Landlocked (36 page)

Had he been trying to go for help? To find Mrs Van to tell her about the situation in the townships? Of course, no one would ever really know, but Flora knew. She confided to Mrs Van that he must have been worried about her, Flora: he had gone to look for her. He had not been able to let Flora out of his sight that last week or so. He kept calling, even if she was out of the room for a few moments: ‘Where are you, Flora, where are you, my love?’

The strike lasted a few more days. It was not ‘broken’ by hunger; because some food did get into the townships, though not enough. Perhaps it was the absurdity of the situation that ended it. There the Africans all were, up and down the Colony, locked in because the authorities were frightened about what the white people might do.

Things got more ridiculous every day. Car loads of white people went down to the boundaries of the locations to shout insults in at the Africans, and then began shouting at
the white and black guards too. In the townships, many Africans sat waiting gloomily for death: at last, they said, the white people had got them where they wanted them—all locked up, weakened with hunger, and helpless. Soon, they said, the troops would move in and slaughter them. The ghost of Lobengula had been seen, it was claimed, with his impis. A few Africans got out somehow from behind fences and cordons and had run away to join earlier fugitives in the veld.

The strike leaders, still invisible, continued to issue orders for discipline, order, restraint. They claimed their authority was absolute, and probably it was; but how was this to be proved when it was white troops who played the role of pickets?

Meanwhile, everyone waited with nerves on edge for something to happen which would spark off real trouble.

The strike came to an end, both sides claiming victory, though the strikers’ main demand, namely that a law should be passed insisting on a minimum wage of three pounds a month, was not gained.

The day after the strike, Johnny was buried. There had been no graves dug for some days because the grave diggers were all locked up in the townships, and the first labourers emerging from the gates of the townships as the strike ended were commandeered by the authorities for that by now most essential service: to dig graves which would be filled as they were completed.

Johnny did not have a religious service, although Flora wanted one. Mrs Van spoke an address ‘as a humanist and a socialist’. Half a dozen services were in progress that afternoon: all over the cemetery groups of people stood above open graves, with white-robed priests and censer-swinging little boys.

Flora stayed alone in the little house for some days. Then she moved into Maisie’s rooming house in the next room along the veranda from Maisie. Rita had gone with her grandmother to Gotwe for a prolonged stay—there was talk of her going to school there.

‘They get on very well together,’ Maisie said. ‘After all,
my mom never knew Binkie, so she doesn’t have to get all upset, being reminded about him. And that fixes the Maynards. They can’t go running out to Gotwe every time they’ve got nothing better to do. It’s nearly two hundred miles.’

For some months everything dawdled and delayed. The divorce had to be postponed because an unexpected letter from Poland said that Grete had been heard of, still alive, in a Russian prison camp. If this was true, then Anton and Martha had never been married. The lawyers decided the safest thing was to conclude that Anton was still married to Grete, and to make some suitable formula for a divorce so that he could marry Bettina. Anton did not tell the Forsters about this complication. He discussed it with Martha—or rather, talked, while she listened. ‘After all, Bettina has had a sheltered life in many respects, and there are many things she does not understand. I don’t want her to be upset unnecessarily.’ Then a further letter, which said the first had been a mistake: the woman heard of as Grete was someone else, and in any case, she had died in Siberia. The divorce with Martha was on again. Anton and Martha continued to live in the minute flat, treated each other with increasing courtesy, and wished only that they could part. But they could not, the lawyers said so. If Anton, living by himself in a room or a flat was caught with Bettina, then Martha could sue on the grounds of adultery. Anton swore she would not. Was it likely?—Martha exclaimed, exasperated, to a legal gentleman who maintained a whimsically detached look. Martha might turn nasty, he told Anton, who apologized: ‘What can I do? I can’t suck a sensible legal system out of my fingers!’

