The fact that on the south side of the tracks there were salubrious houses did not mean the whole of Klerksdorp was prosperous, for on the north side of the tracks there was a shanty town of tin shacks — box-like huts made of old tin sheets, windowless walls and flat roofs, a squatter settlement as slummy as anything I had seen in Tanzania.
Markwassie with its crude sign, 173 miles to Johannesburg, had the look of 1930s Mississippi in the evocative Depression photos: ragged blacks, hot sun-baked fields of pale cookie-dough furrows, grease-stained train yards, rusty tin-roofed warehouses, a curving shine of parallel switching tracks. Markwassie was a railway junction, where skinny black children screeched and waved at the Trans-Karoo Express.
Nothing of Africa here — this looked like hot, sad old America until, about ten miles farther up the line, I saw eland cropping grass at a game ranch. In the distance there were big purple and pink clouds, intimations of sunset in the still air and the uncertain chirps of birds at the day’s end on the high plains of the Middelveld.
I used the hours of darkness to turn from the window and scratch away at my erotic story, copying and revising, and reminding myself that, however secret or forbidden, such images vitalized us and fueled the imagination. In his book on Hokusai, Edmond de Goncourt wrote, ‘Every Japanese painter has a body of erotic works.’ All the greatest Japanese print makers had indulged themselves in the erotic and had devised a nice euphemism for such works, calling them shunga, ‘spring pictures’.
In Johannesburg I had bought Guillaume Apollinaire’s Les Onze Mille Verges, which was plainly porn, not to my taste, Gothic and absurd by turns, most of it too athletic or too painful to be likely. Apollinaire, who had invented the word surrealism, had written about the Japanese prints I had in mind. I read his book quickly and at one point describing the motion of a train he alluded to the Alphonse Allais couplet,
The titillating motion of trains
Sends desire coursing all through our veins.
The dinner gong rang. I sat at a table with a shaven-headed motorcyclist named Chris and an older English couple who seemed tetchy but perhaps were just nervous. They kept their names to themselves. But they did say that they had lived in southern Africa since 1960 and, ‘We could never live in England now.’ They were taking a holiday in the Cape wine lands. The man said he was a train buff. ‘My dream is to take the Trans-Siberian. But I have health problems.’
In spite of his shaven head and missing teeth and bike-madness, Chris had a zen-like view of the world and he discouraged any belittling of the state of the world, Africa included. ‘Yaaaw, never mind.’ Chris said he was half-English and half-Afrikaans. ‘So, yaaaw, I’ve got problems, too.’
‘You go on all these big holiday rides with all the bikers, I suppose,’ the Englishman said, as though chipping flint with his teeth.
‘Oh, yaaaw. Very nice. Like flying,’ Chris said mildly.
‘Quite a few members of the swastika brigade on those rides,’ the Englishman said.
‘Oh, yaaaw. You get everyone,’ Chris said. ‘Women. English. African, too.’
I said, ‘I rode a bike for a while, but I stopped. I figured I would end up an organ donor.’
‘Oh, yaaaw. I’ve got me some good organs to give away. But I smoke, so — Ha! Ha! — not lungs.’
Meanwhile we ate the four-course meal of soup, fish, Karoo lamb, and mousse for dessert. I did not volunteer anything of my travels, and was fearful of mentioning trains to a train buff, but instead asked the Englishman how he happened to choose a life in Africa.
‘I was eighteen, just out of school. I joined the Colonial Service and told my mother I would be away three years. She was so angry. She said, “You’ll never come home!” ’ The Englishman smiled. ‘And I didn’t.’
He had worked in Northern Rhodesia until it became Zambia; then in Southern Rhodesia, until the struggle for Zimbabwe became violent, and finally had come to South Africa. To ask the question that hung in the air — was he staying? — was indelicate, even impertinent.
Anyway, he changed the subject. He said, ‘This is in fact the boat train. People sailed from Europe to the Cape and took it up to Jo’burg. And they went home that way, too.’
I guessed that he was tormenting himself with thoughts of emigrating to Australia.
That night, late, we came to a station in the bleak Karoo. I hopped out of the train to look upwards at the starry sky, the brilliance of luminous pinpricks, more stars than there was darkness around them. I saw a shooting star.
‘Sometimes you can even see the Mulky Why,’ said a disembodied voice on the platform.
In the morning, we passed the stations of Prince Albert Road and Laingsburg, where the Great Karoo descends to the Little Karoo. The Karoo is plateau land and high desert, and rolling through it on this pleasant train I had a creeping recollection of entering Patagonia, seeing the same sorts of simple farm houses and bushes blown sideways and flocks of sheep squinting into the wind, everything except Welsh settlers and gauchos. Even in the middle of nowhere, in grazing land of low bush, with a horizon of low blue mountains, the settlers were houseproud.
The land was mostly prairie, some of it just scrub, and here and there a grove of trees, each one like a farmer’s implanted flag, and at the end of a long cart track a classic white house with a Dutch façade and a white gate.
A rap on my door: the steward. He said, ‘We are coming to Touwsrivier and De Doorns, sir. Please make sure your windows are closed and locked. We’ve had thefts before. People coming through the windows.’
He was right about Touwsrivier, a distressed-looking community of poor houses and ragged yellowish Africans, in the Witteberg of the Little Karoo. The people were Khoisan, ‘coloured,’ the marginalized people of the provinces. The fields were full of ostriches, some of them roosting on the ground, others prancing next to the train. And then some men on the platform came to my window and pressed their faces against the glass and pointed to a dish of chocolates wrapped in foil on a little shelf, each man’s gestures indicating I want one.
De Dooms was partly a slum in a mountain valley, some of it looking very desperate — metal box huts made of roughly cut corrugated sheets; and poor scrap-wood houses. On the other side of the railway line, the white side, a bigger church, better houses. From the vexed oriental look of the men frowsting by the tracks I took them to be Khoisan, their faces feline. Some of them hoisted wooden impedimenta at the train windows, which were boxes of overripe grapes. Beyond the town were vineyards, so I took these squatter camps to be the settlements of grape pickers and winery workers.
At one time, only male workers had been allowed within these town limits. Workers’ hostels and workers’ huts were the tradition, a male society of lonely and hardworked drunken men. As part of his pay, on Fridays each vineyard worker got two liters of wine, a drip-feed system of alcohol that had turned most of them into winos. Perhaps this explained the squatter camps, most of which had sprung up after Mandela came to power, and which were composed of whole families. In the past, the women had been left in the villages, as Nadine had described in a sad but perceptive paragraph of July’s People: