Читать книгу Dog Eat Dog - Niq Mhlongo - Страница 8

Five

At about half past three that afternoon I found myself at the Jorissen Street branch of the Standard Bank. The sun was still very hot. There were about nine people waiting to use the ATM. Ahead of us was a middle-aged black lady who was busy having her private conversation with the ATM. By the way she looked around her, it seemed to me that there was no agreement reached between them.

A thick red line on the pavement that bore the warning STAND BEHIND THIS RED LINE separated her from the short, moustached black man behind her.

About four or five minutes passed. The black lady stood inert in front of the ATM. Her card was still in the slot and I could hear a beeping sound as she looked around her.

“Oh boy! What is she still doing there?” said the blonde behind me to herself.

Making sure that nobody is watching her, or else blaming herself for putting her money in the bank instead of under her mattress, I answered her silently.

The black lady at the ATM looked around again. The blonde curled her lip. She started cursing impatiently each time the black lady inserted her card into the slot to redo her transaction. Agitated, she ruffled her thatch of long blonde hair with her manicured fingers and began tapping her right foot on the pavement.

I looked her up and down; her red dress stashed away her beautiful slender body from shoulder to hip, leaving her sunburnt legs naked. Stylish sunglasses were pushed up into her blonde hair.

At long last the cursing blonde exploded. “Excuse me. Do you mind helping her? She seems to be struggling,” she pleaded, pointing at the lady at the ATM.

What she didn’t realise is that I had a lot on my mind. I was not in a good mood at all. My meeting with Dr Winterburn had taken its toll, and on top of that I had just received the grade for my first Political Studies essay and I had failed it.

With a sudden flash I turned and looked at the blonde. Anger was building up inside me. Why pick me when there are three people in front of me? I asked myself angrily. She could have even offered to help the lady herself if she was really serious about it. Why me? Is it because she is used to blacks running her errands every day?

“Is it because I’m black?” I asked.

With a shade of disbelief creeping into her voice the blonde responded, “Jeez! I was only sayi . . .”

Her face turned pale from my insinuation. Her long blonde hair wagged about as if she was looking for a hole in the ground to swallow her up immediately.

I could tell that my words had had a strong impact. Yes, it is true that I was implying that she was a racist. It was the season of change when everyone was trying hard to disown apartheid, but to me the colour white was synonymous with the word and I didn’t regret what I had said to the blonde. Anyway, I had been told that playing the race card is a good strategy for silencing those whites who still think they are more intelligent than black people. Even in parliament it was often used. When the white political parties questioned the black parties they would be reminded of their past atrocities even if their questions were legitimate. Then the white political parties would have to divert from their original questions and apologise for their past deeds.

The blonde looked around her to see if anybody had overheard our nasty little conversation. People remained unaware of what had passed between us. I stood with a scowl on my face, anticipating her response. She finally summoned up enough courage to speak and stammered: “My gosh! Why on earth do you think I’m racist? I was just –”

“Because you are white,” I answered.

“So that qualifies –”

“Yes. I know the likes of you and I’m sick and tired of pretending. When you see a black man like me I know you don’t see a man, but a black boy.”

“I’m sorry if you feel that way. I was merely saying that maybe she would be more comfortable being assisted by you.”

I clicked my tongue. “Ag! Voetsek, man! What made you think she would be comfortable being helped by me and not you or any­body else in this queue, including the security officer over there?”

“Oh jeez, I mean –”

“Yeah. It’s because I’m black just like her, isn’t it? And you think you are different from us,” I snapped.

The blonde made some attempt to absolve herself but I turned to face the ATM. The security officer had helped the black lady and I was now second in the queue.

When my turn came to use the ATM I found I had three hundred and thirty rand in my bank account. I withdrew three hundred rand and headed to the nearby Moosa Supermarket to buy some groceries. As I walked away I could feel the blonde’s eyes on my back.

Themba, one of my township friends, had finally got a job as a cashier at the Moosa Supermarket. From the shelves I took as many goodies as I wanted without even bothering to check their prices. At the till Themba would either pass my goodies through without ringing them up, or he would ring up a lesser price. As he was doing this he would say, “The rand is weak, my friend, we must save money when we have a chance”.

The total that flashed up on the cash register was forty-seven rand and eighty-one cents. The groceries that I had filched were worth more than one hundred and eighty rand. In order to hoodwink the shop manager, who was sitting at the other till, I tendered eighty rand in tens and twenties. Themba then gave me more than thirty rand in coins. At the door was a black security officer, I folded a ten rand note and handed it to him underneath my receipt; he smiled at me and ticked the receipt.

