Strange Pilgrimages: Short Stories

By Achmat Dangor

From the award-winning pen of Achmat Dangor comes a subtle and multi-layered collection of short stories that showcases an unusual and illuminating take on ‘the struggle years’, and how the past impacts on us in a variety of ways.

The journeys, which are the subject matter of the stories, operate on both a literal and metaphorical level. The reader is introduced to various characters in a variety of situations; the link between them is that each undertakes a ‘pilgrimage’ into the past and shows the impact this has on their lives.

Central to much of this are ‘the struggle years’. This has seen some sent into exile, but few ever forget their ‘South Africanness’, for the pull of ‘nostalgia’ is an ever-present force. Some question the value of what they did during those years, others see it in a rather ambivalent light, while others want to forget, want to move on, want to be relieved of the ‘baggage’ of their past. For many of them, sex becomes the means of escape from the shackles of memory.

This is not just another encomium to the ‘struggle’ years; instead, what makes this book stand out is the author’s unusual and illuminating take on that period of our history. It is not viewed, then, in a way we’ve become accustomed to, but from a different perspective. Additionally, each story is decidedly ‘relevant’ and, most importantly, all make for easy and engrossing reading.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan South Africa
• Release date: Apr 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781770103016

Achmat Dangor

Achmat Dangor lives in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has published four novels, Waiting for Leila (1981), The Z Town Trilogy (1990), Kafka’s Curse (1997) and Bitter Fruit (first released in 2001), as well as a short-story collection, Strange Pilgrimages (2013). Bitter Fruit was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for 2004 as well as the 2003 International Dublin Impac Award. .

Book preview

Strange Pilgrimages

Also by Achmat Dangor

Bitter Fruit (2003) Shortlisted for the 2003 Dublin Impac Award and the 2004 Booker Prize

Kafka’s Curse (1997) Awarded the 1997 Herman Charles Bosman Prize

Z Town Trilogy (1990)

Waiting for Leila (1981)

Strange Pilgrimages

Short Stories

Achmat Dangor

PICADOR AFRICA

First published in 2013 by Picador Africa, an imprint of Pan Macmillan South Africa Private Bag X19, Northlands, Johannesburg, 2116

www.panmacmillan.co.za

ISBN 978-1-77010-300-9

e-ISBN 978-1-77010-301-6

© Achmat Dangor 2013

All rights reserved. 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 the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Editing by Jane Bowman

Proofreading by Valda Strauss

Cover design by K4

Front cover photograph by Anthony Burns, stock.xchng

Author photograph by Debbie Yazbek (© Nelson Mandela Foundation)

Contents

PART ONE: AFRICANS ABROAD

The Poppie of 42nd Street

A Reason to Love

Skin Costs Extra

Goodbye, Midnight

PART TWO: INTERREGNUMS

History is a Sexually Transmitted Disease

Bury Babu on Sandy Bay

A Christmas Story

A Strange Pilgrimage

Venus in my Eye

Author’s Notes and Acknowledgements

For my family.

My wife Audrey for her patience and support, my children Justine, Zain and Zachary who have helped me think about the future even as I recall the past.

PART ONE

AFRICANS ABROAD

The Poppie of 42nd Street

Josh had been struggling for days to find the right image, a word, a phrase, whole and pure, that would help him get beyond the point in his novel where he was stuck. No, it was not a novel; it remained an unformed story, struggling to find its shape in the womb of his imagination. It still did not have the one characteristic that made life as a book a worthy possibility: an authentic voice of its own. In fact, he would kill it, abruptly shutting down the computer as if it were a life-support machine, not bothering to save the last bit of writing; he would clip together the two hundred or so printed pages and dump the whole bundle into the drawer of his desk. Along with all the other aborted stories that had found their way in there over the years.

All writers collect unfinished narratives; novels, plays, poems that simply didn’t seem right at the time; abandoned with relief, the intense struggle not to let go of people, thoughts and ideas they had lived with for weeks, even months, finally over; their consciences appeased by a vague promise to review the piece sometime in the future.

Perhaps that was the source of endless hope these unformed things clung to. Each time Josh opened the drawer, they seemed to light up, and their faded whiteness glistened in the darkness; once he even thought he heard the faint rustle of paper, as if the manuscripts were jostling to catch his attention. When it became apparent that none were to be resurrected, they curled up sadly, ready to welcome the next aborted victim into their midst. The last time, he felt compelled to shut the drawer with such brutal force that a crack appeared in the woodwork.

It was the thought of consigning his latest endeavour into that cracked vault that drove him into the streets that afternoon. He didn’t know about other writers, but he was incapable of using the disparate cell stems, as it were, of those pathetic forms of pre-literary life as material for a new story. He had to start afresh each time and he feared that one day he would run out of places, characters, themes, eras and even milieu. There is only so much the imagination can conjure anew.

