Maybe if I took a break I’d get rid of this gnawing sensation. Maybe I just needed some respite from all the secondary violence, I thought. I was sick of it. It came at you from all angles. Whites knew they didn’t have the law on their side anymore, but that didn’t stop them from being downright rude. You didn’t have to use racist terms to be a racist. You could, for example, use the more refined, and therefore nauseating, weapon of tone. “Things used to be so much faster in the old days,” a white housewife might say for all to hear in the supermarket queue as she inspected her nails. Others might say around a glowing, meat-sizzling fire, “You know, I’m not a racist, but.”
Blacks reciprocated in kind by being as uncommunicative – or familiar – as possible. You asked an assistant for something in a shop and they just walked away without a word, leaving you wondering whether they were going to help you or not. Or they called you cold on a phone and, without greeting you or identifying themselves, said: “How are you?”
It was all good and well that we were allegedly equal now, with all our cultural differences, but it was almost impossible to make friends across the deeply embedded colour line without it feeling forced. If you tried too hard it seemed affected, if you didn’t try at all you felt as if you weren’t doing your duty, a word to which my poor, late mother had made me allergic for life. Once Shanti and I had parted our friends, bar Jay and Veron, had neatly fallen back into their respective racial and/or gender camps. In the end I’d given up, being too lazy to do what the government should have done from the start: insist that every white person speak an indigenous language. It would have solved at least fifty per cent of the problem.
The media were worse. Public figures weren’t criticised, reprimanded or castigated, they were lashed. They weren’t fired or sacked or, worse, euphemistically let go: they were axed. I couldn’t help seeing people with axes embedded in their heads every time I saw that expression. Daily. And I wasn’t guiltless in providing those headlines; it was my job, as they say. The violence came at you as you were driving, nervously waiting at the red light, walking, picking up a paper or switching on the radio or TV.
So that Monday I put in four days’ leave without thinking too much about being the world’s rankest amateur at taking holidays, possibly because my youthful vacations had been such deadly dull affairs. But I had another reason why I took that particular week off. It would be my birthday that Thursday and it was always a time that depressed me and left me ratty for reasons I couldn’t quite fathom. The last thing I felt like doing was taking a cake to the office or having drinks with mates, Jay and Veron again excluded. Still, I found all kinds of excuses not to go away on the first, second and third days, though I did walk Butch a lot and saw Mandla had grown ever thinner, hacking much more. The old man actually remembered my birthday and wished me many more and I told him I wasn’t going to come over that Sunday; I was going away for a break. He understood, he said – did he sound relieved or was he hiding his disappointment? – and God bless you. That night Jay and I drank ourselves stupid.
The next morning I was too hungover to move and told Ms Motsepe I was going away the next day, would she please put the lights on that night and feed the dog.
Long face.
“I’ll pay you extra, of course.”
Less long face.
That night I watched porn but did nothing about it and the next morning I packed one of the tents and a sleeping bag Shunt had left behind, grabbed a couple of extra odds and sods, and drove towards that thing – the only thing – that most of the overseas bourgeoisie was interested in about Africa, and then on their terms: the bush. I knew of a place that was only a few hours outside Johannesburg and gave you the illusion that you were far away from civilisation, apart from powerlines marching across those prehistoric hills like gauntly mutated King Kongs. At night you could lie and look at a sky almost as clear as that of the Karoo in a range named after a rebellious Sotho leader, close to the Cradle of Mankind and equidistant to a dam being choked by hyacinth invaders and a visible ex-nuclear station.
But at least my week wouldn’t be completely wasted, I thought profoundly. If anyone bothered to ask what I’d done in my time off I’d be able to say I’d gone bush. It wasn’t only a good place because of its proximity, but also because no music, TV and musical instruments were allowed. There would be no drunken singalongs around the campfire, thank you very much. No rumbling, window-rattling basses either.
