The Innocence of Roast Chicken Page 23

  ‘Well, let me give you the other side to this.’ His bitterness is frightening. I can’t leave him like this. If I can just get him to see the optimistic side – the Pollyanna principle I used to taunt when it was his normal state of mind. ‘OK …OK, everyone behaved badly. But let’s look at it closer. First let’s take management. The offer they made at the start wasn’t exactly a bad one, was it?’

  ‘No, but Jesus, Kate, they were so inflexible. And their profits are published. The workers know how many millions they made last year. They’re a bloody monopoly. They could’ve afforded more, and they could’ve moved just once from their inflexible stance, if only to save face for the union and allow it to settle, especially when they saw all the violence starting.’

  ‘Well, OK. But in fact the workers ended up with an increase of fifteen per cent. If you think about it rationally, it’s not bad in isolation. OK, now let’s take the workers. It’s their behaviour you’re taking particularly hard, because it’s them you really believed in.’

  ‘What are you trying to do, Kate? Restore my faith or something? Tell me everything was OK in the struggle, that somehow there’s some sort of moral victory in there?’

  ‘No, I’m not sure what I’m doing. But I’m just trying to understand what it was you took so hard. Maybe get you to see things in perspective. You’re too close at the moment, too bitter to see anything but the worst. OK? You believed they had the moral higher ground, you believed they could fight the good fight with disciplined union membership and minimal beastliness.’

  I start to pace up and down the kilim in front of him. I can’t keep still. This is about the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Nothing I’ve been before has prepared me for this. I just have to plunge in, I suppose.

  ‘But look, they had a bloody sophisticated adversary. It must have appeared to the union guys that management was sneering and chortling while they made a big show of hardly being affected by the strike at all. First they managed to find enough scabs and then it turns out they’d been stockpiling. And then of course, as you mentioned, they’re a monopoly. The union thought a boycott would be their ultimate weapon. But how d’you expect a boycott to work when there’s a monopoly? And especially when so many traders, small-time black traders too, are dependent on selling stuff like this to survive. Can you actually conceive of the level of frustration that must build?’

  ‘I know that,’ says Joe, crushing the sofa cushion between his two large hands. ‘I’m not an idiot. Jeez, you must think me a stupid, naïve fool. It’s just that … their anger … frustration … whatever, doesn’t make it right. It’s just that no one seems to care. The people who were really involved … the people on the ground whose lives are affected, or even lost … they’re just treated like bargaining chips. It’s just that the violence wasn’t the isolated sort of scuffling with scab workers, letting a bit of frustration out here and there. It was so horrific. So calculated. Burning alive the small traders … who’re struggling just as much as the strikers, if not more. It’s just that they’re all strutting around now claiming they’ve won.’

  He looks up at me, his eyes imprisoning mine mid-pace.

  ‘It’s just that it was all for nothing. What was the point?’

  ‘Well that, I suppose, is life, Joe. You can’t go around always looking for the point to things.’

  ‘But this was so clear-cut. I thought we had the moral higher ground. It was a good place for me to feel I was doing something for the struggle … please don’t sneer, Kate. It just seemed that there was a point. It seemed the right thing to do.’

  ‘Well now it’s over, Joe. You have to put it behind you. It was a case for you, nothing more. You have to come right. You have to snap out of it. It’s not your whole life, can’t you see that?’

  I can see him already shaking his head as I finish speaking.

  ‘But it was more than a case to me. It was my first labour work and everything seemed to be falling together. The country seemed so hopeful, everything was happening at the same time. I even thought there, for a while, that you and I could come right. It was a symbol, you see, that’s why I can’t just shuck it off. It was a symbol for everything I believed in. It’s not just the strike. I suddenly feel as if maybe people like Louise are right in leaving. For me this stupid strike represented all I hoped for in the country, and in the changes to come.’

  He pauses, searching for the right words. But at least he’s talking. At least he’s not sinking into that awful silence. At least his speech is sounding vaguely passionate again.

