Читать книгу Tales of the Metric System - Imraan Coovadia - Страница 9

1973 THE PASS

At five in the morning, the Edendale bus paused at the entrance. The engine was loud. Victor didn’t open his eyes. He put his hand into the inner pocket of his Crombie coat lying beside him, the former property of a sugar millionaire whose name was spelled beneath the collar in blue thread, and felt for the pass book. There was nothing. It was impossible to accept. Victor went back to sleep, to dream about his coming good fortune. He had all the luck, all the friends, a sponsor in the caretaker, another sponsor who was going to be famous around the world.

In his dream he could almost touch the soft brown face of his father, a beacon of friendship, and see the freckles spaced evenly from his forehead to his chin. The old man had been deft. With a fingernail he had lifted the black-and-white photograph from the pass book, which belonged to a Mozambican miner returning to his country, and replaced it with Victor’s own photograph, taken by the Indian assistant from Crown Portrait Studios. Since then the endorsements at the back, stamped and indecipherably signed and dated in a table of purple ink, had been checked a hundred times by policemen, court administrators, and government clerks. No word had come from his father.

Either the pass book was in his pocket, where his blind hand couldn’t find it, or it lay somewhere beside the mattress. Victor checked under the coat and around it. Without opening his eyes he searched along the mattress.

Suddenly he was wide awake. He heard the clopping of a horse on the road, as if it were coming towards him, and stood up. Through the window he saw the tall animal between the arms of a cart, pulling the trussed bundles on the back to the side of the road. Its eyes were rigged with severe black blinkers, joined by a strut over its head. The driver, wearing a corduroy cap, stopped it outside the tea room, where it continued to switch its tail as the man went into the shop.

Victor saw the horse was no longer young. Its high grey chest, brushed with dark hair at the top and bottom, was muscled like the bodybuilders who tested their weights at the back of the hostel. He kept looking at the horse underneath the awning of the tea room and tried to ignore the discomfort rising in his chest. He didn’t know if he would be as lucky today as in his dreams.

He tidied up first so he could find it quicker. He folded the blanket under his arm and stored it under the mattress. There was nothing when he turned the bed on its side. Nothing in his shoes apart from the smell of polish. Nothing in his shirt buttoned on the hanger. Nothing to be found in the back pockets of his trousers nor in the overalls that he wore to the print shop. He felt he was trying to answer an impossible riddle.

The room was the riddle. It was hard to survey the entire area, which, besides being his bedroom, was used as a storage closet. Two mops stood in buckets beside pungent cleaning supplies. Some boxes contained broken light bulbs. They were kept, like eggs in a carton, in case one fine day they should flicker into light. The caretaker of the Caledonian Christian Men’s Hostel, his friend Mr Samuel Shabangu, hated throwing things away. So there was a roll of knotted chicken wire, tins of Dulux with spattered lids, lengths of catgut, and, on a separate blanket, various tools, spanners and screwdrivers and a spirit level, necessary for the kinds of repairs that the caretaker did on a daily basis.

Only a spell, forbidden to a Christian like Mr Shabangu, could have moved the reference book out of his pocket and across the room. Nevertheless, Victor began to check under the tins. He moved aside the heavy roll of wire to see what it might be hiding. Nothing. He had become a criminal overnight.

Victor had skirted the law to stay in town. His father had a permit when he worked at Natal Command, the barracks across from Durban North Beach, bringing oats in hot pails for the brown horses in the cavalry yard, and washing down the boots of the riders. As a boy Victor had helped with the work. They settled blankets on the backs of the horses when the regiment returned from exercise, inspected the shod feet of the animals, combed out their manes as the horses knelt in front of the barracks.

He and his father had slept side by side in a stall of their own. At midnight, he woke to hear the pleased sounds of the horses urinating, the scuffling of hooves against the stall doors, and the soft conversation with which the animals engaged each other, horses and dogs. The rough-tongued German shepherds slept nose to nose, and trotted suspiciously five metres behind the horses. Each befriended a particular horse and rider. They were liable to snarl when they were displeased, strong enough to rise on their back legs and pin Victor against the wall, powerful enough in the shoulders to hold him there as he turned his head away from the pouring out of salty dog’s breath until some expression on his face satisfied them. But they almost never bit.

Three years ago a certain individual sought to take his father’s job. That man told tales to the European staff sergeant, accusing his father of mistreating the dogs and trading their feed items to an Indian market-gardener. The accusation hung in the atmosphere despite the lack of evidence. His father’s cough had worsened while he worried about being put in jail on suspicion of theft or having the right to have his son with him in the barracks taken away. He hadn’t been able to sleep, and had lost the desire to talk to his many friends among the European riders. The pressure soon proved too much to bear. His father resigned from his position, bought the permit for his son to stay in the province so that they didn’t lose the foothold, left him in Pietermaritzburg, and returned to their native area, near Lesotho, in sight of the mountains. He promised Victor to return when rumours about the supposed theft cooled down. Since then, no message had come.

For three years, asleep or awake, Victor had never been out of reach of his reference book. The fever rose in his head while he searched again in the coat and turned it inside out. He moved the paint tins one by one and set them down in the other corner, pulled the drying rack from the wall, and, finally, opened the door to the outside. There was no lock on it. Light from the corridor came into the room and gave no clue to the whereabouts of the piece of missing property. His head spun.

The building was silent. The naked bulb above the staircase shone pale and yellow into the morning without producing any light. Victor looked past the staircase into the yard. At this hour the inhabitants were invisible, a hundred and eighty grown and grizzled, restless and fearless men, who argued from their beds and the rows of open toilets, who borrowed rapaciously and tried never to return what had been loaned except to Mr Shabangu.

The men were exhausted. The day before, in place of church, they had practised dancing on the cement. They drank jars of illegal fizzing orange beer before sharpening their knives for the fights that developed on the way back from the beer hall. They treated Victor as an extension of Mr Shabangu, sending him with messages, warnings, requests, notifications of disputes, and other announcements that were meant to go first to the caretaker and, through him, to the council of supervisors, five Europeans drawn from the church hierarchy and the police. Their lordly messages, however, were received and then ignored by Mr Shabangu.

