PART IV
TRAVELS WITH MATTIE

78

It was a few days before Christmas. Alex had already flown to Johannesburg. I was at my desk, dashing off notes letting people know that my address would not be changing for a few more weeks or months, after all—my visa extension had come through. My backpack was out of the closet, leaning against the bed—battered survivor of a thousand passages, redolent for me of the Road, and now half-packed with clothes, books, maps, mess kit, and Christmas presents. There was a knock at the door downstairs; I shouted that it was unlocked. Footsteps came up the stairs, accompanied by murmurs and a short, hoarse laugh. Clive appeared in my doorway, with his friend Mattie peeking around him and rapping smartly on the jamb.

"Knock, knock," she said.

"Who's there?"

"Starsky and Hutch. Hands up."

Clive had a Christmas-rush job as a stock boy in a men's clothing store downtown, and he had taken to stopping by our place on his way home from work—this was the third time I had seen him in the week or so since the end of school.

"You going to Joburg?" Clive nodded at my backpack. He and Mattie had made themselves comfortable on my bed.

"First thing tomorrow morning."

"See you there," Clive said.

"You're kidding."

Clive grinned. "They've hired the bus. We have about four more fund raisers in the next four days, but we're leaving on Boxing Day, it's settled."

"That's great ."

Clive shrugged.

"I might see you there as well," Mattie said.

Clive laughed sharply, and he and Mattie looked at each other, then at me.

"You're going on the tour, too?" I asked.

"No. But I may be going on my own."

"Man, she wants to go right away," Clive said. "You should let her go with you."

"With me ?"

"You're hitchhiking, isn't it?" Clive said. "She doesn't have the money for the train."

They had caught me by surprise. And I was doubly surprised to hear Clive talking for Mattie.

"Why do you want to go to Johannesburg suddenly?" I asked Mattie.

"I need a holiday," she said, and she and Clive laughed.

"Do your parents know you're thinking of going?"

"It's fine by them."

"Your hitchhiking a thousand miles across the country is fine by them?"

Mattie shrugged.

Clive said, "She's eighteen, man. You said you were sixteen when you went traveling all over America and Europe. This is just a two-day trip."

"This is different."

"What's different?"

"She's female, for a start."

"She'll be with you."

I was getting more cautious in my old age, obviously. Clive was right about my big jaunts as a teenager, which had included bumming around Europe with my girlfriend, sleeping in forests and fields without giving personal safety, hers or mine, a thought. What really was different about this idea, though, was not only that I was older now, but that this was South Africa and I was white and Mattie was black. Clive and Mattie were undoubtedly more conversant than I was with exactly what kinds of problems that could cause. But I was not eager to discover them the hard way. Neither, however, did I feel like raising this particular objection while they were both sitting on the edge of my bed watching me closely.

"Why do you want to go, again?"

Mattie waited a long beat. "I just want to," she said. "It's not a hundred percent certain that I need to go—"

"Now it's need to go—"

"That's right. But I'd like to know if the option's open."

"Oh, boy."

I couldn't tell whether or not Mattie was in trouble, whether my immediate assumption—that the Security Police were after her—was correct. And she was clearly not going to tell me herself. She didn't seem to be pleading for help. But then, that would not have been her style. The fact was, I couldn't really see how to deny her. "Well," I finally said. "If you're sure it's okay with your parents . . . "

I had arranged a lift out to the highway for early the next morning. I told Mattie to be back by first light if she decided she wanted to go.

"Smart," she said, and she and Clive left.

The next day, I rose before dawn. I was getting ready to leave, feeling increasingly confident that I would not be seeing Mattie, when I heard a car pull up outside. I went to the window. It was misty out, and not yet fully light. But I could see, in the road below, Mattie saying goodbye to her father. She was wearing a heavy peacoat and carrying an old khaki rucksack with a sleeping bag lashed beneath it.

79

An architect friend, a colleague of Fiona's, drove us out to the highway. I studied him as we chatted, trying to tell if he thought we were crazy. He betrayed no such opinion, although he did take us farther than I thought necessary, finally dropping us off near Paarl, about twenty miles out of Cape Town. He wished us luck in a perfectly ordinary way, made a U-turn, and disappeared into the stream of commuter traffic headed back to the city.

There were few cars going our way. We were in flat, green countryside, with the great dark wall of the Hottentots Holland looming in the mist a few miles up the road. A police car went by, its driver turning to study us.

"Are we doing anything illegal?"

"I don't think so," Mattie said. "Not that that ever stops them."

"Maybe if a cop questions us, you should let me do the talking," I said. "Maybe I'll say we're both tourists—you're from Brazil or someplace."

Mattie gave me a sidelong look. "I never had any bus-catching problems," she said.

I had to laugh. In Grassy Park, light-skinned people were some-

times said to have had problems catching buses. Drivers of whites-only buses, seeing them standing alone at a stop, would make a snap judgment that they were black and drive past, while drivers of "nonwhite" buses would decide at a glance they were white and also drive past. I had to laugh at Mattie's remark because it was true that I had been hoping that she, with her olive skin, might attract less attention on the trip ahead than a darker-skinned woman would, traveling with somebody of my hue. It was no doubt a vain hope.

We soon got our first ride: with a beefy, soft-spoken Afrikaner in his late thirties, driving a brand-new Audi. We sailed up into the mountains, over the high, rocky pass at Du Toits Kloof, through a wall of clouds, and into bright morning sunshine. "Over the garden wall," I called back to Mattie, who was in the back seat with our bags. She chuckled. The architect, while driving us out to the highway, had offered his view that it was "good" that we were getting out of Cape Town. "A favorite professor of mine used to tell us, 'The Cape is a garden. You mustn't just settle in here and never leave. Look over the garden wall!"' Mattie had snorted when he said this, and when I caught her eye, she had gestured with her chin toward a ragged little shantytown sprawling over the dunes of the Cape Flats. Some garden, her expression had said.

Sheer mountains soared all around us now, cliffs and canyons and peaks-in-clouds in spectacular profusion. I was twisting and turning in my seat, marveling at the various views, while our driver nodded proprietarily, beaming at each of my exclamations. "Yes, yes," he kept saying. "And over there?" Mattie was also gaping at the sights, although her only comment, much repeated, was a hushed "Smart!" We emerged from the mountains, then quickly descended into the valley wine country of the Boland.

Our driver was an inspector of dried fruit, he told us. He lived in Paarl, but had to come over the mountains nearly every day. His dream was to introduce almonds as a major cash crop to the Boland; they were now being grown experimentally by the government. He himself came from the Boland. In fact, he had a little time—would we like to see his family's wine farm? We turned onto a secondary road, and sped down winding country lanes that our driver obviously knew cold. He would inherit this farm from his father in another ten years, he told us, and he and his wife and children would then move back to this area permanently. We pulled into a circular driveway and parked in front of a large, freshly whitewashed, eighteenth-century Cape Dutch farmhouse. A red-faced woman in an apron came to the

front door as we climbed out of the car. "My mother," our driver said. The woman in the doorway called happily to her son and gestured for me to come inside. Mattie, I noticed, stayed in the back seat.

"Aren't you coming?"

Mattie looked embarrassed. "You must be joking."

I hesitated, shocked.

"Go on," Mattie said. "I'm all right. Just don't stay all morning."

I went inside the house. Our driver's mother shook my hand warmly and offered me coffee. I declined, hoping that would help to shorten our stay. She bore her son off to the kitchen, leaving me in a high-ceilinged, luxurious room, full of antique furniture, glass display cases, and a grand piano. There were oil paintings on the walls: dark, Flemish-looking portraits in ornate frames. This was obviously the manor house of some very old Cape gentry—descendants of the burghers who had not trekked, whose sons all went to Stellenbosch University, sometimes even studied overseas, and now filled most of the top jobs in the government. More cosmopolitan, less verkrampte, generally, than their upcountry compatriots, these were the sort of Afrikaners who could usually be counted on to harbor relatively liberal racial attitudes. Thus, no objection would be raised to the fact that Mattie was traveling with me, yet Mattie, I realized, would not have been welcome in this front room. I was about to go back outside and join her in the car when our driver returned. His mother pressed a bag of cakes on me, shook my hand again, kissed her son, and stood beaming and waving in her doorway as we wheeled out of the driveway.

The fruit inspector dropped us outside the Boland town of Worcester. There were a number of other hitchhikers standing along the highway there, so we walked awhile, then caught a short ride in a farm bakkie out to a rather desolate intersection in the Hex River Valley.

Traffic was steadier now, and most of it looked long-distance. Whole caravans of Mercedes-Benzes with Transvaal plates were streaming past bound for their beach holidays at the Cape, while station wagons piled high with luggage went by in our direction. But all the cars seemed to be driving terribly fast through here, and nobody stopped.

We decided to make a sign. I found a scrap of cardboard and began laboriously stenciling "JHB" on it with a ball-point pen. Mattie took it from me and rapidly produced on the other side of the cardboard a strikingly good-looking sign with a soft pencil from her rucksack.

"My father's a sign painter," she said. "I've been working for him since I was a light."

We got on to the subject of families and passed the next couple of hours taking turns sketching the characters and narrating the histories of our respective clans. Mattie seemed to have a vast family, with branches all over the Western Cape, a small offshoot in Germany, and roots deeply tangled with the origins of Cape Town itself. Mattie had not been the first member of her immediate family to finish high school, she said, though she would be the first to attend a university. Two of her brothers had gone into sign painting with their father; her older sisters were all housewives. In general, the family got along well together—but for one brother-in-law, whom Mattie despised. It was the same rift over politics that seemed to divide so many black families: the brother-in-law was "reactionary," "opportunist," "cynical," according to Mattie. He believed, in other words, that working to overthrow white rule was hopeless, and he liked to mock Mattie for her political activism

Mattie, for her part, seemed mainly interested in my family's political experiences and associations—my father's brushes with the film industry blacklist during the McCarthy era, his brother the mountain-climbing FBI agent, my brother's student radicalism, my sister's feminism, my own experiences in the student anti-war movement. Mattie seemed fascinated by my descriptions of a couple of Black Panthers I had known circa 1970. "They were a suicidal clique, it seems to us here," she said. "Waving guns, practically asking the police to wipe them out. They had some very good ideas, but we can't understand what their strategy was meant to be."

It seemed a propitious time to ask again why she was going to Johannesburg. Mattie shrugged, sighed, looked down the highway, stared at me. Finally, she said, "Do you know COSAS?"

I did, vaguely. The Council of South African Students was a new national organization of black high school students, headquartered in Soweto. Its leaders had been detained shortly after its formation, and it had not been active during the schools boycott, so COSAS had not been much in the news this year. I had never heard the organization's name mentioned in Grassy Park.

"Well," Mattie said, "COSAS is trying to coordinate certain struggles in the Transvaal with others in the Cape. And communication is a problem. The telephone's insecure, the post's no good. So people end up having to travel back and forth. This isn't the first time this year I've gone to Joburg."

"Didn't COSAS call for a stayaway from all black schools that had any white teachers?"

Mattie smiled ruefully. "Together with AZAPO [the Azanian People's Organization—a small, radical, aboveground black political group], at the beginning of this past year. It was a flop."

"Why?"

"Partly because the government preempted it by withdrawing all the soldier-teachers from Soweto this year."

"But shouldn't the soldier-teachers have been the focus of the protest to start with, rather than all white teachers?"

Mattie shrugged. "I don't see why. Plenty of white civilian teachers are spies for the government. And even those who aren't can do an incredible amount of damage. No offense meant."

"What sort of damage?"

"Co-option, confusion. At my school, for instance, we had this white geography teacher, this 'liberal' who was very friendly to his students, invited them to his house, and so on. Some of us quite respected him. He had all these books he used to lend us, and these ideas about history. He seemed quite interesting. But then slowly we discovered his real political agenda. He wanted to turn us all into so-called reasonable blacks. Finally, someone saw him coming out of a PFP office in Pinelands. He lost all credibility after that, and he had quite a hard time of it this year. I'm sure he won't be back. But a lot of students were confused and misled by him."

"Did anyone bother to find out why he was at the PFP office?"

Mattie snorted. "Why? It was obvious already who he was working for."

It was my turn to snort, I thought, but I decided to let it pass.

Motorists were continuing to flash past us at a breakneck rate, with scarcely a glance in our direction. It was now early afternoon—and hot, windy, dusty, and very dry. We had been eating the fruit inspector's mother's cakes, and desperately needed something to wash them down. Across scrubby fields, beside railroad tracks, we could see a general store of some sort.

What sort of store it was became obvious to me only when we had nearly reached it—it was the whites-only sort, with a window on the side of the building through which blacks were served. I stopped in confusion when I saw the arrangement, but Mattie just laughed tightly and headed for the outside trading window, around which a number of farm and railway laborers were gathered. Someone was

shouting inside the shop. I couldn't see what else to do, so I went in the front door.

Once my eyes had adjusted to the gloom, I saw that the yelling was being done by a very fat white woman behind the counter. She was producing a steady stream of crude abuse in Afrikaans—half of it directed at a young black shop assistant who was scrambling up and down a ladder plucking items from shelves, half of it at the customers pushing arms, heads, and whatever else they could manage through the trading window. I was the only customer in the "white" section of the shop, and the shopkeeper didn't see me at first. Her black customers, I noticed, tittered quietly at some of her remarks, which seemed to egg her on. When the woman finally noticed me, she gasped. Her mouth clapped shut and she hurried, blushing, to the counter, calling me "meneer " and asking in very poor English what she could do for me. I bought a Coke and drank it outside, in the shade of a railway warehouse.

As we walked back to the highway, Mattie said, "Do you see why we think whites are stupid? It's because the very stupidest whites are always given positions of direct, petty power over blacks. And we just have to sit and endure them, and watch them create and perform. You should have heard what those workers were saying about that rubbish woman in the shop." Mattie snickered. "It was so dirty, there are no words for it in English."

We resumed our post at the side of the highway. After a few minutes of silence, Mattie suddenly said, "When blacks get anywhere in this country, you know that they are very, very clever. A black who gets a master's degree is probably a genius. But a white with a master's degree? It doesn't take anything special at all. An average person can manage it."

A Mercedes sedan slowed down and looked us over. A black man was driving, with another black man in the passenger seat. The passenger gave us a raised fist salute and laughed as they sped away. We cursed them both at the tops of our voices. "See you in Azania, brother," Mattie bellowed.

Some minutes later, I said, "You know, Azania is a terrible name for this country. If you look at its etymology, you'll see that it comes from an Arab word for East Africa, and that it originally had something to do with slave trading. You probably couldn't come up with a worse liberation name if—"

Mattie cut me off with a murderous look. "Now you want to tell us what we can call our own country? I just can't believe white people

sometimes. Do you have any idea what 'Azania' means to the oppressed in this country? Maybe we don't care what you think of the word, or where you think it comes from. It isn't being used to please you."

"All right, all right."

This was beginning to look like it was going to be a long trip.

80

We finally got a ride out of the Hex River Valley in a truck pulling two semitrailers. Leafy vineyards and rocky mountains gave way to sheep ranches as the landscape widened out into the brown plains of the Little Karroo. Our driver was a small, dark man in a cowboy shirt who said his name was Charles. We introduced ourselves across an expanse of engine cover. Charles said he lived in the Cape Town suburb of Plumstead, and I found myself wondering whether he would be classified "White" or "Coloured"—there was a Plumstead (Lower) and a Plumstead (Upper). His accent was strong—English was not his first language—but inconclusive to my ears. Most truck drivers were black, although I had been told that until very recently they were all white. As Mattie and I were crammed into a seat designed for one person (thin), and the truck's cab was noisy, and Charles was a good ten feet away, I asked Mattie what she thought. She shook her head. "You've been in this country too long," she said.

"Or not long enough."

"White," she said. "So-called poor white."

We had been traveling with Charles for perhaps an hour when I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, something moving in the crawl space behind the truck's cab. I twisted in my seat. To my astonishment, there was a middle-aged African man lying there, three feet from my shoulder. The man smiled at me and nodded. I nodded back. Charles noticed and said, "Don't mind him. He's dead as a stone."

I introduced myself to the man in back nevertheless, and he smiled again, though more tentatively. Charles stared at me across the cab. Finally, he said, "That's Wellington."

