Recovering Academics

Recovering Academics

Published by The Abundant Nerds [email protected]

Copyright © 2016 authors and illustrator All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the authors and illustrator. Cover design: Alison Kearney

Cover illustration: Margaret Orr Book design: Margaret Orr

Printed and bound in South Africa by MegaDigital. First edition 2016

ISBN- 978-0-620-70542-4

Prologue We came together to write stories and something magic happened. We created our own story. Our initial common bond developed into something stronger, healing and creative. As time went by and through each other as our stories unfolded and developed with increasing confidence and clarity, it became a type of routine – a drug, a healing and an essential additive to our middle age lives.

What had held us together in the first place – our workplace –became both the object of escape, the target and the impetus for some of our narratives. Intertwined with the challenges and history of that place, our own personal stories found their voice. These were stories of struggle and movement, identity and illness, past and present in short tales of recovery.

The process was simple- a space, good food, private time and a coming together to write and to read to each other. Our stories at first were hesitant and faltering. The expert input that we had at the beginning made us anxious about things like adjectives and dialogue and we were rather selfconscious and editorial. Gradually though, individual styles blossomed.

The influence of our work context was unavoidable – themes of juggling and justifying, guilt, productivity, paranoia, thwarted energy, change, hope, disillusionment, treachery, struggles of integrity and of recognition. Not for us the happy ending of the Victorian novel. Our goals were more personal, more mid-life. Hot flushes and flashbacks. There was a structure and urgency to our words. We were aware of the transience of life, the preciousness of what we still have and the need to make meaning of it all. Dedication

To all the highly intelligent, quietly competent, caring and conscientious academic and support staff and students of Wits University who do not figure in these true stories.

Contents Prologue

In the office

1

The distinguished professor

4

The secretary

7

Driving through the day

Beginnings and leavings

2

5

Round animal bear

8

Participant observer

13

The cleaner

The hypsochromic shift

12

16

The acting head

20

Travel

27

Rejection

21

Let’s Go …Kaiserschmarrn and Sachertorte

28

Saffron Walden

35

One night in India

40

In Mumbai

50

The great woman

53

Lecturer glasses In transit Romania

Missed trips

32

39 45 51

Out of the office

54

On letting go

59

Yellow dog

Being and becoming

On the edge of beauty

55

62

63

Writing retreat

64

Joie de Vivre

70

Cheap tea

67

Roedean reunion 40 years on

74

My official name

79

A white man in the army

78

The harem

82

Age and sorrow

94

Eventually

97

The nine scrolls – A myth PATT.01151A compass

92

95

In the Office

1


Driving through the day Susan Chemaly

Arrive at work late after fraught session with psychoanalyst. Take detour around Braamfontein while dodging reversing construction vehicles, mad taxis and hooting 4 x 4s due to red and yellow tape blocking off one-way street. Sneak in the back way. Nearly bump into lab assistant in passage. Admire his hat. He tells me that my Honours student is looking for me. Stop myself from turning tail and running, very fast, to anywhere at all. Go into office; discover that email is down. Computer keeps on demanding password and when I oblige, spitting it out again. Switch off computer (feeling of empowerment). Realise that I have forgotten to press Restart and it will take seven minutes for computer to switch on again because of nanny mentality of Wits virus scan. Start clearing office of yesterday’s chaos. Honours student barges into office, shouting. Tell her to calm down and sit down. Her research report for her Honours project needs to be handed in on Monday. Today is Thursday. She says that her results are wrong. They are, by a factor of about 500. Monologue starts in my head. (Asked her, over and over again, to calculate her results as she goes along, so that she would know if something were going wrong. She didn’t. Did my best to train her: ticked her off for spilling chemicals on the analytical balance, reminded her that it is no use to weigh her sample with the balance doors open and while the balance pan is still shaking, showed her how to prepare a solution in a volumetric flask (first year work), begged her to do her reaction inside the spectrophotometer cell, not outside. (The instrument engineer kindly cleaned up her splashes with a pipe-cleaner, charged at R100-00 per minute plus travelling expenses.) Eventually persuaded Honours student to calculate her results. Said she didn’t know how (first year work). Didn’t believe her but was wrong.) Honours student asks me what percentage she would get for her draft report as it stands. Say 35%; slight exaggeration. Student speechless but not for long. Asks me what I can do. Answer, nothing, it’s too late. Tell student to try and explain results. Make several suggestions, including poor experimental technique.

