Another Year in Africa Read online

  Rose Zwi, daughter of Jewish Lithuanian parents, was born in Mexico, lived in London and Israel, but spent most of her life in South Africa. She has lived in Australia since 1988. Author of five novels, she has won several prizes for her work, including the 1980 Olive Schreiner Award for Another Year in Africa, and the Australian Human Rights Award for Fiction in 1994, for her novel Safe Houses.

  OTHER BOOKS BY ROSE ZWI

  The Inverted Pyramid

  Exiles

  The Umbrella Tree

  Safe Houses

  ANOTHER YEAR IN AFRICA

  Rose Zwi

  Spinifex Press Pty Ltd

  504 Queensberry Street

  North Melbourne, Vic. 3051

  Australia

  [email protected]

  www.spinifexpress.com.au

  Published by Spinifex Press, 1995

  Copyright © Rose Zwi, 1995

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

  Cover design by Lin Tobias

  Made and printed in Australia by Australian Print Group

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Zwi, Rose.

  Another year in Africa.

  ISBN 978-1-74219-007-5 Master e-book ISBN

  ISBN 978-1-74219-397-7 (ePub Format)

  ISBN 1 875559 42 6.

  I. Title.

  A823.3

  To my Mother and Father

  who taught me how to sing,

  And to Dina who listened.

  1

  Berka Feldman spat out the nails from between his lips, cleared the table of leather, tacks and thread and left the shoe on the last, to be repaired the following morning. It was only ten to five. He seldom left the workshop before six, but today he felt restive. After an oppressively hot morning the sky had suddenly darkened and distant thunder had rolled like wagon wheels over rocky ground. Ripped by forked lightning the clouds emptied themselves over the suburb then drifted away, leaving a brilliant sunset and steaming streets.

  From the doorway he watched the water gurgle down the gutters towards the Dip. He drew a deep breath. His lungs caught sharply on the smell of damp concrete and a sudden yearning for the wet-straw smell of the veld washed over him. He longed to be on his wagon again, enclosed in the silence and emptiness of the veld, with only his voorloper to lead the oxen. In summer he had watched the grass bend and sway like Jews at prayer while he hummed the half-forgotten songs and psalms of his childhood. In winter he listened to the susurrus of the wind through the dry grass, rising to a mournful swell as it swept over the veld. Towards evening a thin spiral of smoke might appear on the horizon. He savoured his solitude, certain that it would end. Soon he would walk into a mud-walled farmhouse filled with the smell of coffee and griddle cakes baking on an open fire. Hanging from the rafters of the reed-and-thatch roof would be cobs of dried mealies, twisted rolls of tobacco and strips of biltong. From the earthen floor into which peach pips had been beaten would rise the faint sweet smell of cowdung…

  How free, how lonely that life had been.

  He took off his leather apron, washed his hands in the cracked basin at the back of the shop and rinsed out his mouth. The taste of nails persisted. Only a drink would remove that metallic taste, but if he came home on a Friday evening smelling of beer, Yenta would have another weapon in her armoury of abuse. He put his cap over his thick grey hair and walked out of the shop, squinting up at the sun which hung low over Main Street.

  From where he stood he could see the eastern part of the suburb; from the top of Main Street he would see the rest. The city lay to the east, its tall grey towers rosy in the dying light, a coppery blaze piercing the eye as the sun reflected off glass and steel.

  To think that forty-five years ago it had been little more than a miners’ village with row upon row of tin shanties, rough men, horses, ox wagons. Berka shrugged his shoulders at the miracle of its growth.

  His shop was a mile and a half from town, but the Dip brought the buildings nearer and they towered like a fortified city over a village at its gates. Although he might yearn, occasionally, for his carefree days as an itinerant cobbler, he had lived in the shadow of the city for so long that he gladly accepted the boundaries of his world: The sun rose to the east of Main Street, and set over the hill, to the west of it.

  Berka recalled clearly his arrival in South Africa, early in 1892.

