Dust

We sit outside the shop, sometimes a car comes by and we nod to the
drivers. My old eyes are fading these days, blurring the edges,
colouring everything a little yellow. Tractors heave clouds of dust - I
sometimes think those lush green farms push all the dust back into town
where it settles over old-timers like me. Lindiwe gives us smokes for
free sometimes, which is generous. She makes little as it is. A little
boy who looks like Sam dances by.

They threw my mother out of her windowless servant's room when she was
carrying me. An unmarried servant, pregnant! It could have been an
embarrassment for the household and certainly an extra expense they
felt they could not afford. Especially when I came into this world with
a deformed foot.

I hobbled through my childhood in District Six - I recall dogs and the
smell of sewage, tall houses that seemed the tallest thing in the world
to me. And tearing and then patching up my clothes with extra cloth so
they would fit me for as long as possible. We managed to make my church
trousers last a long, long time. The women gossiped about my mother and
me in the church. She managed to run a stall selling cloths for
cleaning, pans and the like but it was hard - people as often as not
improvised such things out of rags and tins.

We shared our room with the widow Emmeline and her children Bobbi,
Little Emmeline, Paul, Jakey and Mike. My mother and Emmeline shared
the bed, us kids jammed against one another between the little stove
and the wall. Emmeline was a believer in forgiveness and penitence and
as such suffered a sinner like my mother.
Once a fever came and the six of us were huddled in a mass of sweat and
confusion. Jakey died. As if old death had come in and played a game
where one of us was the prize.

I mostly learned to read at Sunday school where still the other
children sat a little apart from me. Fires often broke out on a Sunday
as people tried their best to cook up a big meal dredged from the odds
and ends on their jury-rigged cooking ranges. Once I saw charred bodies
pulled, one after the other after the other, from the crookedest little
place. It was odd because I remember that no one seemed to know who
those people were. This was unheard of, for above all in the District,
we knew one another, we had to.

We knew the 'skolly' kids, hawking paper, spitting, stealing - good as
gold in their best on a Sunday. The Jews in their dark clothes with the
suppers that smelt so good on a Friday - how Emmeline pitied 'the
sinners'! The 'coloureds' from far places (yet another different
cooking smell) - I used to think that 'coloureds' was a reference to
the bright clothes they wore on some days. We were in each other's
faces 24 hours a day, so there was no option but to get along and to
help one another. And despite the division around us, we came to love
the similarities between each other.

Everyone except uncle N lived in the country. He stayed there to escape
his own shame, the same but different to my mother's. Uncle N couldn't
give his wife children but another man could and she ran away with him.
I can't imagine that much of a life awaited them and their child.

So when uncle N died, I took over his hardware store, as even an
illegitimate nephew would keep the business (such as there was) in the
family. I watched the news about the World War, as they called it. I
was an invalid, of course - that was stamped on all my papers. For once
in my life, I was glad. I had no taste for war, not like some young
men. Buildings were shooting up like crops - crammed in wherever they
could, some seeming to be built in a day (some collapsing, with
casualties, before long). It was not just the buildings that shot up -
the rent too. Strange to say, this saved my bacon. I had had trouble
from a rival hardware store, but his landlord put the rent up so much
he had to close and his custom came to me. So when the time came for my
rent to rise too, I could stick there, just.

Squeezing through a stinking alleyway, I met Mandi, dancing our way
around each other, clumsily, of course, with me being a cripple. She
smiled, all the same and not just that look of pity I had become
accustomed to. I had stepped in something foul, but at least I saved
her from it. She came into the shop a few days later and would never
tell me whether it was accident or design.

Her mother made her a grand wedding dress - weddings were a big deal
for everyone. I think she sacrificed some nearly-new lace curtains to
make part of it. I remember thanking God for my luck. There was singing
and dancing long into that night and then something better than either.
I had been El the cripple and now I was El the husband.

Our first was born exactly a year after the war was declared finished,
so it was felt right to name her Victoria. She loved the District too
and it loved her back.

But when she was 11 years old, word came. Apparently we were living in
a 'white area' - funny, I saw no white faces there at that time. And at
the same time we were living in a slum, and slums had to be cleared.
'Health reasons' they said, 'sanitation reasons'. Papers came - no
'please sign here' and no good for those who could not read. It didn't
seem real, we wanted to cling to the stones, to the peeling plaster, we
were prepared to live on a pile of rubble just because it was
ours.

