the second child who died was given a name, helping to establish ‘the struggle’. I remember my father saying the name. Hector Pieterson!

Our geese, Gandolph and Moon, were honking outside the piano-room door as my father read from the newspaper, waiting for him to walk into the garden so they could follow behind, squawking and goose-stepping after him all the way to the mulberry bush as though he was an African dictator with his own armed guard. My father was too distracted to notice the geese or take a walk to the mulberry bush. He was standing with a photo of Hector Pieterson in The Star.

I peered over his shoulder: the schoolboy’s slim body in uniform – clean, white shirt so perfect that it must have been ironed for school last night by his mother – which fell at the corner of Moema and Vilakazi Streets. I stared at the photo of Hector Pieterson dangling from the screaming arms of another schoolboy, his sister running alongside, her hands out, pale palms to the air before her as if wanting to stop the truth and the future. There must have been a photographer crouching in the crowd, waiting dangerously for his moment, and there it was. Hector’s photo was emblazoned on the front page of The Star.

“It’s the beginning of the end of apartheid,” my father said.

My mother put her palms together as though in prayer. “Let’s get rid of the bastards,” she said, of all the politicians we would see on television, all dressed up for church on Sundays, so dapper in suits and ties with carnations in their buttonholes, so all-turned-beautifully-out, so religious and righteous, singing psalms to the Lord. All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, they would sing in church, as we would sing in school assembly: All things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all. Yes, all we whites, singing praises to the Lord who had apparently, according to the Bible, cursed the black sons of Ham and made them slaves, which made the politics in this country all right. We, after all, were just following what the Bible said.

My father was right; it was the beginning of the end of injustice that had this country in its grip for forty interminable years.

And now we’re riding through Roodepoort twenty years later. Could we have imagined that day, looking at the photo in The Star, that Nelson Mandela would ever be released, that apartheid would actually come to an end, that a black government would be voted into power? It was unimaginable. Mandela was in solitary confinement on Robben Island. On the day he was released from jail we all gathered around the television in the piano room. My grandmother was still alive. She was standing, neatly decked out in a crisp white shirt, collar turned up, and black skirt, silver hair neatly brushed. She was staring as Mandela, hand in hand with Winnie, took his first steps to freedom. You beauty! she said, her Russian accent still intact after sixty years in South Africa. We watched on TV as the crowd surged, blacks and whites, whistling. We stood, anxious, waiting for his first address. “Never again shall this kind of racial tyranny raise its ugly head. You will all be welcome.” Watching and feeling vulnerable, we whites, wondering what this meant for our futures, there in the piano room together, my grandmother holding a cup of tea, about to drink it with a spoon of jam, the Russian ritual still holding fast after all this time.

And now here we are in transition, with a brand-new constitution considered the most advanced in the world. The African National Congress, Mandela’s freedom party, is in charge, manning a country with forty-five per cent unemployment and crime on the rise. But unemployment doesn’t stop the city growing. Even here in Roodepoort it’s easing out towards the ridge, houses banking up into the rocks, those little boxes made out of ticky-tacky, laying claim to the hillside.

“I hope they’re not going to drive the eagles out. Humans take over everything! We need space for black eagles too!” my mother says, fulminating.

“The development won’t chase away the eagles. Eagles roost in the skyscrapers in New York. Don’t worry about it,” I say to appease both of us.

“I do worry about it,” she says as we park and walk slowly with Evan to the consulting rooms. My brother’s illness has set off an anxiety in both of us. We worry about everything now.

“There are too many people in the world.” I walk on the other side of Evan. “But nature will take care of it. Nature will neatly snuff us all out, so there’s space for tigers again and snow leopards. Floods. Climate change. Deadly hurricanes. Plagues. Bring it on. I’ll go first.”

“Don’t talk like that!” she shouts.

“Sorry,” I say realising that Evan is afflicted with a plague and the last thing I want is for him to go anywhere any time soon.