  ‘It’s a bad time to have come,’ his uncle reproached him. The pogrom should have coincided with a boom in South Africa. ‘There’s no gold in the streets nor, it seems, in the mines,’ he continued crossly as he led Berka into a small room at the back of the Concession Store. ‘You’ll have to work hard. I pay five pounds a month with free board and lodging. If you want to get rich, save.’

  For several years Berka sold blankets and trinkets to black miners. On week-ends he helped in the Kaffir Eating House attached to the store. The smell of burned entrails and cooked meat clung to his clothes and cleaved to his nostrils. His cousins sniffed fastidiously when he came to his uncle’s house for an occasional meal.

  In his sparsely furnished room he studied English from a tattered grammar book. The bar was his elocution class. From the English miners he acquired a Midlands accent which, coupled with impeccable Yiddish inflexions, made his teachers roar with good-natured laughter. He read voraciously. This improved his English, widened his knowledge and assuaged the loneliness of his years as a kafferitnik. He worked for long enough to buy the tools of the trade he had learned in the old country, then started on his life of wandering.

  His uncle never forgave him his ingratitude.

  ‘If you’d remained with me instead of running off into the veld like a wild chatas,’ he said to Berka, ‘you’d have been a rich man. Today you don’t even own the house you live in.’

  ‘Property is theft,’ Berka had replied. ‘I want nothing that I haven’t earned with my own labour.’

  They never spoke to one another again.

  Berka stood at the corner of Main Street and Lovers’ Lane. Wherever he looked he saw Uncle Feldman’s possessions. He had become a man of property over the years. But Uncle Feldman was not a happy man; he had little joy from his sons. They had not gone beyond Standard Seven in school and proved equally inept in business. He would be lucky if they said a decent kaddish for him when he died—at a hundred and twenty years, please God. Berka chuckled. He could think of no greater punishment for his sons.

  Uncle Feldman had moved out of Mayfontein twenty years ago but he retained his Concession Store, the source of all his wealth. He hired a manager and although he was almost eighty, he still went to the business. At irregular hours, Berka thought grimly, so that he could catch the manager stealing. Uncle Feldman was certain that everyone stole from him.

  Berka spat into the gutter.

  Uncle Feldman was one of the few people towards whom Berka could not extend tolerance, an attribute which he valued above most others. Yenta, who had never really understood him, claimed that his tolerance stopped at his own front door.

  He began walking up Main Street, aware that his tall bulky figure was as much an institution in Mayfontein as the headgear of the mine, the white dumps on its outskirts or the bar. As he walked to and from work every day he was hailed from all sides. His heart swelled with emotion: He was the friend of Jew and Gentile, the arbiter in disputes, the consoler in sorrow. In short, he was loved.


  ‘Feldman!’ came a deep voice from the smithy across the road. ‘Why do you stand there in the middle of the street, smiting yourself on the chest, smiling, spitting, shaking your fist?’

  Leib Schwartzman emerged from the smithy. He was a stocky man whose powerful shoulders gleamed with sweat under his grease-stained vest.

  ‘Are you sick that you’re shutting shop so early, or has your uncle written you into his will?’ he asked with a grin.

  ‘Neither. I calculated that if I worked an hour less today, I’d become a millionaire that much later. How’s business?’

  ‘Bad, bad.’ Leib wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘Cars, trams, bicycles. Where have all the horses gone?’

  ‘To the Free State, to become rabbis like that ass Benjamin,’ Berka said.

  ‘Don’t blaspheme against the servants of the Lord. What will happen when you have to account to Him one day?’

  ‘If God is just, as you claim he is, he’ll distinguish between those with kosher stomachs and unkosher souls. I may not get to heaven but neither will my reverend brother-in-law Benjamin. The only trouble is that I’ll probably meet him in the Other Place.’

  Leib laughed. He had studied Law in Kovno but influenced by the workers’ movement he had given up Torah for a trade. The future of society, after all, lay in the hands of the proletariat. But he had retained his love for Jewish tradition and went to shul, to synagogue, regularly. Opiate of the masses, he’d exclaim angrily when Berka defined religion for him. What’s a worse opiate? Going to shul or going to the bar? Meet my learned friend Bernard, he would mock. He’s so thirsty for Justice that he’s been called to the Bar.

