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  Bitter Fruit

  ACHMAT DANGOR was born in 1948 in Johannesburg. He has devoted much of his life to politics, including heading up the Kasigo Trust which, when created, was the largest black-led foundation in South Africa. Since laying down his duties as Director of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, Dangor now writes full time. He is the author of Kafka’s Curse which has appeared in six languages. Bitter Fruit is his latest novel and was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

  ‘Dangor’s writing, and the world he creates with it, exude a vibrant physicality… [the] vivid prose, narrative fluency and facility for literary experiment make Bitter Fruit a considerable achievement.’ Shomit Dutta, Daily Telegraph

  ‘This South African novel tells a powerful story of how the toxins of apartheid seep into the life of one small ‘Coloured’ family… This is a haunting story of a family disintegrating, wonderfully authentic on its context, gender and generation, its progress like slow dancing.’ Barbara Trapido, Independent

  ‘The poet takes over from the political writer… Bitter Fruit has a shocking ability to surprise the reader with the persistence of racial feeling in South Africa.’ Gabriel Gbadamosi, Guardian

  ‘Bitter Fruit… is explicitly about South Africa confronting its own past… The unremitting intensity of Dangor’s focus is just as notable as its depth.’ Laurence Phelan, Independent on Sunday

  ‘In a series of fine characterisations, the dissonance and unease of South Africa are counterpointed with the inner lives of Silas, Lydia and Mikey. It is a textured piece of writing, redolent with the smells and sounds of close-packed living, and the hint that the violence and fanaticism are not likely to end provides a chilling coda.’ Elizabeth Buchan, Daily Mail

  ‘This dense, painful, and luxuriously written book carefully reveals itself… with a subtle but stinging pessimism.’ Claire Allfree, Metro

  ‘Bitter Fruit is a subtly layered tale of truth, reconciliation and redemption… Following in the great tradition of Richard Rive and Alex La Guma, he is a writer who gives texture and grace to the present lives and historical legacy of South Africa’s 500-year-old multi-ethnic society.’ Rachel Holmes, Literary Review

  ‘Meticulously written and perfectly paced, the story, while grim, hints at an escape from history’s tyranny.’ Giles Newington, Irish Times

  Bitter Fruit

  Achmat Dangor

  Atlantic Books

  London

  First published in 2001 by Kwela Books, 28 Wale Street, Cape Town 8001 P.O. Box 6525, Roggebaai 8012.

  First published in Great Britain in 2003 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

  This paperback edition published by Atlantic Books in 2004.

  Copyright © Achmat Dangor 2001

  The moral right of Achmat Dangor to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Paperback ISBN: 1 84354 264 1

  eISBN: 978 1 78239 080 0

  Printed in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham

  Atlantic Books

  An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London WC1N 3JZ

  ‘It is an old story – ours.

  My father’s and mine.’

  William Shakespeare

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part Two

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part Three

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Part One

  Memory

  I will teach you that there is nothing that is not divinely natural, … I will speak to you of everything.

  André Gide, Fruits of the Earth

  1

  IT WAS INEVITABLE. One day Silas would run into someone from the past, someone who had been in a position of power and had abused it. Someone who had affected his life, not in the vague, rather grand way in which everybody had been affected, as people said, because power corrupts even the best of men, but directly and brutally. Good men had done all kinds of things they could not help doing, because they had been corrupted by all the power someone or something had given them.

  ‘Bullshit,’ Silas thought. It’s always something or someone else who’s responsible, a ‘larger scheme of things’ that exonerates people from taking responsibility for the things they do.

  Silas watched the man, the strands of thinning hair combed all the way across his head to hide his baldness, the powdery residue of dry and dying skin on the collar of his jacket, the slight paunch, the grey Pick ’n Pay shoes, the matching grey socks. The man leaned forward to push something along the check-out counter, and turned his face towards where Silas stood, holding a can of tomatoes in his hands like an arrested gesture. Yes, it was Du Boise. François du Boise. The same alertness in his blue eyes. A bit slower, though, Silas thought, as Du Boise moved his head from side to side, watching the cashier ring up his purchases.

  Silas went closer, accidentally jostling a woman in the queue behind Du Boise. Silas watched him pushing his groceries along, even though the cashier was capable of doing this on the conveyor belt. Typical pensioner’s fare. ‘No-name brand’ cans of beans, tuna, long-life milk, sliced white bread, instant coffee, rooibos tea, denture cream.

  So the bastard’s lost his teeth.

  Silas pictured Lydia’s angry face, were he to return home without groceries. Today’s Sunday and the shops are open only until one o’clock. She’d suppose out loud that she’d have to do the shopping the next day, because his job was too important to allow him to take time off from work. All the same, he abandoned the trolley and followed Du Boise out of the store. Halfway down the length of the mall, past shop windows that Du Boise occasionally stopped to look into with familiar ease, Silas began to ask himself what the hell he thought he was doing, following a retired security policeman about in a shopping centre? What Du Boise had done, he had done a long time ago. Nineteen years. And Silas had learned to live with what Du Boise had done, had absorbed that moment’s horror into the flow of his life, a faded moon of a memory that only occasionally intruded into his everyday consciousness. Why did it matter now, when the situation was reversed, and Silas could use the power of his own position to make the old bastard’s life hell?