"I'm Mattie," Mattie called out to Wellington. "Molo." .^[*]

"Molo," Wellington murmured.

Charles stared at Mattie, but said nothing.

* Xhosa greeting.

At sunset, we stopped at a hamburger stand in Laingsburg, a small, American-looking highway town on the Groot River. Wellington stayed in the truck while the three of us went to eat.

A peculiar thing happened while Charles and I were standing near the takeaway window, trying to decide whether to go inside or get our burgers to go: a tall, pimply white boy of about fifteen leaned through the takeaway window and said, indicating the restaurant with an air of terrible, self-conscious magnanimity, "It's okay. It's all races." Mattie was nowhere in sight—she had gone straight from the truck to a gas station rest room—so it was obvious that the kid thought Charles was black. Charles looked furious and I felt embarrassed for him.

We went inside and sat. Though avoiding my eyes, Charles surprised me by muttering, through clenched teeth, "I've been chucked out of pubs because they wouldn't believe I'm white. It's a bastard. I have to carry my Book of Life [an identity document] with me everywhere."

Mattie joined us. Charles asked me to remind him "to get a sandwich and cool drink for the boy," as he called Wellington. While we ate, Charles told us a long story about how his boss had forced him to take this trip after the regular driver fell sick. He was not a truck driver at all, he stressed. He was a mechanic. He didn't like coming way out here in the bundu where he didn't know anyone, and no one knew him.

By the time we got back on the road, it was dark. We rumbled out of Laingsburg and up the low bluffs across the Groot River. A rising full moon suddenly filled the windshield as we emerged onto the immense plateau of the Karroo. Mattie gasped, and murmured, "Smart. " The highway leveled off and the truck slowly ascended through the roaring scales of its multitude of gears, finally arriving at the deep, soothing timbre of its crusising ratio.

A great sense of well-being began to steal over me, a sense less aesthetic—although the silver-blue countryside streaming by, the sisal and thorn bushes against the moon, were beautiful, and the evening air pouring through the truck's open windows was intensely fresh and sweet—than existential. Hitching a ride: some combination of passage, shelter, and irresponsibility that I had always treasured. It had to do with feeling lucky: feeling safe and snug in the eye of a storm of uncontrollable circumstance. And with feeling unfettered: what joy to be bombing through strange and wide-open country, with one's needs pared down to a few—full belly, a good view, forward

motion. Most of all, it had to do with hiatus: adventurous respite, the stolen caesura, the suspension of answerability. It was the innocence and luxury of uninvolved observation, and perhaps the single thing I loved most about travel. It had been a long time since I had felt it in such pure form.

"This is great," I sighed.

"What is?" Mattie wanted to know.

"This," I said, indicating our surroundings in general.

"What a romantic you are," Mattie said, not unkindly.

"Not as romantic as you."

"What? I'm not a romantic. Not a chance! What is it you imagine I'm romantic about?"

"Revolution."

Mattie was outraged. She shoved me against the truck's engine cover and punched me in the ribs. "You're mad," she declared. "I'm not romantic about revolution."

"Yes you are. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that."

"But there is a great deal wrong with it. We don't need romantics in the struggle. They're hysterical."

"You're not hysterical. Not that often, anyway."

"Yussus,"^[*] Mattie said.

"You're also a Puritan."

Another shove, another punch or two. "What do you mean by that? A Puritan is someone who goes about disapproving of everything and can't enjoy themselves, isn't it?"

"That's the idea."

"And you think I'm like that?"

"I think you believe that there is no point in doing anything that doesn't serve the struggle. Doing anything for pleasure, for selfadvancement, or just for the hell of it, is out. It's a waste of time, it's immoral, it's reactionary. There's survival and there's the struggle, and the rest is meaningless."

Mattie was silent for a minute. Then she said, "That's true. That is what I believe. So I'm a Puritan. And you, what are you, a hedonist?"

"I wish." A passenger train was streaming across the veld in the distance, a toylike column of lighted boxes. I imagined I saw people standing in a saloon car. "But I wouldn't mind a beer right now," I said.

* A mild Afrikaans profanity.

"Oh, that's what you are, a drunkard," Mattie said. "We can't have drunkards in the struggle either."

"So I've heard."

A few minutes later, Mattie muttered, "I think those students in Tehran have the right idea about how to cope with Americans. If you give me any more uphill, I'm going to take you hostage."

With that, Mattie fell asleep against my shoulder.

It was after midnight when Charles finally dropped us off, outside a tiny railway village called Leeu-Gamka. Mattie and I stood sleepily beside the highway for half an hour without seeing a vehicle pass in either direction. Then we tramped off into the veld a couple of hundred yards and unrolled our sleeping bags. The moonlit land around us seemed absolutely empty.

"We're well and truly in the Karroo now," Mattie said. "Do you know what they call this bush?" She indicated a low shrub that she was tramping down as a mattress. "Hottentot bedding," she said, and she laughed. The shrub had a lovely, herblike aroma. "Did you know there's not a single hotel for blacks between Cape Town and Kimberley?"

I had heard.

We climbed into our bags and lay looking at the moon. I was deliciously tired from the long day of travel.

"The Cape is not a garden," Mattie's voice, disembodied, said. "What shit they must talk at UCT!"

A little while later, Mattie's voice again: "But the Cape is really a peninsula , you know, politically as well as physically. It's easy to get isolated there from what's going on in the rest of the country."

I lay thinking about South Africa, the whole vast, variegated sprawl of the place. Although the grade was rarely noticeable, we would be climbing steadily all the way from Cape Town to Johannesburg—nearly six thousand feet in all. We were going from the coastal shelf up onto the great African escarpment, as we would have said in geography class. From a Mediterranean region, through a semidesert, to the highveld.

But we had only covered one-fifth of the Cape Town-Johannesburg journey today—and Christmas was just three days away. "Do you have any plans for Christmas?" I asked.

"No."

"Your family doesn't mind your being away at Christmas?"

"My mother probably does."

"But you don't?"

"Christmas means nothing to me. I'm not a Christian."

I laughed.

"What's funny?"

"Nothing."

A while later, Mattie asked me what my plans were after this trip. To stay in Cape Town awhile and write, I said, and then to head north across Africa. Beyond that, I didn't know. I asked Mattie what her plans were.

"Go to university," she said, without enthusiasm.

"UCT?"

"Of course not. I'll go to Bush."

"What do you mean, 'of course not'?"

"Why should I go there? To listen to the shit they talk?"

"It's a better university than UWC. You'd get a far better education there."

"That's not my first priority."

"Realizing your own potential is not your first priority?"

"No. I'm not interested in finding out what I can do. I'm interested in finding out what the people can do, what the masses can do."

"Give me a break."

"What does that mean?"

"It means that sounds hopelessly romantic."

"Too bad."

"You're not going to find out what 'the masses' can do at UWC any more than you would at UCT."

"I know they talk a lot of shit at Bush, too. Even the politically committed students. They talk a lot of theory, a lot of jargon, and they get bogged down in an academic approach to struggle. They use words that ordinary working people don't understand. Workers relate to action, not words. But at UCT, ag , it's much worse. Black UCT students have very little credibility in the black community. People who go there lose their gut connection to oppression. I don't want that to happen to me."

This was more or less the same argument I had had many times with Clive. Still, I could not accept the idea that someone like Mattie should waste her brains at a place like UWC. It went against my grain at a level deeper than politics. I had a strong suspicion that Mattie had served on the Committee of 81, where I had heard that the UWC representatives had effectively dominated the other delegates, behaving with particular arrogance toward their comrades from UCT. I was about to suggest that her motives for wanting to go to UWC had as

much to do with more-oppressed-than-thou one-upmanship in the world of black student politics as they did with anything else—when I realized that Mattie's breathing had lengthened into the long sighs of sleep.

Lying there, looking up at the moon and the southern stars, listening to Mattie breathe, I found that my appetite for argument had fled and been replaced by an overwhelming sympathy for my young companion. "These poor children"—a phrase that I had come to hate in the mouths of conservative teachers and administrators—suddenly felt richly descriptive. Here she was, this spunky kid, too poor to take a train or a bus, hitchhiking a thousand miles with a bedroll to talk to a bunch of other teenagers about how to overthrow the government. And look what they were up against: a neo-Nazi police state with a huge, highly trained army—which now had, according to many reports, nuclear weapons. For Mattie, her own country was enemy territory—her phone was bugged, her mail was opened, the secret police were everywhere. And all this grief simply because of the color of her skin?

What kind of experiences had shaped Mattie's thinking, I wondered. How and when had she been "conscientized"? Had 1976 been her introduction to the struggle? She had been in Standard Seven then. Would her dedication to the cause deepen with time, or would it become proportionally less of her life? If it deepened, would she be driven underground? Would she take up arms? The struggle was like the church. You felt a vocation, you had the faith, so you gave your life over to poverty, obedience, and the greater good. Mattie was like some foul-mouthed mystic nun. As I drifted off to sleep there in the veld, the last thoughts I had that I could later recall involved images of the Struggle as some gigantic wave, or whirlwind, or juggernaut, to which tiny, trembling figures were being drawn from every direction. It was a primitive religious cartoon, like the drawings of the Apocalypse in the tracts given away by Christian fundamentalists, and I felt before it some of the lost soul's dread and awe.

81

The sun rose early, and when I peeked out the top of my sleeping bag—the mild summer night had turned chilly in the hours before dawn—I woke up fast. Our little campsite in the veld, which had seemed a faraway, moonlit world of its own the night before, was plainly

visible both from the highway and from a collection of shacks on a small rise a few hundred yards to the west. I scrambled out of my sleeping bag, quickly made two cups of tea, and woke Mattie. She sat up grumpily, stared at the tea I offered her and at my little gas cooker, mumbled something about "Boy Scouts," took the tea, and turned her back on me and on the blinding sun. I could now see people moving around in the little shantytown on the rise. I pointed them out to Mattie and suggested that we break camp immediately.

Mattie looked at the squatters' camp for a minute, then said, "They won't bother us."

I accepted her judgment. Mattie continued to study the squatters' camp. "Those people have some of the hardest lives you can imagine," she said quietly. "They wander from place to place all over the Karroo, working for white farmers. They get paid almost nothing. Their children don't go to school. The kids are constantly ill, in fact, and a lot of them die. And most of the adults are illiterate. They don't know anything except how to survive from one day to the next."

"Are those Africans or so-called coloreds?"

"Both. They're not too strict about Group Areas in that kind of a place. A lot of the Xhosa people out here are Afrikaans-speaking. There used to be a lot of intermarriage, before Mixed Marriages. Do you see those women?"

A group of women in doeks was setting off from the squatters' camp, heading north across the veld. "They're going for firewood," Mattie said. "They probably have to walk for miles. All the wood from around here will be gone, and most of these little Karroo dorps country towns] have laws against wood gathering around the so-called location. They'll probably have to buy a 'draggie' someplace, and carry it back." Mattie shook her head. "It's not capitalism these people suffer from. It's feudalism."

We sat in silence, finishing our tea. Mattie stretched and yawned. "Do you know what they call this early morning sun out here?" she asked, her voice suddenly full of its usual vigor. "'Armemasebaadjie!' The poor man's coat!"

We packed up our things and headed for the highway.

Leeu-Gamka consisted of a railway station, a hotel, a gas station, and a few houses. At the gas station stood a queue of about twenty-five cars waiting for the pumps to open. This was why there had been no traffic late the night before: all gas stations in South Africa were closed by law from 6 P.M. till 7 A.M. during the week (and from 1 P.M. on Saturday till 7 A.M. on Monday). The gas station was just opening

up as we arrived, so I began working the cars in the queue immediately, while Mattie went around back to the "Non-White" rest rooms to wash up. A middle-aged white couple in a white Mercedes cheerfully agreed to give me and my friend-who-was-in-the-rest-room a lift. We put my backpack in the trunk of their car. But when Mattie appeared, the couple had a change of heart. Muttering something about needing the back seat for their ice chest, they put me out. I avoided looking at Mattie and decided to use a little hitchhiker's Mau-Mau.

I went to the head of the queue, where a young white couple in an old Ford were filling up. I rather breathlessly asked them for a lift for me and my friend-who-was-in-the-rest-room. Obviously embarrassed, the couple hesitated, then agreed. I waited until they were ready to leave and the long queue behind them was growing impatient, however, before I called to Mattie. She hurried over and jumped in the car and we were on the road before the couple got a good look at her. When they did, they looked startled. I didn't mind that, so long as they got us to a less desolate place than Leeu-Gamka, but Mattie seemed to feel differently. She sat through some awkward, mumbled introductions, glared fiercely at me, and then took the damp white washcloth she had just been using for her morning ablutions and hung it over her face.

It was a strange ride. I talked a bit with the couple, who had a three-month-old baby on the seat between them, while Mattie sat like some kind of faceless sphinx beside me. The couple was from Potchefstroom, they said, in the Transvaal. He was a clerk in a government office. They had been married just a year. They were Afrikaans. They were very polite, and reminded me of nothing so much as the photographs I had seen of my parents and their friends from the early 1950s, when they had all been newly married, owned shabby-genteel cars much like this Ford, and had new babies, and the men all had little-boy haircuts like our driver's. The young woman's frequent little panic-stricken, helpless-fawn looks at her husband struck me as excessive, but otherwise they seemed to me like ordinary, inoffensive folk. Our conversation deteriorated drastically, though, after the young man asked me what I thought of the life here in South Africa and I replied, "It looks comfortable if you're white." Mattie snickered from beneath her washcloth—the only sound she made for over sixty miles—and our driver finally filled the loaded silence that followed by pushing a country western tape into the cassette deck.

On the outskirts of Beaufort West, a sprawling Karroo town,

population twenty thousand, we got pulled over. Our driver was given a ticket for speeding. The cop was "colored" and the tension inside our little Ford throughout the episode was incredible. Our driver's wife seemed to be nearing a nervous breakdown. After the cop let us go, we proceeded at a snail's pace into the center of Beaufort West, where our driver pulled to the curb and gestured to us that the lift was over. I nudged Mattie and we disembarked.

"Look at them," I said, as we walked away from the Ford, which remained parked where we had left it. Our driver and his wife were embracing where they sat, and including the baby in the embrace in a desperate-looking huddle. "It's instinctual," I said. "In a time of trouble, they automatically form a laager ."^[*]

"I don't want to look at them," Mattie spat.

"Oh, come on. They're just a poor little family. They've just got a speeding ticket. They're trying to comfort each other. I feel sorry for them."

"Sorry for them, " Mattie exploded. "They're sick! And they're going to make that baby sick! Did you see what they did when they saw me in their car?"

"They didn't do much."

"You're blind, in that case, as well as mad. Their skin was crawling. They were in a complete panic. They make me sick."

Mattie and I argued our way through the dusty streets of Beaufort West. At one point, she said, "You know what your problem is? You're not a racist." I took that as a compliment, but Mattie did not mean it as one. She elaborated: "In this country, you have to stereotype. If you meet some Boer, and they don't differ radically from the typical Boer, you just assume they're racists and fascists and leave it at that. You can't go about giving every individual the benefit of the doubt. That's naive. And naiveté is a luxury we can't afford. A government clerk and his little boeremaisie from bloody Potchefstroom are not innocent until proven guilty. They're guilty, full stop. Because of who they are and what their sick culture does and what it stands for."

We stopped at a Greek grocery and bought rolls and juice and ate our breakfast in the shade of a blue gum tree, but we did not stop arguing. I said something about how "relations between groups" were a problem everywhere, and Mattie blew up again. "'Relations between groups' is not the problem in South Africa! What a white liberal delusion that is! White people are the problem. "

* A defensive formation of circled ox wagons favored by the Boer pioneers.

Later, as we were approaching the highway roundabout where we would be able to start hitchhiking again, I got fed up myself and shouted, "What do you want, anyway? Do you want all the whites in this country just to pack their things and leave?"

Mattie laughed. "Oh, that would be far too much to hope for," she said.

82

A police car cruised slowly past us, with both of the cops in it turning to stare at Mattie and me. A few minutes later, the same car came around the roundabout again. Another long, hard look from the S.A.P. of Beaufort West. We discussed abandoning the shade of the pepper tree we were standing beneath for some spot farther out of town.