  ‘When I saw you packing up early I thought perhaps you wanted to get to shul in time,’ Leib smiled.

  ‘Don’t joke,’ Berka said gloomily. ‘I’ll probably land up doing that to please Ruth. It’s not easy being an honorary grandfather. Ruth’s afraid I’ll land up in Hell because she once heard me say that there was no God. She wants me to look for Him in shul.’

  ‘Strange child,’ Leib said rubbing a grease spot off his arm. ‘Last week your sister-in-law sent Ruth to borrow a pot from us. “Mrs. Blackman,” says Ruth to the wife because she’s speaking English now so the name’s Blackman not Schwartzman, “mine grenny vants to lend your big bleck pot.” Why doesn’t she speak Yiddish to my Chaya? They’re both a pair of English scholars, Ruth and Chaya.’

  ‘Because she doesn’t know Chaya well and to strangers she speaks only English.’ Berka looked angry, upset. ‘I must be getting along. I’ll stop off at the bar to chat with our local proletarians.’

  Leib put his hand on Berka’s shoulder.

  ‘Don’t be angry with me, Berka, I know how fond you are of the child. But to whom can one speak? To her father the dreamer? Or her mother who’s always wrapped up in Vicks and cottonwool?’

  ‘Ruth’s not strange, Leib. She’s got too much imagination and too few friends. The kids tease her because she doesn’t speak English properly. She’ll learn. She begins school on Monday where she’ll mix with other children. Have a good sabbath. See you at the poker game on Sunday night.’

  The sun had almost disappeared behind the Main Street hill and Berka stepped up his pace. He wanted to see it set behind the mine dumps. There were few sights he loved more.

  Poor Ruthie. She’d have to learn to live in the present. A child of six burdened with a consciousness of tragedy and persecution, with memories that weren’t even hers. He himself was guilty of telling the story of his family’s massacre in her presence. He had broken down that time and shouted:

  ‘There is no God!’

  Berka coughed to clear the heaviness on his chest. He hummed tunelessly for a while then remembered the song about the drunkard:

  When they write my epitaph

  It’ll read ‘Here lies a drunk’,

  And I’ll answer with a laugh,

  ‘There’s no brandy here, I’m sunk!’

  He must sing that for Yenta. She said that real Jews didn’t booze. Yet here, immortalised in a Yiddish folk song, was the lament of a Jewish drunkard. Let her explain that one away. Berka walked on, humming the jaunty tune.

  There were few people in Main Street. The Jewish housewives were at home preparing the sabbath meal and the miners’ wives shopped on Saturday morning. Haggard, often toothless, their hair perpetually in curlers, they trudged across the veld in their slippers from the mine’s Married Quarters to do their weekly shopping. There was little enough in their purses after their men had stopped off at the bar and at the bucket shop on Friday evenings. Their children, thin and snot-nosed, ran wild through the suburb.

  Harsh men, these miners, yet who could judge them? Here he was, walking in the clear rain-washed air while they were thousands of feet below surface, drilling into stubborn rock, breathing in poisonous fumes, stumbling through the tunnels that honeycombed the earth beneath his feet. Underground was Hell. Dark tunnels of damp rock, slippery passages, unbearable heat, pressure bursts, rock falls. Could these conditions produce gentle compassionate men? And what was it all for anyway? They wrested a few grains of gold from tons of rock, then buried it again in underground vaults.

  He had watched the men come off shift, their faces pale with dust and fatigue, tin hats in one hand, carbide lamps in the other, blinking in the unaccustomed light of day. They washed down the mine dust with drink and beat up their wives, their children and the hapless mine kaffirs. To them, the blacks were barely human.

