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.