[A third, wholly fictional vignette, imagining Grahamstown-Makhanda cut off from the world in - shall we say - late 2019.]
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| Hill Street, flooded. (c) Dan Wylie |
Roja’s
furious barking brought Rebecca Inglis to the kitchen window. It was still
raining, though apparently the worst of the cyclones were over for now. She
could make out a huddled figure, or figures, outside the gate-that-wasn’t-automatic-now,
chained and padlocked since the power had gone down. She was a bit more paranoid
about security since the blackout: various neighbours’ evacuated properties on
Hill 60 had been raided or illegally occupied.
And she was
alone, apart from Roja.
Moreover, her
cellphone had run out of juice, so if she were to get into trouble there was no
way to contact anyone. She was reluctant to charge it in the car, since she had
very little fuel left, and wanted to use that to get up to the soup kitchen in
Duncan Village the next day. In fact, she’d been contemplating walking over to
the university, where she could hook up to the Pharmacy generator, the only one
still running for restricted hours. Though the university had been formally closed
since halfway through the six-month drought, a few hardy or perhaps just
foolishly loyal academics hung around. It was comforting to gather occasionally
in the Pharmacy tearoom and swop stories and survival tips; in fact Rebecca, in
normal times rather stuck away up the hill in Journalism’s media centre, had
found herself chatting to lecturers from disciplines she would never otherwise
encounter – Accounting, Botany. Not that they talked academia much: in these
straitened times, the utter irrelevance of so much of it had become as stark as
a starveling’s rib.
And Roja was
still barking at immediate reality.
As Rebecca
peered through the rain-frosted window, the figure at the gate spotted her, and
waved. A woman, rotund in the classic Xhosa way; and Rebecca could make out one of those big checkered fibre
bags at her feet. Then a smaller figure detached from the woman’s side, a child. Sisi Mpumelelo, that’s
who it was, with her little grandchild – what was her name again? Rebecca had
met the somewhat forbidding, often harshly vocal Sisi Mpum’, as she was known, just
a few times at the soup kitchen; she was a stalwart of the Sacred Heart church
up in the location, and like so many oldsters had taken over raising the child
of younger parents who had died or absconded. A situation only intensified by
the drought and the floods, the substantial exodus in which mostly the men left
for work in the Cape or Joburg – as if the old migrant-labour system had never
really stopped.
Rebecca
couldn’t imagine why they were at her gate, or even how they knew where to find
her. Mysterious township networks. She slung on a poncho and went out; the pair
looked bedraggled and forlorn and she brought them quickly under the shelter of
her porch. The child – Khaya, she was reminded – was terrified of Roja, though
in fact Rebecca was trying to stop the retriever from licking the little girl
to death.
“Actually,
Roja adores children,” Rebecca
laughed, but the terrified child buried her face in her grandmother’s skirt.
And then there
seemed nothing for it but to invite them right in, offer towels to dry their
faces, and put the kettle on. (Fortunately, she still had gas, which she’d always
cooked on.) They sat in the kitchen and had tea with the longlife milk Rebecca
was now pulling out of storage. Sisi Mpum’ was reticent at first, characteristically
grumpy, but gradually Rebecca pieced some of the story together.
Sisi Mpum’
had always lived in Joza, it seemed, and must be pushing seventy now. She had
had four children: one dead in childbirth, one son killed in a bar brawl at
twenty-one, and a third, successful as things went, had found his way overseas
and not been heard from since. And the fourth, Khaya’s mother, had fallen
pregnant out of wedlock to a feckless individual who had absconded, before she
herself died of AIDS. Khaya, left with her grandmother, was nearly nine but
looked about six; the last year of drought and strain couldn’t have helped her
growth, Rebecca reflected. And her own, much older husband was dead now eight
years or more. Sisi Mpum’ tutted and groused from under her damp doek; Rebecca
wondered how one person could withstand so much tragedy.
“Hm, men,”
she was concurring. “My husband left, too, you know?” Sisi Mpum’ affected
surprise. “He never liked it here, but I did; when the drought came, he wanted
to leave, but I did not. Then when my daughter’s school closed, she went to
join him in Pretoria.” Sisi Mpum’s English was none too good, so Rebecca kept
her words simple, and interspersed with such isiXhosa as she knew. Of course
the situation had been more complicated, the breakdown of the relationship more
gradual and entangled. But the drought had proved the snapping-point, the
subject of the last furious argument – their marriage a victim of climate
change. As for their fifteen-year-old, Simone – she had stayed until even her
relatively self-sufficient school had succumbed to lack of water and sewerage;
she had hung in, sort of home-schooling, until the cyclones hit. The extended
power outage was the proverbial last straw: when kids could no longer easily
access social media by phone or iPad, their entire social world, their very sense
of identity, collapsed; Simone had been almost catatonic with the feeling of
loss. So just the week before, they had found her a lift out of town with
friends with a 4x4 that could negotiate the damaged Bedford road, and she too
was gone.