New York’s streets are a refuge; yes, that stock image of noise and bustle, narrow cross streets running busily between the broad avenues, the buildings leaning almost conspiratorially into each other, as if the place itself was capable of hustling the innocent and the unknowing. Yes, the very feeling of being swept along, of being a miniscule part of some greater, albeit man-made, scheme, gave him comfort. Here, on the corner of 23rd Street and 1st Avenue, away from his desk, he was liberated from the obligation to create. So vast did everything seem out here, away from the narrow shaft of light that fell into his study from an even narrower sky, that he felt free to simply stroll along. Today he didn’t even experience the usually strong compulsion to observe and capture images for use later on. He has learnt how easily these gritty pavements defy literature, man’s puny attempt to reimagine life.

He decided to change what had over time become his therapeutic route. He would avoid the East River; recently, its dull, easy way of rolling slowed things down too much, allowing his mind’s contemplative side to assert itself. His walks became an exercise in guilt. The river reminded him of a tendency, lately, to idleness. All his life he had been taught that even one wasted minute was an opportunity thrown away. In fact, his father had been a tyrant when it came to teaching Josh the value of being industrious: ‘killing’ time, he used to say, was the only crime that justified capital punishment.

He walked up 2nd Avenue, towards Grand Central Station; he would have coffee in a place full of unnatural light, bury his head in the New York Post (the Times demanded too much moral concentration these days), mind his own business, just as the other patrons minded theirs. The sunlight, sharp at this time of day, drove him on. He looked forward to the noisy, phosphorescent atmosphere in which complexions blurred, and accents all sounded similarly blunt. There, in that busy concourse of people endlessly coming and going, anonymity was not an affectation but a simple reality. That ability to be one’s self, to live within one’s own reality was a quality he envied.

Until the mad desire to play God returned and he was forced to hurry back to his desk. But for the moment he was safe. The evening rush hour had started and the streets had truly come to life.

Second Avenue had carried him to the corner of 37th Street much quicker than he had anticipated. The South African consulate was located close by, but he resisted the temptation to walk past it and stare up at the flag. He had left home as a boy, a reluctant exile torn away from his beloved ouma, and had grown up in America. His knowledge of his native country was second-hand, learned from his father and others in the exiled community. Nevertheless, it was intensive learning, brought home by his father’s every word and aspiration, every dream and fear, and finally, by the sight of the old man’s slow and nostalgic death years before freedom was attained; that was his father’s true legacy: Remember my boy, you are a South African!

After the first non-racial elections he was elated, even though he was in New York and unable to vote. He recalled his father’s words, and the sense of being South African was renewed. After April 1994 he included the street where the consulate was located in his daily wanderings, often stopping to watch people leave the building and listen to them talking. He absorbed the familiar, flattened vowels, listened intently whenever Afrikaans was spoken, trying to locate his ouma in it, her voice, her warmth. After 1994 he increasingly heard discussions in isiZulu or isiSotho, which he listened to with uncomprehending appreciation, just as passionate opera fans would listen to a beautiful Italian aria without knowing the meaning of the words.

He often wondered whether the discourse was profound, about politics or the state of the nation, or of ordinary things such as train timetables. He once walked behind two men, austerely elegant in their ‘morning’ suits, making their way to the station. The black man was advising his white colleague about the best place to buy ‘padkos’, that quintessentially South African term for a takeaway dinner, that would survive the long journey home to the suburbs. Ah, how the country was being transformed!

Perhaps it was his distracted state of mind, or his sudden and inexplicable desire to picture his ouma alive, young and vibrant again, that triggered what he at first thought was a hallucination. As he turned to continue his way towards 42nd Street he saw a woman with hair the texture of coarse silk, blonde with streaks of grey. Some kind of gel kept every strand in place. Her hairdo swayed like an elegant skirt as she moved, revealing glimpses of soft skin on her neck. He had to dispel the sudden image of her ‘nakedness’ from his mind. Too distracting for a man as lonely as he.

But there was another reason for this feeling of shame. She was not too tall, but slender and upright. ‘Penorent’, his grandmother used to say. Proudly upright. It was that phrase that drew his attention to the uncanny resemblance between this woman and his ouma. Her bearing, the manner in which everything was ‘held’, her head high, her body straight, her arms by her side, a bag clutched tightly in her hands. When she crossed the street her rapid strides did not disturb her air of containment.

That could be Ouma Poppie crossing Eloff Street in Johannesburg, forty years ago, brushing aside curious passers-by. A good-looking woman, grand in her manner and dress; she could be a European immigrant, Italian, Greek – some of them were so dark! Yes, the ambiguity of her race at a time when things and people were either black or white, made people stare. Of course the boy she held by the hand gave a hint: a commingling of races, the slow bastardisation process that would eventually eliminate the white race; everything they were being warned against now paraded before them in broad daylight.