"I just hope you're not carrying any Urban Foundation literature in there," Mattie said, pointing at my pack.

I laughed. So Mattie knew about my career counseling follies. She was referring, at the same time, to a recent news story in which a distinguished visitor from Canada, the wife of a former Quebec cabinet minister, touring South Africa as part of a study group, had been stopped and searched by police in the Johannesburg airport after a flight from Cape Town. It seemed that one of her fellow passengers had informed the police that the Canadian woman had been reading "communistic literature" on the flight. The literature in question had turned out to be the annual report of the Urban Foundation, which the police confiscated. The incident had gotten into the press and embarrassed the government.

"I just wish you hadn't got so much sun yesterday," I said. "You could use some of that Karoo Freckle Cream."

Mattie glared. "I take back what I said about your not being a racist!" It was true, though: we were both sunburned from the long day of sitting at the side of the road—which only added to our disinclination to start walking down the blindingly bright and treeless highway beyond the roundabout.

I had already picked up a number of Afrikaans swear words from Mattie, curses that I now began to hurl at the backs of the vehicles that passed us. I was still unclear on the exact meanings of most of these expressions, but my use of them seemed to slay Mattie. She laughed until the tears stood in her eyes. "If you only knew what you

were saying!" My accent in Afrikaans, she said, was "quite exotic. You sound like a bloody German or something."

Mattie and I were getting more comfortable with each other. We both enjoyed arguing, and we could make each other laugh. Mattie, moreover, had already become quite unreserved with me, physically. Not only was she constantly shoving, punching, and pinching me, but while sitting there under the pepper tree at the roundabout, she would lean against me, with her forearm on my knee, to read our road map, and remain like that for several minutes, with an absolutely natural air. Such physical ease did not come to me quite so naturally, although I was well acquainted with its roots after a year in Grassy Park, and had always found it wonderful, and knew better than to imagine that Mattie meant anything more by it than an expression of acceptance and trust. It was affectionate, and at some level it was probably exciting, but it was blithe, not romantic, and decidedly not sexual. Still, I found myself wondering whether the Beaufort West police would see it that way when I saw them entering the roundabout yet again. They cruised past us once more without stopping.

A few minutes later, we got a ride at last, in the back of a pickup truck. The driver was a young, bearded white guy who said he was going to Britstown. His black companion rode in the cab beside him—an unusually humane arrangement. We jumped into the truck's bed and dug ourselves in among the tools, pipes, and machinery piled there. It was nice to be moving again—we had been in Beaufort West for five long hours—but the sun and wind were punishing, and Mattie and I were both soon swaddled like Bedouins.

Seen from the depths of a makeshift burnoose—towel hood, sweater muffler, sunglasses, long-billed baseball cap—the land we drove through took on an almost unreal harshness. Burnt red rock and scrubby veld stretched away to a horizon broken only by the stark mesas called kopjes . Dry, savage-looking gullies (dongas) testified to the flash floods that tore through this part of the Karroo after summer rainstorms. We passed some desolate-looking dry lakebeds and some nearly-as-desolate-looking farms, the weathered buildings huddled around windmills above the precious boreholes. Karroo farmers were legendarily tough characters; seeing this country, I could easily understand why. The road signs were for places called Renosterkop (Rhinoceros Head), Wagenaarskraal (Wagoneer's Corral), and Sodium.

By the time we reached Britstown, it was late afternoon. We were dropped at an intersection about two miles beyond the town, back in

open country. It was a bleak spot. Off to the west, eighty miles across the veld, was, according to the highway signs, some place called Prieska—to the east was De Aar. The graffiti scratched into the signposts was angry, ominous stuff, cursing the local farmers and claiming that its authors had spent four hours—nine hours—two days!—stranded here. Many of the names written on the signs bore military designations—ranks and regiments and squadron nicknames—and I wondered if there was some kind of base nearby. That question seemed answered when the first car we saw dropped off a young soldier before turning around and returning toward Britstown.

The "troopie" ignored us, although he stood barely twenty yards away. He was blond, sunburned, crew-cut, in uniform, with his cap tucked smartly through a loop on his shoulder. He was, I guessed, not much older than Mattie. It was strange to think that he and she were enemies and might one day fix each other in their respective rifle sights. When a car came along, the soldier did not put out his thumb, but the car stopped anyway, as patriotic motorists were urged by road signs to do whenever they saw a serviceman standing by the road. Over the next hour, two more soldiers came and went in similar fashion, with virtually no traffic passing other than the cars that dropped them and picked them up. None of the soldiers spoke to us. It was a bit eerie, as well as irritating. Then things became distinctly more menacing as one pickup truck, carrying three young white males, passed us twice, slowing down for a long look on the second pass. I recalled reading about an incident that had occurred a few weeks before—was it near here?—in which four young soldiers from Pretoria had stopped their car on the highway and simply begun shooting black children, killing one boy of nine. We had to get out of here. It would be dark in a couple of hours.

A car appeared in the distance, going our way. It occurred to me that, with her baggy pea coat, shapeless trousers, and short hair, Mattie could easily be mistaken for a boy. Only half-seriously, and expecting nothing but abuse for my trouble, I said, "Show them you're a girl." Mattie surprised me—and the oncoming car—by doing a swishy little dance into the road and lifting one pant leg to reveal a girlish knee. It got us a ride.

A gloriously long ride—all the way to Kimberley. In a new station wagon, with a friendly, nearsighted Afrikaans woman in her late twenties named Estelle. Estelle who said she had stopped only because Mattie's little jig had made her see that she was female, which she would not have noticed otherwise. "Got to get you some high heels

and a miniskirt," I said to Mattie, who slugged me happily. Kimberley was less than three hundred miles from Johannesburg. I dozed as we sped through the long summer dusk, and only awoke as we were entering Kimberley and the light was fading from the western sky.

Estelle was looking forward to a cold beer and "Dallas" in her motel room, she said. My sun-weakened brain swam at the mention of cold beer. But there was little chance of rendezvousing with such a thing, I knew, while traveling with Mattie. Estelle asked if there was anywhere in Kimberley she could drop us. She was going on to Johannesburg tomorrow, she said, and would be happy to take us there, if we could manage to meet her in the morning. At that moment, I spotted a sign for a caravan park. "Right here," I said.

83

It was a sprawling, unkempt, half-deserted, whites-only caravan park. We climbed over a small fence, stayed well away from the caretaker's cottage, and availed ourselves of the park's showers. An old man came in the rest room while I was shaving, but Mattie said she had seen no one on the women's side when we reconvened. We stashed our bags underneath a hedge and went in search of supper. About a mile down the highway, we found a hamburger stand. After getting the nod from a black waitress, we went inside and ate heartily, finishing up with big slices of homemade apple pie and several cups of coffee. Then we strolled back toward the caravan park. On a long, curving bridge where the highway vaulted over a railway yard, we stopped to watch the trainmen working below. I started explaining the various shunting moves being made, showing Mattie the American versions of the lantern signals being used. Soon I was regaling her with stories of peril and courage on the high iron and descriptions of some of the great California railroaders I had worked with. Mattie, to my surprise, seemed fascinated. Then two young white guys walking by carrying duffel bags interrupted us.

"Aren't you two people hitching to Joeys?" one demanded, in an Afrikaans accent. He sounded drunk.

I admitted we were. I remembered this pair from the crowd outside Worcester the day before.

The same one spoke again: "What, aren't you going any further tonight? Do you have a place to stay here?"

"We can't stay here, man," his companion, who sounded equally

drunk, said. "We must get there tonight."

"Right. Well, if you see us by the side of the road, and you're passing by, tell the people you're with they must stop. Say we're your cousins or something."

Mattie, who had been hanging back from this conversation, burst out laughing. The two sodden wayfarers chuckled, too, but not as if they got the joke. It was dark on the bridge, and it seemed they had not got a good look at Mattie.

We resumed our trek back to the caravan park. I observed that the next day was Christmas Eve, and that if Estelle came back for us, and probably even if she didn't, it looked like we would be in Johannesburg for Christmas. Mattie replied in an icy voice that she couldn't care less about Christmas.

"So you say," I said, feeling stung and snapping back. "But you're in a small and toffee-nosed minority. 'The masses' care about Christmas. It's a holiday, a time for people to have fun. In fact, 'the masses' are mostly devout Christians."

"What do you know about it?" Mattie erupted. "Were you here in '76? That was a so-called Black Christmas, when celebrations were banned in the townships by the students. No holiday decorations, no drinking, just gatherings to mourn the dead."

"And people were burying their booze in their backyards, and the students were digging it up and smashing the bottles," I said. "And students were accosting people in the streets if they thought they'd been drinking, and forcing them to drink water, then shoving feathers down their throats to make them throw up. No, I wasn't there, but I've heard the stories. And I know that the students didn't 'conscientize' many people that Christmas."

"How do you know what conscientizes people? Do you live in the black community? Some of us thought this year should have been a Black Christmas. And we know better than you do what were the aftereffects of '76. Christmas and alcohol have been issues in the townships for years. So don't you bother lecturing me about them."

"Fine."

This was not one of our bantering, enjoyable arguments, but a bitter, bruising quarrel that seemed to me to have come out of nowhere. When we arrived back at the caravan park, I dug a book out of my pack and went and sat under a streetlight to read. Mattie spread out her sleeping bag and lay down without a word on a patch of grass in the dark some distance away. My concentration on my reading was imperfect, for I was upset, and the light pulsed and flickered because

of a cloud of moths. But I kept at it for an hour or so, by which time I assumed Mattie was asleep. Then the nasal howl of a muezzin, emanating from a mosque down the street, split the air, giving me a start, and when the prayer was over, Mattie piped up from the dark. "You forgot to mention all the devout Muslims."

"That's next lecture."

Mattie laughed, and a little while later she joined me under the streetlight with a book of her own. She was reading John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World —a lekker book, she informed me. (I was reading Edward Roux's Time Longer Than Rope: A History of the Black Man's Struggle for Freedom in South Africa , a volume of which Mattie also approved, although I was finding its lengthy discussion of the early days of the South African Communist Party heavy going.) We started talking about journalism and history, and I ended up writing out a reading list for her. Then Mattie surprised me by suddenly saying, "I'm just not used to this. That's why I was so stroppy."

"Not used to what?"

Mattie looked off in the direction of the mosque and replied very carefully. "I have never spent so much time with just one person before."

"Never?"

"No. Maybe a day or something, but never just continuously, one day after the other like this. There have always been lots of people around me. My family, my friends, my schoolmates. So this is weird for me. And confusing."

"You, confused? I don't believe it."

Mattie laughed, then grew serious again. "Such as when you were telling me about the railway workers in California, how it was dangerous and some of them got hurt—I couldn't handle that. Because we don't think about America that way. We think of it as this rich, capitalist, imperialist exploiter that sends the CIA out to fuck up progressive movements in the Third World. So when you start telling me about your friends, making them sound like normal working people with normal worries, it fucks me up. It confuses me. It's not your fault, but that's why I get so touchy sometimes."

I took this as an apology and muttered something about how I probably deserved whatever I got. Although Mattie's explanation had shed light on gulfs of cultural difference between us—a life so thoroughly peopled was to me almost unimaginable—I felt closer to her in the wake of her confession. So when she asked me a while later, as we were lying in our sleeping bags, about what sort of writing I

wanted to do, and whether I just planned to travel around forever, I tried to answer her less superficially than I had the night before.

I had recently sold my first feature article to an American national magazine, a long essay about living in a village in Sri Lanka. But I was feeling queasy about the whole business. What was I really doing, I wondered, describing Third World politics and daily life, and all the permutations of my First World reactions thereto, for the leisuretime amusement of those few Americans whose education and class inclined them to read such things? Was I doing anything, that is, beyond satisfying some of the idle curiosity of the wealthy about how the rest of the world lived, beyond irritating and then massaging the thousand loose-waving nerves of liberal guilt? What right did I have to fix real people's lives inside my American frame? And now I was getting inquiries from editors about whether I was planning to write anything about South Africa. No, I was not planning to write a word about South Africa!

"Why not?"

Because it wouldn't do any good. Because I suspected that many of my fellow Americans got a secret kick out of reading about "apartheid," and I didn't want to be the one to give it to them. If I wrote any more magazine articles at all, I announced, I would restrict myself to the lightest subjects—surfing, vacations—for only the breeziest publications.

This announcement drew catcalls from Mattie. She thought the idea stunk. I asked what she thought one could usefully write about South Africa for American readers. She promised to come up with suggestions—but not tonight. Then she fell asleep.

I lay awake feeling conflicted, confused, homesick, and old. Mattie had asked me whether I "just planned to travel around forever," and that had triggered my raving as much as any thoughts about what to write had. I was tired of traveling, tired of being an expatriate, and in some deep sense I wanted to go home. Wandering the world's back roads and byways had begun to seem like a hopelessly self-indulgent thing to be doing. And yet I was no longer sure where home was. How I envied Mattie's clarity, her certainty, her sure sense of connection to even this tortured country. I didn't believe it when she said that her life would be meaningless without her political commitment, but she believed it, and that was what mattered.

I liked traveling with Mattie. She was good company, and she could tell me things about what I saw. Traveling with her also gave things a certain adrenaline edge of outlawry that I liked. But we saw

different countries, Mattie and I. Everywhere she looked, she saw things to done. She saw outrage, injustice, the tabula racista on which she and her comrades would one day write a whole new message. She saw a world to be unmade, and a brave new world to be made. While I saw something infinitely more static and fixed—a place to be contemplated, understood, and described. This difference, between the South Africa Mattie saw and the one I saw, was what made me feel old.

I turned and watched her sleep. I wondered what she thought of me. The uppermost thing in her mind, no doubt, was her mission. In terms of that, I probably figured as some offbeat kind of cover. And otherwise? Mattie wore her scorn for sappy sentiment on her sleeve. And the rigor of her manner discouraged melting thoughts. Besides that, romance would be "bad security," as they said in the struggle. Did she regard me as a teacher, still? I doubted it. In fact, I rather regarded her as one.

84

Estelle returned for us in the morning. Joyously, we tossed our "JHB" sign in a bin. Estelle wanted to visit the Big Hole, she said, before we left Kimberley. This was the town's main tourist attraction: a vast excavation, said to be the world's largest, out of which three tons of diamonds had been mined since the 1880s. We spent an hour there, wandering around a museum gawking at replicas of famous diamonds, walking the streets of a Disneyland-type reconstruction of frontier Kimberley, and gazing into the Big Hole itself. A mile around and half a mile deep, the old mine looked, I thought, like a high mountain lake, a deep blue gem of catchment in some sheer glacial cirque. Mining continued from an ungainly-looking and silent barge. I smiled to recall the description of the Big Hole on the Grassy Park High Touring Club's itinerary: "We will visit the so-called Big Hole, where South Africa's first industrial capitalists, led by the arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes, began to exploit the country's mineral wealth and enrich themselves with our undistributed wages."

As we left Kimberley, we saw two ragged-looking figures on the side of the road ahead, gesturing angrily at the passing traffic. It was the pair of Afrikaners we had met on the bridge the night before. Mattie thrust her head out the passenger window, threw her arms wide, and cried "Cousins!" to the startled hitchhikers. Estelle didn't

get it, but Mattie and I laughed all the way into the Transvaal.

We had left the Karroo the previous afternoon. Now we were in the highveld. The land was green from early summer rains, with rolling grassy plains, small farms, rivers—all very soothing to the Karroo-seared eyes. Although we had left the Cape only two days before, it seemed like longer. Mattie and I were both deeply sunburned; our lips were swollen and cracked; my tongue felt swollen. We traded our stick of "lip ice" back and forth, rolling it on in thick minty layers.

Estelle was in a talkative mood. She told us about the toy manufacturing business she had started, which was booming. With her profits, she said, she had recently bought a "piece of ground" outside Johannesburg, on which she was soon going to build a house. She planned to do everything on the house herself, from the architecture to the laying of the bricks. She would hire a man only for some of the heavy lifting. Her family thought she was mad, Estelle said with a laugh. To be nearly thirty and not even worried about being unmarried! She was becoming "the black sheep," she said. Although she wasn't interested in politics, her relatives accused her of being a kaffirboetie (nigger lover)—Estelle looked ruefully at Mattie when she said this, and I wondered if she had managed to prove herself an "innocent" Afrikaner in Mattie's eyes.

