A Ripple From the Storm

  ‘Thanks, mate,’ the African heard.

  He said: ‘Good night, Comrade Baas,’ and walked off himself, very fast, shooting frightened glances in every direction. But it seemed no one had noticed.

  Jimmy wriggled to a thicker clump of grass and got his back to it and to the camp. He lay on his elbow resting. Save for the thin pulse of music coming from the officers’ mess, he might be miles away from people. The camp held the lives of several thousand men within its tall taut encircling wires; held them close and tidy and confined. Jimmy thought that for all those months he had lived in a simple repetitive cycle of movement: sleep in the hut; work by the air-strip; jaunts into town in the camp bus from the gaunt gates on the main road. Yet here, ten yards from the camp, the trees stood dark and whole under the moon, the grass was tall and unflattened. The wish to move on had ebbed out of him. It was the wire fence he had wished to escape, the eternal pressure of the wire fence, as if steel cobwebs confined him, pressing on his flesh every time he moved out of line. He thought: I’ll stay here until morning, and then walk around the wire through the trees to the main road, and present myself at the gate with my pass. No one’ll know. There’s no harm sleeping out. He settled himself, head back, motionless, moving his eyes only to take in the moon, the trees, the grass, the soft gleaming trash that littered the soil. City boy from blackened, cold streets, he breathed the fresh tart air of the high-veld in and out of tainted lungs, fingered grains of heavy soil that clung to his fingers, frowned at the moonlight about him and thought: This is something like it. Never see a sky like this at home. The grass behind him was a solid wall, grown to its July strength, the sap no longer running, each stem taut and slippery as fine steel, massed together in a resilient antagonist to his back. He swung himself slightly, away from it and back again, and found himself laughing out loud out of a deep startled pleasure because of the toughness of the resisting grass. But the laugh frightened him. He heard it raucous and sudden, not his. Now his ears were opened to sound, and above the whine and distant roaring of engines on the strip in the camp, he heard the soft noises of the night all around him. Grasses, leaves, earth kept up a perpetual soft movement of sound. There was a steady clicking and singing from the grasses. Birds? he wondered, frowning again. Frogs? He listened carefully, and became conscious that the grass smelled sweet. Over his head bent tall soft fronds, feathered like oats, He looked up, seeing the strands clear and individual and black against the silvery star-swarming sky, and thought: Behind my back as tough as – metal. Over my head they bend, separate. Soft. Moving because of the wind. And again his nostrils filled with a sweet sharp breath of scent. His mouth fell open, his eyes stared and glazed a little, his body was tense, trying to absorb noises, scents. He was thinking, I’ll get my fill of this and then I’ll sleep. The sun’ll wake me. The sun comes up hot and sudden and it’ll wake me … His eyes, wide on the black-defined fronds above him, blinked, then again – there was something in his eye. No, he had stared too long at the fine black outline, because it had clotted, on the delicate feather was a black knot. He blinked, hard and sharp, hearing, just above him, a sudden outburst of noise, as loud as machine-gun fire. And from behind his back, in the grass-stems, another. He shifted uneasily, his blood pounding, his nerves tight. He looked and waited. All of a sudden he realized that the black knot was an insect, it was making that noise. And behind him too. He rolled sharply away from the grass-clump and examined it. All over the thick gleaming grass, dark knots. Some moved as he watched. They were silent again, the small machine-gun fire had ceased. My God, he thought, they were making that noise, the insects. His flesh crawled with fear. Looking down at himself, as he crouched in the grass, he saw his legs and body splotched with dark objects. My God, they were all over him, large, horny beetle-insects, clumsily waving their feelers and moving up over him. He let out a yell of fear, and brushed them off with frantic hands. The insects clung, and when they fell off, fell heavily into the grass and lay waving their legs — like some kind of monster, he thought wildly, every particle of his flesh crawling with loathing, Five, six, ten – while he lay there, on the soil, they had been crawling on to him, and had even started to make their noise, as if he had not been there at all. Now as he stood, half-crouched, his eyes moving warily about him, he saw them everywhere in the grass, and half a dozen paces away they were still clicking and singing as if he didn’t exist. But they were everywhere! He let out another yell of pure terror and ran off fast away from the camp into the trees, beating at his legs and body with his hands as if he were on fire and he were beating out the flames.