  The man’s smell, a faint stench of decaying metabolism, was in Silas’s nostrils, as if he were a hunter come suddenly upon his wounded prey. Du Boise stopped at a café, pulled a chair out from under the table, ready to sit down. Silas stood close to him, facing him, and suffered a moment of uncertainty. Shit, this man looked so much old
er than the Du Boise he remembered. Then he looked – startled – into the man’s equally startled eyes.

  ‘Du Boise? Lieutenant Du Boise?’

  ‘Yes?’ he said, and looked Silas up and down, his bewildered manner changing to one of annoyance. He sat down, uttering a weary sigh, trying to draw the attention of other shoppers. Look, here was a youngster bothering an old man, a pensioner.

  ‘Do you remember me?’ Silas asked.

  Du Boise leaned back in his chair, his air of open-armed, I’m-being-put-upon vulnerability quickly bringing a security guard closer.

  ‘Should I?’ he asked quietly, caught the eye of the security guard, then raised himself from his chair and pushed his trolley towards the exit.

  Silas watched Du Boise disappear into the bright sunlight, watched the security guard watching him, and then turned away. The rage he felt was in his stomach, an acidity that made him fart sourly, out loud, oblivious to the head-shaking group of shoppers who had gathered to witness a potential scene. The guard spoke into his radio, the café owner pointedly dragged the chair back to its neat place beneath the table. Silas’s rage moved disconsolately into his heart.

  He drove home and, without saying a word to Lydia, took a six-pack of beer from the fridge and walked up Tudhope Avenue towards the small park. He found a tiny island of green in the bristly grass. A couple of hoboes, smiling generously, moved over to make room for him to sit down, legs sprawled out. He smiled back, but ignored the obvious hint. He placed the opulent, still-sealed pack of beer between his legs, and leaned back on his elbows.

  Silas remembered how Lydia had looked up from the paper, then put it aside to watch him as he collected the beer from the fridge, walked out through the door. Her eyes had followed him as he passed the window where she sat, and when he turned to close the gate, he had seen the wariness in her face, and the tiredness. What unspoken trauma had he brought home, she must have been wondering. He felt guilty for a moment, then opened a can and drank, long deep gulps. He paused, burped, heard one of the hoboes remark that ‘some people have it good in this new South Africa’. Silas turned and stared defiantly at them, then continued drinking, slow, slaking swallows, until his eyes swam and his face flushed warmly. The hoboes got up and walked away in disgust.

  At ease now, he stretched out his legs, smiled at passers-by. The park, even with its ragged lawn and fallen-down fence, provided some relief from the hot criss-cross of streets. Located on a busy intersection, it reminded him of those unexpected patches of green in the townships, where you could go without fuss. None of that ‘let’s go to the park’ kind of ceremony that people so quickly acquired when they moved to the suburbs. Just tiny oases, where you could start off by yourself, a spontaneous decision to seek some solitariness, and the very peacefulness of you sitting on your own, sipping beer, would summon a whole group of bras to join you, all bringing along their own ‘ammo’. Soon there would be a group of guys squatting in a circle and talking bra-talk, a mellifluous flow of gruff observation and counter-observation, no topic serious enough or dwelt upon sufficiently to maroon the hazy passage of a pleasurable, forgetful afternoon.

  No one pressed you for answers or confidences, you soon forgot the problem that had driven you and your pack of beer into the street, you were just one of the ‘manne’, deserving of your privacy. Until a wife or a mother, or a formidable duet of mother and wife, came along to tell you that this was no way to resolve your problems, drinking in the street like a kid, or worse still, like a tsotsi who had taken to petty crime because he couldn’t face life. And drinking in public was a crime, petty or not.

  The worst was when the cops arrived, all cold-eyed and admonishing, revving the engine of their van until you and your friends slowly dispersed, a herd of dumb, resentful beasts being driven from a favoured waterhole.

  Silas cracked open his third beer, lay back on the grass, resting his head on the three remaining cans. The sun pressed down on his eyelids, a hot illumination that would soon make him feel drowsy. This must be the way blind people absorbed light into their heads: raising their faces to the sun, to Ra, god of the blind. Everyone needed real light, not just the artificial, thought-up light of the imagination.

  ‘God! You are so insensitive!’ Lydia would have said, had he repeated this thought to her. An innocuous, light-hearted thought, born in a truly carefree moment. She would punish him for it. Lydia had an unforgiving mind. What went on in her heart these days? Well, he’d find out soon. Have to tell her about Du Boise. Not good at keeping secrets … well, not really. It struck him that he and Lydia spoke very little these days, and when they did, it was about something practical, the car needing a service, the leaking taps, the length of the grass at the back of the house.

