Author: Hilary Mantel
Category: Literature
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Most of these matters of principle we call “blanket problems”—this is our shorthand for anything that derails us, in the ethical line. Now that the cold weather is here, some of the poorest people come to the door every day to ask for blankets. We have or can get or can knit blankets, but it seems that Mr. and Mrs. Standish, after they had given them out, would visit the recipients in their homes to check that the blankets were really needed and that they had not been sold. Anna and I, we feel terrible about this. It seems demeaning to all concerned. Yet Lucy Moyo says that if we don’t do it, it will be widely understood that we are fools.
What should I do? I feel that, if I had had some training in England, I would have been aware that I would meet such problems of conscience—or am I dignifying them, are they indeed just problems of procedure? I keep saying it: I wasn’t ready to come to Africa. Anna says, what is the use of all this effort? There is nothing an individual can do against a political system which, it seems to us, becomes more regressive and savage by the day. I try to urge people to think ahead, to show initiative, to help themselves, but what’s the point when we know that in five years’ time our town will no longer exist?
Lucy Moyo explained Koos, in her usual easy manner: “The doctor went with some bad type of colored girl.” She laughed. “She thought it was for payment. He thought it was for romance.”
Anna reported it to Ralph. “The colored girl had a baby. A small-town scandal, you know?” She had picked up some Afrikaans now, and her voice had taken on the local accent, the lilt. When she saw something pretty and helpless—a child, a kitten—she spoke in chorus with Lucy and Rosinah: “Ag, shame!”
“Yes, I think I do know,” Ralph said. “And I suppose that it happened in the days when it was only a disgrace, not a crime.” He shook his head. “What happened to the woman and the child, does Lucy know?”
Anna was back to herself, her English tone: “Oh, Lucy wouldn’t stoop to know a thing like that.”
He thought of the doctor scrubbing himself, scouring his hands with the blistering soap. Had Koos a home, other than the back room with the camp bed? Seemingly not; not anymore.
Uncle James wrote back:
My dear Ralph, of course you were not ready to go to Africa. You went out of your own need, not out of the need of the people you were supposed to serve. Don’t blame yourselves for that. It is the usual European way. When we find we lack a sense of purpose at home, we export our doubts; I have known people who—mis-guidedly, in my view—have gone to China to save their marriage.
The problems of our own country seem so complicated, that intelligent people wonder if it can be right to take a stance. It seems a thing only professional politicians can do—as we pay them, they can bear the burden of being simpleminded. But when we think of other countries, we imagine their problems are easy to solve—they are clear-cut, and we are so sure of the right moral line. Why do they make such a muddle of it? It is so obvious what ought to be done.
How clear-sighted we are—how benevolent! Until we arrive, of course, and see the reality.
Men and women working in the mission field are supposed to sort out their own notions before they try to foist them on others. But in my experience, when they arrive at their posting, they become—if they are worth anything— more confused than anyone else around them.
So do try, Ralph, not to burden yourself with a compulsion to be better than other people. Just do your best, can’t you? I am aware that this sounds like a nursery nostrum, but it is the only advice I can give. You say you doubt (or Anna doubts) the power of the individual to achieve anything. But what if all the individuals give up? There will be precious little then for the people you are trying to serve. God will not provide, you know. You need not think it. His method is never so direct.
Every day brings a fresh problem to solve. Some people might argue that if you had a settled faith, you would not experience such turmoil. Myself, I have never believed in settled faith; there is always some emergency, God-given or otherwise, to undermine whatever certainties you have established for yourself. You could not take on, uncritically, your father’s beliefs. You have had to find your own way. Conflict is not, in itself, a sign of lack of faith. It may be a sign of—dare I say itspiritual insight, development. And at the very least—if what faces you is only a mental conflict, and an administrative problem—it shows you are beyond thinking of the world as a simple place, where good intentions are enough.
As for your problem about the blankets—of course you must go and see the people in their own houses. Has it occurred to you that the blankets may be a pretext? The people who apply to you may need far more than blankets, but find it difficult to draw your attention to this fact. And it may be that not all their needs are material.