Victor looked for his friend. He should be around. The custodian didn’t seem to sleep. At any hour he might be prowling the hallway, inspecting the burglar bars for spots of rust, taking the council members on a tour, leading a policeman to an interview with one of the men about a theft or an assault, standing and thumbing the passages in a Gideons Bible, which shone in an oiled black leather cover.

Mr Shabangu, after all, was the person to ask if you had lost something or were looking for someone. There were no obvious limits to his knowledge. Sometimes he even seemed to know the future, who might find a position with the machinist shops, a fitter and turner and a large tool and die maker on Rissik Square, which of the residents might wind up in the district hospital, and which one might be arrested in connection with the burglary of a certain premises. Mr Shabangu stood for a system, fixed in place, in which you knew how to measure who and what was important.

Down the corridor, the door to Shabangu’s room was closed. Victor considered knocking. The caretaker hated any disappearances in the building, whether it concerned a man or a woman or an item of property, because it reflected poorly on him. He had seen the worst that a man could do, many times over, and liked to remind you of the lessons he had learned while drinking straight from a carton of very sour Juba in which the alcohol was as piercing as a European woman’s perfume.

Many identified Victor as something of a son to Mr Shabangu. They were wrong. Sometimes there was no connection with the older man. The caretaker had to struggle, on certain occasions, to recall Victor’s name. His large face would go blank while he was trying to fix on the letters, as if someone had relaxed the string holding his eyes and mouth in harness. He was unable to set his jaws. It was frightening. You feared that the man had been overcome by a fit and that he might choke. After a minute or two, Mr Shabangu recovered his self-possession, completed his sentence, retreated his tongue, and again seemed to recognise the other person. Afterwards he didn’t refer back to these incidents.

The people Mr Shabangu truly remembered, for whom his face tightened on the string, were the ones to whom he had loaned money. On Fridays he set up at the desk in the entrance, behind the frosted-glass door, and doled out new two-rand notes in exchange for their signatures. Over Christmas he made longer-term loans, which the residents took to the rural areas to pay for a new roof, or a coffin, or a daughter’s or sister’s dowry, or the celebrations to mark a boy’s circumcision. He took down their pass numbers as part of his security. Looking over the top of plastic glasses, he copied the details into the end pages of the Gideons Bible. When you repaid your loan, a line went through your name with the help of a Parker pen and a ruler.

The outstanding accounts belonged to men who vanished. Some chose not to return to the urban area because of the pressure. Others died after a short illness and were buried in a potter’s field. Several had left the country to join Umkhonto, in which case the disappearance was not mentioned. Their names were nevertheless kept in the book and transcribed into a new Gideons when more space was required. They might come back into the country someday. Mr Shabangu repeated the numbers under his breath, updating the principal to allow for each month of interest, when he went through his records column by column. He was the only man who could do such calculations in his head. He was as good as an Indian.

Victor knocked on the door and listened. There was no movement. He waited and put his ear to the door. Sometimes in the passage he heard the caretaker talk to himself on his long trestle bed after he had stored his mops and buckets. His stern lips recalled the names of the debtors and the amounts outstanding in a voice so low you had to stand beside the door to make out the words and numbers. You almost believed you had caught Mr Shabangu casting a spell.

Victor went back down the hall and into his room, remembering the feeling of bad magic about the custodian. It was common knowledge, when somebody fell behind on his loan, that misfortune was sure to follow. Shabangu sent Victor to remind the person when a payment was due. Victor brought back promises, excuses, and other stories, and the knowledge that the payment would be made. Nobody defied Shabangu for fear of what he could do at a distance.

When he wanted to celebrate a sizeable repayment, the custodian came into the store room with a dish of sugared and startlingly orange baked beans, or a bowl of saltless bone-white pap from which rose the merest scent of water. On a long holiday, when certain longstanding accounts had been closed, he might bring an unlabelled tin of golden syrup. He ate slowly and delightedly without, however, offering Victor so much as a spoonful. Nobody knew Shabangu’s people. Victor was clearly his favourite at the hostel and perhaps in his life. Yet he didn’t get a spoon.

Towards others in the hostel the caretaker was obscure and even unfriendly. If Mr Shabangu wasn’t much liked, he was respected on account of his longevity. He was understood to be the oldest man in the building, snow having settled thick on his eyebrows and in the stiff hair around his black mouth. He walked up and down the staircase while hitching one of his legs. He sat down on a chair with a noticeable degree of discomfort and could only find peace in certain positions. Nevertheless, Mr Shabangu was not yet out of his forties.

Victor went to look again in the store room. He couldn’t rely on his friend to save him.

Mr Shabangu didn’t knock. He simply arrived by right, putting his broad hands around the door and hauling himself inside the store room, where everything had been turned upside down and moved away from the wall.

—And how are you this morning, Victor? Is everything going to your satisfaction?

—I have no complaints, Mr Shabangu.

The pass book was nowhere. Victor could cry out loud. The past was gone. There wasn’t anything you could do to return lost objects to their positions. Nor could a person trace his steps so exactly that he would discover at which point he and his possession had parted.

—Everything is out of its place in here, I see. I can also see that you have moved my supplies from their usual locations. I prefer this room to be ship-shape, as you know.

—I understand. I will put it all back in the right place.

The caretaker put his hands out to make a sign.

—Everything must fit together like a tea set.

—I promise to put it back as it was. I misplaced something.

—Nothing too important, I hope. I know you have extra work thanks to the recent invaders. That gentleman Polk is to blame, I believe. He has put an extra strain on you.

—He gave me a chance to work on the play.

—Nevertheless, it takes a toll. I understand completely. When you are distracted it is only natural to lose track of your property.

Mr Shabangu smiled broadly. It seemed to be the product of some dislocation at the jaw. Mr Shabangu had moods which were monotonous for months at a time, strung the one on the other like beads in a necklace. He got through Christmas and Boxing Day without the slightest trace of good cheer, singing hymns in the front row of the choir with a face as clouded as a Scotsman’s, and afterwards drinking the red fruit juice from the punchbowl with no more joy than if it were medicine.