Around midday, we stopped in a small Transvaal town for Estelle to make some phone calls. After she left the car, Mattie also climbed out, saying she would try to find us some snacks. I drowsed in the sun—so that I was caught by surprise when a few minutes later a brown arm, reaching through the car window, silently set a quart bottle of ice-cold Lion Lager in my lap. The bottle had a ribbon tied around the neck. "Happy Christmas," Mattie said.

That beer ranked with the best I have tasted. Mattie laughed in disbelief at my groans of appreciation as I drank, and told me to be quiet, lest I draw unwelcome attention from "the local tannies "—Afrikaner "aunties" known for their devotion to public decency. My puritanical young friend refused to taste a drop herself, although she admitted that her tongue, too, felt swollen. "Not enough Bushman blood on my side of the family," she said.

On we drove to Johannesburg. Billboards multiplied, traffic increased, highways converged, factories and mine dumps appeared on the land, and smog began to rouge the horizon. On the way into the city, we skirted Soweto. At last I got a look, albeit a quick one, at the famous township, which looked exactly like the older townships on

the Cape Flats, only bigger. We passed Baragwanath Hospital, where so many dead, dying, and wounded schoolchildren had been taken in 1976. Then we caught our first glimpse of the knot of downtown skyscrapers. Estelle had offered to take us to the address I had, so we turned left and headed for the northern suburbs. Soon we were cruising wide, shady streets lined with huge homes. Uniformed gardeners watered the lawns in the sultry late afternoon heat. The area looked like Beverly Hills—only bigger. The mansions seemed to go on for miles. Finally, we found the address we sought. Mattie and I dragged ourselves and our bags out of Estelle's car and thanked her inadequately for her kindness. She drove away and we stood staring at what we could see of a long, low, brown stucco house, flanked by very high walls that ran for fifty yards down the street in each direction.

"You didn't mention you were going to prison," Mattie said. That was exactly what the house looked like: some kind of modern jail. The only windows we could see were barred. There was no sign of life.

It took a long time to get any answer at the front door. A black maid in uniform eventually appeared. She regarded the two of us very suspiciously and seemed about to shut the door. Then I mentioned my name, and she relaxed. I was expected. We were ushered into the entranceway. Alex appeared, looking pleased to see me safe and sound, but more than a little taken aback to see Mattie. We were escorted farther into what looked to be a vast house.

"What is this place?"

Alex laughed. "My sister is house-sitting for some friends of hers. I couldn't believe it, either. Your room is about the fifth one along that passage over there, on the right."

I had arrived just in time for the big Christmas Eve dinner, it seemed, which was due to be served in a couple of hours. Everyone was off getting ready for it now. I just had time to clean up, change, and—and do whatever else I needed to do. Which, I realized, meant "do something with her ." I took Mattie aside and asked her what she wanted to do. She said she wanted to get out of there as soon as possible. She, too, had friends who were expecting her. I went back to Alex, who agreed to let me use one of the house's fleet of cars.

With Mattie navigating, we headed south and west in an aged Morris Mini (the children's Shetland pony, apparently, to all the German and Italian thoroughbreds we had glimpsed gleaming in a long garage). We left the rolling hills and jacaranda-canopied promenades of the northern suburbs, followed a railway line through a warehouse district, then clattered into a maze of bleak brick houses

and concrete tenements. Mattie had been here before and kept seeing beer halls and street corners she recognized, but she could not find her friend's house. The streets were full of people, many of whom bent over to peer through the windows of our car, yet stopping to ask directions seemed unwise. "I guess they don't see many whiteys around here," Mattie said, in reference to the shouts that erupted repeatedly in our wake. I was just glad we had not borrowed a Mercedes or a vintage Alfa for this trip. Finally, we saw a woman in an otherwise empty road. We stopped. Mattie mentioned the name of her friend. And the woman directed us to his house without hesitation.

I dropped Mattie off outside the back unit in a shabby old duplex built against a hill. A girl of about sixteen came out and hugged her, followed by an old woman who remained in the doorway and several little kids who ran around excitedly. Mattie and I stood there, searching for something to say. "Perhaps you'd like to meet Mohamed," she said, gesturing toward the duplex. But her friend said, "He's sleeping." Mattie shrugged and said, "Anyway, he's banned. So who could introduce you?" She laughed her hacking, ironic laugh. "Joke," she said to me. "He can only be in the same room with one other person who's not in his family."

"I got it," I said.

"Well, okay. Then see you around."

"See you around. Merry Christmas."

85

Rising early and making tea or coffee for any tea- or coffee-drinking companions who seemed to be stirring was my usual way of starting the day. In Rondebosch, this habit seemed to amuse Alex and Fiona, who would make remarks about my livery ("Really must get the boy new khakis") and my political correctness ("And the intellectuals shall wait upon the workers!"), but in Johannesburg, staying in that vast house in the northern suburbs, I never managed to indulge it. Every morning, my first waking impression was of a uniformed figure gliding from the child's bedroom where I slept. On a tray on the table beside my bed would be a small pot of hot coffee, a silver urn of hot milk, and a china cup and saucer. This was how most white South Africans started the day, I knew, but it must have been three, possibly even four days before I got used to it.

The house itself I never did get used to. It contained at least

twenty rooms, which jutted off, fell away, and turned back on each other at such a variety of angles that it was entirely possible to get lost in transit between wings. Over the week that I stayed there, I repeatedly ended up, while trying to find the kitchen, in a small, crowded study of some kind, without ever understanding how I got there. Neither did I understand the architect's intentions with respect to the domes, alcoves, split levels, skylights, and oddly curved walls that seemed to litter the house at random. It was as though each room had been designed by a different person and each designer made to work with a different set of gimmicks. One unifying feature of the house was its lack of windows, and the fact that none of the few windows could be opened. This gave the house a certain uniform airlessness.

There were plenty of sliding glass doors, opening out onto the terraces, swimming pool, and wide sloping lawns of the backyard. The problem was that the six or seven Great Danes that patrolled the backyard would instantly surge into the house through any door opened onto their domain. Outdoors, these dogs were menace enough—huge, filthy, evil-smelling beasts, covered with flies, slobbering and affection-starved. Indoors, they were simply out of the question, bounding hysterically down the halls, skidding on slick floors, knocking over vases and tables and people. So the sliding doors had to remain shut at all times. As a result, the house tended to heat up unbearably over the course of a day. There was supposedly some kind of air conditioning, but none of us could figure out how to turn it on.

In residence, besides Alex and three or four servants and me, were Alex's sister, her husband, and their two-year-old son, who normally lived together in a flat in another part of Johannesburg, and Alex's mother, who was "out from England" on a holiday. The owners of the house were skiing in Europe somewhere, so calling them for advice about how their house worked was out, although the lack of air conditioning was only one of many similar problems. The house was loaded with technology that only the servants, and they only sometimes, knew how to use. Again and again, while groping my way through some dim passage or antechamber, I would come upon fellow guests punching away hopelessly at light-switch panels the size of drafting tables. Heating up some water on the stove required a degree in electrical engineering. Without the servants, I became convinced, the rest of us would have all starved to death in the dark, since none of us ever mastered the multitiered security system that controlled the one door that led to the outside world.

Although the house was kept dusted and polished by the several maids, it also gave an impression of profound neglect. The little items with which any house is stocked all seemed to be missing—there were no clothes hangers, no razor blades, no pens that worked. Much of the house's gadgetry was simply broken: the intercom system, the trash compactor, the garbage disposal. The swimming pool's custom-designed self-cleaner was acting up and poisoning rather than purifying the water. Even the basic appliances like the washing machine were on the blink. Going out to buy the little things the house needed turned out to be a major enterprise, since it was miles to the nearest shops. And then there was the security system, inhibiting casual outings with its arsenal of sirens, buzzers, floodlights, and automatic armed response.

So the house as a metaphor for white South Africa was inescapable, so to speak. The airless luxury, the helplessness of the masters without their servants, the sense of being trapped inside an overheated, incomprehensible labyrinth—it was all so like being white under apartheid.

The most alarming part was the way that staying there began to affect me. The house got on my nerves like a rash, until I felt like screaming highly un-guestlike questions at the ceiling. Why can't we go in the swimming pool today? Why are there no more Ping-Pong balls? Why must the backyard be a sea of dog waste? Although the servants were the obvious people to ask these questions of, and although I began to suspect that the gardener deliberately left rafts of dog waste outside each sliding glass door so as to increase the privacy of his little cottage at the bottom of the backyard, I did not ask them. I was ashamed enough just to be thinking them.

In this state of mind, fighting this rising tide of self-disgust and rage over Ping-Pong balls, I was somehow especially ill prepared for what I found in the stack of mail Fiona brought when she flew up from Cape Town on Christmas Day: a copy, the first I had seen, of the American magazine that contained my essay about living in a village in Sri Lanka. I took one look at the magazine and thrust it to the bottom of my backpack. The next morning, I tried to feed the magazine to the trash compactor in the kitchen. "That machine do not work," a maid named Sunny said, having come up behind me silently. She took the magazine from me, studied it, and took it with her back to her living quarters. I hadn't bothered to think through my reaction to the sight of that essay in that magazine, but I knew that my mortification, my sense of unworthiness, had everything to do with

the Sunnys of the world, and with my having somehow appropriated their misery for my own dubious purposes—for the entertainment of the sort of people who owned this house, in fact. So I could appreciate the poetic justice of her rescuing the magazine from the shredder—she was scarcely literate, so what she planned to do with it was a mystery to me—and I returned to my child's bedroom and my little pot of coffee without further tantrum. Also in the stack of mail from Cape Town was a telegram from Rachel saying that there had been some kind of foul-up in Zimbabwe and that she might not have a job at the university there after all.

I had a pretty dismal Christmas, all things considered. The dinner on Christmas Eve was lavish, but I knew only a handful of the twenty-odd guests, and I was too tired from Karroo-crossing to enjoy it. There were gifts on Christmas itself, and a certain amount of family holiday feeling, but it was not my family, and I did not feel close to anyone in it.

Alex's sister was a speech therapist; her husband was a management consultant. Both of them were thrilled with their luxury house-sit and conducted regular guided tours around the house for friends and acquaintances, each time pronouncing the Pierneef landscapes (the house contained a number of canvases by the eminent South African painter Pierneef) "vital" and the little waterfall by the swimming pool "clever." Their son was painfully spoiled, and kept up a near-continual screeching while parents and servants scurried around trying to pacify him with sweets and toys.

Alex himself was listless and withdrawn. From what I saw of his and his sister's interaction, his decision to hide his head in books in distant corners of the house whenever possible, and to nod agreeably and do as he was instructed the rest of the time, seemed understandable. His sister was older and obviously felt some profound compulsion to dominate and criticize him.

Their mother made some attempts to referee and, under the circumstances, I got along best with her. She was a charming woman, with a wealth of stories about her years as the young wife of a game warden in what is now Zambia. These tales—of marauding elephants and man-eating lions a hundred miles up the Zambezi River from the nearest road—I discovered in the course of several long conversations held in an alcove overlooking the poisoned little swimming pool. Sometimes Alex's mother would sigh and compare her present life in England, where she and her husband were the caretakers of a barrister's country house and garden, and hunted rabbits rather than

rhinos—and could not afford the air fare for both of them to visit their children—with those adventurous days gone by. But she remained a breath of jolly fresh air in that vast, claustrophobic house.

For my part, I made myself scarce after a day or so, spending virtually all my waking hours wandering around Johannesburg.

86

I had things to do in the city, which entailed visits to bookstores, offices (of organizations offering bursaries for which Grassy Park High students had applied), and the library at Witwatersrand University. These errands took only a fraction of the time I had at my disposal, though; I filled many more hours simply wandering at random around the city. I walked, hitchhiked, and rode municipal buses—the Morris Mini was not loaned again. And I saw a different Johannesburg from the one I had seen eleven months before.

It was no less wealthy or Western, but its pizzerias and supermarkets no longer knocked me out, its whites-only gun shops no longer gave me pause. Seeing the hotel where we had spent our first night in the country, passing the deli where my eyes had filled over a bite of real cheese, I got the sort of fond jolt that usually comes with a memory many years old. Not that I didn't find the downtown streets exciting now. The Africans in central Johannesburg had far more flash and sparkle than the blacks in downtown Cape Town did, I thought. Or maybe it was just that I had grown used to the English, Afrikaans, and Xhosa one heard on Cape Town streets, and found the din of Zulu, Tswana, and Sotho that filled the thin and hectic air of Johannesburg—Egoli, the Africans called it, the city of gold—exotic. But the people, the blacks, seemed more confident, more raucous, too, both more "modern" and more "tribal." I listened to a man whose face bore a network of ritual scars play electric guitar on a street corner in the financial district. He had a small amplifier, and the chords he played, which were both bluesy and unmistakably southern African, bounced off the steel and glass walls of the skyscrapers with a poignancy and plaintive beauty not quite like anything I had heard before.

My sense of Johannesburg as a whole was much expanded since my earlier visit. It is essentially a gold-rush town that has not stopped booming since it was a clump of dirty tents less than a hundred years ago, and I now strolled its parks and malls always aware of the tremendous warren of tunnels underneath my feet—and of the myriad

"compounds" outside the city where migrant workers from every corner of southern Africa lived without their families between long, dark, dangerous shifts in the mines. Those miners and the arbitrary value of the yellow metal they spent their lives extracting from the earth were the spring from which all of Johannesburg's wealth flowed. They were the only reason the city was built. Indeed, South Africa as we know it would never have existed without the Witwatersrand gold. It was easy to forget that bizarre yet basic fact while living in the Cape, but in Johannesburg one felt close to the harsh, thudding heart of the country.

I fell in with an assortment of people in the course of my roaming. An Indian businessman who picked me up hitchhiking took me to lunch. An African clerk with whom I played chess in Joubert Park invited me to visit him and his family in Orlando West, Soweto. I went into a downtown cafeteria for lunch one day and found myself surrounded by a group of curious municipal workers who first wanted to know why I was eating there—no apartheid signs were posted, but mine was the only white face in the large and crowded room—and then, discovering I was American, wanted to know all I could tell them about Mike Weaver. That same evening, by way of the broadest possible contrast, I spent in a gently lit café in fashionable Hillbrow, having run into two young women in a bookstore whom I knew slightly from Rondebosch—they were UCT students, home for the holidays—who insisted on taking me to hear their friend play sixties-style folk music while we sipped wine and ate impala steaks.

The strangest crew I fell in with consisted of four young Afrikaners on motorcycles from the white working-class suburb of Vrededorp. One of them, Mickey, had picked me up hitchhiking and invited me to his friend Kiewit's house. Kiewit's parents were away visiting relatives, Mickey said, so they were going to have a jol . Kiewit's parents' house turned out to be a small, white-brick affair somewhere deep in a maze of blocks of identical houses. Three late-model touring bikes stood in the driveway, and Kiewit and his friends, Hennie and Dirk, were busy fussing over them when we arrived.

They were a colorless bunch to look at, all quite pale, with longish dirty brown hair. "This ou 's from America, kêrels [gents]," Mickey announced, and they each wiped their hands and shook mine eagerly. After that, however, they couldn't seem to find much to say to me—their English was minimal, I began to suspect—and they soon returned to their bikes. Mickey, saddled with talking to me, nodded toward the house, from which a barrage of anonymous rock music

poured, and asked me how I liked Boston.

I said that I had never spent more than a week or two there, but that I liked it fine.

Mickey looked distrubed and began oiling his bike, too.

Later, Kiewit took me into the house. He and the others had been taking turns running in and out, and now Kiewit showed me why. There was a half-empty bottle of brandy standing just inside the front door. I pleased Kiewit by taking a belt. Glancing around the front room, I realized what had happened with Mickey a few minutes before. The record on the stereo had been made by an American band called Boston.