Yes, Ralph thought, laying the letter aside; but who am I to diagnose these needs?
Anna came in. “Am I interrupting you?”
“No. A letter from James.”
“I’ll read it when I’ve a minute.” She wanted to tell him the news. The play group children were going to give a concert. A ladies’ charity from Jo’burg had donated a secondhand sewing machine, and Anna would make costumes. She had been already to beg remnants from Mr. Ahmed, on Nile Street.
For the next week, the machine’s whine cut through his evening. Rain drummed on the roof, and the streets ran with red-brown water.
One week on, he found Anna running her hand, covetously, across a roll of cloth: it was a soft, limp fabric, a paisley pattern in a faded, near-mud green. “Mr. Ahmed sent this,” she said. “It’s got a big flaw in it. But I wouldn’t mind—I could make wonderful curtains, if I could get some thick lining material. I mean,” she added, “if I could persuade Mr. Ahmed to give me some.”
“Why don’t you do it? You’ve nearly finished the costumes now. You could start after supper, if you’re not too tired.”
Anna shook her head. “We have curtains already, don’t we? Lucy Moyo sewed them with her own hands, those purple efforts with the sunbursts. The Sunday-school teachers had a collection among themselves to buy the material.” She looked up. “Is it wicked to care about the way things look?”
“Of course not.”
“But the way people feel is more important, I suppose.”
So that was the end of the paisley curtains. Anna cut three yards off the bale, where the flaw showed least, and made herself a flowing calf-length skirt, gathered softly into the waist. “Oh, Mrs. Eldred,” Lucy said. “Such a good seamstress you are. If you had your outfit made in Paris it couldn’t fit you better. But that fabric— shame, so dull! Still, we must use what the Lord provides.”
Anna smiled. The weather cleared. Each morning the sun woke them, slashing through the inch where the curtains didn’t meet.
Ralph wrote to James:
How do you live? What is the proper way? The idea is gaining ground—and I find it is not without its appeal— that you should live like the people you work among, that for a Christian that is the only way. Why should you have more money and more comforts than they do? How can you mean anything to them, if you keep yourself apart?
And yet, I can see that the idea might have disabling consequences.
He thought of Koos, with his dinner of mealie-pap and gravy.
I am not sure I am brave enough to try to put it into practice.
James wrote:
Do you have so much, Ralph, for people to envy you? Do I need to tell you that you are 7,000 miles from home? (You might, I realize, think it not much of a sacrifice—but let me tell you, if you do not miss us, we miss you, your sister and I, and we talk of you very often.) In one breath you complain to me of your life, your hardships and frustrations—and in the next you complain of your luxurious standard of living!
Suppose you join the people you work among, and move into a lean-to in someone’s backyard. What conceivable good will it do to anyone? It may make you feel better, for a week or two, but are your feelings the issue? When that life be
comes unbearable—as it quickly would—you could escape. It would be, at best, only a well-intentioned experiment. The people around you cannot escape; there is no term put to their sentence. And so, you see, any gestures you might make in the direction of the equality of man are an insult to them. You are free to go, and they are not.
You have your education. You have your white skin, in a country where that means everything. Even the resources of your well-fed body mark you out as different. How dare you think you can become one of them? Privilege cannot be undone, once it has been conferred.
Ralph put his uncle’s letter in the drawer. Again he thought of Koos, trying to scrub his skin away.
“I had another talk with Dearie,” Ralph said to the doctor. “Anna had a talk too. We keep wondering if we should just grab the baby one day and bring it down to you, but that doesn’t seem fair on Dearie, she’s an adult after all. Or maybe you could come up to the mission. Though I don’t know how we’d get him away from Dearie, for you to examine him. She keeps him fastened on her back the whole time. As far as I can see, he’ll die there.”
“Promise her an injection,” Koos said. “That’s my last offer.”
“For her, or for the baby?”
