— What was it you call him? —
— Witbooi. —
Her face. - How old is he? —
— How would I know? Don’t suppose he knows, either. —
She would refer to ‘that herdsman of yours, Swart Gevaar’.
Her face was — is? — the smooth pale sallow colour he supposes you call olive-skinned, although olives are green, brown or black. The sort of monotoned skin that has no shades nor gradation of texture; fascinating. From the nose-wings to the ears, the chin to the hairline. Her hair began very clearly, too — he likes that. No encroachment on the oval, neither at the temples nor in the form of wispy growth in front of the ears. Straight hair, dark dull brown in colour, coarse and shiny. In her thirties, she ostentatiously does — did? — not pull out one
Witbooi = White boy Swart Gevaar = Black danger or two single white hairs that, visible from the fount of the crown all the way down, seem transparent, like nylon fishing line. — Trouble — she said, leaning across the café table so that not only the dark tanned V but also the paler flesh at the top of her breasts showed in the unbuttoned neck of one of those shirts she wore. He’d seen her eyes, staring at nothing while she waited for him, before she caught sight of him: staring at fear. But as she gabbled her story she began to show off, as such people always did. When she forgot the fear, by pretending to him she wasn’t afraid, she was enjoying herself. It should have been quite obvious to her that what had happened would happen: she filled her house with blacks, and white parsons who went around preaching Jesus was a revolutionary, and then when the police walked in she was surprised. No ordinary pig-iron dealer: it suited her, telephoning him mysteriously to meet her in some Greek café, to make that a kind of flattery, now, to use the implications to make some claim on him. He was to speak to a good lawyer — a respectable, shrewd company lawyer, the kind he would know; it was no good being represented in court by one of her own set. While she talked he could picture her saying to them: I know someone, one of those tycoons who know how to do things. One of those tycoons they despised. The naïveté of them all, her kind! The high-minded stupidity. Written all over her ‘intelligent’ face.
If she were here now her body would be beginning to be foreshortened, that’s what happens to women in a few years, the space between hips-and-belly and breasts gets less and less, as if age presses down upon them from the top of their heads. It is happening to the beautiful woman — the friend of fifteen years who asks him to dinner too often. Coming to a fence that cuts across the field to the reeds, he stops a moment; a week’s absence in Japan isn’t a bad way to have begun cooling that old friendship. A week can become weeks, a month. I’ve been away a lot… It happens that people drift apart. Everyone drops someone from time to time. He stands watching a black and white stork, over the fence. The daughter — the little girl no longer a little girl — is an impossibility. She will have the space between hips and breasts, even dressed it is obvious she has no belly, absolutely flat. That stork should have left for Europe long ago; it jerks along with hunched wings and eyes on the ground, as if it has lost something valuable. The ring, last year; never turned up; he realizes that although that ring, even if not in his mind, is usually in the reflex with which the tip of his boot flips over stones when he walks about the farm, today he has forgotten it. The stork is taking no notice of his presence. The drought changes the pattern of migration, perhaps? The birds hang on, where there’s water, to the last dried-up pool where the hippos abort their half-formed young. There were atrocities in Cambodia, no maize crop at all, the second year running, in the Transkei, the paper also said — the Sunday paper that is a nuisance to him to be carrying. He has turned up along the fence, plodding towards the road and eucalyptus trees, as inattentive to the earth as the stork is attentive. It is fatal to fall asleep in the afternoon. Sometimes he wakes up with the words of an old dance number — he can’t even sing in tune, that’s how much he knows of music — going round in his head like a trapped bluebottle fly. Sometimes there’s the presence of an extreme irritation over something trivial that has floated up from some obscure corner of experience. Sometimes, as now, he seems to be addressing someone. It is only a step away from the aberration of talking to oneself. Atrocities in Cambodia. Not a good idea to take the Metallgesellschaft Germans to the Kruger Park because of the possibility of stinking hippo foetuses. Across the empty irrigation ditch and on to the road, he meets the pot-bellied black brats with tins on their heads, standing aside for him on their way to fetch more water. This is what they’re doing all day, every day. And do you think I don’t know? You think I don’t know? He even slaps at his thigh with the folded newspaper; if anyone on the road or the newly-ploughed field, where the mealie stalks are piled into tepees, is looking at him, it may be interpreted as the brisk gesture of a man enjoying exercise. But the children ignore him as he ignores them. What percentage of the world is starving? How long can we go on getting away scot free? When the aristocrats were caught up in the Terror, did they recognize: it’s come to us. Did the Jews of Germany think: it’s our turn. Soon, in this generation or the next, it must be our turn to starve and suffer. Why not? And did you think my respectable company lawyer, defending the just cause of your jolly parties with blacks, your posters discovering injustice as if you’d invented it — did you think he could save you from that?
Earth in his mouth.
There is grit between his teeth; as he swallows and the heavy upper and lower molars meet they grind some microscopic boulders. Earth in his mouth. Although he did wipe his lips. He gathers saliva with his tongue and drops a string of spit into the dust.
Half-grown, half-wild cats in the roof-gutter above the kitchen door; there’s plenty of milk, but they probably don’t ever bother to feed them. — No, there is a scummy dish beside the step. Psspsspss. He will wash out his mouth in the bathroom. The screen door squeaks open and bangs, swinging again of its own momentum and banging a second time behind him. The kitchen smells of burned porridge and soured milk and the plates of the electric stove, although switched off, give heat like a flushed face; they cook here, of course, although they are not supposed to. In the rest of the house the floors are thick with diligently-applied polish that no one walks on.
A place to bring a woman.
The shower is dousing warm soda water over his face and turns colder and more forceful as it runs, blinding and deafening him. Once in the bathroom, it seemed a far better idea than just rinsing his mouth. The chromium snake and rose, which may be secured in a bracket on the wall above the bath or held in the hand, are in brilliant contrast to the chipped tiles decorated with peeling Bambi transfers which were the previous owners’ level of bathroom luxury. A thousand needles of water are breaking down the immobility of his face. He holds his breath and then gasps, and the water prickles delightfully into his mouth, pinging his tongue. He hears bells ringing; water beating on your head always gives the sensation of ringing. But no; something is ringing, outside his head. The telephone. It has taken several years for his aural sense to learn to respond only to the particular combination of rings on the party line — three short and one long — that is his. He goes! naked down the passage, his spoor beading wet on the impermeable layer of wax polish.