There were books in her house on butterflies and architecture, cave paintings and birds, as well as the sociology and history and politics you would expect. It seemed to Shibalo that she had books on everything; for her it was not that the birds were simply there, flying around, mushrooms came up in the veld after rain. She possessed the world twice over; once as a natural phenomenon, a second time as a filing cabinet in which all creation existed again in the form of a name and description, all concurrent, all within the compass of one man’s experience. He was aware of this second possession as some kind of power over life; one he didn’t have, though he’d got his B.A. at Fort Hare, years ago.
Callie Stow darned his socks and thought nothing of waiting for him on a public street corner; but who would have dreamed that this woman with her tweed skirt and sensible shoes, and her calm white head (he thought of it, all his life, as “the professor’s head”), was getting into the small beige Austin driven by her lover? He was not unattracted by her, either; it was again a first time, the first time he had desired a woman mentally, been drawn to her through the processes of her thinking. In the end, the very thing that had made the open relationship possible killed it off, for him. He did not feel like her lover; she came out of prison and he came from “underground” where he had been lying low for a while, and she said, “Hullo my dear, it’s good to see you,” with the “ui” sound in “good” that he remembered so well. It was all right to say it, but he suddenly felt cheated and disappointed beyond words. He did not know what he wanted; he had not known it was not this. He moved away from her, taking with him a certain discipline of mind, an ability to get at arm’s length from himself, that he had got from her but that he could make use of only intermittently, since it was acquired and not inherent; it continued to be most easily at his command only when he found himself in her company or in the set within a set in which he had moved with her. In time he began to see it as an act that he could do to show how easy it was, really, to belong with them.
White friends like the young advertising men at the flat, who were not much interested in politics except as a subject for argument, enjoyed a black man’s joke at their own expense, and in several places Shibalo had quite a success with the well-timed remark, confiding, marvelling, assuming a naïvety they knew to be assumed: “I knew a white woman once who kept a snake-bite outfit in her car.” Pause: “Never drove through town without it.” (Of course he knew quite well that Callie Stow kept the snake-bite outfit in the car because she used to go climbing in the Magaliesberg on Sundays, with a woman friend.) They would laugh, but he would keep looking at them straight-faced and questioning: “I mean, a snake-bite outfit? The needles? The stuff in the little bottle? The knife to make the cut?” He shrugged and looked impressed. And they laughed indulgently at the calculatedness of the white man’s way of living.
He emerged from the mat of people on one side of the street, darted across, was taken in at once in the line of the bus queue. He had spent two or three nights at the flat, and now was lost to his hosts, with their casual friendliness and the excess of equipment which even the most modest or hard-up white person seemed to find it impossible to do without. Ahead of him a woman sat on the kerb unravelling her baby from the wrappings it had worn on her back; it had a hot, wet, but not a bad, smell. People were eating single bananas, bought for a penny from an Indian with a push-cart. The intersection at the corner was one of the main exits from town and great processions of white men’s cars and buses pulled up face to face. As the lights changed and the press began to move on, a drunk brown boy walked almost into a bus. He had straightened hair in a crew cut, wore a loose jacket, and carried at the end of his long arm a transistor radio covered with imitation crocodile skin. He wove through the sluggish cars, swinging back from one to bump the nose of another, and shouting modestly all the time, “Ya fuckin’ bastard …”
The bus settled low on its wheels as it filled up and then pushed a way into the traffic. Gideon Shibalo’s body adjusted itself to the pressure and jar of other bodies like the automatic accommodation of muscles to a bed whose discomforts are so familiar that they have acquired a certain comfort of their own. He read a column of newspaper between the angle of someone’s jaw and a dusty shoulder. The shriek and chitter of penny whistle music came from a loud speaker down on the heads of those, like himself, who occupied standing room; he looked up from the print along the lightly bobbing heads, seeing the amber of stale afternoon sun show dusty on the wool of the bareheaded ones; he thought: like the pin-heads of mould. If you saw us from high enough we would populate the earth like the furry patch spreading on a bit of cheese. He was smiling as he turned back to the paper. The smells of cheap soap, dirty feet, oranges, chips, and the civet smell of the perfume on a girl spooky-faced with white women’s make-up, were soon overcome by the warm, strong sourness of kaffir beer, given out from the pores of the men and shining on their faces like a libation.
As he walked through the township he called out to people he knew, stopped to talk, and, as the home-comers dispersed along the streets, passed for whole stretches, before houses, boarded-up shops, a church with uneven windows, a dry-cleaner’s, a coffin-maker’s, a men’s hairdresser’s, the insurance agent and the herbalist, without seeing what he passed, though he avoided surely the sudden ditches that sagged down beside the streets, the zigzag of brats and dogs and the occasional mule. He did not see all this, but he could have sat down in a room anywhere on earth and drawn it. If it were to be pulled down, bulldozed and smoothed flat for other occupants, he would not see it any less clearly, or forget a single letter of the writing on the hairdresser’s sign that got smaller as space on the board ran out. For years, up until the time the passport was refused, he had hated all such places, but once the passport was refused, once he began to spend most of his time among whites, the strong feeling died away. The passport had slammed in his face; lethargy can produce an effect outwardly very like content. He was drinking a lot then, and the township, with what he had thought of as its muck-heap tolerance, its unbearable gregariousness, its sentimental brutality, sheltered him. You could die of self-pity in those places; no one would harry you into feeling ashamed, or flog you on to your feet with bull about what you owe yourself, the way whites do to each other.