“Both,” Koos said. “Let’s—what’s the expression?—let’s push the boat out. The people here, they love injections. Injections are the main thing with them. And I give so many, because if they don’t get one from me they’ll go and get jabbed with God knows what by God knows who, and pay a fat price for it.”
“It’s not real medicine, is it?” Ralph was uneasy. “Just giving your patients what they want.”
Koos tapped his forehead. “Up here, Ralphie—that’s where the battle’s fought. You know, they have no confidence in me, these people. The girls want to find out if they’re pregnant, and so they go to a diviner the day after they’re late, and the diviner tells them what they want to hear, yes or no as it suits. If he’s wrong, the girls somehow manage to forget it. But they come to me and I say, I can’t tell you now, visit me again after two months. They look at me like—man, hes stupid, this Boer.”
Ralph glanced up at him. Koos wanted to talk; there was so much that he bottled up inside himself every day, and he would talk about anything, anything except what ailed him. “Your girl, Dearie,” he said. “You need to find out why she thinks her babies are always sick. You know, in this part of the world, we don’t have misfortunes plain and simple. If something goes wrong you need somebody to blame. Who’s done this to me, you ask? Who’s put this sickness on me? It might be, you see, your ancestors. It might be some enemy of yours. But it’s not just plain fate. It’s not the hand of God.”
“I suppose that’s comforting, in a way,” Ralph said.
“Is it?”
They both wondered, whether it was comforting or not: in the silence, cattleflies buzzed and dashed against the wire-mesh window. Koos said, “It sounds to me that what your girl needs is to call on Luke Mbatha, my dispenser. You’ve met Luke? You’ve seen Luke, Saturday night, in his zoot suit, with some Jo’burg shebeen queen on his arm? You think he bought that on what I pay him?”
“What, the suit or the woman?”
Koos was bowed by his amusement; his red hand knuckled his head. “Both cost, Ralphie, suit and cunt. No, Luke—he does a good trade in cats’ livers and lizard skins and python fat. You ought to go and see him in the backyard there. A lot of his mixtures you don’t swallow, thank Christ, you just put the bottle on a string and hang it round your neck. Might suit your girl Dearie. He does business by mail, too. Love potions. Maybe other kind of potions— murder ones—but I don’t ask him. A man came in last week and said he had beetles in his bowels. I sent him straight through to the back. If he believes that, it’s Luke he needs, not me.”
Ralph no longer bothered to get on his high horse; to say, they’re not barbarians. He knew Koos was not passing judgment. He was implying that there is another view of the world that you could entertain: and that he did not entirely despise it. “Still,” he said, “you have to keep your eye on Luke, I suppose. To see that he’s not harming anyone.”
“He does less harm than some. Have you seen these things the blacks use?” Koos took a little box out of his desk drawer and skimmed it across at Ralph. Extra Strong Native Pills, he read. “Extra Strong is an understatement,” Koos said. “Almost, if you had beetles, you’d blast them out. And worms—I tell you, man, they’re always deworming themselves, and killing themselves in the process. I’ve seen it—I’ve had people crawl in here and die on me slowly. Certified worm-free, but unluckily for them their blerry worm-free liver’s packed up—and you need to see people dying at that speed, Ralphie, because when the liver’s gone, a person’s life continues three days, and the only pain relief’s a bullet in the brain.” Koos shifted in his chair. “So I let Luke get on with it. It’s like these churches, isn’t it? You wish your mission servants would come to your church—but you know they go to more exciting types of services. What I do is, I go in there every month or so, have a look around among Luke’s stock. Just make sure there’s nothing human, that’s all. Anything human, and—I’ve warned him—I go to the police.”
“What do you mean, human?”
“People disappear, you know? We always say, they’re lost into Johannesburg, but sometimes they’ve gone a lot farther than that.