Now it’s 10.30 am. Go to switch on spectrophotometer and take reagents out of fridge to warm up. Find that someone has put virus on slave computer of spectrophotometer. Follow his trail and leave him rude note. Clean memory stick. Virus scan slave computer. Virus scan office computer. Wonder how I’m going to fit one 60-minute and three 80-minute experiments into rest of day. Go to tea-room for cup of coffee. Resident School Evangelical Christian grabs me. Disentangle myself. Forget to eat my yoghurt. Check email - one page junk-mail and suggestion from my boss that I repeat experiment of MSc student who is getting funny results. Delete junk. Delete suggestion.

Do 60-minute experiment. Eskom fiddles with power supply (power surge) after 48 minutes. Repeat experiment. Calculate experiment. Do first 80-minute experiment. While it’s running have some lunch. Check up on colleague’s cockatiel (Bella). Has she laid another egg (the cockatiel I mean)? No, but husband (Peter) has covered up egg and Vet says it will be OK for two weeks. The egg, she means. The cockatiel’s husband she means. Do second 80-minute experiment. Calculate results.

2


Levitate several centimetres above chair when colleague pops into office shouting Hallelujah. Colleague apologises and points out that she is happy because I have four points in a straight line on my graph. (I’m aiming for five, one point for each of three replicate experiments.) Give up on third 80-minute experiment.

5.30 pm. Definitely don’t want to be locked in building for the night but forgot staff card in car. Hastily do washing up. Remember to pour cyanide into waste bottle and not down sink. Leave by only door that’s still unlocked. Check on student who tried to open locked door with a flourish for pretty girl and squashed his nose. Say hello to my friend the rat, who is sitting on haunches nibbling piece of naartjie peel next to overflowing rubbish bin. Don’t actually know if it’s same rat every day; suspect there’s a whole family of them. Discover Senate House is locked. Take scenic route up and down stairs through Central Block to car. Wind my way between stopped cars of mommies and daddies picking up students in front of Senate House. Left into Jorissen Street. Around the corner into Bertha Street, being careful not to run over suicidal pedestrians. Run into wall of traffic in Jan Smuts Avenue. Sit.

3


The distinguished professor Cynthia Kros

She was distinguished in her field. It was one of those fields in which women are not very often distinguished like composing music (so much less the case than it used to be) or nuclear physics. She had made some Faustian pact, exchanging almost everything for a rare, singular brilliance. Her loose flesh had fallen and seemed to puddle around her ankles. Her eyes were small and without expression. She kept two youngish male prodigies in tow. For some reason they felt they owed their prodigality to her.

It was also her duty to keep the memory of the Shoah alive. It meant that she kept running into trouble with the SRC with their equal commitment to the Palestinian cause. She was briefly famous for having withstood a whole phalanx of students who had charged into the Great Hall to ambush an Israeli musician. In the end they had been deflected by her immoveable bulk and the two male prodigies. She saw to it that the students were disciplined. I sat through a meeting with her telling us about the incident and wringing her puffy, little hands at the horror and injustice of it all. The thing is she wasn’t a bit put out by other incidents of horror and injustice. She passed the cleaners in our building every day without noticing them or the fact that they were struggling to get by on a couple of thousand Rand a month. She joined in the fray whenever a colleague was down no matter who it was or what he/she was purported to have done or not to have done. The smell of blood attracted her and she came gliding through the murk of disinformation and putrid gossip like an ancient predator unerringly towards its prey.

4


Beginnings and leavings Moyra Keane

I arrived at the new position of Senior Researcher with a sense of mild trepidation and of confidence, of excitement and anticipation, of being free, appreciated and well paid. I parked in the quiet almost-empty basement parking. The administrator had arranged everything – unlike the position I had just left in academia. When I arrived there, some years before, I had had a storeroom for an office. Not an empty store room: one filled with dust and old files and books and tables piled up, and broken chairs and no computer, no phone and a window so dirty I didn’t know if I was facing west or east.