While communication with my newfound friends continued to be bedeviled by such missed cultural connections, the brandy eventually took some of the edges off our conversation. I discovered that all four of them worked at the post office and that all four of them still lived at home with their parents. Their English was indeed poor—worse than that of my worst students at Grassy Park High. So we talked in a crude pidgin that relied heavily on the few Afrikaans curse words I knew—which seemed to be the heart and soul of my companions' vocabulary, too. None of them had finished high school, and none of them seemed to know anything much about the world beyond Vrededorp—except what they had seen in the army. (Hennie asked me if California was a bigger city than Joburg, and no one blinked.)

The army had obviously made a huge impression on all of them. With increasing frequency as the brandy disappeared, Kiewit began breaking into drill chants and marching songs, insisting that his friends roar their parts of the call-and-response routines and looking aggrieved when I declined to learn any lines. Mickey had apparently disgraced himself in the army somehow, and his friends taunted him about the incident. All I could gather was that he had become separated from his squadron while on patrol "on the border," and had been helped back to camp by a local woman. Mickey clearly hated being reminded of this misadventure. He kept threatening to donder anyone who mentioned it. But his friends only laughed harder when he glared and teased him more gleefully.

As the sun went down, talk turned increasingly to "the club." This was a lekker night spot, I was told. I would love it. The women were beautiful, plentiful, and amorous. Kiewit favored us with several repetitions of a scarcely credible tale about his success the night before with "this English chickie" whom he had met at the club. His friends finally diverted him from this anecdote by asking Kiewit if he

was sure he wasn't thinking of "the coon girl"—they indicated the servants' quarters behind his parents' house—whom he might have confused in his extreme drunkenness with the English beauty of his dreams. This suggestion infuriated Kiewit and, like Mickey's little Waterloo in Namibia, immediately became a theme for the evening.

I was happy to be leaving Kiewit's house for the club, since I was lost and did not fancy trying to walk from the depths of Vrededorp to somewhere else, but I was not properly attired for the club, Mickey said. He insisted that I put on a pair of his "stoves"—narrow-ankled white Levi's. He and the others were all wearing them, and there was no reason I should be left out. Although they were several inches too short for me, and I thought they looked ridiculous on the others even when they fit, I put on the pants and we set off for the club, which turned out to be in downtown Johannesburg.

The manager of the Club Europa shared my opinion of "stoves," it seemed. After a long argument at the door, he finally agreed to let us into the place, but only if we sat at a table off in the shadows and did not go on the dance floor. Another problem then arose: a cash-flow problem concerning the cover charge. I had loaned my companions several rands before I realized the true state of our party's financial affairs—which was that they had little or no money among them and were expecting me to pick up the tab for the evening. I bought the first round of drinks and resolved to nurse mine.

Looking around the room, it was easy to see why the manager had been concerned about our group's appearance. While we sported T-shirts, jeans, and motorcycle boots, the other men in the club all wore coats and ties or their best safari suits. The women were also dressed to the teeth. My companions obviously fancied themselves a sort of biker outlaw faction at the Club Europa, and I noticed that they had each adopted rebellious sneers as soon as we entered. If this act was meant to attract adventurous women, I had serious doubts about its efficacy, especially as Kiewit and friends began to turn the air above our table blue with some of their raunchiest talk yet.

Meanwhile, everyone else seemed to be having a wonderful time. There were probably two hundred people in the club, most of them in their twenties, but a good proportion of them middle-aged. Virtually everyone seemed to be Afrikaans. The scene reminded me of a bar somewhere in the American West more than it did a big-city discotheque. The older men all looked like Idaho truck drivers: potbellied, ruddy, muscular, with brilliantined hair and a fondness for polyester. The women wore unfashionable pantsuits, and the icy expressions

behind their makeup could be seen melting into unpretentious grins whenever somebody spoke to them. I saw lone males shaking hands and forming teams, and I overheard boys urging tables full of strangers to go over and ask their sisters to dance.

Nobody asked the post office clerks cum hoodlums at our table to dance with their sisters. And their company became steadily less charming as everyone else in the club ignored them. Conversation began turning back compulsively to Kiewit's chances of getting some "coon poes " when he got home that night. Finally, after Mickey ordered a second round for the table, I couldn't take any more. I went to the men's room and changed back into my own pants. I rolled up Mickey's "stoves" and gave them to a club employee standing near the street door. As I pointed out the table to which I wished he would deliver the parcel, I noticed a barmaid standing beside my erstwhile companions waiting to be paid. I made my exit, and I jogged all the way through the dark and silent Johannesburg financial district to the depot for buses to the northern suburbs.

"Real rock spiders!" was the delighted pronouncement of the breakfast table the next morning when I described Mickey, Kiewit, Hennie, and Dirk.

"You've actually met some! They're not easy to meet!"

"I've never even been to Vrededorp, though I've been riding past it all my life!"

"Now you can see why this country's politics are such a cock-up! It's because such people have the vote!"

Over the next few days, I was asked to recount my escapade with "the Vrededorp jaapies " again and again for friends and visitors—until I feared I might become part of the guided tour, after the Pierneefs and the waterfall. But I quickly lost interest in the story myself. I didn't share the wealthy liberal's notion that poor, ignorant Afrikaners were the cause of all of South Africa's problems, and I didn't like to feed that conceit. If anything, I felt more sympathetic to the fears of the uneducated white supremacist than to the disdain of the wealthy sophisticate. It was the former's unskilled job that was threatened by the prospect of black advancement, not the latter's investments. It wasn't that "such people" had the vote, but that so many others did not.

At the same time, I had been pretty well horrified by the mentality of the boys from Vrededorp, such as I had glimpsed it. We hadn't talked politics, we hadn't discussed "race"—we hadn't needed to. Mat-

tie was right when she said that you didn't have to talk at length with every white you met to know where he or she stood. And Clive had been right, really, with his blanket damnations of the white working class while we sat on the station platform at Muizenberg. Mickey and his friends were descendants of the bywoners , the Boers who had lost their farms during the first decades of the century and moved to the cities. They had scrambled out of poverty with the help of the government and at the expense of blacks. Upper-class Afrikaners like the people on that Boland wine farm ran the government, but post office clerks were the backbone of the National Party.

I disliked sweeping generalizations and ironclad pigeonholes and preferred to look at people first as individuals, but I was beginning to have to admit the shortcomings of this approach in a situation like South Africa's. I was also beginning to tire of a longtime traveling habit of mine: the uncontrolled digression; the side trip without a point; experience for its own sake.

87

Mattie was not an easy person to reach while we were in Johannesburg. I had a phone number for her, but the people who answered there never acknowledged that they knew her; they simply offered to take messages. Mattie returned my calls, but she had to use a pay phone, she said, and functioning pay phones were scarce where she was staying. She was also extremely busy, she said, running all over the Rand. I was surprised, therefore, when, a few days after Christmas, she suddenly announced that she had arranged for me to meet someone who could give me better advice than she could about what was worth writing about South Africa: Zwelakhe Sisulu, news editor of the Sunday Post and president of the Media Writers Association of South Africa, a national union of black journalists. I had mentioned Sisulu a couple of times in conversation with Mattie but had never considered that she might have access to him. She had made the appointment of her own accord, and I was touched as well as grateful.

Sisulu had caught my attention a couple of months before with his address to his union's national congress in Cape Town, which read in part: "In our situation, the question is not whether one is a propagandist or not, but whether one is a collaborationist propagandist or a revolutionary propagandist. Because we have expressed a desire for radical change in the scheme of things, we must be propagandists for

change. It has been said that there are no politics of neutrality in this country and conversely there cannot be a journalism of neutrality. We accept that the press has to be responsible, but responsibility of the press in this context merely means co-option—that the press must not interrupt social coherence at the expense of political fulfillment."

I began to prepare some questions about the uses and abuses of a "journalism of neutrality," and to wonder whether or not I should ask Sisulu anything about his parents. His father, Walter Sisulu, was serving a life sentence on Robben Island. A former secretary-general of the ANC and still a hero throughout black South Africa, he had been jailed for sabotage since 1963. His wife, Albertina—Zwelakhe's mother—had been banned continually since 1964.

On the day before we were scheduled to meet, however, Zwelakhe Sisulu was himself banned for three years. By order of the Minister of Justice, he was forbidden to leave his house between 7 P.M. and 6 A.M. on weekdays and was under blanket house arrest over weekends and public holidays. He was forbidden to receive visitors other than his parents, his in-laws, or a medical doctor. He was forbidden to enter any newspaper office, industrial complex, or educational institution. He was forbidden to attend any social or political gatherings. He was forbidden to enter any black residential area other than the part of Soweto in which he lived, and he was confined under all circumstances to the Johannesburg magisterial district. As with all banned persons, it became a criminal offense to quote him or to publish his photograph. As with all banned persons, no reasons for the banning order were given. Sisulu's career as a journalist and trade unionist was simply terminated that day, for a minimum of three years. He was removed from society. Another vital figure erased.

The next time I spoke to Mattie, I told her I still wanted to go to Soweto, if only just to see the place. She said she would try to arrange something, and we met the next day outside a black cinema in west Johannesburg. An Indian friend of hers would drive us to Soweto in his car, Mattie said. There were people expecting us there, some of whom I might find interesting. We set off on foot for our driver's house—there were no "white" buses plying the route. It was a couple of miles' walk, which gave us time to talk.

Mattie was curious about my luxury billet, and she howled with laughter at my descriptions of life inside the "prison" in the northern suburbs. Then she admitted that she had been feeling nonplussed and impatient herself during much of the past few days. Her main business in Johannesburg had been accomplished during a couple of meet-

ings of "the executive." She would be ready to return to the Cape as soon as a few last questions had been settled. In the meantime, her time was her own, and she had been using it to check out as many local political groups as possible. "But some of these people up here, I just don't know about them," she said, and she shook her head. The night before, Mattie said, she had gone to a meeting in Lenasia, an Indian township near Soweto, of the Unity Movement's local chapter. "I'm telling you, Bill, it was pathetic . Just a talking shop, nothing more. They all think we're still in the 1950s or something." A visit she had paid to the home of Zindzi Mandela had been much more inspiring, it seemed.

I pointed out a piece of graffiti on a bus shelter we were passing. "ANC," it read, in big, hurried letters.

"Ja, " Mattie said quietly. "You don't see that in Cape Town."

"The lines seem more sharply drawn up here," I said.

"For so-called coloreds, they definitely are. The system oppresses all blacks more equally here. These Transvaal Boers don't hate you less if you're classified colored, like some of the Cape Boers do. In fact, they hate you more . Your existence proves that their oupa slept with African women."

"I didn't mean color lines. I meant battle lines."

Mattie shrugged. "Same thing in South Africa," she said.

We had been following a dusty, truck-filled thoroughfare. Now we turned off, hiked up an embankment, and entered a treeless suburb of low-roofed, pastel-colored houses. I followed Mattie to the door of a yellow stucco house. An older woman let us in, but Mattie's friend was not there. We waited in the front room, sitting on hard-backed chairs set against the walls, drinking tea and nibbling on spicy pastries called samoosas . The house smelled of Indian cooking and incense. Finally, the phone rang. It was Mattie's friend. Something had come up. He couldn't go to Soweto today. Mattie was embarrassed. I was disappointed. She said she might be able to arrange something for the following afternoon, and I walked back to white Johannesburg by myself.

The next morning, Mattie dumbfounded me by turning up at the front door where I was staying with three Ping-Pong balls in her hand. Mattie seemed to get a kick out of my expression. "You said there was a table but no balls," she said, pushing past me. "Are you prepared to be beaten?"

I gave Mattie a quick tour of the house. She found the Pierneefs "smart," but virtually everything else "disgusting." Then we raided

the kitchen, turned up the radio, and got down to Ping-Pong. The maids muttered darkly, but everyone else was out, fortunately. Mattie would not say how she had managed to find the house again or how she had gotten there. "My secret, your serve," she barked, slashing at the air with her paddle. We were evenly matched at Ping-Pong, and we had some good games. But then the house began to heat up. We decided to make another run at Soweto.

Mattie did not have transport arranged this time. So we hitchhiked downtown and made our way to the main Johannesburg railway station. Mattie bought two tickets for Soweto and we headed for the platform. But trains for Soweto, it turned out, ran from what was virtually a separate station—the "Non-White" station—and I felt hopelessly conspicuous as we hurried through a grimy entrance hall toward the gates to the train. A black ticket checker stepped into my path. He ignored the ticket I thrust toward him. Watching me closely, he just kept saying, "I'm sorry, sir. I'm sorry, sir."

We retreated and reviewed our options. Buses were out for the same reason as trains. Share-taxis would never take me, either—they had enough problems with the law already. We couldn't afford a private taxi, even if we could convince a driver to break the law by taking me to Soweto without a permit. I certainly couldn't afford to rent a car. We might be able to hitch a ride in the direction of Soweto, although it was unlikely that anyone going into the township would be willing to take me in. Going in without any way to leave again was foolish and presumptuous, in any case. And simply walking into Soweto, over hill and dale, was, for a white, according to Mattie, an even more foolish plan.

While we weighed and rejected these possibilities, we were walking in the general direction of Soweto, and hitchhiking cursorily. We got a couple of short rides, and found ourselves trudging through a sparsely built industrial area. It was here that I noticed a road sign for "Crown Mines." Alex and Fiona had often mentioned Crown Mines. They had lived there while they were Wits students. I even had an address in Crown Mines, where some friends in Rondebosch had said I would be welcome to stay. At my suggestion, we turned and followed the road indicated by the sign.

The road went under a railway line—through a narrow, timberframed underpass—and seemed to emerge in another country. Crown Mines was an old mining village. Rich-hued and sleepy in the summer heat, with abundant hedges and blooming hydrangeas tumbling over ramshackle fences, the little community sat at the center of a ring of

grassy hills, like a fascicle of flowers floating in a bowl. Mattie and I walked up and down the three or four short, unkempt streets quietly, as if we had wandered into someone else's dream. There was an old wooden church shaded by weeping willows. A stereo played country blues behind a screen door. Two little boys—one black, one white—pedaled by on tricycles. Then a young white guy in overalls crawled out from under a Volkswagen and gave us directions to the address I showed him. We found the house. It was a pleasant-looking old place with a screened-in porch and a rusting metal roof.

Nobody answered my knock at the front door, but we could hear a radio playing inside. I tried the door and found it unlocked, and we went in. The house was cool and cluttered and airy. We went through to the kitchen and found a young African man sitting at the kitchen table sewing a patch on a jacket. Our appearance startled him. He turned down his radio. I explained whom we were looking for.

"She is not here," he said. "She's gone to Cape Town. No one is here. They're all gone on holiday. I'm looking after the place."

We introduced ourselves. His name, he said, was Abraham. He put the kettle on for tea and said that if we needed a place, we were welcome to stay in the house. Mattie and I looked at one another. What an idea! Mattie had been complaining about the place where she was staying—indeed, I had decided that the reason she had come over so unexpectedly that morning had been to escape from all the wrangling there. For my part—who wouldn't prefer the lovely, elegiac atmosphere of Crown Mines to my situation in the northern suburbs? When our tea was made, Abraham returned to his sewing, and Mattie and I took our cups and wandered through the house. There was a living room and three bedrooms, all full of plants and books and posters. We sat in a fuchsia-bordered bay window that looked out on the street, sipped our tea, and decided to come back the next day with our things. It really was like some charmed otherworld, Crown Mines. Both Soweto and white Johannesburg seemed very far away.

We told Abraham we would see him the next day and walked back out through the looking glass/railway underpass. It was too late now to go to Soweto today, Mattie said. She had things to do, anyway. A bus came by, with its destination marquee showing the name of the township Mattie was staying in. She flagged it down, squeezed my arm, and was gone.

I continued along, past marshy fields littered with the shells of stripped cars. I could see Soweto in the distance, its endless rows of metal roofs shining in the sun. Why did I want to go there? If it was

simply to see the place, the government ran sightseeing tours five days a week. These approached the city as if it were a game park, whisking white tourists out from downtown in air-conditioned buses, with scheduled stops at a folklore park and a model kindergarten, and a chance to take photos on "Millionaires' Row." No; I hadn't even brought my camera from Cape Town. And I knew what a black township looked like.