  ‘It seemed such a good fight to be part of. The struggle in the country, I mean. It was so unequivocal, all the jailed leaders were so right. I wanted them to be on the side of right. And I wanted to be there with them, also on the side of right, in my small lawyerly way.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Joe, life isn’t like that. Neither is the country. In a struggle, or a war or a strike, it’s easy to have sides, to see the right all on one side. It’s like a great big war comic with lantern-jawed Germans strutting up and down shouting “Achtung” and “Himmel”. This country’s been a great big war comic for much too long. It was easy – black and white, so to speak. But you have to face the fact that once we move from a struggle situation, we have to stop living in a war comic.’

  I can see him sinking again, sagging into his seat with the heaviness of this new load of sadness. I have to keep talking – I feel I’m losing him. I stand right in front of him, trying to keep him, hold his eyes hostage while I try to reach him.

  ‘Joe, just look properly at this strike. Can’t you see it as neutral? One lot made a reasonably fair offer. The other side thought it could be fairer, but they couldn’t make an impact. So they got frustrated. So violence broke out. It’s human nature. You can see how it happened. Some things aren’t just right or wrong, Joe.’

  He looks up at me, and then his gaze wanders to the walls and then on to the intricate patterning of our pressed-steel ceiling. I can see his eyes wandering the curlicues, turning maze-like through their twists and curves. Is he listening? It’s hard to tell. I can hear a harsh quality in my voice now, a straining for him to hear me, a desperation to pull him back from the pit he’s falling into.

  ‘Most things are merely neutral, Joe. And actually I think that’s the most we can hope for. Maybe, just maybe, the world isn’t split into the good and evil you try to see in everything. Maybe – Joe, dear God, listen to me! – maybe that’s some weird Christocentric thing we’ve imposed on our lives. But it doesn’t fit this place. Can’t you see that? It doesn’t help us make sense of the harshness of this country. Maybe a balance is the most we should hope for, to keep things neutral, to merge the good and evil so they can do the least damage to each other. Maybe that’s the balance of Africa.’

  He hunches down into himself. He’s trying to escape me. I still can’t tell if he’s listening, or even capable of hearing. I feel exhausted by the effort. I’m fighting harder than I’ve ever fought for anything in my life.

  I can’t bear him to be like this. Not so much for him. It’s for me! I can’t survive without him. The way he was, I mean – not this. He was always raw and open to hurt but now, he’s like a silkworm left out in the sun for the ants. He’ll either die or he’ll be forced to weave himself into a cocoon, build his own kind of glass jar. I should know. I’ve been like that, peeled of my shell and crushed, where every breath of air is painful. I can’t allow him to drop into the kind of prison I’ve been in my whole life. Joe’s been my connection with the world outside my jar. He’s been my counterpoint, my balance, the other leg to my stool. Without him, I crash.

  ‘Mm, well, that’s that I suppose,’ Joe says suddenly. ‘I suppose you could’ve told me all along not to expect anything of people or causes. Why did I try? I should’ve listened to you. I should’ve taken it to heart when you said all people were pigs. How fucking naïve I was. How stupid you must
’ve thought me.’

  ‘Joe …’ I feel like a pale night creature, blindly creeping from its hole for the first time in years. Jeez, this is scary, and absurd. For fourteen years he’s been begging and coaxing me to open my jar. And all that time he’s failed. In the final analysis he had to nearly destroy himself with disillusionment and despair to do what he couldn’t do all those years with love. Not that I’m altogether out of my jar. But I can feel myself. I can feel all kinds of things. When last did I feel this pity and this strange, unaccustomed yearning?

  Emotionless, blunted by glass, I was free to sneer and indulge myself to my heart’s content. Now, what is this, this aching caring? He whom I’ve scorned and laughed at, talked to, lived with and, yes, leant on all these years. But never loved. I always scorned love as a romantic myth. I used to say that people clung to each other because each took something from the other, used each other in a mutually acceptable way. But this strange, blind, mole-like creature, forced by danger and crisis to grope its way from safety into this new element, this creature feels pain in every part of it. It aches with sensation, stings with pity and sorrow and wrenches with a longing tenderness.