And now, while
Rebecca rattled disconsolately about her large house, Sisi Mpum’, apparently,
was suffering a rather more dramatic loss: her home had survived the
dust-storms but not the cyclones, her roof ripped off, her little garden
stripped bare by vandals and buried under mud.
“We want to
stay here,” she said bluntly.
“Ah.”
Rebecca
mused briefly on the town’s – the country’s – history of division, hatred and
misunderstanding, For all her work with the Black Sash in the apartheid years,
and more recent charitable efforts at the soup kitchen and reading groups, her social
interchange with Xhosa folk had remained superficial and desultory. She had occasionally
entertained folk from the townships, but never had anyone stay overnight. Suspicion
had, if anything, intensified under the latest climatic upheaval. Rebecca had
the sense that the 1819 Battle of Grahamstown – which in some low-grade fashion
had perhaps never ceased – was being renewed as Xhosa destitutes increasingly
raided westwards into the ‘white’ suburbs.
Now,
however, there seemed no question of turning her visitors away. She recalled
Mrs Curran, the protagonist of J M Coetzee’s novel Age of Iron, her discomfiture at the invasive presence of the
vagrant Verceuil. But this was different: Rebecca in fact felt a bit relieved, trusting,
companionable, even a bit self-congratulatory as she installed them in the
spare bedroom. Khaya wanted to sleep with her gran, as she was accustomed to.
They
returned to sit at the kitchen table, which at this time of day seemed more
appropriate than the lounge, or leaving the still somewhat awkward guests in the
bedroom. Rebecca wondered what now to do with the rest of her day. There were
limits to how much ‘entertaining’ she could do. Maybe just go to the university
as she’d intended, even take Khanya; or retire to her study to work on a PhD
chapter (she was working on a study of sexism in selected Zimbabwean newspapers
of the 1990s, though nothing seemed more irrelevant right now).
There was,
for example, what to have to eat, since the supermarkets had been eviscerated.
In truth, Rebecca had stuff still in storage, tinned and dried foods. Her
husband Jack had been a troubled and troublesome character in many ways, but in
his favour he had been pragmatic and prescient, in a gloomily apocalyptic sort
of way. “El Nino is looming,” he’d say. “The desert will encroach,” he’d say;
or “This municipality will never get its act together”; or, “Mark my words,
Eskom is in a death spiral.” Hence he had stockpiled food and a bit of petrol,
installed an array of rainwater tanks and solar panels for LED lights and
water-heating, and a small gas fridge for emergencies. He had left Rebecca a
lot better off than most townspeople, who had generally done little to hedge
against even a mild disaster. Even so, now in the third week of the
province-wide power outage and the reduction of fuel and food resupply to an ad
hoc trickle, her margins felt exceptionally thin. Only water was suddenly
abundant again.
But Sisi
Mpum’ was opening up a plastic bag onto the kitchen table: a carton of Cokes,
packets of two-minute noodles, cans of chakalaka relish, crackers, some carrots,
teabags. She did not, evidently, intend to stay for nothing, without the
dignity of contributing.
“Goodness,”
Rebecca exclaimed, “how did you get this stuff, not from shops, surely?”
“I have
friends, the taxi-drivers,” the old woman said. “They go to the break in the PE
road, then they walk to the other side, they come back with these things. You want batteries, I can get; even petrol, I
can get for you. Sometimes expensive, but we can get.”
“Boer maak plan,” Rebecca quipped, and
they had a little warm chuckle together. Always, in times of stress and even
violence, some people got together, forged unlikely alliances, gave with
uncommon generosity. Out of the blue, for example, one of her students, Jesse van der Vleis, a boy she scarcely knew,
had several times now taken it upon himself to bring her biltong, once even
some fresh venison he had shot on his parents’ farm, and declined recompense.
Around the soup kitchen, too, as vicious depredations and even death – a Zimbabwean
storekeeper had been murdered just two days before – swirled around, sweetness
and sharing also blossomed, like flowers in the Richtersveld. What was that
book by her namesake, Rebecca Solnit, something like Building Paradise in the
Middle of Hell – about such generosities and beauty in the midst of disasters?
“You might
like to come with me to the soup kitchen tomorrow,” she said to Sisi Mpum’, you
could help me a lot just by being there.”
“I will
come,” the Xhosa woman replied. “You are
a good woman, Mama English.” They looked at each other across the table, then reached
out and held hands for a moment. “We are together, ne?”
Roja barked, as if in agreement, and for some reason that
made even Khanya laugh.
*****
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