  He ran clumsily, sobbing out his breath and muttering: Filthy, dirty, disgusting … and he glanced continually down at himself, as if he had been soiled and contaminated. He came into a clearing free of grass between trees that made deep dark patterns of shadow. There he stopped. Where was he running to? The veld sloped gently down in front of him. Three miles away the night sky flared up pinky-mauve, the lights of the city, He was running towards the lights. But he wanted to see Elias; and where he lived the sparse light made no glow in the sky. If he headed towards the sky-glow, he would arrive in the white town. He turned himself to the left, thinking: But shall I cross the river?

  The river was a dirty little stream, and a dozen medical officers had lectured the men on not letting one drop of that water, or any other wild water touch their flesh. Disease lived in the water, which might keep them under treatment for months.

  Jimmy came sharp down into a gully, saw a gleam of wet, and thought: I’ll jump it. The sides of the gully were steep. He jumped and crouched down to the water-level and made a wild leap, landing knee-deep in water, clutching at slippery stiff grasses for support. Here the vegetation was silent, but his flesh was crawling again: Those little buggers are waiting for me in the grass, he thought. I’ve stopped their filthy row, but they are there all right. Still in the water, feeling the sluggish flow of it tug at his legs inside his wet and heavy trousers, he looked up at the steep grass side of the gully, hesitating, not wanting to leave the water because of the insects. At last he pulled himself up and out, and crawled through the grass, crouched double, his arms folded around himself in protection. He came out in low anklelength grass the other side. The moon was lower now, throwing long shadows. Half a mile away were the flanks of the white town, the walls of villas glaring sharp in the moonlight. A few hundreds of yards away on the left, a shamble of tall dark huts or sheds, like sentry-boxes or outdoor lavatories each with its long jagged shadow. He inspected himself loathingly for insects, found one, threw it off, cursing, and moved off towards the dark huts. He was moving through a foul smell; and he turned his head from side to side trying to evade it. He realized the smell came from the grass he was moving through, not from the huts, and moved on tiptoe, clenched in horror. Around the brick huts was a flat ungrassed space. There was a smell of grain, a soft sweet smell. Threads of light around the doors of the huts. A banjo was playing inside one. Jimmy knocked on its door, the banjo at once stopped. He knocked again. The door slightly opened, a dark face looked out, the jaw dropping fast at the sight of a white face.

  Jimmy said: ‘Here, mate, let me in,’ He stopped, because the dark face stared and was frightened. The white eyeballs glistened in the moonlight.

  Jimmy said: ‘Listen, mate, I just want to ask you something, that’s all.’

  The door shut. The light vanished. In the other dozen or so huts that stood up tall under the moon the lights went out. They might all have been deserted.

  Jimmy thought wildly, incredulous: He was scared of me! Of me. Then – poor buggers! Then, muck them, muck the lot of them, muck all these white bastards.

  Jimmy the social being had been revived. He stood humped up, frowning, thinking, outside the door that had been closed in his face: I must be off my chump, knocking at doors like that in this bloody fascist dump – could get them into trouble – if I go and see Elias like this, he might get properly into trouble too.

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; He stripped off his jacket. But even so, with his shirt and trousers he was, at one glance, from the camp. He was shivering. It was cold now. The cold lay heavily around him all over the grass, a thin moving mist. He put on his jacket again, and moved forward towards the Location thinking: I’ll be careful, and it’ll be all right.

