Part 35 (1/2)

When he walked beside her in the tunnel, illuminating the uneven floor with his moon-yellow flashlight, it was her choice to keep going, to lean forward and put her full 102 pounds into the chair, to force it over the jags of rock. The blisters would heal. The pain would go. She could control her bladder, could carry this p.i.s.s all the way to Saarlim City.

12.

When she had spun the pistol on her finger it had been her choice, but it had not felt like it. She had walked towards Aziz on that gluey grey-skied day because ... she was twenty-three years old ... she had that jelly feeling in her legs, the warm soft heat behind her eyes. It had been a little madness, a frisson. But far from evaporating, as you might expect, this feeling had been distilled, condensed, intensified by almost everything she saw thereafter even, for Chrissakes, the man's domestic life. The sight of a wife, children you would expect this to be a killer, but she carried her crush in deep disguise, right into his home. She slit her eyes, hollowed her cheeks, thrust her jaw, got a tingling at the nape of her neck watching how this cool, elegant man with the poker player's eyes was also the dab, the patron. She got numb and icy in her sinuses watching how he exercised his power, how he listened to his brothers with his dark eyes never leaving their faces, how he nodded, gestured, settled a dispute about propane gas by placing a hand against another man's cheek. Jacqui, who hated the ordinariness of the lower-middle cla.s.s of Efica, found herself sympathetically imagining life inside that little grocery store. She liked how they lashed the bedding on to the rafters just before dawn, the way they scrubbed the cracked green concrete floor until it smelt like a s.h.i.+p at sea; and although the men did have Glock automatics stuck in their belts, there was also a definite edge to the place she found almost religious hierarchical, ascetic, clean. She was not, herself, religious, but this slight foreign man with weird-looking sideburns was that rarity not mediocre.

When she rode with him in the truck, he talked to her man to man. It was almost unbearable, the intimacy. She twice had visions of resting her palm on his bristly olive-skinned neck. He told her frankly, in English, how they hi-jacked the big gasoline auto-lorries when they crossed the border out of Voorstand. He would die not knowing he had said these things to a woman. She did not want to tell him either. That was the paradox. It was her business to hold secrets, to retain them, to gain pleasure only from their tumescent pressure, never their release.

Aziz made Wally Paccione appear more and more a spiv. He was rude about the blown-out tyre, bad-tempered on the road, and now, as they pushed on through the stale air of the tunnel, the old Efican seemed to Jacqui to look like a Grand Duke by Bertolt Brecht. Sometimes, when his wheelbarrow hit a b.u.mp, you could hear him cuss. But he never did direct a human remark to the man who pushed him. Jacqui had watched. She had not yet seen so much as a smile or a nod pa.s.s between them.

In Chemin Rouge, Wally had been a reasonable employer, occasionally withholding, but mostly good-hearted. But neither he nor I this was her opinion made any concessions to the country we were pa.s.sing through. We had* not learned a word of Old Dutch and this, to a linguist, seemed both lazy and offensive. To her it seemed ill-mannered and provincial to continue to call a tyre a 'sock', a truck a 'Teuf-teuf'. In Zeelung our nurse began silently to judge us.

'Shut-the-f.u.c.k-up,' Wally had said, and Aziz, this so-called gangster, who could just as easily slit our throats, had sheltered us, fed us and abandoned his own truck just so he could fulfil his part of a bargain.

Jacqui could not bear that he be treated like this.

When he shone the torch for her, she thanked him in his own language: 'Dankie voor die flits.'

In the flickering yellow light she could see his mouth was compressed. His top lip was slightly swollen and this, with its intimations of both violence and grief, she found attractive.

'I am sorry,' she said to him. 'I know we have offended you.'

She had not really imagined he would hold her responsible for Wally's rudeness, so the darting hostility of his eyes, when he looked at her, shocked her.

'Het spijt ons als wij jou kwaai gemaakt,' she said, but he would not let himself be ma.s.saged by the language.

'There is no offence,' he said coldly.

'You must be concerned about your truck?' she said.

'Wat?'

'Ben jou worried oor jou auto-lorrie?'

'The auto-lorrie,' he said, s.h.i.+ning the flashlight on a jagged tooth of rock which they both had to duck beneath, 'is gone.'

'Hey,' Jacqui laughed, not knowing what to say, but meaning, please, mollo-mollo, I'm not your enemy.

'Wat?'

'Relax, the truck is fine.'

'You are a boy. What can you know?'

'I heard you ask the camarade with the gun,' Jacqui said. 'You asked him to care for the truck. He is your family?'

'You listened?'

'Aziz, you spoke in front of me. You know I speak your language.'

'You are very rude boy,' Aziz said.

Jacqui felt her eyes burning.

'He is thief,' Aziz said. 'He take too much money. This man will take my auto-lorrie The pumpkins, he sells them, then the auto-lorrie. Do you think I meet my family family by the road?' by the road?'

'I'm sorry but ...'

'Sorry, sorry, I'm so sorry,' Aziz mocked, making his voice so girlish that Jacqui, chilled with fright, felt she could not hold her bladder a second longer.

'Please shut up,' Wally Paccione said. 'Push the chair.'

'You shut up,' Aziz said.

'I was not talking to you, mug-wallop. I was talking to the nurse.'

Jacqui saw the size of the offence. She saw the explosion coming like a bulge in a cartoon snake.

'Mug-wallop?' Aziz said, his voice rising incredulously. 'Mug-wallop?'

'It's not this camarade's business to talk to you,' Wally said. 'His business is to push the chair. It is my business to talk to you.'

Aziz called to the farmer. 'Jy mag nou wegdonder,' he said. 'Jy can die wheelbarrow vat. Hy kan die rest lopen.'

The farmer immediately obeyed. He stopped pus.h.i.+ng. He stood immobile, his closely barbered head bent so as not to hit the ceiling.

Aziz was going to make the old spiv walk.

'Ik heb mijn geld nodig,' the farmer said, producing a blue cloth purse from his trouser pockets. 'Ik moes blijven tot ik mijn geld krijg,' the farmer said. He loosened the lips of the purse and waited.

'He needs to go,' Aziz said curtly. 'Now you pay him. Geduld,' he said to the farmer. 'Hierdie heer sal jou nou betalen.'

The farmer turned towards Wally, who began to struggle from the barrow which, being temporarily unsupported, tipped and sent him sprawling. He hit his head against the rock wall. When he stood up there was blood oozing down his temple and into his eye.

'I am an old man,' Wally said.

'My truck is gone,' Aziz said.

'Pet.i.t con.'

'Let me help you,' Jacques said to Wally. 'Let me interpret ...'