As usual, nobody’s fault; but the irritation of it all did nothing to soften the fact that the ship she had booked on was suddenly taken out of commission because of necessary repairs to war damage. She was given another sailing date.
These dates, that of her leaving the country, and that of the divorce, were within a week of each other. If something happened to upset the divorce again, then it might mean expensive and difficult legal processes from England. Better, perhaps, to postpone the sailing date? In the end, she and Anton decided to take a chance, but the uncertainty of it all made them increasingly prickly, and it was difficult to maintain the tolerance towards each other which was a question of self-respect now for both of them.

Meanwhile, she worked on Johnny Lindsay’s memoirs. This meant running about to see people who had known Johnny in the old days; and long discussions with Mrs Van about political difficulties. Mrs Van said it would be useful to have the two views ‘labour’ and ‘communist’ about the book. But it turned out that it was their temperaments, and not their politics, which dictated their differences. Unless these two strands could be considered to have met when Mrs Van complained that Martha ‘like all communists’ was getting very reactionary? ‘You all go on as if the Russians were the whole human race. Just because they’ve made a mess of things, you behave as if socialism itself has failed.’

‘Well, but you must admit, it’s all very discouraging. That is, if all these books are true.’

‘Why should you need all these nasty, spiteful books at all? All you had to do was to listen to your elders and betters. No, I’ve been fighting you communists all my life, and you are romantics, every one. You exaggerate, you have no sense of proportion, you think anything is justified if enough people die for it. No, I’ve no patience with you.’

Thus Mrs Van, with a queenly nod, to her old enemy: everything that was not sane, disciplined, reasonable. But then, having softened her statement with a maternal smile, she bent her head over the manuscript where she encountered the enemy again. For her old comrade Johnny Lindsay’s life had been full of the qualities she distrusted so much, impeccably ‘labour’ though he had always been.

‘Do you really think we ought to leave this in, Matty?’

‘Why not, Mrs Van?’

‘It’s not exactly the sort of thing it gives one pleasure to read!’

‘You mean, he behaved foolishly?’

‘No. And if he did, it’s no more than one expects from everyone. It’s that he describes these terrible things with such gusto—as if he enjoyed it.’

‘But I think he did.’

‘I’ve never been able to tolerate that—the schoolboy’s picnic aspect of socialism—children defying authority
—you
know! For instance, when Johnny and his friends were kidnapped by the police, it was a question of hanging, and some of them
were
hanged. But Johnny always told the story roaring with laughter.’ Remembering the story, Martha smiled. ‘Oh, yes, yes! If something’s colourful and bizarre, that’s all you ask! And they were all very brave, of course. But if more sensible methods had been used, perhaps none of the derring-do would have been necessary?’

‘Well, Mrs Van,
I
wasn’t there.’

‘Well, it irritates me, it always has.’

Martha said: ‘Always, Mrs Van?’ So hard was it, even now, to hear what this old friend always called ‘personal matters’, that Martha heard her tongue trip, and she went red. Mrs Van reddened too, and lowered her eyes. She sat wryly smiling: a look often on her face these days, since Flora had moved into Maisie’s rooming house. Flora and Maisie were increasingly subjects of scandal, the latest being that Flora was living with—not the man from McGrath’s stores—‘at least they are the same age, Matty!’—but young Tommy Brown. Malicious people even said that Maisie and Flora shared him.

‘It’s all so very strange, Matty. The more I think about it all, the more I—I can’t stand it, Matty. There’s something about life…Did you know that Johnny came to this country in the first place, because of Flora? Yes, it’s true. He left everything he made for himself on the Rand—and he was chairman here, and secretary there, and everyone knew him. But his children hated Flora and she was miserable, and so he came here to make a new life for her—you’re going to say,
it happened
, I suppose.’

‘Well, yes, I was.’

Johnny had dedicated his memoirs—not to the Labour Movement, not to Mrs Van, not to ‘world socialism,’ but to Flora. ‘To the love of my life, Flora, the best and the kindest and the most beautiful of women.’ He had whispered this to Mrs Van late one night while Flora was at the pictures. ‘Write this down for me, my dear…’ She had done so. ‘Now read it to me—yes, yes, that’s right.’ She had put it, as he wanted, in front of the memoirs. ‘Of course,’ she said to Martha. ‘I’d be quite within my rights to tear that dedication up! He was not in his right mind that night. He was rambling, earlier.’