  Again he moved through foul-smelling grass, found a hard-beaten path and followed it. Meandering, it led towards the Location. A mile further on and he was on the outskirts of the place. There was a wire fence confining the Location, but these thousands of people, too swarming for the amount of earth allotted to them, overflowed out over the fence into hundreds of ugly little shacks and boxes. They were all dark and silent. He walked through them, Gulliver in Lilliput, for he was taller than some of these houses. Inside each, he knew, a dozen people might be sleeping: this was one of the shanty-towns, he had heard about them from Elias. He came up against the fence. It was low and rusted. He thought ironically: We airforce types rate a ten-foot fence. Comrade Baas, that’s us, with a fine fence. He saluted himself, the comrade baas. Fences, fences, everywhere you look, concentration camps everywhere and fences. He thought of the concentration camps in Europe and without any feeling of being alien. He felt identified with them, and with the people sleeping all around him in their little boxes and shacks. If we got to the moon, he thought, we’d put up fences and keep people inside them. He was looking up at the moon, now at eye-level, a small silver-bright disc. Standing just inside the fence he saluted the moon, derisively, thinking: Well, mate? We’ll have you nice and tidy before you know it.

  Inside the fence there was order, of a kind. Streets there were none: they were tracks of dust between lines of houses, unsurfaced and badly potholed. Dozens of minute houses, dolls’ houses, stretched around him. He moved through them, unconsciously trying to make himself smaller, for he felt enormous in this clear shallow night. Now he knew where he was going. Last time he entered the Location, selling Watchdogs, he had found a warm and accepting comradeship in a certain building that could not be far from here. City boy with tidy numbered streets, he moved his big face this way and that like a dog sniffing, and moved off, certain of his direction, into a part of the Location that consisted of parallel brick lines, rooms built side by side under a long single tin roof. He moved, crouched low, breathing hard. There was not a light anywhere. On his own flesh he felt the pressure of the people sleeping massed along the brick lines. The memories of his own flesh shared their experience. Now he came to a building that was like the smaller courts of the Coloured Quarter, built in a square, with a gap in front like a missing tooth. Each side consisted of a dozen rooms. He moved into the court which smelled thick of vegetables and grains, for in the day it was a market. The room he was looking for showed a thin light below the door. He heard, very soft, the beat of drums. He knocked. The drum-beat stopped. The door opened and a face he knew appeared and instantly showed fear. ‘Let me in, mate,’ said Jimmy urgently, and the door opened and he was inside. The room was about twelve feet square. It was low, and its ceiling and walls were white-washed but stained. The floor was of rough red brick. Half a dozen young men sat on the floor, leaning their backs against the walls. They had mouth organs, a banjo, a guitar, a native-style tom-tom, One young man sat on the only chair. He had a set of drums, old and battered, but real drums and he was playing them softly, watching Jimmy; another had a trumpet, but he was fingering and loving it with his hands, silently playing it. Sometimes he lifted it to make a long soft note under cover of the music, but it was too loud to play safely. Jimmy stood there smiling, feeling warmed because this door had opened to admit him; and looked on while the young men smiled white teeth at him out of dark shining faces, and continued to play, soft, softly, a breath of music, because this was long after hours, long after the time when regulations said lights out, no more music, sleep now so that you will be fresh for the white man’s work in the morning.

  Jimmy let his back slide down the rough wall, and he sat as the Africans did, on his haunches, his arms resting loose on his knees, listening. He did not know music and he did not know what they were playing.

  The white dance bands in the city played many kinds of jazz, but when they played wild it was fast, Chicago-style, white man’s jazz – there were no Africans in the white town’s bands. Here they played wild too, what these boys had heard from listening outside walls, outside windows while white people danced inside to the jazz born in the head of Chicago, the city on the river up from New Orleans. Sometimes, when the trumpet had time and space to sing, it sang slowly, more sorrowful; and sometimes the drums beat, not from the memory of what the white man’s drums did at the dances in the town, but because drums had beaten through the childhood of all these dark boys, city boys now, but bred in the villages of a country where drums were seldom silent. In this small damp room now, and it was one of a couple of dozen similar rooms in this location, stood the hide-covered wooden drum from the villages, and it stood beside the metal-shining drums bought second-hand from a white man’s band, and often, late at night, the two kinds of drum spoke together against each other, as if talking each other out in argument.

  Sometimes, late at night, because it was long past the time for music, it was time for sleep, the sleep that feeds conscientious and reliable work – sometimes, because of the necessity for caution and secrecy, a soft music came into life that sang and questioned and hesitated, music born out of secrecy, double-talk and the brotherhood of oppression.