But Soweto had, particularly since 1976, a special status among black South African communities. It was not only the largest township in the country; it had also come to be seen as the heart, soul, and leading edge of the freedom struggle. Whether or not this reputation was justified—and it could certainly be argued that the workers in the Eastern Cape were more organized and militant, that the townships around Durban harbored more armed guerrillas, that the people in Sharpeville and the other townships south of Johannesburg were more brutally oppressed and angrily explosive, that the students on the Cape Flats had marched far ahead of their brothers and sisters in Soweto in 1980, and that depoliticized, American-style joller consumerism was more advanced as a culture in Soweto than anywhere else in black South Africa—it was still this mythic stature that made me want to visit Soweto. I had nothing special to do there. I didn't particularly care whom I spoke to, so long as I had a reputable guide, which I assumed Mattie to be. In fact, I realized, I was no different in this respect from those foreign journalists whom I had come to disdain for their skin-deep approach to black South Africa. Soweto was an established locale and bit player in the world media, so I wanted to talk to a Sowetan. Any Sowetan would do.

There was more to it than that, though. There was the feeling, the frustration, that had nagged at me all year in Cape Town: a sense of not being at the center. As Mattie said, the Cape was a peninsula; it was not representative of the country as a whole. And "coloreds" were a special case. And urban blacks were generally less oppressed than the millions who lived on the land. Where exactly the center of things, the true nexus of oppression and rebellion in black South Africa was, nobody seemed to know. It just always seemed to be somewhere else. Of course, "the rural areas" were a hard place to think about coherently, for they were by definition spread all over. And many of them were also, in their own ways, special cases. I sometimes wondered if the key, the nerve center of the liberation movement, was even in South Africa. Was it not, perhaps, in exile, at ANC headquarters in London or Lusaka or Dar es Salaam? This idea I had often heard

scorned by activists—the belief that salvation would come from afar had been a fatal weakness of the freedom struggle for many years. Still, I continued to imagine that the essence of black South Africa, the blood and marrow of that unfledged nation which was preparing to rise, somehow ran in channels I had not yet seen. And Soweto was widely thought of as the center—that was why I wanted to go there.

The more I thought about it, though, the less important a quick visit seemed. I appreciated Mattie's efforts to get me there, but I decided I would survive if I did not make it to Soweto this trip. Soweto was the center of many things, certainly. But Cape Town was the center of others. Durban, Port Elizabeth, Pretoria were also key cities. Even Dar es Salaam had, as they say, a role to play. Grassy Park was only a detail, one panel in a very large tapestry. But I had not come to South Africa to take a poll, or to map the country from end to end. I had blundered in and would blunder through, seeing what I could see.

As things turned out, I never did make it to Soweto that week. Neither did Mattie and I move to Crown Mines. She had too many things to do the next day, she said. I was also busy. Then she said that she was nearly ready to leave Johannesburg and couldn't be bothered moving across the city for just a couple of nights. And I, too, gave up the idea—although I suspected that Mattie's real reasons for not moving to Crown Mines had less to do with logistics than with second thoughts about leaving a difficult situation in a black township for an idyllic, "non-racial" haven in a white area. Also, before I left Johannesburg, a woman whom I met at a New Year's party in the northern suburbs, a friend of Alex's and Fiona's who lived in Crown Mines, disabused me of my fond notions about life in her neighborhood. It only looked as if the place was inhabited entirely by white students, hippies, radicals, and their black friends, she said. In truth, most Crown Mines residents were white miners and their families, who had lived there for generations and who hated the gentle newcomers. These simple working folk were forever calling the police, she said, claiming to have glimpsed violations of the Immorality Act taking place inside the houses of the kaffirboeties . Every time you walked down the road, she said, you could see the curtains in their windows twitch, pulled aside by baleful observers. Last year, she said, there had even been full-scale street fighting, after a mob of longtime residents attacked an afternoon braai at which blacks and whites were dancing together in her front yard.

Mattie and I did get together again a couple of days later, at a shopping mall called Oriental Plaza. It was a crowded, noisy, yet strangely sterile place—a government creation, it had been built to accommodate some of the Indian merchants forced out of the central business district by Group Areas, and by white businessmen covetous of their downtown locations—with hundreds of stalls and shops selling Asian trinkets and discount clothes. We ate samoosas and wandered around. I got into an animated conversation with a young white couple about Sri Lanka, where they had vacationed. When I said something afterward about what a friendly pair they had been, Mattie said, "Whites are so cold. Blacks speak together like that all the time, even if they're complete strangers."

"You know, you should go to work for the government," I said. "You've always got a racial generalization ready to hand."

"And you should watch yourself, before somebody takes you hostage."

I bought a baseball cap at an outdoor stall. The cap it was meant to replace was ready for retirement—I had been wearing it for nearly two years, since Indonesia—but Mattie took the old cap from me and put it on. With her curls springing out from under it, she looked like a short, prettier Luis Tiant. With my permission, she said, she would wear the cap back to Cape Town.

We had never discussed our return travel plans, Mattie and I. I had avoided assuming that we would even make the trip together. But now Mattie said that she would be ready to leave Johannesburg the next morning. I said I would be, too.

"For Durban," she added.

"For Durban? "

Yes, she had people to see in Durban. Besides, she had never been there before. And how far out of the way was it, really?

"Eight hundred kilometers!"

Mattie shrugged and pulled my cap down low over her eyes. "They've got surfing in Durban," she said.

We strolled awhile in silence—out of Oriental Plaza, along a hot quiet street of crumbling warehouses. I finally said I reckoned that anything was better than crossing the Karroo again.

88

Alex's brother-in-law had offered to give Mattie and me a lift across Johannesburg to the highway to Durban. Mattie had said she would be at the house by nine that morning. While we were still eating breakfast, the telephone rang. A servant announced that the call was for Alex. It was someone named Nelson, she said. Alex and I each rushed for phones in different rooms.

Nelson's voice was faraway but energetic. "The tour is going fantastically," he said. "We've been all over the show already. We're in Kimberley now. And we're coming to Joburg today. But we've been having trouble getting in touch with this church group who were meant to tell us where we can stay. So listen, Alex, man, haven't you got a place there where we could kip for a night or two?"

"You don't mean the whole touring club?" Alex's voice was incredulous.

"Yes, of course. Just a place to park this bus, you know. We can sleep on the bus."

I put down the phone and ran into the kitchen, where Alex was talking. He looked distraught. He said, "Hold on, Nelson," and covered the mouthpiece. "What shall I say? They can't come here."

"Why not? There's plenty of room in the backyard. The bus could park down there by the garage. The wall's so high, the neighbors would never see it. They could use the bathroom out by the pool."

Alex's expression was so shocked that I stopped speaking, although the idea of the Grassy Park High Touring Club camping in the backyard had already fixed itself vividly in my mind as both feasible and wonderful, and a number of other points in recommendation of the plan were on the tip of my tongue. Alex turned away.

"Listen, Nelson," he said. "I'm sorry, but there's really no place here. I'm staying with friends myself—"

I left the kitchen. Back at the breakfast table, the others were curious about who was on the phone. I was vague in reply. While I was wondering if we should perhaps postpone leaving for Durban and try to rendezvous with the Touring Club somehow, Mattie arrived at the front door with her rucksack. My companions at breakfast made a fuss over her and insisted that she join us for fresh fruit and coffee. I found that I had lost my appetite, but I sat with the others while they chatted and ate, and I eventually decided that there was no point in suggesting to Mattie that we stick around. Alex's mother politely

questioned the safety of our hitchhiking across the country; Alex's brother-in-law said heartily that he had done it all the time when he was a student. Then he announced that it was time to leave.

Alex finally returned from the kitchen as we were saying our farewells. I tried to signal silently to him that I understood his reluctance to ask his sister's permission for the Touring Club to stay in the yard and that I was sorry I had mentioned the idea, but he would not look at me.

We had an easy trip down to Durban. We caught a ride with a white salesman in a swift little car who took a looping, secondary route, passing through the country towns of Volksrust, Newcastle, and Greytown. It was not the same road that Rachel and I had driven a year before, but the countryside and the season were the same, and it took me back. Upon leaving the Transvaal, we descended the escarpment, from the highveld plateau down to the tropical coastal hills of Natal. We crossed a huge coalfield near Newcastle, where long grimy coal trains snaked through green hills. In the distance to the west, we caught glimpses of the sheer purple eastern wall of the Drakensberg. Then we entered KwaZulu, and started seeing African villages scattered across the hillsides, little groups of mud-walled rondavels with thatched roofs and abstract patterns in black and white and ocher painted around their cavelike doors.

Mattie and I talked little, and our driver did not talk at all. He was a big man, English-speaking, with a mustache and sunglasses and skin like rare roast beef. He made a number of brief calls on customers at car dealerships and garages. At most of these stops, black children in rags came around the car to beg. I asked Mattie if she had seen this sort of thing before. "Not quite like this," she said. Her voice was low and troubled. She gave a few cents to each child who approached until she had no more change. A black gas station attendant chased a group of children away from the car at one place, then grinned ingratiatingly at us. I asked Mattie if she understood Zulu. "Sakubona,"^[*] she said quietly. "And amandla ngawethu . That's about it."

The sections of KwaZulu we passed through were arid but heavily populated. Women walked along the road with earthen jugs balanced on their heads. Barefoot boys herded cattle. Men smoking pipes stood under trees with knobkerries under their arms. Mattie had her nose pressed to the window, her eyes glued to the passing scene. This tour

* Zulu greeting.

of ours, I thought, would probably prove at least as educational for her as it would for me—even if I was the only one taking notes. Mattie gave a grunt of approval as we passed a sign indicating the road to a monument at Isandhlwana. Isandhlwana was where the Zulu army had defeated a British imperial regiment in 1879, killing eight hundred Englishmen. I glanced over my shoulder. Mattie grinned and gave me a raised-fist salute.

We arrived in Durban in the early evening. It was overcast and muggy, and the streets were deserted where the salesman dropped us. We walked down rows of shuttered Indian clothing shops, past a park full of British colonial statuary. The skyline of the city's waterfront—a row of tall, heavy, undistinguished buildings—rose up in the east. At an Indian café, Mattie made phone calls while I sipped tea and watched night descend on a Muslim cemetery across the street. Durban, I had read, was the largest Indian city in the world outside India—there were more Indians living here than whites, than "coloreds," than Africans. Mattie was unable to reach her main contacts, but said she had spoken to one guy who had offered us a place to stay. "That's quite an exclusive area," the proprietor said when we told him the address. It had begun to rain, so we let him call us a cab.

The cab took us to a sprawling, split-level house perched on a hillside. The door was answered by a little girl, who took one look at us and screamed, "Pat!" Pat appeared. He was a tall, overweight Indian medical student. He and Mattie had obviously met before. He shook my hand and brought us inside. The house rose up from the entrance hall, then fanned out to either side. Except for the painting of Krishna at the top of the stairs, the house could have been anywhere in the hills outside Los Angeles where I grew up. We met Pat's mother and grandmother, both of whom wore saris. They sat us down and fed us curry, sambol, and yellow rice, with chapati on the side. I noticed Pat's grandmother lecturing his little sister in the kitchen in Hindi, and heard the little girl answering in English.

After dinner, Pat and Mattie and I repaired to a small, windowless lounge. Mattie surprised me by shaking her head when I began to pull out my notebook. Pat, who did not strike me as the paranoid political activist type, politely ignored the exchange. I put the notebook away, and he began to bring Mattie up to date on recent developments at his university. Names I did not know soon filled the air, and he and Mattie became embroiled in a complicated doctrinal debate about "the BC line" being taken by a student organization Pat apparently headed. To amuse myself, I began to count the acronyms they

used—those I knew, and those I didn't. There were twenty-one of the former, somewhat fewer of the latter. But I began to sense that my presence was becoming a constraint. So I retired to the guest room that Pat's mother had indicated was mine for the night.

As I lay in bed, I could still hear, through the wall, Mattie and Pat talking. Then the doorbell rang, and at least two more voices joined theirs in the rise and fall of intent conversation. Perhaps these others were the people whom Mattie needed to see in Durban. All these kids, I thought, trying to forge a viable resistance out of the bottomless grievance and scattered forces of the black majority. What a long, dark, difficult road it seemed, from the splintered resistance of that historical moment to a full-fledged national liberation movement. There were the ANC and the PAC, of course, but they were in exile. There were the new black trade unions, which were still struggling to get off the ground. There were the tiny aboveground political organizations—AZAPO, the Unity Movement—and all the student, civic, professional, ad hoc, and single-issue organizations. But could these many disparate groups ever come together beneath one banner and act? How would the crucial links be forged, and when? Could the ANC lead the way? How large, how powerful, could the underground become in this computerized police state?

89

"I suppose you want to go surfing straightaway," Mattie said in the morning. We were drinking coffee in Pat's dining room, while the rest of the household bustled around us, getting ready for work and school. Mattie looked as though she had hardly slept.

I said I had surfed in Durban before. In fact, I had agreed to travel this way only because Mattie wanted to—I was not interested in mediocre waves swarming with aggressive adolescents. I asked Mattie what her plans for the day were.

"I have nothing more to do in Durban," she said. "I'm actually ready to leave whenever you are."

"In that case—Transkei, here we come."

We caught a ride down to the highway with Pat's father, a sleek businessman driving a brand-new Mercedes sedan.

"Is it any wonder that Pat talks such shit sometimes?" Mattie asked me, pointing with her chin at Pat's father's car as it glided away from us, headed downtown. We stood in the red mud beside a freeway

on-ramp. "Naturally he's going to prefer a racial perspective on the struggle. Because he and his family are rich! They're capitalists. No wonder he rejects a class analysis! They want to keep their money and be seen as liberationists both!"

"But aren't a lot of Indians in that position?"

"No. Only a few are. They get all the publicity, but most so-called Indians are poor and oppressed. In fact, they've probably suffered from Group Areas more than any other 'group.' Look." Mattie pointed to a nearby hillside covered with makeshift hovels. "Those are so-called Indians living in those pondoks there."

It was a sparkling, hot, rain-washed morning, and we received a quick series of short rides south, all of them with Indian drivers. We passed through a heavy industrial area behind the Durban port, then wide fields of sugarcane. From the back of a carpenter's Japanese pickup, we watched a series of "white" resorts roll by, each with one or more high-rise hotels or apartment houses set on the bluff above it—"like Monopoly properties," I said, and Mattie snickered.

At Umzinto, we turned inland, and the rides immediately got scarcer. There was very little traffic, and all of it was local: mud-spattered cars and farm trucks, each ride carrying us a few miles farther up into lush, tangled hills where canefields alternated with forests. The sky clouded over, and a rain wind began to blow.

We sheltered from a short, violent downpour under the eaves of a small grocery store attached to a mechanic's shop. There was local produce set out in cardboard boxes underneath the eaves, but it all seemed to be hard green mangoes and nearly black bananas. We bought soft drinks and a roll of biscuits inside the store, where the proprietress was a young black woman with glasses in rhinestone-studded frames. A heavyset white mechanic with long red sideburns emerged from the garage next door to stare at us suspiciously. When I looked back at him, he grunted and disappeared.

The rain stopped, and we returned to the roadside. A flatbed truck came rumbling out of a farm road across the way. I managed to persuade its driver with frantic gestures to let us join the ten or twelve laborers already riding in back, and we clambered aboard. Our companions on the truck seemed astonished to find us in their midst, but we had soon shaken hands all around, and become involved in separate conversations—Mattie with a young guy in sunglasses, I with an older man in a straw hat who said his name was Stephen.

Stephen told me that he had worked in the mines near Johannesburg for fifteen years. "But I never liked the bachelor life," he said.

Agricultural work paid very poorly, but going away for eleven months a year was just not worth it to him anymore. He had five children. One of his sons was studying to become a Methodist minister—Stephen said this with obvious pride.

One of the men who was listening to our conversation said something to Stephen in Xhosa. "This man seeks to know what place you are from."

I told them, and the news went around the group.

Stephen received more instructions in Xhosa. "They seek to know how you find South Africa," he said carefully.

I said I found it a rich and beautiful country, but that the wealth and the power did not seem to me fairly distributed, because the whites had most of it.

Stephen translated, and there was a round of whistles, chuckles, moans, and implosive clicks which I could not interpret. Then Stephen said, "These fellows believe the same, too. It is not a right thing. We have too little money, and too little land, and not enough school for our children." The truck suddenly flew over a rise, tossing us all a foot in the air. Somebody shouted something at Stephen, and everyone in the truck roared with laughter. I asked Stephen for a translation. He said, "He say we must be careful what we speak."