I got out of my car as the NGO Director arrived. He had interviewed me and I had also just met him again at a friend’s party. He walked past me without a greeting. I didn’t much care – I was up-beat and excited. The receptionist greeted me warmly and opened my new office. The building was new and clean and I was surprised and delighted to find it overlooked a small canal covered in dense foliage. My large office windows looked on to thick undergrowth and a bank of tall trees where I could almost see right into the birds’ nests. I had been given the biggest and certainly most pleasant office. Next door was the small cubicle of my young research assistant, next to her an admin officer. Across the passage was the library with a treasure of archives, education journals, and a librarian who offered to find any literature I may need. Half the offices were empty – there was a clear understanding that working-from-home was completely acceptable, and anyway – the available space was more than we needed for the five researchers, two interns, administrators and three managers. The other new senior researcher, Mali, who had joined a month earlier was just leaving for meetings in Uganda and Malawi. I was envious and looked forward to taking up similar projects. I liked Mali immediately in that way that you instantly admire and trust and respect someone. Mali looked just as pleased to see me. By day two I was given an easy and yet interesting project on Recognition of Prior Learning. I was not familiar with SETAs so had a fair amount of reading to do. I got to work immediately and in the absence of dozens of emails, disruptions, meetings, multitasking, I was impressed at how much I achieved. I was left to arrange interviews and free to come and go. I was learning new things, had a willing research assistant and wonderful colleagues. We were a team of female researchers who enjoyed each other’s confidences and stories and soon I found everyone was willing to contribute when the pressure mounted. I was asked to represent the organisation at high level research consortium meetings. I felt privileged to meet the minister, to contribute to real-world discussions, and to be trusted to make decisions. By the second month I was writing funding proposals and responding to calls for tenders. Mali and I were often in the office late on a Friday night when everyone else had left sometime by Wednesday midday. We were often alone in the office on a Sunday with the weight of finding money for the whole organisations’ salaries. Impossible deadlines piled up, exacerbated by frequent powercuts and emergency meetings with the Education Department. We nevertheless submitted a number of reasonable and carefully thought through research proposals which were professionally

5


packaged and couriered by the experienced administrator. We had four successful bids in half as many months. However the reality of financial distress loomed over us all. The internal politics of funders and the Department spilled over into our work. Being in an NGO, on-call to do work for others began to feel like prostitution. Especially as budgets were cut on research projects and the same amount of work had to be done – or at least the same outcomes were expected.

My own research interests and writing faded. I began to realise what a luxury it was in academia to attend talks, choose one’s research area, and take on a variety of tasks that did not have to be budgeted for. For example if a student wished to stay an extra hour in consultation I did not think twice about it; I could accept external examining or read a colleague’s draft paper as a matter of course. Now I had time sheets to fill in accounting for every minute of every day as everything had a Rand value.

Mali and I instigated a frank discussion with colleagues and management. We drafted a way-forward plan. But first it was like untangling a frayed knot of cotton. Perhaps some of the threads were cut and if the mess was untangled loose ends would fall out. Perhaps the unravelling was too difficult. If you pulled one thread the bundle got tighter. We found out that through the years new recruits had come and gone – sometimes staying only a couple of days. I looked out now sadly onto the wintery embankment. There was a photo of my trip to Venda on the wall. My shelves were now filled with books and files. The building was now also dark and deserted: it was 10pm. I had missed a conference in Durban where I had been sponsored to give a presentation by my old research group. Mali and I wrote our resignation letters on the same day. What a pity – or maybe not. Mali is now mother of a beautiful 1 year old son who will surely have his parents’ brains and fineness of character. I have an office in the university again and no longer meet with the minister.

Back in academia I still have an overflow of pressing demands and interests, but I am more appreciative of our academic freedoms, of the opportunities to learn and contribute to others’ learning, of being committed to a meaningful development of students and society, and hoping that micro-measurements of accountability, competition, and managerialism do not destroy the established ethos of trust, collegiality, critique, creativity and conscience that keeps academics inspired and productive.

6


The secretary Susan Chemaly

Cora was a departmental secretary and saw herself as the earth mother kind. She was tall, wore shapeless, slightly dirty cotton T-shirts and skirts and innumerable strings of beads and strange icons on leather thongs. She pulled enormous, horny raw carrots from her garden and ate them for lunch with the earth still on them. She told us that she believed in fairies and, as evidence for this, she had several portraits on her office walls of the ones from her garden. She couldn’t type. After her lunchtime carrots she liked to take a nap, usually under the table in our tea-room/meeting-room. We once held a departmental meeting with her fast asleep under the table and hidden by the long table cloth. She said that she had to lie flat on her back in the middle of the day in order to soothe her sore back. She often took several days off at a time, claiming that she couldn’t work because her back was too painful. Unfortunately for her, someone saw her sauntering around the Rosebank crafts market with a group of friends, when she was supposed to be on her sickbed. She was given the choice of taking early retirement or being fired. She took the early retirement option and informed us that she was going to make a living by giving Indian head massage to selected clients.