In the same instant Victor understood that it was his landlord who had taken the reference book. He had come to the store room to gloat, declaring there was nothing that could be done.

Victor saw he was as lost as his permit. Shabangu had been at the top of his list, the first of his patrons. Victor tried to be friends with everyone who could help him. Now, for no reason he could understand, the custodian had taken the permit. There was no sense in it. He was bare in front of Mr Shabangu. He staggered. He wanted to sit down on the floor. He had never had such a flux of hot and cold sensations.

The intruder came further into the room, looking around at the items displaced by the search and the thin mattress, which stood on its side against the wall. There was one window in the store room, barred, although you would have needed a long ladder to reach it from the road. Through it, the cornmeal-coloured sunlight suddenly poured. It gave Mr Shabangu’s face an unexpected golden aspect, a King Midas who had brought his hands to his head.

Victor understood, for the first time, that it wasn’t a trustworthy countenance. Mr Shabangu was lean elsewhere, in his hands and chest, yet his neck and chin resembled a lizard’s collar. He was pleased by the knowledge of other men’s frailties and superstitions, information he relayed to Victor, by the discovery he made every day that nobody in the building was better than him. There was no African to beat him.

How had Victor borne it for three years? How had he survived the weight of the caretaker leaning on him, for three full years, and stealing the breath out of his chest? How bad was his luck that, in a single month three years ago, he had lost his father and gained a succubus to drain his life energies? He couldn’t measure his misfortune. This Shabangu would sit on him until he died.

The caretaker settled on the bottom of the mattress.

—For you, Victor, life can be delightful forever, provided you have the rent for me. Yes, it is true that I came to remind you of that unlucky day of the month. Not that I wish to be the messenger of bad news only. This evening, I am buying meat from Clover butchery. I have ordered mutton chops. You can join me if that suits you.

—I have the rent money right now. Only I cannot eat with you, Mr Shabangu. Mr Polk wants me from the afternoon. Tonight the play opens downstairs. They didn’t inform you? It is supposed to go until quite late.

—Indeed that is what they have warned us to expect.

—So I don’t think I will be free.

—Well, that is a pity then. Good chops.

Victor was surprised to find the notes where he had left them in his trousers. He counted out the four rands and twenty cents to the caretaker. They were accepted in the good grace that had struck Mr Shabangu like a ray of moonshine. Victor remembered that the caretaker was the only person in the building who knew the secret of the reference book. Before he left town his father had taken the caretaker into confidence, consulting with him as to the proper price to pay. Shabangu had protected Victor for three years. In this fatal week when Polk’s play was about to open, the caretaker had been unable to prevent himself taking advantage of his knowledge. He wanted to profit on both sides.

They went downstairs together where Mr Shabangu had to start opening the doors and running after the kitchen staff. Victor tried to understand the caretaker’s complete change of mood. Shabangu was the riddle. Why would he do it? Why would it make him happy? The police were useless. If he was correct about what had happened, and the caretaker’s smile shone into his soul as the proof, then it was up to Victor to search the money-lender’s heart, not to say Shabangu’s room, and rescue his permit.

In the meantime he couldn’t afford to alert the other man. He couldn’t let the pass book leave the building. Then he would be finished.

They stood for a minute in the canteen, where the preparations for the play were almost complete.

—You won’t come to see the performance, Mr Shabangu? The tickets are for free, of course, because you have assisted the production. You can also stand on the stairs over there and watch through the window. Mr Polk doesn’t mind.

—Then he is a very unusual European. I have never heard of such a man. Not to worry about the tickets! But I have seen enough to agree with you that, with Mr Peter Polk, what we have is a different kettle of fish. In any case, Victor, my religion does not believe in plays.

The older man’s lips were twitching, as if he were unwilling to erase his victorious feeling and become unhappy again at the changes in his kingdom. He looked around the large room.

—I don’t know why there has been such a fuss about Mr Polk’s play. For weeks they have turned our lives upside down. For a piece of make-believe!

In this regard Mr Shabangu was quite correct. Despite the way Polk had presented his plan to the supervisors, the preparations for the play had come to interfere with the routine operations of the hostel. The canteen, where there were usually churning pots on the stove holding shining Maizena porridge alongside piles of hairy corn cobs bedraggled from boiling water, had been converted into a theatre. The benches had been shifted from their usual place. Black drapes had been nailed over the makeshift stage. In the evenings, when the men remained on the steps to talk or to practise their dancing, there had been the sounds of rehearsals behind the locked doors and the beguiling voice of a woman. Late into the evening there had been the outbursts of Polk the director, as likely to come to the boil and spill over as one of the pots on the stove.

They were also skirting the law. There were certain ordinances that prevented black and white actors performing professionally, for money, on the same stage. Polk thought he had found a loophole, by changing the method of payment, and had chosen four Caledonian residents to work alongside his two principal actors, Roland Adams and Janet Gilfillan. Victor had become as interested in the actor and actress as in Polk himself. They seemed to fly from thought to thought, feeling to feeling, like acrobats. Polk’s company seemed to work outside the law, beyond what could easily be measured or defined, and yet, as you overheard in their conversation, they had their own strong sense of what counted. They chose the individual over the system and their own ways of doing things above everything else and everybody else’s expectations. The two of them stayed on the same floor of the whites-only hotel despite Roland’s complexion.

There was a chance Polk and his actors would understand Victor’s predicament. Polk could try to help. If Victor complained about Shabangu to any of the hostel residents, however, they would laugh at him. After all, he had told a Christian his secret and exposed himself.

—I can come to your room afterwards then, Mr Shabangu. I will see if you are still awake. Maybe we can still celebrate together.

—I will see you then. Enjoy your play.

Victor waited until the caretaker had gone into the passage and then closed the door. He was shivering. It would be this evening or never that he had the reference book back in his hands. When there was unrest the laws were enforced more strictly. If it was found that the endorsement in your pass book had expired, you would be put in a lorry to the native reserves.