There is a trade, you can’t deny it. In bodies, live ones. They take the eyes, the tongue, whatever they need for medicine at that time. It’s a big problem for the police as to who’s guilty—and of course they feel they shouldn’t have to handle it, it’s a native problem. The reason why it’s so difficult to pin blame is that gangs do these things, networks, and how can you pick out who’s responsible— who can you say is the killer, if a person’s been cut up by different hands? And of course, if you cut people to pieces, they do die in the end.” Koos looked up, and saw the expression on Ralph’s face. “All right, don’t believe me,” he said. “I don’t like to think about it either. Who wants to admit such things go on?” He jerked his thumb in the general direction of Pretoria. “It gives encouragement to them.”
When the new year came, the bus fares went up, and the bus boycott started. Ralph got up at four each morning to pack the mission’s car with more people than it should hold, and to edge the complaining vehicle out of Elim, downhill toward Pretoria. The people who had permits to work in the city needed to keep their jobs; every taxi in Elim was commandeered, but still they passed silent convoys of men and women, walking downhill in the smoky dawn. The headlights of other cars, going uphill, crept by theirs; there was some sympathy in the liberal suburbs of Johannesburg, and there were men and women willing to drive through the night to help the people from the townships. Ralph had his name noted, at roadblocks. He was questioned, roughly, in Afrikaans. His lack of understanding drove the policemen into a fury. “We’ve got your number, man,” they said. “You must be a communist, eh?”
I want, he thought, to put into practice a different kind of Christianity from my father’s: one in which I don’t pass judgment on people. I don’t judge Lucy Moyo, or Koos, or (without evidence) Luke the dispenser whose trade is so dark; I don’t judge the president, or the police sergeant who has just cursed me out. “But if you don’t judge,” Anna said, “you certainly institute some stiff inquiries into people’s motives. I am not sure that is always quite separate from the process of passing judgment.”
She knew him better, by now. That kindness of his, which she had taken so personally, was essentially impersonal, she saw.
That morning at the roadblock, the policeman said to Ralph, kafifirboetie. Black man’s brother, or dear friend. “I would like to be,” Ralph said. “But I wouldn’t make the claim.” The policeman spat into the roadway. Only his upbringing prevented him from spitting in Ralph’s face.
On the day of the public meeting, the day of the baton charge, Koos opened his hospital in the nursery school’s hall, rolling up his shocked an
d bloodied patients in blankets, speaking in five languages to ban the hot sweet tea and ask for water, just water; for bandages—anything, any rags; for anyone with a steady hand to help him swab and clean.
Ralph gave a thought to a dusty office in London, an aerie in Clerkenwell, the headquarters of the organization that had sent him here; and he thought of the churchgoers of Norfolk, passing the collection plate; he heard them say to him, you have no right to misappropriate funds in this way, misuse mission property: to press the blue smock of a nursery school angel to the bleeding mouth of a township whore who has been smashed in the face by a baton. It was the cook, Rosinah, who of all the mission staff had witnessed the police charge; Rosinah, who seemed to have no life outside her dictatorial kitchen practices. Now she rocked herself in a stupor of grief, telling how it was peaceful, baas, hymn singing, a speech, and now the police have chased the young women and beaten them on their breasts, they have done that thing, they know where young women are weak.
Ralph knew that on the scale of atrocity it was small. It was not, for example, Treblinka. Koos showed him what a sjambok cut looked like, administered by an experienced, determined hand. He learned something about himself; that the presence of evil made him shake, like an invalid or octogenarian.
Next day he was able to piece together a little more of the story. It had been a peaceful meeting, as Rosinah said, on a patch of waste ground he knew, a mile away from Flower Street; but this was a typical thing in Elim, that there was no line of communication except an underground one, there was no knowledge, a mile away, of what was occurring on the waste ground; there was no mechanism by which he and Anna could have been warned and told to stand by for casualties. The meeting was to decide strategy for the bus boycott. At the last minute the police had demanded it be called off. A few children had started throwing stones, and the police had charged before the crowd could disperse. A great number of those injured appeared to be passersby. They were dazed and weeping, their shaved and stitched scalps still oozing blood and clear fluid; they said that they had not known anything, not known there was a meeting at all.