Bulldozers and wrecking balls came. Their work did not take long on the
buildings, but the people still stood and tried to look proud, tried to
look like a community. We stayed as long as we could, until the
building next door was dust. Victoria clung to the doorpost as we tried
to leave and Mandi had to say 'Look around, sweetness, there is
nothing. There is nothing here anymore.'

I don't know how we got there, why we went there, but we found
ourselves sleeping under the sky on the flats just outside Cape Town.
In the coming weeks, we built ourselves a room from crates, from scrap,
from tins. We hoped that perhaps that special spirit of the District
would rise again and make everything all right. But suddenly we were
all strangers to one another - there were arguments over people
lighting fires, over who had the 'right' to some worthless piece of
scrap or other, there was the hard task of just living. Those
bulldozers had destroyed more than buildings, those diggers had gone
deeper than foundations.

The next few years are blurred in my mind - I don't know how we found
ourselves one day in a small square of breeze blocks, with something
like a roof at least. A bed for the three of us, a small gas cooker.
Things had settled a little, people began to talk again, but it wasn't
the same. We had been flung apart, flung into the townships where we
had to make our own pitiful economy, build our ramshackle homes,
compete for the meagreness that there was. I had set up a hardware
store of sorts from the front of my house and life continued, but
smaller and meaner than it had been, like a life without a soul.

-------------------------

Victoria's a widow now, was widowed before me, even. The cancer took
him. I can't say I wept, he was a no good man. But their children were
beautiful, beautiful and good. Sam used to shuffle from foot to foot as
he talked, a little dance, as if to dance away the crippledness of his
grandpa. Eliza was solemn and still like her mother, still is.

Sam, dancer Sam, he danced away from his mother. Dark things got into
his heart and I don't know how it happened. When the news came that the
Apartheid was finished, he was happy with rest, like a child again
(well, he was little more than a child). There were tears, laughters,
children half-joking, half-hoping talking of fine careers and good
cars; Sam among them. 'Gran'pa,' he smiled 'I'll be a big star and I'll
get you a gold cane to walk with, you'll see!'

I felt so tired; I wasn't sure I'd live too see this grand new age, it
was for Sam, not for me. I'd seen enough to know, I had found, I must
say, that the white man was better at keeping his promises when the
consequences were the worse for us. Things, we soon discovered, were
not going to get better easy, nor quickly. I was pleasantly surprised
in some ways, grimly in others.

The boys - they were so angry. There was so much out there that might
be in their grasp, that they saw themselves as heir to now that we were
free. But it was still so far away and now that the Apartheid had gone
it seemed more unfair to them than ever. I heard tales of savage
behaviour - no, it was not enough to steal, they did far worse. Never
did I think my smiling Sam would be one of them, never until they
hammered at my door, late one night (thank God, after Mandi had left
this world). I'll never forget that boy's face, dripping, wide-eyed
beneath his bandana 'You Sam's gran'pa? He's hurt, maybe bad'. They'd
been in my end of town, scrapping. Not with fists, not with sticks;
with machetes, with guns. And there was a bullet in Sam's chest. He was
still breathing when they carried him in, but there were no words left
in him. His eyes were rolled up into his head. It was a few hours
before an ambulance could judder its way through to somewhere near my
hut and the men came with boxes and gadgets and a stretcher. The latter
was all that was needed - Sam was long gone and with him, it seemed to
me, my hope for the future for us all. Not for my family? for us
all.

A church charity paid for me to move out to the country. I couldn't
stay in that room, looking at the dark patch on the ground where Sam
had trickled away.

They're paying reparation to people who lived in District 6, I hear,
they're giving people rights to live on that land. They could never
build on it anyway - 'Zonnebloem' they tried to call it, Sunflower. But
it was tainted land and everyone knew it. I shan't be going back. It is
not my home, this world is not my home, or not for very much longer.
Good luck to them, to their clean and bright apartments, their clean
and bright children

Eliza has moved to the city with her children, she is a lawyer. Her
children go to a school in a big white building, live in an apartment
with real walls where they cannot hear all the neighbours business and
where they have a bed each to sleep on. I hope that they will be able
to sweep away the dust, to find the jewels there worth finding and to
wear them in their hearts. Listen to me, talking like an old poet and
not the cripple with the hardware store! It goes to show, we are all a
bit of everything, when all is said and done, we are all a bit of each
other. Eliza and Sam, me and Mandi, the black, the white, the coloured,
all God's mud mixed up in us!

As for me, I am a dusty old man, not so interesting, waiting to return
to dust, watching it settle over the slow road.