Along the way back to the Y and not very far from the Moosa Supermarket was a bottlestore. The change that Themba had given me at the supermarket was jangling in the back pocket of my jeans. I walked inside with my grocery bags and within a few seconds I had increased my load by twelve cold beers.

At the corner of De Korte and a small street that I didn’t know the name of, I started feeling the weight of the heavy plastic bags that I was carrying. My fingers began to twitch as if I had cut off the blood supply.

I stopped by the robots opposite Damelin College to see if there was a car coming. There was nothing on the road, so I crossed before the green man appeared on the robot and sat down on a big stone under a giant tree next to the College building. I looked inside one of my bags and saw some appetising biltong curling up at me like a snake.

I put my hand inside the plastic bag to pull out the biltong. But instead I touched the ice-cold Black Label dumpies. My mouth started to water. I tried to swallow the saliva, but my throat was too dry. I spat out the saliva and watched the blob fall noisily on the tarmac while my hand groped inside the bag again. With a mind of its own, my hand bypassed the biltong and came out with an ice-cold lager. I laughed at myself, but I didn’t put the beer back in the bag. After all, the Y is still far away and I am tired of walking. Who’s going to see that I’m drinking a beer under this tree?

As I twisted the top off my dumpie my mind landed comfortably on the very first glass of beer that my father gave me. That was way back in the late 1970s.

My father was a good musician. Unfortunately none of his children took after him, but in drinking I think I outclass my old man. My mother used to complain a lot about my father’s drinking and his late homecomings; sometimes she would even accuse him of having an affair. But later I found out that my father was just enjoying playing his music and drinking beer at the bottlestore, where he could find good drunken backing vocalists to accompany him when he played his Xizambi.

This traditional Shangaan instrument was made out of a thin cane which was bent into the shape of a bow. A melodious string would be fastened from one bent end of the wood to another. A short carved stick would then be struck against the cane, providing percussion and melody at the same time.

My father was brilliant at carving and he used to make his own instruments as well as other things. He would often go to the countryside and fell trees from which he would carve wooden spoons, wooden plates and things for home decoration. He would sell those things for profit at the train stations during his spare time.

Most of my father’s followers were drunken women that he met at the bottlestore. Every Friday night we would hear him coming from afar with the crowd behind him singing along in carefree tones. But by the time he reached our home the crowd would have disappeared. His food would be ready on his carved wooden plate, but he would continue playing his instrument. Sometimes he would ask my mother to join him in a tune. She would join in if she was in a good mood. She knew all of his songs.

My father sang his songs when he was both happy and sad, or when he wanted to make a point about something. There was a particular song that my father used to sing when he wanted to tell a troublesome tenant to leave our home. Its Shangaan title was “Nghoma ya makhalibode”, “The song of cardboard boxes”, and it went like this:

Ayi gube ya makhalibode	(Take your cardboard boxes and leave my house)
I khale mi hi nyagatsa	(It is long that you been troubling us)
Aho chava ku mi hlongola	(We were afraid of chucking you out)
Hi nghoma ya makhalibode	(This is the song of the cardboard boxes)

After singing that song we all knew that someone among my father’s tenants should leave the house, but my father was a very kind man and although most of the tenants in our home were our relatives, they never paid rent.

One day my father arrived home late, singing as usual. My mother was very angry because he had spent most of his money on beer. What made matters worse was that earlier the same day she had come home with her hand torn and bleeding. She and her friends had been bitten by the dogs at a farm near Pimville. A white farmer had set the dogs on them as they were trying to collect cow dung to smear on the floor of our house. Only one of her friends managed to escape, by jumping the fence. My mother was caught by the arm by one of the dogs, while her other friend was caught by the leg. After enjoying their plight the farmer instructed his dogs to leave the “kaffirs” alone, but the scar is still vivid even today.

My father used this as an opportunity to compose a song about white people. The song ran as follows and was in English:

You, white man, leave my family alone

This is the last warning

I worked hard and paid lobola for my wife

Unlike you, who just give them a ring to put on their finger

I have eight children with her not just two

But that night we were woken up by a serious argument in my parents’ bedroom. My brother and I were sleeping in the sitting-dining room. We listened very quietly. My mother was threatening to leave the house because my father didn’t spend enough time at home.

The following day, a Friday, my father came straight home from work sober. After dinner he told me to come with him. I didn’t ask where. We went to the local bottlestore, and that was the day he gave me my very first beer. The first ever glass of beer in my life.

When we came back home I was his backing vocalist. I was drunk, but my mother was happy and never complained when he took me with him. It was clear to her that if he took me with him he was just enjoying drinking at the bottlestore and not seeing other women.