Victor wanted to travel in a Mercedes and in an aeroplane, attend the double feature at the European drive-in, buy more meat from the Clover butchery than a man could consume in a sitting, walk the streets without fear of interception, and kiss the reluctant women in town. To do any of it he needed to recover his permit from Mr Shabangu before it was gone forever.

He wouldn’t be able to do anything during the play. The caretaker would most likely stay in his room during the performance, as agitated as if he had to prevent demons entering from downstairs. It was a unique occasion. Since Victor had arrived at the hostel, Polk was the first person to give Mr Shabangu pause under the roof of his kingdom.

The world changed with the units of measurement. There were no more inches and yards, no more distances in miles on the road signs, no more pound notes fetched from the drawers of the cash register, no more pints and gallons as defined by the Imperial System. Instead, there were metric units, which simplified division and multiplication and therefore exposed any confusions in existing arrangements.

At the Shell garage they had converted a row of pumps to sell petrol per rand per litre. When the oil supply was interrupted in the Middle East, a queue of Chevrolets, Cortinas, and Hillman Avengers stood bumper to bumper. Next door was Galaxy Tea Room where the men bought provisions, and which had started to stock white sugar in fly-bothered half-kilogram packets, along with milk in half-litre glass bottles, while, behind the counter, the proprietor, Tarun Naicker, announced that now he was doing things by halves.

You weren’t familiar with litres, not to say centimetres, kilograms, and electricity sold in bundles of kilowatt hours. The terms had the ring of the space age, the vocabulary of astronauts and cosmonauts. You had heard about the success of George Foreman, studied the indistinct portrait of the world heavyweight champion in the same newspaper where you read that the Vietnam war had ended. Two beauty queens travelled to London on the same Jumbo jet to compete for Miss World, a Miss South Africa who was fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and long-legged, plus a Miss Africa South who was a long-legged coloured. Skylab 2 was launched to survey a planet where the star of a hundred kung-fu movies, Bruce Lee, found sudden death. On September 11th, General Pinochet levelled the Presidential Palace in Santiago.

And it was opening night at the Caledonian Christian Men’s Hostel. It was the only drama the building had seen apart from the Nativity plays put on by visiting evangelists. Polk was calmer than ever. He sat behind the wheel of his Datsun, instructing the workers through the open window as they brought in cartons from the back of the van. He was not far into his forties yet he seemed as heavy as an old man when you considered him sunk into his seat.

—Have you seen Roland? He was meant to be here by now.

—I haven’t seen him, Mr Polk. Must I go and look for him?

—You can go and look, but I don’t think you’ll find anything, my boy. On opening day Roland is bound to act up. You go inside. I don’t want to have your Mr Sobukwe giving me the evil eye.

—Mr Shabangu.

—Mr Shabangu who has this place in his toils. I don’t envy you being under his thumb.

Victor didn’t mind flying back in search of Roland. The actors would be gone by the weekend. He wanted to memorise each unlikely minute of their appearance, to drink in the picture of Janet in her satin blouse with raised red roses on the pocket. She was already standing on the stage, repeating her lines from a card, red hair pinned tightly to her bone-white scalp. He could have spied on her all day from his vantage point in the passage. She had the strange immeasurable beauty of a witch. He wouldn’t be able to get her out of his eyes.

At the same time Victor didn’t want to be caught in the act of looking. Only some people had the right to look at others. Even with Polk and his stars, who were unlike any other Europeans he had encountered, Victor had the instinct to flinch when they tried to talk to him directly.

He went back out and put his head through the window of the van.

—Roland never arrived. Janet is there.

—Get in on the other side. We can go and find a Castle Lager.

Victor got in and sat on the other side of the van, which had no seatbelts, and a rusting panel where the radio had been. Polk was wearing his standard uniform consisting of a short-sleeved safari shirt, belted light-brown pants and brown dress shoes. He looked like a farmer. He showed a certain pleasure in the bulk of his body. You could see it in the way he steered the bakkie.

—You don’t want to check on Roland first?

—When we come back from the bottle store, then we will see if he is here or not. If he still hasn’t arrived we will go after him. Then he’s had his chips.

Polk talked like a farmer, turning the sentences around in his mouth, descending to an accent so gravelly and so sincere that it was no longer believable. You could only speak like that if you lived in the heart of the country, never listened to an lp or to a radio drama, if you still counted your produce in terms of pounds and gallons and fluid ounces rather than litres and kilograms. But Polk wasn’t a farmer. He had been around the world and he had already begun to undermine the system of Mr Shabangu.

On the main road there were Bedford trucks on their way to the vast harbour under construction at Richards Bay. The canvas rose under the ropes at the rear to reveal stacks of pine planks and canisters of diesel gas. In between them were smaller vans used by employers to transport their workers to building sites, shoeless men in shorts sitting on the back of the vehicle holding hoes and rakes.

Polk parked outside the bottle store and waited for Victor to bring his order. Then they sat on the side of the main road and drank beer from an ice-filled packet. It wasn’t the first time they had done it. Each evening, once rehearsal was done, Polk emptied a string of Castles, one after the other. He drank in the front seat of his Datsun until his face was red in the atmosphere of the car light. When one bottle was finished he staggered out of the car and opened the trunk to find the next. He had told Victor about the nineteen months he spent on a merchant ship after failing out of university, sailing across the Persian Gulf with cargoes of soy beans and car parts, and about his first play performed in a one-room schoolhouse in King William’s Town, and about the open spaces of the country which subdued and exalted the heart.

Victor liked to listen to Polk. He would have listened to him, and drunk with him, for another few hours today. But he didn’t want the director to tire himself out so early on the day of the opening performance. He suspected Polk would fall asleep if he consumed another bottle, his thick legs wedged unnaturally on the safety brake.

When Polk opened the door to piss in the parking lot and looked fondly at the bottle-store window, it was time to remind him to go back to the hostel and see about Roland. Polk could hardly understand the question. He looked bewildered. Victor couldn’t think where, in such a sodden man, the power of imagination was located.