  And about Mikey. Speaking about Mikey was the closest she came to revealing herself. Not exactly pouring her heart out, but hinting at what was in there, the anxiety eating away at her calm exterior. She was always asking Silas to ‘intervene’, to take an active interest in his son. Hadn’t he noticed how Mikey had changed, how he was no longer the easygoing kid they once knew?

  ‘We all grow up, Lyd, and suddenly the going’s not that easy!’

  Words he would love to say, but dare not.

  ‘Try and speak to him, Silas, try and find out whether he’s got any problems, you know, a girl, drugs, things happen to young people.’

  Meaning he doesn’t speak to you, is that it?

  Someone loomed above Silas, shutting out the sun. Served him right for falling asleep in a public park in the heart of Berea. Steal your shoes off your feet, people say.

  ‘Dad?’

  He opened his eyes and sat up. Mikey was smiling at him in that condescending way he seemed to reserve for his father’s drunkenness.

  ‘Dad, we have to be at Jackson and Mam Agnes’s by three.’

  This was Lydia’s doing, sending Mikey out to find him, to humiliate him in public, lead him home, steering him by the elbow. Well, that hadn’t happened for a long time. Silas imagined Lydia telling Mikey that his grandmother would be frantic. Mam Agnes was relying on Mikey to drive her to this wedding in Lenasia, because Jackson wouldn’t go with her. Mikey’s grandfather is strange, the way men can be. He doesn’t like Mam Agnes’s Lenasia friends, not because they’re Indian, but because they gossip. More likely because they don’t booze, and, in any case, Jackson was probably in his ‘high nines’ by now.

  All of this would have been said in motherly tones, full of nagging intimacy. Mikey would have been reading, or listening to music, or sitting at the back staring into God knows what kind of nothingness. He would have looked at his mother, not pleadingly, simply to convey his annoyance, and then he would have strode out of the house to come and find Silas.

  The way he looks at me, Lydia says. As if he were the adult and I the child.

  Mikey extended a hand and helped Silas to his feet. It was a comradely gesture, Silas knew, a warning to expect nothing but cold scorn from Lydia when they got home. He farted loudly as he rose to his feet.

  ‘Christ, Dad!’ Mikey said, and walked away.

  Silas didn’t mind this anger. It brought the kind of understanding he needed and knew Lydia would not offer, a recognition of his ordinariness, his capacity for weakness, it drove the anger out of him, replaced it with a sense of fulfilment that was light, somehow, even if it was accompanied by a mortal belching and the sly emission of pungent farts.

  Simple things that helped ordinary people to cope with life. Lydia asked Mikey to drive, as if to demonstrate the need for a ‘man around the house’. Usually, she wanted to drive even when Silas was sober. Women are better at these things, we don’t have egos to parade. Mikey, who had only recently obtained his licence, drove now, fast and resolute on the freeway, slow and careful when they took the off-ramp to Soweto. An afternoon haze of smog turned the sun to brass. When they pulled up outside Jackson and Mam Agnes’s house, Silas said he would wait in the car. The vehicle wouldn’t be safe if left unguarde
d, and, in any case, ‘You’re on night duty and we can’t stay long,’ he said to Lydia’s disappearing back. Soon, Jackson, his face burnished the colour of dark wood by a day of drinking in the sun, swaggered out through the gate, his oversized shorts flapping around his sturdy legs.

  ‘Sielas, Sielas, they’ll steal you along with the fucken car,’ Jackson said, delighting in the musical tone this emphasis gave Silas’s name. ‘Why don’t you come in and have a drink?’ Silas went inside to have a beer with his father-in-law. Mam Agnes gave the two men chiding looks, while Lydia became stony-faced. Mam Agnes, dressed ‘like the queen bee in drag’, according to Silas, made some remark about men who did nothing but drink beer all day, then handed Mikey the keys to Jackson’s car (an old but stately Rover that ‘needed a slow hand’, in the words of its owner). The one thing she wished for her grandson, she said, was that he never became a beer-drinking slob.

  Mikey and Mam Agnes drove off under Jackson’s watchful eye, while Lydia strode away towards their own car. Silas gulped his beer much too quickly, and joined Lydia. They drove back towards the city. His loud, exaggerated burping brought no reaction from Lydia, who concentrated on her driving, glancing at her watch all the time.

  ‘I saw Du Boise today.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Du Boise, Lieutenant Du Boise.’

  Lydia said nothing. Her fingers gripped the steering wheel more tightly.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the mall.’

  ‘Is that why we have no groceries?’

  He looked out of the window. They had emerged from the township smog. Clouds darkened the sky. He opened the window, letting in a gust of moist, refreshing air.

  ‘I recognized him immediately. Old and fucken decrepit, but Du Boise all right. It was his eyes. And that arrogant voice.’

  Lydia looked at him, then returned her attention to the traffic. He tried to engage her eyes, but she stared straight ahead of her.

  ‘You spoke to him?’ she asked after a while, her enquiry casual.