The World Beneath (16 page)

“Boy!” He opens his eyes. Anna stands before him. Close up, he can see she is taller than before, but still the same Anna; her eyes are bluer and her dark hair longer. “Come!” And she runs straight down the length of the fence to the back of the house. Here there is another yard, another maid’s room, and a door she pulls open. “Quick, in here!”

The door slams, she is gone, and he is left alone with the relief that floods through him. In the gloom he can just see a workbench, a few tools on it, a vise clamped to it, an old dog basket, and at the end of the room, behind a pile of broken furniture and under the workbench, a space. In he goes. His mouth is dry. He is so thirsty, he wishes he’d had more of the beer.

He closes his eyes, wraps his arms around his knees, and makes himself as small as he can, as small as he had been under the stairs.

“Sssst.”
He can hear a hissing noise somewhere, and he drags himself out of a deep place where he is running and running after a person he knows to be Tsumalo, who is retreating and retreating before him across a desert he has to cross to get into Botswana. He has been trying to call out, but all that would come out of his mouth was a tiny dry croak, like a young frog’s.

“Here, have this!” He opens his eyes with a start, and there is Anna, crouching beside him: yes, taller, up close, but still smaller than him. Less plump, bangs in her eyes, and holding out a mug of water. He drinks it down so fast, he almost chokes.

“What are you doing here?” He doesn’t even know how to answer this and lifts both hands in a gesture that says,
I couldn’t begin to explain.

Instead he asks, “Are they gone?”

“Yes.”

“Is it safe to come out?”

“No. Stay for a bit.”

“Thank you.” He waves the mug at her and smiles suddenly, a big, happy smile, and she smiles too.

“Where have you been?” she asks. “It’s been two years. I was worried that you had been killed, like Tsumalo. The police released your mother, and she left for the Ciskei. Mrs. Malherbe’s son took her away. But we never knew what happened to you.”

“No,” he says, and hesitates. Should he tell her? “I was in the camps. They are training soldiers to come back with bombs. To carry on the struggle.” He stops. What can she know, this pampered little white girl? Yet she had helped him without a shadow of hesitation. There is something different about her now. A certain wiry strength, a watchfulness about the eyes; she is less strident, more considered.

“Thank you,” he says to her again. “Now I must go.”

H
e is out in the road, running in the light dusk, keeping close to the hedges. In a minute he is back outside the Browns’. But there is something strange about the way the gates are standing ajar, one gate wider than the other. And where are the dogs? He turns on his heel just as he sees from the corner of his eye a flash of blue uniform. A policeman!

There is a yell, a guttural swear word he can’t quite hear, and the air burning in his throat and his lungs. He didn’t know he could run so fast. He rounds the corner onto Links Road and shinnies up and over the six-foot wooden fence and into the garden on the far side of Anna’s house.

In the middle of the lawn there is a fishpond. Sitting on a bench by it is an elderly white man, alone in the half-dark beside a seated stone Buddha. He scrambles to his feet. Outside, in the road, they can both hear the heavy tread and the sonorous breathing of the policeman as he passes. “Boy!” he shouts. “Just you wait,
bliksem
, just you wait.”

Joshua fixes his gaze on the old man and raises a shaking finger to his lips.

Their eyes stay locked until the heavy breathing and the footsteps have faded. Joshua places his hands together in the prayer position and bows his head. “Thank you,” he mouths. The man inclines his head in response. And Joshua might be wrong, but he’s sure he can see the glimmer of a smile.

He is with the Browns in their study.

They had heard the sirens and rushed down to the shed to warn him. And when he wasn’t there, they’d panicked.

Fat Mrs. Ellis from across the road had blabbed that she had seen a black boy going into the Andersons’ garden and it was known they were away. She was worried he might be a burglar. So the police had come. Poor Margie had had the devil of a job calming them down, says Mr. Brown.

Margie had said the boy was her grandson but that he was gone now, gone to catch the bus to Jo’burg; she had just been giving him some supper. Then the police had started a house-to-house search. They had burst into the Browns’ garden; the dogs had escaped through the open gates.

The fish in their cases gape at him; they are frozen, as if they are still swimming, pewter bodies curved, mouths open. He wondered how it must have felt, deep and safe in the cool green ocean, and then the slice of the hook and the terrible fight, and the thrashing and drowning in the bright upper air.

Mr. Brown and Mrs. Brown are sitting side by side on the brown leather sofa, holding hands. He has never seen grown-ups holding hands. He can see they are frightened and he does not blame them. He is a liability.

“Joshua.” It is Mr. Brown. He is frowning, and he squeezes his wife’s hand as he speaks. “You can’t stay here any longer. It was safer for you to lie low. But now the police have come”— and he gives an involuntary shudder —“you really need to go. They could come back and finish their search. And who knows what that might turn up.”

Joshua knows instantly that there are things in this house that must not be found by the police. There may be hidden weapons or things that in other countries would not matter — like certain books.