Polk soon recovered, however. He sent Victor to get a very hot cup of coffee with Cremora from the adjoining tea room. He drank it without being scalded, and drove back carefully on the other side of the street, leaning towards the windscreen to get a closer look at the road. Every morning, after all, it was as if the previous evening and the previous bottle never happened. Already Polk couldn’t remember being angry at Roland. The guy would have a second portion of chips.

At noon, however, Roland hadn’t arrived and couldn’t be raised on the hotel telephone. Polk concentrated on Janet and made some adjustments to her movements around the other actors. He drew a map for her in red ink, where she would stand and where she would be looking during each major speech, and made her memorise her itinerary around the stage before he tore it up. He showed no further ill effect from the alcohol. During rehearsal, as he sent Victor along with messages, he was far more awake than the actors. He rolled cigarettes with one hand, tightening the tobacco inside the wrapper as if coaxing a screw, and watched the scenario through the brown smoke.

As Victor heard how he dealt with his actors and explained the correct gestures and expressions and the way to occupy a certain volume of space, how to react to the other person, how to pause on or speed over the phrases in each sentence, he felt that the director had a wisdom that was, after all, as certain as any farmer’s.

When the rehearsal was over Polk came up to him.

—We should probably find Roland now. Are you coming?

—Of course I am coming. I will do anything, Sir.

—Anything is not required. You only need to catch sight of him.

—I’ll find him, Sir.

—You have to be like a bloodhound. I gather he and Janet had something of a showdown. It’s not the first time. In my opinion, the responsibility is on both of them. He keeps after her. For her part, Janet can act like a bitch on heat. So this is our drama. He’s in love with her. She’s in love with me. I am in love with myself. We have a merry triangle going.

—I didn’t notice, Mr Polk.

—You notice everything, Victor. Let’s see if we can find the van before the metre maid has her way with it.

—The metre maids don’t come over here.

—So we have the metres and not the maids. The best of possible worlds.

They were in luck. Polk continued to talk as he drove through town. It was busy. From Friday noon, lasting until Sunday evening, the factory workers had money to spend on alcohol, brown bread, tinned vegetables. The farmers came from the interior of the province, the bachelor in his bakkie and the married man in the family Mercedes, to buy supplies, meet their friends at the new hamburger restaurants, pick up magazine subscriptions at the Christian bookshop, check the catalogues of agricultural machinery, and, perhaps, attend performances of the Natal Philharmonic, which courted controversy by programming Russian symphonies.

At the next intersection a cement mixer was stuck. Polk put the car in neutral.

—What is it, Victor? Is it a woman? Is it Janet also?

—Sorry, Sir?

—Something’s wrong with you today. You’re usually as cheerful as a starfish. I will work it out eventually if you don’t confess.

—It’s okay, Mr Polk.

—It’s okay. It’s not okay. Sometimes you are as difficult to piece together as your friend Shabangu. You can tell me your troubles if you want, but I won’t force anything out of you. Now do you suppose they will ever move this truck?

The robot went from red to green while the mixer continued to sit in the middle of the road, its massive green cylinder sputtering and the exhaust pipe breathing clouds of unhealthy white smoke, while the driver studied the engine hopelessly. Other men got out of their cars to advise him.

A Black Maria clambered onto the pavement, two men in the compartment whose arms were handcuffed to the railing above their heads. They looked out at Victor as if to remind him about his permit book. But he was luckier than them.

Polk continued.

—In any event, you can’t be worse off than Roland. His father was white. His mother, on the other hand, was a certain coloured lady, Yolanda Adams, and so he was brought up in a coloured area and went to coloured schools and so on. Roland has suffered from a broken heart since he met Janet. The three of us met at the same time, donkey’s years now, when I was putting on my first production. Since then Roland has good days and some bad days when nothing can get his chin off the floor.

—I can see that, Mr Polk.

—Ah, but what you don’t know is that all this time, Roland has been quietly married to a very nice lady who is a secondary-school teacher. I have met her and she has nothing to do with any sort of drama. He has a son in class two, plus a daughter in standard three. He is as happy as a clam in the heart of his family, but none of it can protect him from the negative influence of Janet’s existence. That’s love for you. Roland resents me because he sees Janet is in love with me. In my opinion Janet is in love with the idea of love. She has never been committed to the physical side of it.

—I think it’s too complicated, Sir.

—We get most of our energy from complications. If you were to ask me, right now, where I get half my ideas from, it is from the two of them, Roland and Janet. But there is also a cost to it. Sometimes I feel that I have to carry around Master Roland on my back, and all his moods and his grievances. I never get the opportunity to put him down.

When he was drunk, Polk was as sad as the night was long. When he was back to sober, there was a good feeling that came off him, as if you were sitting around a fire and having your hands and face warmed by his confidence. The same was true for the others in the production. If the sun was up, then Polk would continue to pull at your unhappiness until it unravelled.

The mixer was pushed to the side of the road and they could be on their way again. Victor wanted to tell Polk about his situation with the reference book. Yet there was nothing obvious the director could accomplish. You had to be a good judge of what people could and couldn’t do for you. Many of the Caledonian residents had the idea that they could take their problems to a European and they would be sorted out. Victor thought it was wishful thinking. If Polk made a noise about the disappearance of the permit, then the people in the hostel would know about his plight. One of them would report him to the other, and the magistrate would be forced to apply the rules that were his professional existence. Victor would be arrested by the end of the day.

They went through the old section of town, where there was a line of fruit-and-vegetable shops shuttered for Friday prayers, and then an international hotel, the library, and post office. Victor read the signs in the shops and the sandwich boards announcing the rugby results.

Polk had based the play, which focused on the idea of a false accusation, on a story that Neil Hunter had passed on to him. He had tried to explain the connection between the story and the play but Victor couldn’t see it for himself.

—I invited Neil again although he says one visit to the set is enough. I don’t think he will come.

—Why not, Sir? As you said, you put some of his ideas in your play. You wrote about him and his life. I would love to see a version of myself in a play.

