DURBAN. TAXIS, BICYCLES AND rickshaws and the cries of papersellers. Neon lights in rain-shimmer streets. My last night in the land I was born in, perhaps forever. Two hours inland lies the farm. Is Beauty still living in the backyard hut? Is Jamani still at school with all the unrest and the burning of black schools? For a moment I wish I could be papoosed tutuzela tutuzela on Beauty’s back again, or that I could be with Zane inside the woodstove kitchen while Lucky Strike weaves the magic strands of his stories. I wish I could smell my mother and hear my father say:
– Bona wena kosasa. See you tomorrow.
I wish I had Grandpa Barter’s pocket knife in my pocket. All I have is the string of Xhosa beads I finger. The beads carry me into the past: I am again the barefoot, clay-smeared boy hunting lizards and catching fish in the likkewaan river with Zane and Jamani. I hear the nkankaan cry ha ha haaa. I hear Lucky Strike call: Fly fly fly, young baas.
The chug and rev of engines, the laughter of hatted figures dodging the falling rain, tugs me back to reality.
In the charged, humid nightfall, folk head for flickering bars and fizzing cafés, for theatre and romance.
My way winds down to Point Road and I walk along it until hotels and flats give way to warehouses. Cranes and masts crisscross in a blurred frieze in the rain. Grandpa Barter once said my mother went to the Cliff Richard dance looking like a Point Road whore, so I look for girls who match the image of a whore in my head: high heels, black fishnet stockings and painted lips, but I see none like that.
There is a pale girl, hair gone all stringy in the rain, eyeing me. I cannot tell how old she is. Maybe nineteen. I stand still in the humid rain, and she stares her haunting eyes at me.
– Hey sweetie. Want a fuck or a suck?
She says it so lazily that she might just as well have said: Want a Fanta or a Sprite?
I climb narrow stairs after her, up and up into an attic room with faded pink wallpaper and a red blanket on the bed that reminds me of Grandmama Rudd’s bloodred gown. The room feels bleak to me and the memory of Grandmama does not make me feel sexy. There is no music to create a mood, just the rain against the window.
– What’s your name, sweetie?
I lie, as if she might be dragged into the dock by the sarmajoor to witness against me if she knew my name.
– Mine’s Doris, she says as she deftly undoes my cords so that they flop down to my sandalled feet.
The name Doris reminds me again of my Grandmama and of times when women were called Doris or Marjorie or Ruby. Doris bids me lie on the red bed. My cords still folded around my feet, I hobble across the scabby carpet.
I look up into her eyes, feeling guilty that I feel so unsexy. Her unhooked breasts swing against my ribs, and I wish I had paid her to have a coffee with me instead.
Out of the blue, jazz floats up from a window below and mixes with rain-blurred voices and I close my eyes to float with the music. But I still see her stringy hair and haunting eyes. I want to cry over her old woman’s name.
As it turns out, my last human encounter in South Africa is as impotent as my life in South Africa has been. I ran into a pole while running away from the police. I went to the army rather than face jail. And now I run from the army into the arms of a woman and my cock goes limp.
I do up my cords in shame.
– Never mind, says Doris. Another time.
Me in the taxi to the airport, running towards my bee-zithering dream of seeing the world at the end of the Atlantic, into the unknown.
crying for my mother and father, my brother
guilty for having sinned with a whore
guilty for leaving behind faceless and furtive encounters with black Africans. My white eyes averted. I never asked Mila how many children he had in the Transkei. I did not know his Xhosa name. Though Nana made my bed for all my Paarl years I never went inside her house. Once, from the door to her house, I glimpsed a museum of thrown-out things from ours:
a broken riempie stool, resting on bricks
earless china cups
a chipped coffee mug with the Paarl Boys’ High emblem
a deck chair with a gaping hole in the canvas.