  Every year Berka watched the black recruits arriving at Mayfontein Railway Station clad in loin cloths and blankets. They were tall sturdy men, selected for their strength and good health. For two shillings a day, a pot of mealie meal and kaffir beer, they travelled hundreds of miles from their kraals and their families to live in crowded mine compounds and to do the hardest work underground. When their nine months’ contract ended, they might be a few pounds richer, wear trousers and a shirt, and carry away with them, under their gay blankets, a lung disease.

  And the white miners organised unions to protect themselves from the blacks’ cheap labour, but left them to be slaves to the mine bosses.

  ‘Berka! You look as though you’re carrying the world on your shoulders,’ a gentle voice said at his side. ‘And all the way uphill too.’

  ‘Reb Hershl! Just the man I need to see.’ Berka stopped at the bakery door and sniffed. ‘Ah, you perfume the suburb. There’s such comfort in the smell of fresh bread. Little wonder I’ve got such a big nose. All my emotions are filtered through it.’ He put his arm around Hershl’s shoulders and walked into the bakery with him. He had time. There would be another sunset tomorrow evening. Such a pessimist he wasn’t. A few words with Hershl would remove the metallic taste from his mouth and the ash from his soul.

  Hershl took off his floury apron and hung it on a nail behind the counter. The bakery was small. The front portion had been divided off from the wall ovens at the back by a thin wooden partition. There was a glass-fronted counter which displayed iced cakes, buns and several kinds of bread: rye with aniseed, special sabbath kitkes and sandwich loaves. Through the opening in the partition came a surge of hot air as the iron doors of the wall ovens swung open to receive another load of bread. A loud crash of metal trays and bread tins drowned the first part of Hershl’s sentence:

  ‘…the last lot of loaves for the night,’ he said as the noise died down. ‘Dirk will lock up. Since I took him on I can go to the synagogue on Friday evenings.’

  ‘How’s business?’ Berka asked.

  ‘Excellent, improving all the time. It paid to take on a trained baker. Faigel works up front now and only does the confectionery for special occasions. I bought a horse and cart this week. The deliveries were getting too big for my bicycle.’

  ‘Leib will be pleased to hear there’s another horse in town,’ Berka said. ‘He thought they’d all gone to the Free State.’

  ‘Free State?’ Hershl looked puzzled. He did not alway
s understand Berka’s jokes. ‘Did I tell you I’d made an offer for Sharp’s delicatessen? It’s much bigger than my shop and I can build in extra ovens. Now that I’ve got contracts with a few Concession stores I shall need it. I saw Uncle Feldman the other day,’ Hershl added. ‘For two reasons. To get an order for the bakery and to ask for a donation for the Refugees’ Fund.’

  ‘Let me guess,’ Berka said drily. ‘The order you got at cut prices. And if you did get a donation, you had to sweat blood first.’

  ‘You know the man. He denied he was stingy. All rumours, he said. People thought he was mean because he didn’t advertise his charitable deeds as others did. He gave anonymously.’

  ‘So anonymously that he doesn’t even sign his cheques.’ Berka retorted. ‘Let’s talk of cheerful things.’

  ‘Cheerful things?’ Hershl’s face dropped. ‘There’s nothing cheerful in 1937. Look at Germany: Jews thrown out of jobs, property confiscated, schools closed, people shut up in ghettos. That’s cheerful? And suddenly the world’s too overcrowded to take in a few Jewish refugees.’

  ‘They let some Jews into South Africa from Germany.’

  ‘And are drafting the Aliens Act to keep the others out. They hate the Jews as much as the Nazis do.’

  ‘But what’s happening in Germany couldn’t happen here,’ Berka persisted.

  ‘You’ve been saying that for years, Berka. This isn’t the same South Africa you knew in the old days. All those stories you tell of Boer hospitality and respect for the people of the Book. When they’re in the Book they’re all right, but when the farmer’s crops fail and he comes to borrow from the Jewish storekeeper at interest, it’s a different matter. When the Jew was a smous, a pedlar, they tolerated him. When he holds the purse strings or he’s in competition, they fear him. And where there’s fear, there’ll be persecution.’