—That way you would live forever. But Neil doesn’t really like plays and novels. He prefers abstract concepts instead of life itself. Neil sees the world in a straight line. Maybe you saw that when he came to see the rehearsals. Neil does not understand why we tell stories instead of conveying the facts as they happened. For example, he wants me to say what I think out loud and take the consequences for it. What do you think the police would have to say? Out of the two of us, he is the naïve one. What he is doing, with the Free University, is too much in the open. Because they can see it, they will find a way to stop it. What we are doing is hardly even visible.

—You think it’s better to be invisible?

—Making plays to be invisible? You can’t insist on scientific logic if you want to live in this world. As you see, Victor, I can’t rely on the actors to turn up, for the electricity to stay on. I make do with whatever arrives. So I have to learn the trick of making something appear out of nothing. But sometimes, I can promise you, it’s better to make nothing out of something.

Polk sent him inside to find Roland. The out-of-town actors, soloists, and studio musicians who came for shows or to record parts in a radio drama went to the bar at the end of a shopping arcade, past the women toting their bags on the escalator, convenient to the hotel and the main station. There were three ladies with coloured curlers in their hair sitting underneath the hood dryers in the salon, their handbags laid on the leather chairs behind them.

Victor realised he was hungry. The sharp smells interested him, burning coffee and sausage rolls in tin foil in the tea room where the court reporters and the advocates went. However, he had to go in quickly, careful not to attract attention in case a policeman or shopkeeper came to question him. Up until today he hadn’t minded, because there was some strange pleasure in giving his pass over and having it found to be in order.

Roland was at the back of the room, stirring his sour spirits at a table. The bar was decorated with signed photographs of sportsmen in blazers, standing in black-and-white cricket pavilions, alongside portraits of Natal prime ministers and a painting that depicted, in heavy brush strokes, King Shaka bending his legs behind a cowhide shield.

Besides the actor there were only Europeans, a bartender in a short-sleeved white shirt, and several older men sitting at the counter. Roland passed for white in their eyes, although he had never claimed to be a European in Victor’s earshot. The sunshine revealed his golden-brown skin. Yet he appeared to enjoy the freedom of entering a bar or hotel, a restaurant or the beach, without worrying about being caught on account of the idle syllables in his voice which sounded nothing like a European. He seemed to settle back into his skin when unobserved.

Victor approached, hoping that nobody would stop him from entering the room, and saw that on the stained wooden table, covered in burn marks, was a thin-necked bottle, Mainstay rum, and an extra glass with ice. Roland’s attention was at the bottom of the bottle. But then he put down the drink and seemed to straighten out his expression.

Victor sounded ruder than he felt.

—Mr Polk sent me to fetch you, Mr Adams. You must come now.

—Is Peter waiting in his car? He comes to fetch me and can’t be bothered to come in. Let him wait until I have decided what to do with the rest of this bottle. He’s not the policeman of me.

—The whole cast is waiting.

—I can’t pretend and put on a performance. I told Peter to leave me behind for this one. I told him I cannot work with Janet. What can you know about it? With your name, at your age, you can only expect to win. Whereas I am the master of losing.

Victor didn’t sit down. He was dizzy, and didn’t know if it was still from happiness. He needed Roland to come. Otherwise he would never dislodge Mr Shabangu from his roost and take his pass book back. He would never be safe.

—I can see that you are unhappier when you are separated from Janet. So I don’t think Mr Polk is to blame.

—On every production Peter has to have a favourite, apart from Janet. Do you know that I used to be his favourite when I was a few years older than you are right now? Today you happen to be the favourite. Although you are only a helper on the set. He has plans for you.

—Your life is still good.

—It only looks like that from the outside. Inside I am still as desperate as when I was your age.

Victor wasn’t sure how to reply this time. He had heard it before. There was so much feeling in the man. When Roland had sent Victor on a mission at any point in the past few weeks—to take money to a jockey at the turf club who might send back information on the condition of the horses, to take a receipt to the Tattersalls, to make an appointment with Janet—he spoke from his throat.

—I will come after I’ve finished my bottle. In the meantime, I can tell you something you haven’t noticed. Do you want to hear it, Victor?

—Please.

—That caretaker, Samuel, is jealous of you and Peter.

—Don’t worry. Just come. So long as the play starts on time, I can handle Mr Shabangu.

—He is trying to be a father over you. Even Peter would be better than that.

In the car Roland continued to talk to him in the back seat. He ignored Polk. To Victor’s surprise he was more interested in what was happening in sports than in anything to do with the play. It wasn’t just the luck of horses and jockeys that Roland depended on, but cricket and rugby teams, Arsenal and Manchester United, and the Cape Town league games. He was someone, like Polk, you could learn from.

Roland fell silent when they went past a building site in the centre of town. The crane was crowned with a line of red lights and protected by a security gate. Two soldiers sat at the boom. They were armed with long rifles that lay in their laps.

You heard the occasional gunshot, then distant sirens, yet no report came on the radio or in the newspapers. After an incident, the police were surly, interrogating Bantus, checking the details on their endorsements, listening gravely to military radios at the roadblocks that sprang up, and hauling anyone for any reason into a Black Maria. Every Bantu was in trouble. If you were caught so much as smiling at a European it would go badly. Nonetheless, directly after an attack, Victor sometimes found that he was looking a policeman straight in the face and wondering if he was going to be hit with the man’s truncheon. He knew that his gaze was too direct.

Roland continued talking.

—Look at what people read about, Peter. They want to know about the war in Biafra, to justify how they keep the Bantus down, and what the service is like on the Concorde, and the lifestyle of Aristotle Onassis. That’s what your plays want to take away from them. So they’re not interested. They care about what gratifies them. However, there is someone who does pay close attention. I have it on good authority that the Security Branch will be in attendance tonight.

—You’re telling stories again. You have the disease of telling stories, Roland.

—I have it on good authority, Peter. For now, that is all I am permitted to say.

Polk was annoyed.

