They both gazed at the structure a moment.
— Are you going to paint the tank? —
— You don’t paint these. It’s asbestos — some special stuff you don’t —
— Yes, I know asbestos, man. Like for the roof. —
The Indian began to climb again and this time gained the platform. Once up, he stretched his legs behind him, face-down on the ledge like an athlete doing push-ups, and carefully fished with an arm over the side to pull up the paint tin.
— You going to do the platform? —
He didn’t answer but shook his head very slowly.
Well what was he going to do up there then? Izak could see by the way the head was shaken the Indian had decided on something. But just at that moment Izak’s attention was distracted by one of the farm children who came along the road with a tiny tin of syrup balanced on her head. She wanted him to give her a lift back, pleaded and nagged. — I’m tired, Boetie. -
— How are you tired, Sesi, look at that little thing, it’s not heavy. —
— But my foot’s sore. —
— What foot? What sore foot? You just want to go on the bicycle, I know. —
When he looked up again a band of brown was begun round the top of the tank. It was not a very large tank, shaped like a barrel, and by standing on his toes — the red rubber soles of his sandals showed — the Indian could reach up the brush to the rim. He was going to paint the tank after all? No. When he had eased himself all round it and finished the top band, he squatted and with some difficulty, because squatting took up more room than standing on the platform, made the same band, the width of the paint brush, round the bottom. Now he was starting to write — no, draw something on the belly of the tank, where it faced Izak and the road. Izak began to pass remarks and show off, gently, not going too far, laughing.
— What are you doing? What’s that you’re making there? It’s a face! What is this? Ag come on, man —
The Indian only shook his head again slowly; he knew what he was doing.
— What thing is it? —
When the sign was gone over a second time to thicken the outlines, he drew himself aside from it and turned the dark glasses once again: — Don’t you see? —
The outline of an egg, standing upright, was divided inside by four lines, or rather one vertical line that half-way down subdivided, branching off a shorter line to either side at an angle. The Indian hung there a moment beside his work, swinging one foot. Then he came down in only two movements, the second a clear leap, easy as a cat from a roof, and began wiping his hands on a bit of rag. He did not look up at what he had painted.
Izak knew that egg. He saw it on the motorbikes. Even on shirts. It was smart. People wore it like you wear Jesus’s cross. It was, he saw now, what was shiny hanging at the end of the chain on the Indian’s bare chest. But he did not know what it really meant, as he knew the cross and also the six-pointed star that the people of the Church of Zion had on their flag. — It looks nice there. —
The Indian still did not look up at it. He had not seen how his handiwork looked from the ground, as Izak did.
— I’d like to buy me one. You must get one for me in your shop, ay. —
The Indian laughed and shook his head again without looking up at him, either.
— Oh, please, man, I like to have one (he patted his breast, where it would lie). How much you selling for? Why you don’t get it for me —
— We don’t keep it in the shop. -
They didn’t talk together any more after that, because the Indian didn’t talk. Izak hung on for a while zigzagging the front wheel of his bicycle in the dust and watching him return to the job of painting the struts.
— You’ll break a leg — It was the voice of Dawood, the most recently-married brother, speaking Gujerati. The painter glanced down a second behind his dark glasses: the farm boy had tired of waiting for conversation and gone away; the little sister had the married brother by the hand, as if she had dragged him there.
— What’s that for? — Dawood was tussling with the child, laughing.
— It’s the peace sign. -
— I know, stupid –
Two days later, stirring one of the cups of milky tea that was brought to him regularly from the house, the father spoke from a silence between them. — Jalal, why do you have to put that (still holding the teaspoon, he flapped the hand from the wrist) up there. —
He answered in English without a smile. — For fun. —
— But two feet high, everybody sees it from a mile away. —
— What d’you expect me to put up? The South African flag? The moon of Islam? —
— You wear it hanging round your neck — all right —
— What’s wrong with it. What’s the difference round my neck or on the water tank. —
— Yes, it’s all right for the white boys, they’ve got no other troubles. The hippies. White students at the university. And it looks red — the colour of the paint, I mean —
The young man’s face closed in on the other in cruel amazement, grinning and spitting — Red! Red! You believe everything you read in their papers, everything they tell you on the radio. You swallow it all down. Day after day. If they tell you it’s communists, then it’s communists. Red! And let me tell you something, that paint’s your paint, it’s brown bloody paint from the store-room. Red! If they tell you Koolie, then it’s Koolie, hey, why not — you believe what they say is true, don’t you. —
He shouted as if he and his father were alone.
His father never forgot the presence of the old man; in his place, in his chair. He spoke as a man does conscious of witness, of giving account to an invisible code.
— Never mind. You’ve got all these Dutch farmers up and down this road and they see it. You never know when someone notices and starts something — I know about these things, believe me. They don’t worry us, we don’t worry them, that’s the best way. Leave it like that…. The police van is up and down this road every day —
— So the police are going to come and say you’re a communist, we’re communist Koolies, that’s what’s going to happen, ay? — That’s the hammer and the sickle up there, you say — they’ve told you — you and they say —
His temper and his nerve flew apart under his own words. They took a hammer to the coloured photograph of himself smiling on the day he got his matric results that hung with all the wedding pictures in the sitting-room. He was smashing himself. - They know — you believe — Suddenly aware — urgent as an alarming internal spasm prefacing uncontrollable diarrhoea — that tears were about to come, he burst through the dark passage that led from shop to house and shut himself in the room he shared with brothers.
They were at school. There was no key but he pushed the corner of a bed across the door as he had done at other times. He heard his mother breathing on the far side and making small polite noises in her throat. But she would hang about, afraid actually to speak. He lay on his bed and smoked. There were no tears. He thought where he might go. To cousins in Klerksdorp. His mother’s aunt in Lichtenburg. An uncle and cousins in Standerton. Even Dawood’s wife’s people near Durban. Plenty of places. To work in the same kind of shop and hear the same talk.
His mother smelt the cigarette and went almost soundlessly, although she was a majestic size, turned away, down the narrow passage.
The telephone answering device has twice recorded an attempt to reach him through a personal service overseas call.
He could, in his turn, record an instruction for calls to be diverted to the number at the farm. But he does not. There is no one to answer at the house, unless he happens to be inside when the phone rings. And it would mean that anyone else — if there is anyone left, by now, who may not have given up trying to invite him to dinner — would be able to foreshorten the distance (business in Australia, skiing in Austria) at which absence has placed him, in their minds, over the holidays.