  ‘Joe. Help me here! I’m trying, you know. At last I’m actually trying. Doesn’t that mean something to you?’

  ‘It’s too late, Kate. Much too late. I no longer care. It’s a great release in a way. I don’t care about anything, not a thing.’

  ‘Yes you do, deep down. You’re not so locked in that you can’t come out of it again.’

  ‘Why on earth should I want to? Why should I want to return to feeling the way I did? It’s too painful. I can’t survive like that, you know. No one can feel like I did, again and again, and live.’

  He seems perfectly sober. He stands, steady now, in control. Actually, too much in control. He’s curling away inside himself before my eyes. He disappears into the kitchen and returns with two wineglasses.

  ‘Spritzer,’ he says. ‘I felt like some wine but I thought maybe we’d had enough. So I compromised.’

  ‘Well, that’s progress I s’pose,’ I say, but without my usual acerbity and with a small attempt at a chuckle. Joe leans his great body against the fireplace, his elbow on the mantelpiece.

  ‘You know,’ he says, and pauses to take a long sip. ‘I’m tired. I’m exhausted by dealing with the country and all its ramifications, nastiness and violence. I’m tired of hoping all the time and then feeling disillusioned. Little by little it’s all drained out of me. I know you think I overreacted to this strike …’

  ‘Well maybe I just think you took it too hard. You’ve been disillusioned by things before.’

  ‘Ja, I have. But you see, this was the culmination of everything. Everything led to this point, and, because I was involved, it symbolised my role in a new South Africa, the hope I felt and the way I expected things to slowly come right between people. It was my first labour work, so it just turned into this big shining symbol. You know, I never told you this – I thought you’d sneer – but when I did law I thought I could use it to work for what was right in this country. And slowly it dawned on me that things didn’t always work out that way in the day-to-day grind of making a living. This desire of mine to get into labour work, it was my last hope, my last try, to get on the side of right.’

  ‘So what are you saying? What d’you want to do now?’

  ‘I’m telling you that I’m tired of the struggle to live in this society and be moral. I can’t do it any more, Kate. And I don’t care to try. I don’t know what you want to do, I don’t even know how I feel about you, but I want to get out. I’m exhausted and I’ve had enough. I want to leave the country.’

  ‘Oh, Joe …’ As he speaks I feel my blind, squishy inner self oozing out, beyond all my efforts at control. Exposed to the glare of this emotion, it tries to slip back. But it is out. Even the air hurts. It aches to breathe.

  ‘Oh Joe, you can’t leave, any more than I can. You and I are rooted here …’ I feel suddenly a wetness on my face. I jerk my hand upward to touch my cheek and find that I am weeping. It is so long since I cried, not since I was a small child – not since that year, when my life changed. I’d forgotten the feeling, what it felt like to cry. Joe is watching me, torn between detachment and wonder.

  ‘What d’you mean?’ he asks abruptly. ‘You never cared for anything to do with this country. You always scorned everything in sight. And you’ve always put as much distance as you could between yourself and your Eastern Cape roots.’

  ‘But that doesn’t mean anything. I’ve never gone back to the Eastern Cape, but that doesn’t mean I’m not part of it …’ My throat aches with the effort of trying to express something I’ve never put into words, something I’ve always resented about myself and this hard country.

  ‘It’s … it’s like my flesh is formed from that parched earth. As if my blood flows because of those gnarled bushes, my sex smells of the musk of the Old Man’s Beard. Whether you love it or hate it, whether or not you ever go back, you and I are rooted in it. Heart and soul, we’re imprisoned by the branches of the wild fig. We’re pierced and pinned by the acacia. We are this place.

  ‘Leave, Joe, and you’ll wither and die. You’ll end up a dried old husk of a bitter exile. Your heart will die.’

  ‘Why do you care, suddenly? Why after all these years that I’ve loved you and cared for you and tried to heal you? Why now? I could hate you for that, I really could. I tried so hard to make you care and now, now when I give up, then you suddenly decide it’s time to burst open.’