  Jimmy sat loose, humped against the wall, breathing easy, listening like the others for the sounds of official steps outside, listening to the soft beat of the music, and thought: I feel at home here. This is the only place in this bloody country I’ve felt at home.

  The mouth organs and the guitar fell silent. The drums competed for a moment. The trumpeter lifted his trumpet and let out one dark defiant note, and then clapped his hand over its mouth as if to shut it up, shutting himself up. Now there was silence and the young man who had let Jimmy in sang out, as if continuing the music: ‘Comrade Jimmy, Jimmy man, and what you doing here, so late, Jimmy man, but you’ll get us all into fine trouble, man.’

  Jimmy blurted, breaking the rhythm, ‘I got fed up with that camp.’

  ‘It’s the high jump for you, man, if they catch you,’ said the trumpeter.

  Jimmy saw it was not enough to say, simply, that he wanted to be here, he saw, now that the music was finished, their eyes held a look which said he must prove himself.

  He said nervously: ‘I wanted to talk to Elias.’ He added quickly, seeing that eyes met each other and quickly withdrew: ‘I need to ask him something.’

  ‘Elias Phiri?’ said the drummer, and beat out a dozen thudding notes on the tom-tom, ending with a double thud on the cymbals, silencing the cymbals with a snatch of his hand.

  ‘The government interpreter?’ said the trumpeter.

  ‘He’s all right,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘Ya, man, government officials are all right,’ said a youth with a mouth organ. He blew a discordant noise, and let it groan out, in derision.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ said Jimmy, looking hotly from one to another. ‘Isn’t he OK then?’

  ‘OK, he’s OK,’ said the youth who had let him in. He wore a bright yellow shirt and a purple flowing tie, and he now stood up, hunching on a sharp-shouldered jacket. The trumpeter stood up, hiding the trumpet under a jacket folded over his arm. The man with the tom-tom wrapped it in brown paper like a store parcel.

  Jimmy rose, repeating: ‘What’s wrong? What’s the matter?’

  The man who sat behind the set of drums was lifting it into a large packing-case and fitting down the lid. The packing-case had stencilled on it in black paint: Heinz Baked Beans and Tomato Sauce. He sang out, softly, with a rollingeyed smile at the others: ‘We Kaffirs are an unreliable lot, an unreliable lot, we Kaffirs yes, man.’ Two of the young men sharply opened the door, stood listening, listening, glancing fast around the empty moon-shadow
ed space in the court of the building, then ran out on silent feet towards the opening in front. They vanished. The trumpeter and the tom-tom player stood like divers on the edge of a pool, and dived out into the moonlight and disappeared. Jimmy said to the remaining young men: ‘What’ve I done wrong, I don’t get it.’

  ‘Nothing, boy, nothing,’ said the young man who had admitted him. He was grinning. He laid his hand on Jimmy’s shoulder, and rocked him back and forth a moment. ‘Nothing, boy,’ he repeated. Then he looked at the door. Jimmy went out. The three young men worked on locking and fixing the door. Then, without another look at Jimmy they ran hard through the court and swung out of sight into the road.

  Jimmy went after them, stumbling over cabbage stalks and maize cobs. By the time he reached the opening, there was not a soul in sight. He stood in the shadow of a wall, a shadow six inches deep, and waited. At the end of the road, two native policemen came into sight, swinging their clubs, They strolled down the moon-filled space between the brickrows, not seeing him. Whey they had gone Jimmy went up towards Elias’s house, his heart swollen into a hot and angry and pounding fist that seemed to fill all his chest. He was thinking, poisoned by a sense of injustice: They were scared of me. They don’t trust me. They were frightened.

  It hurt him so much he wanted to cry out, explain himself to them. But it hurt too much to sustain, and a hot pity took the place of the hot anger, and he felt protectiveness, a need to shelter them. He thought: I’ll get to Elias, we’ll work out something. He wanted to destroy and to punish: to protect and to save.

  Elias’s house was one of the best houses, since Elias was a government employee. It stood in a short road of such houses. They all had two small rooms and a sentry-box-like lavatory standing at the back. They were all quite dark. It was about three in the morning.