Ralph knew that on the scale of atrocity it was small. It was not, for example, Treblinka. Koos showed him what a sjambok cut looked like, administered by an experienced, determined hand. He learned something about himself; that the presence of evil made him shake, like an invalid or octogenarian.
Next day he was able to piece together a little more of the story. It had been a peaceful meeting, as Rosinah said, on a patch of waste ground he knew, a mile away from Flower Street; but this was a typical thing in Elim, that there was no line of communication except an underground one, there was no knowledge, a mile away, of what was occurring on the waste ground; there was no mechanism by which he and Anna could have been warned and told to stand by for casualties. The meeting was to decide strategy for the bus boycott. At the last minute the police had demanded it be called off. A few children had started throwing stones, and the police had charged before the crowd could disperse. A great number of those injured appeared to be passersby. They were dazed and weeping, their shaved and stitched scalps still oozing blood and clear fluid; they said that they had not known anything, not known there was a meeting at all.
Ralph walked over the site of the catastrophe. A few odd shoes had been left behind in the scramble to escape the batons and whips. He saw a straw shopping bag, decorated with a swelling, pink straw rose; it lay on its side, and its contents were by now on someone else’s shelf. The ground had been picked over pretty well, he saw; he thought it was a strange form of looting. It was hard to know who was worse; the policemen who had done what they said was their duty, or the scavengers who had taken from the housemaid’s bag the half loaf, the two ounces of green tripe, perhaps the soap ends or old cardigan some Madam had given, some well-meaning idiot woman down in the white houses, the jacaranda groves.
“Can you do anything, Mr. Eldred?” Lucy Moyo said. “Anything to help us?”
“I can try,” Ralph said.
He went back to his office and rifled through his papers for the list he had been compiling: the names, addresses, telephone numbers of the senior policemen within a hundred miles. He picked up the telephone receiver and began to work his way through the list. These calls did not last long, in most cases; when the policemen heard his English accent, and learned that he lived in Elim, they put the phone down on him.
He sat up for most of the night, writing to the newspapers. “You saw the casualties,” he said to Koos. “You know what happened here, better than anybody. Put your name on these letters with me.”
Koos shook his head. “Better not, Ralph. I have my patients to think about. What would they do without me?” He shrugged. “A lot better, maybe.”
After the baton charge, their situation changed. They were invited to houses in Elim they had never entered before. People who were not churchgoers came to the Mission House. The local organizer of the African National Congress called on them; and on the same day came a man from Sophiatown, a black journalist from
Rosinah’s apprentice served him tea in an enamel mug. Anna said sharply, “The cups and saucers, please, Dearie.” Dearie brought a cup and slapped it down on the table. She scowled. Cups were for whites, enamel mugs were for Africans; this Madam had instituted different practices, which proved she knew nothing. She thought this black man was above himself, putting on airs, in his lightweight blue suit with the sharp creases in the trousers. Trouble came of it: in her opinion.
“Pretoria wants to grow, grow, grow,” the handsome boy said, lolling back on his chair. “The Nats want this place cleared. They will find these people somewhere else, some piece of the veld where they can put them and forget them. Some place with no water and no roads. So that their children can grow back into savages.” The young man laughed, a satirical laugh. His eyes were distant already, and it could be seen that he was on his way to a scholarship abroad: Moscow, perhaps, and who could blame him? “I can tell you, Mrs. Eldred,” he said, “it is hardly possible for an African to live and breathe and be on the right side of the law.” He looked deeply into Anna’s eyes; indicating, one, that she attracted him and two, that he would not think to take any trouble over her.
It was after midnight when the handsome boy left. Next afternoon, a white police sergeant sat on the same chair: its legs now foursquare and grounded. “Makes a change, Mr. Eldred, for me to come and see you. Usually it’s you comes to see us.”
The sergeant was fair-haired, meager, not a big man. But he sat like a true Afrikaner: legs splayed, as if to indicate that in no other way could he ease his bull-like endowment. Ralph did not, at once, dislike him, perhaps because he was of the same familiar, freckled, physical type as Koos, and anxious too, nervously smiling; his nails were bitten down to the quick.
The sergeant had not refused tea. Dearie gave him a cup, of course, and a saucer too. He just wanted Ralph to know, he said, as he helped himself to sugar, that the police were aware what kind of visitors he’d been getting. “You’re a stranger here,” the policeman complained. “You’re new to South Africa. You ought to make
In passing, Ralph felt sorry for him. He was nervous, a chain-smoker, offering his pack each time to Anna; sometimes a fleeting spasm crossed his face, as if he were in pain.
“I didn’t catch your name,” Ralph said, when the sergeant wiped his mouth and stood up to go. “Why don’t you just call me Quintus,” the man said. “Because I expect we’ll be getting to know each other.”
“I think he must have beetles in the bowels,” Ralph said after he’d gone. “Needs to go to Luke Mbatha for some python fat.”
Ralph told Koos that the more stupid the white policemen were, the worse they treated him—except maybe this Quintus, who was well intentioned in his way.
Koos rubbed his red hands through his scrubby pale hair; and Ralph, who had been learning anatomy among other things, felt he could see afternoon light flash between radius and ulna. “Be over to his braai, soon, Ralphie. You drink his beer, man, you eat up his scorched flesh-meat.”
“No. I don’t see we’ll be on those terms.”
“Ah,” Koos said. “But you soon learn to like those motherfuckers. You like me, don’t you? And I’m one of them. Something sweet and simple about us, isn’t there? Something pathetic? Always trying to be liked. Well, there’s this thing we have, a kind of-— hospitality. If a man comes by you make him comfortable; it’s an African thing, the blacks have it and so do we. Do you think that while you’ve been in this township you have learned anything at all about what goes on here? Because if you do, man, you’re more imbecilic than I took you for.”
Later, in a more sober mood, Koos said: “You have to try to understand these—my lot, I mean. The British put their women and children in concentration camps. The Zulu smashed the skulls of their babies against their waggon wheels. They have long memories, Afrikaners. Memory is their specialty.”
Ralph was struck by how he said “these people.” Just as Lucy Moyo did, when she talked about her friends and neighbors.