I instantly felt better out there, of course, encouraging myself to do this more often, really, and went for a long walk through hardy bush, red soil and particularly rough rock instead of putting up the tent, one of the many things at which the supremely organised Shunt had been particularly good. When I got back it was beyond dusk and I struggled to get the bloody thing to resemble any kind of shelter. In fact, it turned out to be our – her – provisions tent. In other words, it was a children’s tent: tiny. Moreover, a wind had sprung up and come rushing over the Drakensberg-side hills and down into the valley as if ordered, turning my little fire into a joke of horizontal flames. I lay freezing in the mini-tent with my bagged feet sticking out, flame-side. Keeping them at the right distance so as not to melt the sleeping bag meant I would have to stay awake, otherwise I might roast my feet. And now I had an Australian rock song about burning beds going through my head, over and over. Wonderful. I finally lost my temper with myself and struggled out of the tent, accidentally tripped over and loosened the anchoring rope, which sent the tent billowing away like a tumbleweed. I chased after it, stepped into a nest of thorns appropriately called little devils in Afrikaans, hopping about while brushing them off, and finally managed to wrestle the mangled mess of nylon into a ball, shove it into the boot and slam it shut. I didn’t need to stomp out the fire because Mother Nature had already done her duty in that regard. Thank you, I silently shouted at the heavens. Thank you very fucking much!
Now I opened the passenger door, finally found the lever to push the seat back into an approximation of prostration, and laid Shunt’s bag out on it. That was much better, except that I hadn’t thought of bringing a pillow and could feel my neck heading towards spasm, so I still couldn’t sleep. Plus I could still feel a residue of her in there, smell her. For all our troubles, we had been able to talk. We could have objective, even constructive, disagreements, as long as they were about ideas, art, politics, news, the country. In fact, we used to talk so much that we’d arrive late at events as a result, and that was something. It would be good just to have a normal natter – even disagreement – with her again.
But what now? After about an hour or so I knew. Beethoven. Listening to him build castles, no, much more, civilisation itself, in the air – with nothing. The first movement of the fourteenth is melancholic but never indulgent. If this work’s predecessor was disjointed, restless, filled with silence and violence, then this, his favourite, was filled with continuity, healing perhaps. Transcendence certainly. Beethoven in Africa. I had always scoffed at black Africans talking about a united continent, but if I could lie here and consider myself African as much as I was comfortable with a very distant Beethoven as part of “my” culture, why couldn’t “they” think or feel the way they did? Sweetest of all, hadn’t it been a black host who had introduced me to the quartets on that classical station? That, and the fact that the eminently learned Professor Joseph Kerman wrote that a mature Beethoven piece, like this C sharp minor, was “a person”. It was an admittedly non-technical argument, but it had a Beethovian ring of truth about it and that – apart from the fact that it suited me personally – was all that mattered.
Naturally I was “looking” at this music through that symbol so beloved of publishers to sum up the alleged romance of Africa – an acacia tree – while the music itself continued in its own fine, progressive way. All of it was so logical and whole that I found myself feeling more or less at peace with the world, even, most surprisingly, with my ex-wife. But there was still the brief but funereal sixth movement, flowing into the finale beyond death: assertive, powerful, affirmative, eternal. Shanti.
The next morning I woke up with the early sun in my eyes, stiff in all departments, as usual, and discovered that my sole box of Lion matches had ended up in the flames the night before, a whoosh I had enjoyed causing as a child. But now I was fireless. The Civic’s lighter had given up the ghost a long time ago, so I was forced to ask the neighbours for a light to restart my fire in order to boil some water and have a smoke. They were all about a decade younger than me, had all the accoutrements of camping and it soon transpired that the two men and one woman had a slightly smirking, messianic quality about them. Greenies. Vegheads. Cause junkies.
The other woman, however, a dark redhead, said she would bring me a cup of coffee and a box of matches after I’d done my ablutions. That done, she came over and I felt obliged to regale her with my heroics of the night before. When all else fails, make them laugh. Dance like a monkey. Entertain them. Except she wasn’t laughing at me, just smiling, as if she was seeing and hearing something completely different to what I was saying. She was one of those open-faced beauties who didn’t use – or need to use – make-up. She really wasn’t my type: gentle, practical and, judging by her questions and silences, intelligent. We really had nothing in common, but it turned out we lived a few blocks away from each other back in Jozi. The others, however, were impatient to go on their hike.
So I drove away from that camp feeling guilty that I hadn’t seen the old man, deeply reluctant to go to work on a Sunday (or any other day, for that matter), and intensely annoyed with myself that I’d been too much of a coward to ask that beautiful woman her name or address, knowing she would have given it to me. The sum result was that it felt like I was driving in one direction but going in its complete opposite.