The Will to Die by Can Themba

Author:Can Themba [Themba, Can]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781803288796
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

The Dube Train

The morning was too cold for a summer morning, at least, to me, a child of the sun. But then on all Monday mornings I feel rotten and shivering, with a clogged feeling in the chest and a nauseous churning in the stomach. It debilitates my interest in the whole world around me.

The Dube Station with the prospect of congested trains, filled with sour-smelling humanity, did not improve my impression of a hostile life directing its malevolence plumb at me. All sorts of disgruntledties darted through my brain: the lateness of the trains, the shoving savagery of the crowds, the grey aspect around me. Even the announcer over the loudspeaker gave confused directions. I suppose it had something to do with the peculiar chemistry of the body on Monday morning. But for me all was wrong with the world.

Yet, by one of those flukes that occur in all routines, the train I caught was not full when it came. I usually try to avoid seats next to the door, but sometimes it cannot be helped. So it was that Monday morning when I hopped into the Third Class carriage. As the train moved off, I leaned out of the paneless window and looked lack-lustrely at the leaden platform churning away beneath me like a fast conveyer belt.

Two or three yards away, a door had been broken and repaired with masonite so that it would be an opening door no more. Moreover, just there a seat was missing, and there was a kind of a hall.

I was sitting opposite a hulk of a man; his hugeness was obtrusive to the sight when you saw him, and to the mind when you looked away. His head tilted to one side in a half-drowsy position, with flaring nostrils and trembling lips. He looked like a kind of genie, pretending to sleep but watching your every nefarious intention. His chin was stubbled with crisp, little black barbs. The neck was thick and corded, and the enormous chest was a live barrel that heaved forth and back. The overall he wore was open almost down to the navel, and he seemed to have nothing else underneath. I stared, fascinated, at his large breasts with their winking, dark nipples.

With the rocking of the train as it rolled towards Phefeni Station, he swayed slightly this way and that, and now and then he lazily chanted a township ditty. The titillating bawdiness of the words incited no humour or lechery or significance. The words were words, the tune was just a tune.

Above and around him, the other passengers, looking Monday-bleared, had no enthusiasm about them. They were just like the lights of the carriage—dull, dreary, undramatic. Almost as if they, too, felt that they should not be alight during the day.

Phefeni Station rushed at us with human faces blurring past. When the train stopped, in stepped a girl. She must have been a mere child. Not just petite, but juvenile in structure. Yet her manner was

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