A Dry White Season by Andre Brink

Author:Andre Brink [Brink, André]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-062-03143-3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1979-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

THREE

1

In the dark it was a different city. The sun was down when they reached Uncle Charlie’s Roadhouse; by the time they left the main road near the bulky chimneys of the power station, the red glow was already darkening through smoke and dust, smudged like paint. A premonition of winter in the air. The network of narrow eroded paths and roads across the bare veld; then the railway-crossing and a sharp right turn into the streets running between the countless rows of low, squat houses. At last it was there, all around them, as overwhelming as the previous time, but in a different way. The dark seemed to soften the violence of the confrontation, hiding the details that had assaulted and insulted the eyes, denying the squalor. Everything was still there, stunning in its mere presence, alien, even threatening; and yet the night was reassuring too. There were no eyes conspicuously staring. And the light coming from the small square windows of the innumerable houses – the deadly pallor of gas, the warmer yellow of candles or paraffin lamps – had all the nostalgic intimacy of a train passing in the night. The place was still abundantly alive, but with a life reduced to sound: not the sort of sound one heard with one’s ears, but something subterranean and dark, appealing directly to bones and blood. The hundreds of thousands of separate lives one had been conscious of the first time – the children playing soccer, the barbers, the women on street corners, the young ones with clenched fists – had now blurred into a single omnipresent organism, murmuring and moving, devouring one like an enormous gullet that forced one further down, with peristaltic motions, to be digested and absorbed or excreted in the dark.

“What you looking at?” asked Stanley.

“I’m trying to memorise the way.”

“Forget it, you’re a foreigner.” But he didn’t say it unkindly, more in sympathy. “Anyway, I’m here to show you the way, aren’t I?”

“I know. But suppose I have to come on my own one day?”

Stanley laughed, swerving to avoid a scavenging dog. “Don’t try it,” he said.

“I can’t be a millstone round your neck, Stanley.”

“The hell with it. We’re in it together, man.”

It moved him, more than anything Stanley had said before. So Melanie had been right, after all: in some indefinable way he had been ‘accepted'.

He’d telephoned Stanley the previous evening, after his day of disconnected reflections, walking three blocks from his home to a public booth to make sure Susan wouldn’t know. They arranged to meet between four and half-past, but Stanley had been late. In fact it had been nearly half-past five before the big white Dodge had pulled up at the garage where they’d met before. No word of apology; actually, he’d seemed surprised at Ben’s annoyance.

He wasn’t wearing his dark glasses today: they protruded from the top pocket of his brown jacket. Striped shirt, wild floral tie, chunky cuff-links.

They drove off, wheels spinning, engine roaring, watched by a startled and grinning gardener in blue overalls on a lawn in a garden opposite the garage.

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