  I am weeping openly, sobs forming dangerous fissures in my glass jar. It is all or nothing now. A different game, far more dangerous than before. I won’t easily be able to disappear again. I somehow have to make this work.

  ‘I suppose it’s what you said, Joe. We’ve been two damaged halves. I needed you. I needed you the way you were. You kept the world near, but far enough so I could handle it. Without you I might have disappeared entirely into myself, become catatonic or something – and even that had a certain appeal. But perhaps, deep down, I wasn’t quite ready to give up on the world. So I needed you.

  ‘Joe, I knew you were reaching for me, trying to help me, but I couldn’t feel anything. Now I can’t tell you how much every piece of me aches with the sorrow of what I’ve done to you.’

  ‘So what do you want us to do now? We can’t go on like before, Kate. We can never go back. I can’t be the person I was a week ago, even for you.’

  ‘The only way we could’ve survived here all those years was together, you know that, Joe? You couldn’t have survived without my balance either. We were complementary – two halves of a South African truth.’

  I stand and walk to the window. God, it is so beautiful in the moonlight: the towering oak, the sheltering camphor trees, the tiny yellowwood that Joe planted one summer. God, it hurts. It hurts so much to care. I wrap both arms around my clenched stomach and hunch there, my back to Joe.

  ‘No one can survive this country with your level of hope and idealism. It’ll let you down every time. Too much idealism is an affliction, just as much as my cynicism. This is no gentle, pastoral land, nourishing hopes and quiet dreams. It’s too harsh a place. And the people mirror the land, the environment which suckled them.’ I pause, trying to find the words, praying for the eloquence to move him.

  ‘Is … Is there more cruelty in the lion eating the bushbuck, or dying because it can’t hunt? It’s the way of the land, Joe. People are too close to basic survival, too bound by the earth, to uphold soft pretensions.’

  He looks at me for a long time. I can’t read his expression, but I’m all played out. I can say no more. And then he speaks.

  ‘So, what do you want us to do? It doesn’t seem like there’s anything to be done about us, then. How are we to carry on?’

  ‘I think we have to take from each other, Joe. We have to teach each other. We
have to become whole. We need a balance within ourselves. We can’t leave, we need to survive.’

  ‘You talk as if we can just do it. As if we can have some kind of cross-transfusion and everything will be OK.’

  ‘No, I know it’ll be hard.’ I can hear myself heaving – the child’s dry, involuntary sobs. ‘And it’ll hurt. Jesus, Joe, it hurts already. I can’t tell you how much …’

  I turn from the window. I want to touch him, but I have no practice in reaching out to him.

  ‘Is it really worth it, Kati?’

  ‘Is life worth it? No one told us we had a God-given right to happiness.’

  ‘Yes they did,’ he says, with a rough growl of laughter. ‘My mother did. She told me I had a right to be happy. And I suppose we all absorbed that belief – that our lives would be eased by our background, our skin colour, and our schooling and stuff. We ended up believing that’s how it should be.’

  I laugh too, a tiny, hurting laugh. ‘Well, I suppose I might have shared that with you, if it hadn’t all been blown apart …’

  ‘What was it, Kate? It’s absurd that we could’ve lived together all these years and I feel I don’t know the largest part of you.’

  ‘So, Joe …’ He thinks I’m changing the subject. His face hardens and he turns away to sit on the couch. I walk from the window and stand in front of him. ‘So now the strike’s finished, we can go on holiday. Are you still keen to go down to the Eastern Cape?’

  ‘Is there a point, Kati?’

  ‘There has to be a point. We can’t not go. If we’re both to survive, we both have to face what’s made us what we are. At some stage it has to be done.’

  ‘D’you think you can face it, Kati? I know it’s hard for you. I mean, I can face what I am by laughing. As long as I can see the absurdity of my cotton-wool existence, I’ll be OK … but you?’

  ‘I can … I think, if you help me. And Joe?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I … I love you.’

  ‘Ah Kati, love.’ His voice cracks on the words.