—Considering the state of the border, I hope the National Party has a better sense of priorities. If they have nothing better to do than listen to every word of my poor play, then we are truly lost.

The evening proved Polk wrong. The strike at the Clover factory, and the collaboration between some theatre groups and the trade-union movement had aroused the government. On the other side there were rumours about a new Mandela plan, a Mandela day on which freedom would be created at a single stroke.

Most of the men staying in the hostel came to see Polk’s play. They were tough, did stick-fighting in the road, worked as security guards or assistants to plumbers and electricians. The Christians among them wore their church clothing, Jewish shirts and pants on credit, while others wore hand-me-down jackets and re-soled Bata shoes. Victor was helping Janet with her costume. She released him after twenty minutes.

When the play was about to begin, the main light was switched off. Victor found a place sitting cross-legged at the side of the room. The hum of the electric fan rose as the men in the audience stopped their conversations.

In the dusk he was aware of the breathing ranks of people, their washing-powder smell, and the proximity of their legs and arms. There was a young woman, no older than he was but more confident, whose hand was close enough he could hold it. She wore beaded blue and red bracelets on her arms. She was intent on the stage. He ached to look her properly in the face. She was good enough to hypnotise Mr Shabangu.

Roland and Janet were standing, folding and unfolding their bodies like dancers, to indicate the start of the performance while the curtain was unfurled in front of them. Someone put on the eight-track cassette that had Polk’s carefully chosen music on it, songs by Duke Ellington and Dollar Brand. After some time the curtain came down. It was rolled up like a carpet by a stagehand, and transported behind the stage. Victor thought he had never been so happy at such a moment of danger. He couldn’t understand his own feelings.

It was the first time he had the chance to see the play from beginning to end. The setting was a private Christian school near Cradock, in the eastern Cape, where Janet was a teacher, head of the History Department, and Roland was the guard on the property. You first saw Roland alone, nailing a blackboard to the wall to the tune of a wireless radio, and complaining to himself about the wrongs in his life. He was unexpectedly large in the middle of the canteen.

Victor was surprised to see Roland on stage. He became a different person. Even his arms were more muscular. Roland spoke too much in real life, a sing-song man, but on stage he talked in a stripped-down dialect, using only flat sentences and questions, language as bare as the stage, which held only three chairs and a hat rack, and the blackboard with corrections on it, and with as few elements as the tools in his hand. Polk was noted for the spareness of his script and stage. He would only admit a word, or an action, into a play when it satisfied some internal ruler. He made sure everything counted.

Janet’s husband was the principal of the school. Nevertheless she had fallen in love with Roland. She kept an eye on him as she marked the class essays, her red pen held at an odd angle in her strong hand. Through the window, on the sports ground, the students were doing hurdles. She would get up and watch them when she could no longer concentrate while Roland painted the ceiling from a step-ladder.

They talked when he came down to clean the rollers. In the play it was an unequal relationship. Roland’s character was handsome; he was far more certain in his skin than Janet. He had five children who never appeared on stage. She taught him to play the piano, which stood on the right-hand corner of the stage and sounded much louder than you expected when they played together.

At one point her husband came in. He was played by the husband of the nurse who came to the hostel to administer certain injections. The principal didn’t acknowledge his wife’s presence as he gave Roland a set of detailed instructions about the geyser. The principal had a soldier’s posture and harsh voice. Victor didn’t understand how the character could have been based on Polk’s friend Professor Hunter. They had nothing in common apart from a patch on the elbow of the tweed jacket that Polk had borrowed from his friend for the duration of the play.

The second act brought trouble and reminded Victor that his permit book was somewhere in the very same building. One of the students stole from Janet’s purse. She counted it, and decided that the guard had taken her property. Victor stirred in his seat and wondered if he should try to sneak out of the performance. It was too early. As he had suspected there was no sign of the custodian on the staircase, listening intently to the antics on stage. Mr Shabangu preferred to steer clear of what he could not control.

Janet called Roland to her classroom and tried to persuade him to confess. She told him that she didn’t want to report him to her husband on account of his five children. She made him empty out his pockets in front of her and then give her the key to his locker. Victor wished he could do the same thing with Mr Shabangu. His world was full of accusations. Roland refused to admit to Janet that he was guilty. He thought it was because she had fallen in love with him that she was willing to go to such lengths. He had never stolen a thing. He wished that he had never listened to her stories in the first place. It was worse for him because she had told him about her husband and family, the school board, and the operation that had left her unable to bear a child. She slapped him. He pushed her away.

Around him Victor sensed the audience becoming more excited by the different predicaments, as if some secret, usually lost in the spaces between people, had become visible. He was distracted by the nearby girl and then by the question of what to do about Mr Shabangu.

When he came back to the play not much had changed except the progress of their feelings. Anger crackled between the main characters with all their unsatisfied and disappointed love. Victor saw that he was also angry at Polk, at Roland, who had delayed him, and at Davidson the printer, who employed him to set the government gazette and then pretended not to remember his name the next time he went to ask for a job.

At the beginning of the final act the guard picked his hammer out of the toolbox and never put it down again. He kept it behind his back, hidden from his companion but visible to the audience, the head going up and down as the tension between the actors varied. What was said between Janet and Roland didn’t matter. The hammer mattered. When she accused Roland to her husband it listened and drew its own conclusions.

It was only in the final minutes of the play that the hammer revealed itself between the two principals. The guard was supposed to be collecting his possessions when she went into his room on the back of the property. Janet couldn’t take her eyes off the hammer when she saw it in his hands. The tension was unbearable in the canteen, hardly relieved when Roland hit her twice on the back of the head, just as if he were testing the soundness of the hammer against bone.

His victim didn’t have a chance to protect herself. She collapsed as the curtain was rolled down and lay stretched out on the stage, her feet trembling more slowly, for a few minutes before getting up again. The audience began to clap although you couldn’t say what they were clapping for. Perhaps it was for her resurrection. Janet, Roland, and the principal stood in the front of the canteen and bowed.