“Of course I will go,” he says quickly. “I will go now, if you like.”

“No,” says Mrs. Brown. “That would be dangerous for you.”

She explains that Joshua is to leave the following morning. They will take him to the bus station. There he will not take a bus, but he will be picked up and taken to the Ciskei, back home, back to his mother and the twins, his grandparents; back to school.

He realizes that he doesn’t want to go. He wants to stay in this city by the sea, with the mountain and the shantytowns and the fierce dogs and the nasturtiums. And even the police and the Black Marias. He can feel the heat and familiarity of all these things with an intensity that surprises him.

But then he closes his eyes, and he can hear Tsumalo’s voice: “If you are going to be a free man, you must know how to read.”

He can hear him say, “You are better than a son.”

He can hear him say, “You and I will be free one day.”

And he thinks,
Viva Ngenge. Tsumalo is King.
I will never forget you.

But there is one thing he still has to do. So after he has thanked the Browns and said good night to them, he takes the flashlight they gave him and pads back down the concrete path, shoes in hand, and climbs over the locked gate, laying his jacket over the spikes. He uses the loquat tree to get into Anna’s garden; he finds her window and showers it with little pieces of gravel until she wakes.

This time, he is going to tell her where he is going.

T
he next day is hot. Mrs. Brown gives him a pack of sandwiches, a foil packet of Romany Creams, and a thermos of tea, two sugars. He stows them in his rucksack, along with some of her son’s old clothes. They all climb into the station wagon, and Joshua sits in the back like a laborer being given a lift to the bus stop. He slouches down in his seat, the tweed cap pulled low.

His head prickles with the heat.

As the car pulls out of the driveway, he looks up. The tarmac shimmers. He blinks: at the crossroads by the house stands Mrs. Malherbe. She is leaning down, her close-cropped, shingled hair gleaming in the sun, silver now, not pepper and salt. And she is holding the hand of the little boy from the shopping center. As he looks up at her, Joshua sees the clear blue eyes under the blond bangs. Of course; he is Robert’s son.

A moment later they have crossed the road, turned left, and are out of sight: but that is when things begin to happen.

A Black Maria screeches to a halt across the road in front of the car. Mrs. Brown screams. Mr. Brown hits the horn hard. “Go!” he says without looking around, opens his door, and jumps out. “Officer?” he calls, polite but puzzled.

Joshua surprises himself by rolling out of the far-side door, springing to his feet, and running like a deer around the corner. He does not look back, though he can hear shouts. Above him are the close-leaved branches of the oak trees; he grabs the thickest branch he can see and swings himself up onto it.

Not a moment too soon. He sits, not breathing, as several pairs of feet pound beneath him along the road. He doesn’t look down. If he does, he might fall. And if he falls, he might never stop falling. He puts a hand into the pocket of the jacket Mr. Brown gave him and into which he had put Sindiso’s gun this morning. It is still there.

He knows that if the policemen come back along the road, he could kill one of them — but only one. And he remembers what Sindiso said when he asked for a gun of his own: “If you have a gun, you will be one person with a gun. And they will all have guns. So you will be killed.”

So now he is a boy on his own with a gun. He wonders what has happened to the Browns. Have they been arrested? He wonders what will happen to the dogs. He thinks about their son in America. He thinks about all of these things as he sits in the tree on Links Road, just along from the tree in which Tsumalo had sat so long ago. All day he sits, his hands aching from holding on to the branches, until the sounds of the search begin to fade away, and dusk begins to fall.

He looks down through the leaves. He can hear there is a car coming slowly along the road, and he stiffens, holding his breath, as it comes into view. It is a red Alfa, roof down. He can see a head of curly brown hair. The man pulls the car over and gets out. He begins to walk along under the trees, looking around him and calling softly for his dog.

“Betsy,” he calls, “come here, girl. Betsy!”

It is Robert. Joshua and he both know that Betsy is not there.

He stops and listens. Then, very quietly, he says, “Joshua? Are you there? I’ve come to take you home.”

Joshua closes his eyes tight. He can see his grandparents’ house and the dusty road that leads to it. He can see himself running down it calling, “Mama! Mama!”— and there they are, all of them, crowding out of the little building, calling his name: his sister, his brother, his grandmother, his grandfather, and then, at last, his mother. There are tears streaming down her face like a waterfall.

“I’m coming,” he whispers, and he begins to climb down.

amandla
— Xhosa for “power”; a rallying cry during the fight against apartheid.

bergie
— Afrikaans for homeless person

Black Maria
— police van with a steel cage on the back to transport prisoners

bliksem
— Afrikaans for “lightning”; derogatory term, roughly translates as “bastard”

boetie
— Afrikaans for little brother

Ciskei
and
Transkei
— “homelands” or “Bantustans” that were part of the apartheid system, areas created like Native American reservations, supposedly to act as home territories for the black population. They covered a fraction of the area of “white” South Africa, although the black population was far larger. The people who were based there needed passes in order to work in the “white” part of the country.