And that boy, her grandson, struggling to keep up with her because the curiosity of others aroused his own, used to stare back, his smile bringing involuntary and unwanted softness to the closed faces he encountered.

Ouma used to pull him along, speaking to him in Afrikaans.

‘Kom Josh, ons is laat.’

Come on Josh, we’re late.

Her fluent Afrikaans, that clear platteland texture made matters worse.

‘Dit is Afrikaans, nogal!’

On top of it all, they, these ‘things’ were Afrikaans-speaking!

Now he observed the woman again. He wasn’t very different from her, a shade darker, but with the same clear blue eyes. Today no one would be able to tell them apart, racially speaking: but back then, in the streets of Johannesburg, they could and did.

Josh watched her cross onto the other side of the avenue, gravely elegant even as she hurried to beat the quickly changing traffic light. He walked along on the other side trying to keep up. He noticed how her stern manner slowly yielded and became almost wayward in its warmth. Early forties, he guessed, the same age as Ouma the last time he saw her. That was when his long-absent father suddenly appeared to take his son into exile with him. Above all, she was immaculately dressed too, this woman, a real poppie.

Then he remembered that his grandmother’s real name was Susana, that poppie was an appellation, the Afrikaner equivalent of the Jewish princess or the Indian family jewel. The appellation became a name because she continued to be so classically pretty, through girl and womanhood. It was said that she drove men mad, even as a child.

‘It is your life, Pop,’ Josh had heard a woman they met in a café saying to his ouma once, ‘but think, Poppie, think. It can be so different!’

The woman had smiled, rather sadly, looked around her, then leaned across the table, closer to where he and Ouma sat, until he could smell the woman’s odour, and it was warm, just like Ouma’s. He knew instinctively that they were sisters, though they seemed at pains to avoid any displays of sibling affection.

‘You’re a real poppie, look at you, look at us! Look around you; we’re no different from them. And this is the future, Poppie. White, Pop, the future is white! Leave Jo’burg, just ... get on the bus and come home. Everyone there still knows us as Du Toit’s, Tannie Betty’s children ...’

Ouma Poppie had smiled, the wry turn of her mouth that made it difficult to tell whether she was sad or happy.

The woman had glanced over at Josh, and her own smile grew even sadder than Ouma’s. She got up and hugged Ouma, touched her on the cheek and left the restaurant without looking back. Ouma Poppie fought back her tears. He became aware that people were looking at them. He touched her hand and smiled reassuringly. Being stared at did not frighten him, it merely awakened his senses. She had taken him in her arms, more to draw comfort from him he realised than to offer him any.

He would later hear her tell someone: ‘Josh is such a serene child, just like Oupa Vincent.’

Oupa Vincent. He often heard that name, spoken in a hush, as if he was some kind of sprokie, a character from one of the fables Ouma told him when he could not sleep. He had only seen Oupa Vincent in a photo: a handsome man, with hair piled onto one side of his head.

‘Just like a real Hotnot God,’ Ouma Poppie used to say in a faraway voice that warned him she was about to behave strangely, start singing to herself, laughing and crying in quick succession.

The woman had stopped on the corner of 42nd Street; she glanced around her, then at her watch. She leaned up against the shop window, obviously waiting for someone. From across the street she looked almost unreal, her slender pose, her immaculate dress, not a hair out of place, as if she had just stepped out of the window behind her. She came to life again, opened her bag, searched for something, peered through lowered eyes across the road. Her head sunk and her whole manner became awkward. Had she sensed that she was being watched?

Josh turned away, pretending that he was interested in the luggage on display outside the shop where he stood. He read the adverts proclaiming the virtues of various bags. ‘Sleek’. ‘Rolls Along’. ‘Easy to Handle’. ‘Elegant’. He should have been a copywriter; would have made a decent living finding poetic descriptions for hand luggage. It was a creative pursuit of sorts with none of that ‘real writer’ baggage. A lot of kak, all this siel angst.

Oh God, after all these years he was thinking in Afrikaans again. He turned around, hoping she would have disappeared, taking the past away with her. She was still there, all anxious and awkward. She kept looking up along 2nd Avenue. Her eyes narrowed, and she began to relax, gently swinging her bag beside her. A slow smile formed on her lips; a look of pleasurable anticipation. Josh saw a man weaving through the crowd, making his way towards her. Her body lifted, she was proud and upright once more.

The man greeted her with a gesture of supplication, palms open, hands held before him. She laughed, her ‘forgiving’ light-hearted. They turned and walked side by side along 42nd Street, towards Grand Central. Josh