Mattie and I left the truck on the outskirts of the country town of Ixopo. I asked her what the young guy in sunglasses had been saying. "Ag, he was talking a load of shit about Inkatha," she said. "That group really brainwashes these poor ous ."

It was midafternoon now, and much cooler than down on the coast. The hills had opened out, and lifted around us in great green swells, with dark groves of eucalyptus filling the draws. "Listen for the titihoya bird," I said. "This is Cry, the Beloved Country country."

"Is it?"

"Ixopo. Yes."

"Alan Paton was a sellout," Mattie said.

"What?"

"That's right. He wrote about the Alexandra bus boycott of '44, right? People all over the world read his book and thought, 'Hey, here's this great white guy, he's really on the side of the oppressed in South Africa.' But when the Alexandra bus boycott of '57 came, Paton, who was a famous author by then, went and got involved, supposedly on the side of the people. But he was really working for the Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce. He made secret deals to try to end the boycott. He completely sold out the people."

"Where did you hear this?"

"Everybody knows it. He discredited himself completely."

An old Ford came wheeling off the highway onto the shoulder at that moment, spraying gravel and putting an end to this conversation. (I later checked Mattie's story and found that, while there were many versions of Alan Paton's role in the 1957 Alexandra bus boycott, one of them believed by many people, and possessed of a solid body of evidence, did have him working to end the boycott by compromises worked out with the Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce when he had no popular mandate to negotiate on behalf of the fifty thousand black workers who were then walking twenty miles back and forth to their jobs rather than pay increased bus fares. The episode had certainly destroyed Paton's political bona fides among many black South Africans.) The old Ford's driver was a boisterous middle-aged African in a porkpie hat. He had with him a lanky young "colored" guy with sharp yellow eyes. They were headed for Mount Ayliff, in the Transkei, they said. It didn't take us long to see that they were both fairly drunk, as we tore through the hills toward the border station at Umzimkulu. They asked us loud questions about our itinerary, declared that we would spend that night at the driver's house near Mount Ayliff, and passed a bottle of brandy back and forth between them. They also passed a number of rapid, chortling comments in Xhosa back and forth, the sound of which I did not like.

The Umzimkulu border station was a bustling modern facility—"a sick joke," Mattie pronounced the operation, as we were issued five-day visitor's cards, to be surrendered when we left the Transkei. "These people running these bantustans are also playing Monopoly." The atmosphere inside the border station, where uniformed officials laughed and chatted and jauntily stamped documents, really was more like an office party than an international frontier. Our driver and his sidekick, who were already in a festive mood themselves, decided to have a drink in a large, noisy bar attached to the border station, and told us to wait for them in the car. Mattie and I quickly cadged a ride with a young white couple coming out of the border station, and left Umzimkulu without saying good-bye to our friends inside the bar.

The road curved back and forth over the border between the Transkei and Natal several times in the next fifty miles, though there were no more border stations. The couple dropped us at Brooks Nek, at the summit of a long, steep climb up from the town of Kokstad. From there, the next two hundred miles south would be entirely

Transkei, and the change in the landscape at that point was dramatic. Looking to the north and to the east—back into Natal—one gazed upon a Western land of fences, farmhouses, barns, eucalyptus windbreaks in rows, and rectangular fields. Looking south and west, one saw Africa—vast, treeless hills with round white huts scattered almost randomly across them, a myriad of footpaths weaving red lines across the green earth, with small herds of cattle and goats, small plots of corn and vegetables, and human figures dwarfed by the scale of the land. There was a dirt road running off to the southeast at Brooks Nek, with a sign for Port St. Johns, a town—the only town—on the Transkei coast. "I've heard nice things about Port St. Johns," I said. Mattie laughed, then said, "Why not? We've got five days." A bus came by, turning onto the dirt road. We flagged it down. Port St. Johns, the sign said, was 145 kilometers away.

It was a South African Railways bus, coming from Natal, with a Non-Whites Only sign still stuck in the window. The fact that it picked me up was a reminder that petty apartheid would not be applied in the Transkei. The bus was dusty and crowded, and Mattie and I took seats in the back. Many of the people around us had luggage, I noticed. "Contract workers coming home," Mattie whispered. The other passengers began singing a hymn of some kind. "That's a song of homecoming," Mattie guessed.

Whatever it was, it was beautiful, and the singing seemed to carry us along on a wave of Xhosa voices as the bus rumbled over the hills. It was late afternoon; the sun streamed through the streaked, dusty windows. The bus stopped often, to pick up and discharge passengers; people shouted greetings to bicyclists and pedestrians who stood beside the road waiting for us to pass. I moved to a window seat when one became available, as much for the fresh air as for the view—there was a powerful stench of unwashed bodies inside the bus. "Showers to the people," I muttered to Mattie, who frowned, then laughed, widening her eyes in agreement.

"Port St. Johns!" the driver yelled as we stopped at a fork in the road. He was talking to us and pointing down the road he was not taking. Mattie and I grabbed our bags and disembarked.

After the bus had roared away, the immensity of the land seemed to amplify around us. We started walking along a broad-backed ridge. We were now in the midst of the African landscape that we had seen earlier from a distance, and its loveliness was absolutely stunning. The sun was going down, drenching the hills in golden light and deep, glowing shadows. People were cooking and chatting outside their huts, weeding in their corn plots, driving cattle along the spindly

trails, calling to one another, greeting us with shy, curious smiles. We could see a game of soccer in progress on a field on the next ridge west, and we could hear the laughing shouts of the players. The feeling, looking out across the land, was one of seamless community. There seemed to be no villages—just a loose carpet of family kraals . There was a sense of harmony and near-perfect proportion. This land was fully inhabited, fully humanized, yet it did not seem overcrowded or overbuilt. The whole scene bore a strong resemblance to my idea of an earthly paradise.

Which is not to say that the people we saw appeared to be leading a life of leisure. Most of them were working—if not cooking or herding or weeding, then grinding corn, hoeing the earth, or carrying water, firewood, or roof-thatching. They just looked great doing whatever they were doing. The children who ran behind us looked healthy and happy. The place was more than picturesque; it seemed to radiate tranquillity.

"So this is a brutally oppressed and impoverished bantustan," I said.

Mattie harumphed. After a while, she replied, without much conviction, "This is underdevelopment."

"You think they should build an oil refinery on that hill over there?"

Mattie sighed and said nothing. She, too, seemed to be under the countryside's spell, and I told myself to stop baiting her. I really knew better than to equate bucolic charm with the good life. In the case of the Transkei, I had seen the figures—it was one of the poorest states in the world. On a map of South Africa showing zones of economic activity, all the bantustans looked like uninhabited territories. One only had to note the scarcity of ablebodied men in the scene around us to recall the real function of a region like this one in the larger society. And the people here were certainly aware of their exploitation. This area, known as eastern Pondoland, had been the scene of the most significant peasant uprising in recent South African history. It had occurred in 1960, when thousands of tribesmen rebelled against the government-appointed chiefs, established an alternative administration, and even sent a representative, a local tinsmith, to the United Nations, protesting Bantu Education, the pass laws, and the lack of black political representation, as well as local conditions. The Pondoland revolt lasted nine months before it was crushed by the government, which declared a state of emergency and imprisoned nearly five thousand people.

Another bus came along, and carried us as far as Flagstaff, a

crumbling old colonial outpost with a single muddy street and a rambling, low-roofed, arcaded hotel. It was now getting dark, and we were told there would be no more buses to Port St. Johns till morning. So we checked into the hotel. A sleepy clerk showed us to a moldy-smelling room with two beds and a cement floor and a barred window that opened directly onto the street. We left our bags there and went to eat. The only restaurant in town was the hotel dining room, the hotel clerk said. It was a dimly lit, cement-floored, impressively barren place, with half a dozen empty tables. It reminded me of a hundred other decrepit frontier dining rooms I had seen in a dozen other ex-colonies. There was no menu. We were served—by the clerk once again, who for all we knew was also the chef—slabs of tough beef and some slimy, unidentified vegetables.

After dinner, we took a walk up and down Flagstaff's one street. It was Saturday night, and there seemed to be a lot of people out, but the street was extremely dark, so strolling was difficult, and we soon returned to the lighted area under the hotel's arcades. A number of young men joined us there, all of them frightfully drunk. They wanted to know our names, to shake our hands, to buy us drinks, to ask us questions that their English and our Xhosa were not up to. The hotel's all-purpose employee came out and chased them away, and Mattie and I retreated to our room. More drunks soon joined us, by way of our street window. After some more unsuccessful conversation, we yawned theatrically, and closed a pair of heavy wooden shutters that the hotel had thoughtfully provided for the window.

"This is worse than Retreat on Saturday night!" Mattie said.

Over the next hour, while we sat reading, the occasional drunken shouts, howls, and roars in the street grew more frequent. Then the lights went out. It was pitch-black inside the room, and the sound of the hotel's generator grinding to a decisive halt outside suggested that it was going to stay that way till morning. We took our cue and retired.

But falling asleep was impossible while the racket in the street persisted—especially after a tape deck arrived outside our window, playing Boney M's disco version of "Rivers of Babylon" over and over and over.

Then somebody began pounding on the shutters and shouting. I got up and pounded and shouted back.

"it sounds like a lunatic asylum out there," Mattie said, her voice slightly tremulous in the darkness.

Voices and footsteps started echoing in the hotel corridor. I groped

my way to the door and checked the lock. A moment later, somebody started pounding on the door. The pounding on the shutters resumed. The effect was unsettling, to say the least. There were now angry, drunken male voices at both door and window. The pounding seemed to reverberate and build inside the small room, like the wake-up scene in a nightmare. This time, I did not pound back. Instead, Mattie and I sat on the edge of one of the beds, holding hands tightly, and agreed to say nothing. The men trying to get in obviously knew we were in there, but the sound of our voices—especially Mattie's—would only make them crazier, we reasoned. The screaming and roaring up and down the street seemed to be reaching some kind of climax. Bottles were being smashed against the wall just outside our window. I even thought I heard gunshots.

After a couple of minutes, the pounding on the door stopped. The pounding on the shutters stopped soon after that. And the pandemonium in the street slowly died down. But Boney M jangled on, more and more slowly as the tape deck's batteries ran down, and it was hours before I managed to sleep.

90

The hotel's ubiquitous factotum banged on the door first thing in the morning. He had brought us coffee—instant coffee in tin mugs on a beer tray, to be sure, but still a welcome holdover from more decorous days. We asked about the previous night's riot. He clucked his tongue disapprovingly, and said, "Every Saturday night, these people are drinking and troublemaking. And you will never see them in church!" I asked about the chances of getting a bath, and he said there would be hot water soon.

The bathtub was in an ablutions block behind the hotel proper. I wandered out there to watch the hotel man fire up the ancient, coal-burning water heater. It belched brown smoke, which drifted away across the misty, bright green fields. Behind the hotel was a scatter of tin-roofed huts. An old man wrapped in a Basuto blanket came out of one, pissed in the grass, inspected the corn in his vegetable plot, then went to fetch a donkey tethered to a fence post. The old man led the donkey past the spot where I stood, greeting me quietly, and I saw that his blanket was festooned with blue airplanes flying across a red and yellow sky. Behind me, the hotel man hacked bananas from a raft that hung from the eaves outside the kitchen. The scene took

me back to Asia, to the South Pacific—and ahead to "Black Africa." This was the low-rent, arcane travel milieu I had left behind when I came to South Africa. I felt it beckon: the lethean life that allowed me to avoid for weeks at a time thinking too much about what I was and was not doing. When the tank of water was hot, the hotel man took an old steel bucket and began filling the bathtub by hand. Had I said I was tired of traveling? The tub was full of rust and the water quickly cooled, but I couldn't remember the last bath I enjoyed more.

There was, we were told, only one bus from Flagstaff to Port St. Johns on a Sunday morning: Grim Boy. Apparently, the local buses were named, like ships. Mattie and I walked over to a market square where the buses were parked. Flagstaff did not look any the worse for its night of revelry, although it did strike me now, in its physical layout, as a sort of African Dodge City. Two men on their way to church in stiff, black, museum-piece suits helped furnish this conceit. We found buses called Broadway and My Mother's Love before we came upon the one with "Grim Boy" painted in fancy lettering on its flanks. We bought two ears of roasted corn for the ride and were pleased when the bus left only an hour behind schedule.

On the way to Port St. Johns, I suggested to Mattie that we had been vouchsafed a glimpse of the origins of the Afrikaner's obsession with swartgevaar (black peril) the night before. "They may not experience it directly now, in their whites-only suburbs, but it's still their most basic cultural memory—being surrounded by strange, hostile, black people. Think of all the thousands of nights they spent huddled in their homesteads, wondering if the 'natives' would attack that night or not. Think of all that fear, generation after generation of it. I think it makes their paranoia, their racism, their determination to have their own 'group areas,' more understandable."

While she had never admitted to being frightened, the assault on our hotel room the night before had obviously made an impression on Mattie. Her face was drawn and serious. Still, she refused to concede my point. "The Boer's big fear is not of black 'barbarity,'" she said. "It's of black competition. That's what Group Areas and influx control are all about: unfair advantage, privilege, exploitation, not the frontier wars that ended a hundred years ago, and that they won, anyway."

Grim Boy dropped us on the bank of a wide, green river—the Umzimvubu—just short of Port St. Johns. There was a car ferry there, and the first white people we had seen since Natal, and the ocean's salt smell was in the air. We rode the ferry across and got a ride into

town, catching glimpses of the sea in the distance.

Port St. Johns was a pretty place, old and solidly built. It reminded me of a New England fishing village, transferred to the tropics. There were lots of white tourists, their Land Cruisers and station wagons bedecked with canoes and beach chairs. There was even a sign saying Surfing Beach, with an arrow pointing west across the dunes.

We spent the next couple of days in and around Port St. Johns. The "surfing beach" was a wide, sandy cove with an outdoor restaurant under a grove of spreading shade trees. The waves were small and shapeless, but the sea was warm, so I borrowed a surfboard and talked Mattie into the water. She cursed nonstop, clutching the rails of the board, as I pushed her out through the gently slapping lines of white water, then turned her around and shoved her into a wave. She rode it all the way to the beach, lying down, steering between the bathers scattering out of her path, and when she jumped up on the sand and looked back out, I saw that her face was lit with a great, childlike grin. Soon, she was insisting that I let her paddle out herself and catch her own waves, and that I show her how to get to her feet. She was agile and strong, and learned quickly, though she continued to swear continually under her breath.

We stayed in a holiday camp about a mile east of Port St. Johns, on the other side of the Umzimvubu. The shoreline was steep and rocky there—the Transkeian coast is known to sailors as the Wild Coast, and the wind and waves crashing against the headlands made it obvious why. Mattie and I spent our time reading or walking along the cliffs—postponing our return to the highway and Cape Town for as long as we dared.

One conversation we had, while sitting on a sunny point watching Xhosa fishermen pull in galjoen with bamboo poles, is worth noting. Mattie had said that she would tell me what she thought I should try to write about South Africa. Now she admitted that she didn't know. "If people in America want to know what is happening here in South Africa, they can easily find out already. So much has been written. Most of it is banned here, but just from looking at the lists of banned publications, we can see how much is available overseas. The horrors of apartheid are very well documented. Anyway, you haven't spent your time here in the resettlement camps, or the jails. You've been in Grassy Park, at Grassy Park High, where the people aren't hungry or subjected to influx control. You've seen people, particularly the

students, engaged in struggle. But will that sort of thing interest Americans?"

I doubted it. But I was interested in what black South Africans would like to see written about them by Americans.

Mattie pursed her lips. "Frankly, I doubt there is anything you could write that could help us here," she said. "We need international solidarity and material aid, but nobody really expects that to come from America. In fact, we expect America to try to prop up the regime when it begins to fall, just as it is supporting the system now with all its investments here. But you must write for Americans, isn't it? You said you don't like to think of writing just for the ruling-class liberals in America who are the only ones who read. But who else would you write for? I think you must go back there and see for yourself what things are like. You can't run away from it forever. Also, I think you mustn't just give up and write only about surfing. And I say that as one surfer to another!"