‘But Mrs Van, you
didn’t
tear it up!’

‘All right!
It happened
. But
my
point is made, I think!’

In the event, nothing was suppressed, or even toned down; and reading it was like listening to Johnny’s voice; they were the memoirs of a gallant and innocent boy; and Mrs Van sat smiling as she turned the pages of the history which to her had been a lifetime of committee work, paperwork, research, self-discipline, self-deprivation.

Concurrently with this, Martha did a very different job of editing. Some weeks after Thomas’s death, the Native Commissioner in S…had delivered to his office by an African in a loin-cloth who said he came from Chief so and so, with greetings, a sheaf of stained, damp papers which were found in Thomas’s hut. These papers were sent to Thomas’s wife, who sent them to Jack Dobie, who gave them to Martha, since, he said, they were clearly meant to be part of Thomas’s report on conditions in the rural areas. They were in a dreadful state; for the ink had run where rain-water had dripped on them, probably from an ill-thatched roof. Ants had left half a hundred sheets looking like red-edged lace paper. And in any case, the pages were not numbered, and apparently had never been put in order. How was Martha, or anybody, to know what Thomas had meant? How much had been destroyed, or lost? Also, there were notes, comments, scribbled over and across and on the margins of the original text, in red pencil. These, hard to decipher, were in
themselves a different story, or at least, made of the original a different story.

Every morning as the sun rose, Thomas had risen too, and had sat in the doorway of his hut, a writing pad on his knees and a bottle of ink in the dust beside him. People emerged stretching and yawning from their huts into weak sunlight, the women fetched water from the river, and attended to the millet patches, the men sharpened their spears for hunting. Thomas sat there, and wrote; and again at night, in the light from the cooking fires and, more than once, by moonlight.

But what was he trying to write? A paragraph about life in Sochaczen was followed by poetry, in Polish. Translated, it turned out to be a folk song. Then, how his mother cooked potatoes. Then, across this, in red pencil: If these people could be persuaded to grow potatoes—but what use, if the salt has lost its savour? A great many Jewish jokes, or rather Yiddish. Solly translated. (He, too, was writing memoirs, called: Patterns of Betrayal. Yes, I feel my life is over, Matty, and when I’ve finished this book, I shall live on a kibbutz in Israel.) The jokes, he said, might have come out of a joke-book: he had cut his teeth on them. Was there a theme or tendency shown in their choice? Not unless there was a theme running through all Jewish jokes, and if so, he’d leave it to Martha to sneer at it. There was a long article, about how to run a carp farm. A tributary of the Zambesi might very well be netted off as a carp farm, and the carp used to supplement the Africans’ diet. Or for fertilizer? said the red pencil, across this. Stories: ‘Once there was a man who travelled to a distant country. When he got there, the enemy he had fled from was waiting for him. Although he had proved the uselessness of travelling, he went to yet another country. No, his enemy was
not
there.’ (Surprised, are you! said the red pencil.) ‘So he killed himself.’ To make fish stew in the manner of the Mamonka…first catch your fish. If you keep your grain on stilts, to save it from the white ants, why not walk on stilts yourself?

Pages of this kind of thing, damp, musty-smelling pages, which Jack and Martha turned, never once saying, at least,
not at the start: Well, our old friend Thomas, he was off his head, at the end.

But that was not all. At last there emerged a sort of pattern, or one could be made. Because, embedded in all this, were stories of the people in the village, a history of the tribe, facts, figures—as if, sometimes, Thomas had intended to produce material for the Survey. Many of the biographies were obituaries. ‘So and so, “born in the year of the heavy rains”, aged about thirty. Married. Three children, two dead of malaria. Never seen a white man before myself. Never been out of the Valley. Died this morning.’ ‘So and so. I think fifty-odd. His father was once in a town, but I can’t make out which. It had “men of stone” in the streets, which he took to be protective magic figures. Has had two wives. Nine children, three still living. Can understand headlines in the newspaper. Died this morning.’ Quite sensible, these were, and full of interest. But across them, as across everything else, the notes in red pencil.