Victor also clapped but he didn’t believe in Polk’s story. It was too neat. It was told from the wrong side. In his experience, it was the one who was safe, who had money in his pocket, who told stories, who also had the hammer in his hand and would stand over your body shedding tears to prove his humanity. Mr Shabangu, for example, had the hammer. Janet, or her husband, would have had the hammer.

He was sure his good luck had returned at the end of the day. Everybody’s secrets had come out on stage. It was as if he had been drinking a secret liquor all day, watering a seed in his breast which had blossomed into happiness. He saw Polk, who stopped Victor to talk. He was as exhilarated as Victor. His shirt was open to the navel.

—You think it worked, after all?

—I didn’t expect the men to understand. But it looks like they did.

—When it comes to a play I don’t think understanding means much. Chekhov acts on your heart, on your breathing. Like Shakespeare. Next year I am going to put on Macbeth in Zulu. I hope you will come and assist me.

—I will be happy to come.

The girl Victor noticed before had vanished. He didn’t mind. Polk, with his rusted white beard and wine on his lips, looked like a hero. Nobody else in the building mattered.

—Everything will be different now, Victor. We proved something here.

Victor wasn’t sure what Polk meant. The audience was breaking up and the volunteers were folding chairs and putting them against the wall. He had to hurry.

—So your Mr Shabangu didn’t come after all. I expected him to fix his evil eye on us for taking over his canteen. He couldn’t forgive the intrusion. Steer clear of that man, Victor.

—I will try. But I have to go and see him now. I believe that he has taken my reference book.

Polk didn’t appear to hear. He had turned away and was already talking to Janet. Victor couldn’t expect any help from him. The building was almost empty and the men were already in their beds. When Victor went upstairs, avoiding the last members of the audience and Roland, who had come out with his face scrubbed, he found he was alone in the hallway.

To Victor’s despair, the light was already on in the caretaker’s room. He knelt and looked through the keyhole to establish the situation.

Mr Shabangu was nowhere to be seen. Instead there was a European sitting at the desk on which the caretaker checked his calculations and did his accounts. The pad of carbon paper had been replaced with a complicated machine, a motor bearing two spindles through which was passing a section of thick brown tape.

The caretaker was sure to have arranged it ahead of time. Victor couldn’t imagine the machine being set up in a single evening. He was surprised that Mr Shabangu hadn’t warned him to stay away from the top floor after the performance. It was as if he wanted to get caught in the act, wanted to show off his European friend.

Crouching in front of the door, Victor noted the man’s reddish-brown, big-buttoned leather jacket on the back of the chair and the short trimmed hair on his rectangular head. He had earphones over his ears and was adjusting the dials on the machine.

At some point the caretaker would reappear. He never slept in any other place, never travelled for the holidays, never spent a night in the hospital. So there would be no other chance of looking in his room. Victor’s opportunities were diminishing by the hour. Last night Mr Shabangu had eaten him. This evening a new man with a recorder had appeared to guard what had been taken.

Victor was sure that the man was a Special Branch. An sb wore civilian clothing, a leather jacket in place of a blue uniform. He had the reputation of being more intelligent than the average policeman. They were soft-spoken, possessing an individual potency that was feared throughout the country. You could disappear forever in the company of an sb. He could invalidate your employer’s endorsement on the spot and tear up your pass book. If you were a European, he could confiscate your passport, put you on an aeroplane to another country, place you in detention, or recommend you to the Minister for house arrest. If he caught you, then you had your chips.

Victor was just standing up when he found that he had been picked up by the neck and was being forced through the door into Mr Shabangu’s room. The man behind him, efficient and strong, forced his arms behind his back and didn’t allow him to turn around. The man in front of him stood with his face suddenly red, removing the earphones and turning the recording machine off.

—I found a friend outside. Seen him before?

—He’s working with Polk. Isn’t that so, my friend?

A thrill passed through Victor’s body, from his feet all the way to his head. The world was a performance. He and his father and Samuel Shabangu were players without a name, people who didn’t count in the grand scheme. He couldn’t say a word out loud to the Special Branch. But he defied them. He didn’t mind being tongue-tied in front of them. He was even luckier than he had ever been before. His name would be a legend.

The man behind him held his ear and spoke.

—We are like the bioscope for you? You think you can watch us like this, my friend? What are you even doing on this floor?

—I sleep in the next room, where the mattress is. I was just passing by to see Mr Shabangu.

—Your Shabangu is not here to save you. Where’s your pass?

—I am Victor Moloi. Mr Shabangu will tell you. He took my permit today. It’s somewhere here in this room.

—You are full of beans, my boy. I must tell you that you are full of beans today.

Victor was held to the man’s head. He stood on his toes, hardly recognising the pain, and watched the other man start to pack up and put on his jacket. It was a relief to be held, to be located, and commanded, and forced to confess. He had been on the run for three years. Now he could be clear of it all. He could go back to his father.

—Well, you will have to stay with us for a while, my friend. In any case we can’t let you go and tell stories now to Polk and his brilliant parade of actors and actresses. We don’t want to trouble his beautiful redhead. Tomorrow we will begin to clear up what happened here. We will begin to have some conversations with those involved. In the meantime you have come in the middle of an entire operation.

The man in the back released Victor and pushed him onto the bed. The two policemen, now both wearing their leather jackets, sat in front of the recorder, trying to remove the two spools without breaking the tape. He thought they were even more helpless than he was. Their system of pass books and police forces, prisons and tape recorders, this system which they carried in their hearts and treated as their gospel, was a childish invention. It had fatal effects, and yet its reasons were no more serious than a child’s logic.

—My reference book is here, in this room, because Mr Shabangu sold it to me in the first place. Everybody knows. When you give him enough money he will go to the department and come back with a reference book for you.

—You’re making a serious accusation. Mr Shabangu has been a friend to our department for many years. I don’t believe he is trading pass books.

—Let me look around the room. I can find it and I will show you.

They didn’t allow him. The other man went to fetch the caretaker. He came back, after a few minutes, with a smile that stayed on his face. There was no pleasantness in it.

—Our Shabangu must have heard something. He is gone like a shot.