On the morning we left Port St. Johns, we stopped for breakfast at an old hotel in the center of town. At a nearby table sat an extremely fat, pink-cheeked priest with a snow-white beard. He stared at us while we ordered, then introduced himself in a loud voice, without getting up, as the proprietor of the place, and started asking us questions. "Where do you people come from?" "How long have you been in the Transkei?" I found his questions rude, the manner of his interrogation outrageous, and the man himself repulsive, and I began to ignore him. But he had already zeroed in on Mattie. When she said she had just finished high school in Cape Town, he demanded to know, "What do you colored children think you're doing, boycotting your classes? Who put you up to that nonsense?"

"Apartheid put us up to it."

"What does disobeying your teachers have to do with apartheid?"

"We were trying to make a connection between the two."

I was amazed that Mattie was willing to keep talking to the man, and that she was able to answer him so levelly. I couldn't even look at him, for as he spoke he was busy stuffing his vast face with fried eggs, ham, and a huge stack of toast, and snapping greasily in Afrikaans at a scared young serving girl.

Now the old priest was claiming not to be a racist. "I live in the Transkei, don't I, where the government of the country itself is black. But there's simply no point in pretending, you know, that Africans can advance from tribalism to modern life in one generation, or even

in several generations! It took us whites thousands of years to achieve this level of civilization."

"First of all, the Transkei is not a country," Mattie said, still as calm as could be. "It's an apartheid labor reserve. And the government isn't a government. It's a lot of hired warders. And the question isn't whether blacks are prepared to act like whites. It is, 'What gives the white minority the right to rule over the black majority?' And the answer is, 'Nothing.'"

No, I thought, the answer is "force of arms." But I didn't say so.

Mattie and the priest went on in this vein until we had finished our meal. Mattie never raised her voice or lost her temper, though the priest continued to produce self-satisfied drivel on every subject they touched. She didn't even react, beyond making a certain, surprised sound in her nose, when the priest declared, "I know how the colored people think. I worked with them for years."

When we got out on the street, I demanded to know how and why Mattie had been able to put up with all the old priest's rubbish, when she blasted me for every remark she considered overly "white." Mattie laughed delightedly and said, "From each according to his capacity, to each according to his need. There's no use getting angry with someone like that. They won't listen anyway. But you, you're not so old. There's still hope for you. You're worth shouting at."

We got a ride from Port St. Johns back to the main Durban-to-Cape Town highway in a BMW with two young Indians from Durban. They were in the Transkei on business, they said—selling appliances. I asked them what it was like doing business in a bantustan, and one of them said, "Very frankly, terrible. The level of graft is appalling. These officials want so much baksheesh that we can't make a profit."

We made a pit stop at a gas station where I stood watching some country women prepare for the hike back to their villages—and suddenly recalled how Rachel and I had been thrilled by the Transkei a year before. How remote, and how benighted, that earlier enthusiasm now seemed. South Africa had relieved me of a virginity I had not known I owned. While Pondoland could still put me in mind of an earthly paradise, and "Black Africa" could still fill the immediate future with a promise of sweet, colorful oblivion, I now looked upon that old passion—to journey to the heart of faraway and tribal places, to lose the white middle-class American self in every form of Third World funkiness—with considerable skepticism. What interested me now, I realized, about the Transkei was not its homemade beer, its

native music, or the white bracelets the witch doctor wore. Indeed, these were some of the same exotica the South African government tried to peddle as evidence that Africans could not be included in a modern political dispensation. What interested me now was the more mundane matter of the region's political life. The newspapers banned, the journalists jailed, the hundreds of political prisoners, the dozens of organizations suppressed by the Matanzima regime, the risk that Reagan would try to make the United States the first country in the world to recognize Transkeian "independence" (he had declared his interest in doing so), the true feelings of most Transkeians about their pseudo-citizenship, the dead-end economics of the Transkei's particular form of—yes, Mattie—underdevelopment, the grim figures for health care, malnutrition, infant mortality, life expectancy, literacy—these were the things that seemed important to me now. If these Xhosa villagers, with their bare feet and cascading bracelets, their long-stemmed pipes and ineffable African grace, had some primitive wisdom to impart, then it seemed I might miss it. The past year in South Africa had made history seem too urgent for such recondite absorptions.

91

The Great Kei River bridge looked more like an international border than Umzimkulu had, although the Transkei authorities scarcely glanced at our visitor's cards when we tried to hand them in. The land had been getting steadily drier since southern Natal, and now, as we entered the Eastern Cape, it was impressively harsh—white boulders, chalky earth, and cactus. We were traveling in a noisy lime-green Volkswagen with a chubby, thirtyish, flaxen-haired lecturer in history at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. When we passed through King William's Town, which was where Steve Biko had spent the last years of his life under a banning order, our driver shouted over the roar of his engine that he had gone to Biko's funeral. He called it either "a very heavy experience" or "a fairly iffy experience"—Mattie and I later disagreed about which it had been.

Grahamstown is an odd little English-looking college town with a particularly miserable and violent "location." Mattie knew people there, but they had no phone, and as it was dark by the time we got to Grahamstown, going on foot to look for them was out of the question. It was the middle of the university's summer vacation, so the city

center was deserted. We hiked through silent, leafy, street-lit white residential neighborhoods, eating takeaway curry-and-rice and stepping into the shadows when police cars passed. We slept in a eucalyptus grove at the bottom of a ravine somewhere east of the city.

In the morning, we caught a ride to the coast and Port Elizabeth with a handsome, high-strung young African named Jimmy in a canary-yellow Plymouth Duster. It wasn't clear how Jimmy came by such a car, particularly not after it broke down in a township outside Port Elizabeth where we had been delivering his sister to work, and I had to loan Jimmy the ten rands to get it fixed. Jimmy worked as an assistant at a hardware store, where a ten-rand advance to repay me turned out to be beyond his credit. I gave Jimmy my address in Cape Town, so that he could just send the money when he got it, but his distress over the situation would not be allayed. He paced back and forth in the parking lot next to the hardware store, talking and making tight, anguished gestures with both hands to illustrate.

"And now this boss, my boss, he says I must just stay here and work. Because I am late, you see, because of the car. So I may not take you to New Brighton to look for your friend as I said I would. I am very sorry about this. And why won't he give me advance on my pay? I am a good employee for him. I don't like this job. But I must have it. If only I had finished my Standard Nine. If only we were allowed to write our exams in '76. Then I would have my matric, and my training, and some better job."

Jimmy reminded me of my old squash partner, Patrick, except that his life wasn't working as well. Mattie and I tried to calm him down, but when his boss called him in to work, Jimmy's last words to me were a miserable, vehement, "I will post you the money, Bill!" (Which he did, in a money order that almost beat me to Cape Town.)

Jimmy's hardware store was in a white suburb many miles from the black township of New Brighton, where Mattie had someone she wanted to see. We started walking in the direction of New Brighton, trudging along a bright empty thoroughfare past houses with yards full of flowers. After an hour, we came to a freeway. It was the road to Cape Town. We abandoned the New Brighton plan and clambered down the ice plant embankment to the freeway. A truck pulling two tank semitrailers stopped. The ride that followed was a bit unearthly. The truck and trailers were painted white, the white-haired Afrikaner driver wore white overalls, and the tanks he was pulling were, he told us, full of milk. But the driver was a jolly old soul, I thought. He and Mattie talked the entire sixty miles to Humansdorp, all in

Afrikaans, while I tried to see across the dunes whether there was surf at Jeffreys Bay. As soon as the milk truck had dropped us off, however, Mattie exclaimed, "My God! Couldn't you understand what that old toppie was saying? "

I admitted I couldn't.

"He wanted us to come stay with him in Humansdorp. Rather, he wanted me to come. And he kept telling me about how he would come to see me tonight, once his wife was asleep. I couldn't believe my ears!"

"Was that what all that jolly chuckling was about?"

"Yes! He was going into great detail!"

Our next ride took us as far as the Storm River Bridge, at the east end of a scenic coastal strip known as the Garden Route. There were a gas station and a cafeteria beside the bridge, which is a tourist attraction for the deep, intricately tiered gorge it spans. Traffic thinned out noticeably while we waited there, though, and the gas station and restaurant closed. Things began to look a little desperate. We were standing in a dense, ferny forest, probably forty miles from the nearest town. There were vervet monkeys scampering around in the bosky gloom, darting forward to raid a roadside trash can. The sun was going down; it would soon be dark. When an old truck pulling a battered stock trailer screeched and wheezed to a halt a couple of hundred yards beyond us, we did not ask questions, but sprinted after it and clambered in.

My hitchhiker's early warning system went on red alert immediately. There were four black men in the cab—two "colored," two Xhosa—and two Xhosa teenage girls. The girls were huddled behind the passenger's seat. They looked battered and terrified. They said nothing and did not acknowledge us. Mattie and I were on the engine cover, wedged against a bunk that was full of machinery, with two men on either side of us. The driver was silent and sober, but the other three men were boisterous and reeked of homemade beer. They talked loudly to Mattie in skollie taal Afrikaans as we roared along into the night. To my relief, Mattie talked just as loudly back, in Afrikaans just as crude, and she frequently managed to make them laugh. I could not follow the conversation, beyond recognizing that it was not being kind to die baas . I did understand the reply, however, when Mattie asked how far the men were planning to travel tonight. There was a hesitation, and then their spokesman said, with a poor attempt at offhandedness, that they were tired and would soon be pulling over to have a rest. At that point, we were descending into Bloukrans Gorge, a vast wilderness canyon, and we had not seen another vehicle

for at least fifteen minutes. It was an utterly black night.

Suddenly, we were in a traffic jam. That is, we came upon a line of cars stopped bumper to bumper on a steep, narrow curve. The truck's cab resounded with outraged swearing. More cars soon arrived behind us, and the queue did not budge. We could not see what the obstruction was. I picked my moment, then started climbing over the men on my left, gesturing that I wanted to relieve myself. They tried to stop me, indicating that traffic was about to move, but when I pushed, they let go. I jumped to the ground, turned, and shouted for them to throw down our backpacks. There wasn't much else they could do. I was standing in the road, in the headlights of all the cars behind us. The backpacks came flying out, and then Mattie appeared and jumped down.

We hiked along the line of cars until we came to the cause of it all. It was a truck that had hit the mountain and jackknifed across both lanes. Emergency vehicles—police cars, fire trucks, road department trucks, ambulances—stretched away in a line of whirling lights beyond the accident. Mattie and I watched as a road crew tried to pull the truck away from the mountain. There was a tow truck hauling on a cable, but most of the work was being done, astonishingly, by hand. Thirty or forty black men were engaged in lifting the front half of the truck, carrying it onto the road, and preventing it from running away, while at least a dozen white supervisors shouted at them. It was a harrowing operation, as the blacks struggled desperately to keep the truck from rolling over on top of them, and the whites worked themselves into a frenzy. Mattie, who had been so cool and resourceful throughout the ride in the stock truck, now began to lose it. "Look at those ous, " she hissed, backing away. She meant the white supervisors. In the whirling red lights, they did look demonic, screaming at the tops of their voices. Some had guns on their hips, some had sjamboks in their hands. "Those are the people that join the Wit Kommando,"^[*] Mattie said, her voice thin and distorted with fear.

As we retreated from the scene of the accident, I stopped to petition a tall young white guy with a black mustache who was standing beside his BMW smoking a cigarette. He agreed to take us to George—another eighty miles west—as soon as the road was cleared.

That took hours, as it turned out. Once we got started, though, the trip was swift and painless. Our driver was a doctor in the army, he told us, on leave from his post at Ondangwa, Namibia, up near the

* The Wit Kommando (White Commando)—a right-wing terrorist group.

Angolan border. I asked him what it was like living there. It was bleak and dangerous, he said, but worth it. He and his wife, who was also a doctor, were making a fortune in hazard pay, and would soon be able to buy their own office building in George.

I thought our being rescued by this dashing soldier-doctor from a gang of skollie truckers was pretty ironic, but when I turned in my seat to see what Mattie thought about it, I saw that she was fast asleep. Her violent reaction to the spectacle of the white supervisors at the accident in Bloukrans Gorge had surprised me at the time. But when I thought more about it, it made more sense. Mattie was a city girl. She didn't often see black-white relations in their rawest form—the way one would, for instance, on a farm. Whites ruled and blacks served everywhere in South Africa. But one rarely saw the sjambok in town. Mattie and her comrades spent their time trying to decide how to fight white racist rule, but they probably came face to face with their enemy only in the tumult of township uprisings or when they were detained by the police. The road crew supervisors were no doubt just typical whites from some nearby small town. No wonder the sight shook Mattie.

We reached George sometime after midnight. Hitchhiking was hopeless at that hour, so we lay down to sleep in the first vacant lot we found. It immediately began to rain, big, cold drops, driving us down the road in a frantic search for cover. We took refuge in a bus shelter, where we tried to doze sitting up. The rain quit, but dawn seemed to take an eternity to arrive. When it finally did, and we got back on the road, we were both stiff, cranky, and exhausted. I got out my trusty cooker. There was a sharp little wind off the sea, which made it difficult to boil water. Two cups of coffee were produced eventually, though, which took the edge off the chill we had both caught, and made the day more bearable generally. "Boy Scouts to the rescue again," Mattie murmured.

A Volkswagen bus, driven by a clean-cut young Afrikaans couple, stopped. They were bound, they said, for Cape Town. We climbed in, silently rejoicing, stretched out in back, and slept for most of the day.

It was midafternoon when we awoke. We were crossing the plateau east of the Hottentots Holland, less than thirty miles from Cape Town. As we rolled over the summit of Sir Lowry's Pass, the whole Cape Peninsula sprang into view: the Cape Flats shining in the sun in the foreground, with the entire length of the berg , from Table Mountain to the Cape of Good Hope, etched like a great blue sleeping lion across the western horizon. In my enthusiasm for the sight, I yelled out, "Jou moer! "

Mattie stared at me in horror. I was aware of the couple in front seeming to freeze in their seats, and of their falling sharply silent. I asked Mattie what the matter was, but she just kept shaking her head in disbelief. Finally, she whispered, "What made you say that?"

I actually hadn't thought about it. "Jou moer" was an expression that Mattie often used, and I liked. If I did think about it, I knew that it was highly obscene, and meant, roughly, "Your mother's womb." But because I didn't speak Afrikaans, the words were to me more sound than meaning. "It just came out," I said. Mattie seemed to have trouble accepting that explanation and kept glancing at the couple in front, who had tentatively resumed their conversation. "We're lucky they didn't stop and chuck us out on the road right there," Mattie muttered.

Disgraced but unejected, we proceeded down the mountain to the broad plain of the Cape Flats, and headed for town. I was elated to get back, and I said so to Mattie. "I can't believe we actually made it," I said.

"Why not?"

I remembered how reluctant I had been to travel with Mattie when she and Clive first presented me with the idea, and I laughed to myself. Mattie had been the best part of the trip! My misgivings, it occurred to me now, were probably not unlike the way Alex had felt at the prospect of the Grassy Park High Touring Club descending on him in Johannesburg. The difference was that I had only myself to worry about, while Alex had his family. That was the difference between me and South Africans in general. I was a free agent here. I wondered what had happened to the Touring Club in Johannesburg, and where they were now. I also wondered why Mattie did not seem to be as pleased as I was that we were getting back to Cape Town.

I asked her about it.

"I am pleased. And my mother will be more pleased still. But we don't see these things like you do, Bill. You think it's great fun to go out and take risks and survive and come home. But we're not interested in having adventures. We can't afford to be romantic about these things like you can."

"Jou moer," I said quietly.

"Sies, jou vark." (Shame, you pig.)

"You little Puritan, you'll never forgive me for calling you a romantic, will you?"

"No, man, I never will." Mattie laughed, and pointed to a pondok in the dunes. "Hey, it's nice to be back in the so-called garden."

The young couple who had brought us from George, whose names

we had never learned, delivered us to the train station at Observatory, deep in the afternoon shadow of Table Mountain. Mattie went to the "Non-White" window and bought a third-class ticket to Retreat. I went to the "Whites Only" window and bought a first-class ticket to Rondebosch. Then we stood together on the platform, arm in arm, while the commuters around us stared, and waited for the train.