I began to think about our life in Soweto in those days. At midnight every Tuesday and Friday the white policemen would knock rudely on our kitchen and sitting-dining room doors. Without search warrants, they would rummage through our house for so-called illegal immigrants from the homelands and any other illegal stuff such as home-made ntakunyisa beer. After opening the doors, they would count us in their attempt to control the African birth rate, or influx from rural areas, or whatever the reason was.

One day my uncle, who had recently arrived from the rural areas to look for a job in the big city of gold, got a seventy-two hour order from the police. That meant that he had to leave Johannesburg and go back to the country if he did not find a job within three days. No one was allowed to hang around in town without written permission from his or her employer in those days.

It had been about three weeks since he got the order on his urban permit document. He should have already left the city and returned to the homelands. My uncle had been surviving the police raids by hiding under a big steel bath which we would turn over with him underneath it when we heard the terrifying knock of the police at the door.

The police caught my uncle one cold Saturday night. We were still listening to a radio broadcast when they knocked. Everybody was excited by the news that Prime Minister B J Vorster had resigned as the Prime Minister of the country and P W Botha had taken over as the new Prime Minister. I was the only one who was listening with blithe indifference, as I was still politically naive. The police had been clever because they had changed their timetable and come to our house on a Saturday. But we still identified the knock at the door as theirs because it was very loud as usual, and was followed by the words, “Polisie, maak oop,” spoken in a gruff voice.

In two ticks my uncle had run to the kitchen to take his usual shelter. Unfortunately for him the steel bath was full of soaking clothes. There was no way he could throw the clothes out because the water would spill all over the place and make the police suspicious. Sweating, my uncle just stood there in nervous anticipation of his fate.

Suddenly the voice at the door became unfriendly. “What are you natives still doing there? Do you think we have the whole night for you? We will break this scrap door now!”

We all froze with horror inside the house. We were aware that the police were capable of doing what they said – they had broken two of our doors the year before because we had not responded in time. The first time they came was around midnight when we were all asleep. My father was still getting dressed when they said he was wasting their time and broke down the door. The second occasion we delayed them, as we were still hiding my uncle under the steel bath. Because of this our small bedroom, where three of my brothers and my uncle slept, had no door as we had used it to replace the sitting-dining room door. A sheet had been hung across the doorway as a substitute for the broken door.

I heard my mother pleading with the policemen in the dark. “Please don’t break, I’m coming now,” she said, struggling to unlock the door, which was already being pushed hard from outside. As she opened it, it whipped open and banged against her forehead. Stolidly she stepped aside for the four uniformed white policemen and their two black colleagues to enter.

“What were you doing inside, woman? Still making babies? You natives! Next time we will break the door and beat you up for delaying us,” shouted one of the tall officers as if my mother was deaf.

The officer flashed an electric torch into my mother’s eyes and dazzled her.

“Let me see your permit.”

Without a word she quickly went to her bedroom and returned with a written page. The officer used his torch to complement the dim light from the single candle in the corner. In an effort to aid the police officers, my mother went inside her bedroom again to get a lamp, which was made out of a small Royal Baking Powder tin.

By the time she returned we were all in the sitting-dining room waiting to be counted like animals in the kraal. I was still drowsy, because even though my brothers were listening to the radio I had been slumbering.

Two police officers started counting us and the other four ferreted around in every corner of the house.

“You are supposed to be ten in this house. Which baboon does not belong here?” asked one of the police officers angrily.

We were all afraid to point a finger at my uncle. My parents looked down. My brothers and I looked at my uncle. He was very scared. But I heard his quivering voice.

“Me, baas.”

“Where are your papers?” asked another police officer.

Before my uncle could respond, the police officer’s fat hand was on the scruff of his neck. I was hoping that they wouldn’t beat him up; Brixton police were notorious for their violence.

There had even been rumours in the township of the appearance of a feared whites-only police squad. We kids were made to believe that they had more than two thirds of their faces covered by a bushy beard and moustache, and because of this you couldn’t see their mouths when they were silent. According to the rumours, in order to speak the Brixton whites-only squad would hold their bushy moustaches up with their left hands and pull down their beards with their right to enable them to open their mouths. It was also believed that they would walk around with small brooms to help them sweep their bushy wrist thatches out of the way when they wanted to check the time on their watches.

I stood in the middle of the room stupidly, examining each police officer in an attempt to verify this rumour. Meanwhile my uncle was handing his expired papers to them.

“You suppose to have been gone to the country by now. You go with us today, boy.”

“Please, sir, don’t –” pleaded my mother.

“Shut the fuck up! You kaffir bitch!”

Silence fell. We watched in horror as my uncle hobbled helplessly out into the street with the police. They all disappeared inside the police van and I only saw him again ten years later.