The obituaries spread to include ancestors, parents, children, animals. ‘So and so, born the year the lightning hit the Chief’s hut,’ then the history of the Chief, and what the witchdoctor said about lightning. About the birth of the Chief’s first son: he was born feet foremost because ‘he wanted to walk as soon as he was born.’ About the village of the mother of the first-born, which was across the river, and then about the mother’s brother’s personal habits—he was jealous of the old goat
his
mother used to sleep beside, for warmth on cold nights—there were no blankets twenty years ago; and when he had his six teeth knocked out, the four incisors and two upper canines, with the chisel, he had never once uttered a sound, as was right and proper, but he had a fit, and thereafter the people of the tribe knew that the gods had not been pleased with him, for the poor quality of the sacrificed teeth. But he ran down a deer better than anyone, and no one knew as much about catching fish by the use of herbs. And so on. Before the conclusion: Died this afternoon, it was hard to remember who had died: Martha had to leaf through perhaps fifty sheets to find out. And in the middle of all this, slap in the middle of Africa,
Poland: On Wednesday afternoon, I had to take the horse to the smith for my uncle, and Mira from the school window called to me: Leave the horse and come to the river. So I went swimming in the pool with Mira, and the horse broke its rein from the tree and ran away. My father beat me. My mother made a poultice of sour milk. What the father breaks, the mother makes. Even so I couldn’t sit down for a week. These people, these red mud-smeared savages don’t beat their children. Comment across this in red pencil: It could be said, therefore, that gentleness saves sour milk.

‘Vermin, vermin,’ said the red pencil, ‘the world is a lump of filth crawling with vermin.’ ‘Death here. Death there too. Everywhere. Blood on his face where the bullet went in under the cheek-bone. Death in the bottom of the river. His face, red: the faces of the Mamonka, red with red mud. His hair: red. Their hair: red. His red: blood. Their red: mud. Did he have lice in his hair? (A riddle!) No. Neither do the Mamonka, the red mud keeps lice away. The backside of a baboon, scaly and red.’

Obscenities in English, Polish, Yiddish.

‘If flies buzz, buzz harder. There are enough flies here—to kill a crow. Kill. Crows are more common than eagles, while vultures sit on the trees around the village smelling our deaths. The vultures come down from the trees gobble gobble with their red necks, thin skin of red necks puff and blister like wounds puff in the sun. A wound made by fire, if a leg is left lying in the fire too long, first has flies walking over it, then the skin puffs and blisters and walks gobble gobble. Vermin, Swine, Murderers, Apes. Apes with red, blistering behinds. Kill, Kill, my comrades, and make a good meal of it. The meal is kept on stilts away from the white ants, and so are you.’

In the end, there were two versions of Thomas’s last testament—Jack Dobie’s name for it. One version consisted of the short biographies and the obituaries and the recipes and the charms and the tales and anecdotes. The other, typed out on flimsy sheets which could be inserted over the heavier sheets of the first version, made a whole roughly
like the original—more or less common sense, as a foundation, with a layer of nonsense over it. But even in the first version, the ‘sensible’ one, was a note of something harsh and repellent. Martha sat holding this extraordinary document, fitting the leaves in between each other, separating them, so that sense and nonsense met each other, as in a dance, and left each other; and meanwhile thought of Thomas, the strong, brown man she had known—this was the same person. She felt she should ask the real Thomas, the man she had loved, to forgive her, for her obtuseness. Presumably this person revealed to her, in this document, had been there all the time? Yet she did not recognize much of Thomas in this, except (and she did not know why) perhaps in the facetiousness which marred even the most straightforward entries and which, perhaps, was a line forward into the man who wrote ‘vermin, vermin, we are all vermin’? Yet facetiousness had not been a quality of Thomas’s. He had had an abrupt, grim humour—yes. For instance, the grimness of the story of when he visited his old teacher, in Israel: And how’s evolution with you, my teacher? Is that you, Thomas Stern? Are you still working hard at your Latin?