At the end of the year Faculty party, just before she retired, she brought along as a guest her friend Nora, who was shorter and fatter than Cora but who could have, otherwise, been her identical twin. Nora was, by profession, a reflexology foot massager. The two of them drank a fairly large quantity of wine and got tiddly. Towards the tail-end of the party, they cornered the very handsome but rather small (compared to them) Dean of the Faculty and offered him a simultaneous head and foot massage. The poor man blushed, demurred and made a hasty exit.

7


Round animal bear Dale Taylor

On my way out of Paputzi’s coffee shop, I laughed out loud. Sitting wedged into the security bars of the window next to the door was a row of stuffed sheep - each the shape and size of a soccer ball, with straggly cream and beige loops of wool for coats. Their eyes were not visible under the wool, but they had large grins on their corduroy faces - sheepish grins, really. I reached out and touched one, connecting with the texture of its coat. Still smiling, I walked out towards my car, and tipped the car guard.

In the middle of the carpark, I stopped, suddenly gripped by an urge to buy one of the creatures. ‘You’re crazy,’ I told myself, ‘you have three live animals at home – you don’t need stuffed ones!’ But I acted on the impulse anyhow, justifying that it could make a useful gift for a niece or nephew.

I walked out of the coffee shop a second time, the owner of a stuffed sheep. I looked down at it. Was it a sheep? I was not so sure now. Maybe it was meant to be a hedgehog. Its shape gave little clue: completely spherical with four small appendages. I checked the label. It said ‘Round Animal Bear’. Clearly the Chinese manufacturers weren’t too sure either, though bear it definitely was not.

Buying the creature was my second impulsive act of the day. The first was my visit to the coffee shop. I had been on my way back to the university after seeing my psychologist. Of late my visits with her had left me more down than up, as I faced the reality of my dysfunctional marriage. Prompted by a fast-food whiff en route back to work, I had a sudden surprising urge for slap chips, and decided to stop at this coffee-cum-gift shop, halfway between therapy and work. I walked in, sussed out the various nooks and crannies the old Linden house had to offer, and decided to sit on the veranda. The waiter was excessively polite, and the rousing classical music a little too loud. And I realized chips were not on the healthy menu. I negotiated with the waiter for a toasted health bread sandwich with potato wedges instead of the prescribed salad. I sat alone and comfortable with my solitude, writing random thoughts in a notebook. A grey loerie in the brush cherry tree next to the veranda complained as she clumsily tried to find the best position for eating the berries, surreal in their vivid cerise waxiness. It occurred to me that, for the second time, Doug and I had lost our closest friends to emigration. I jotted down ‘Find replacement friends,’ people we could phone on a Friday afternoon and meet later at a restaurant. I added ‘not easy’ – not easy to find people without plans long made in frenetic Jo’burg. But we were at our best with others.

Large bamboo chimes hung in the brush cherry tree, but completely failed to catch the breeze which rustled the tree. I was relieved that Doug had at last been diagnosed with post-cancer depression, more than two years since his second encounter with cancer. But I despaired that, ten days after filling a script for anti-depressants, he had not started taking them.

8


The sun shone through the brush cherry tree, replicating itself in bright spots on a pile of rocks. I looked at my watch for the first time. The bill arrived with lemon-flavoured Endearmints. The culinary surprise was still on my tongue when I spotted the sheep. I opened my car and put my Round Animal Bear on the passenger seat. In tune with my restored humour, I fastened the seatbelt around it. It grinned away. I chuckled at the product of my random impulse.

I arrived at work, and put the Round Animal Bear on the pile of work in my In-tray. It continued smiling benignly, even though it was sitting on an impossible load of work. My lab technician came in. ‘I like your hedgehog,’ she said (so maybe it was a hedgehog after all) but was too polite to ask what it was doing on my desk.

That evening, I took the hedgehog home. I wanted to show it to Doug, yearning to share something of the emotions of my day with him. I left it sitting on my desk, and wondered what kind of response it would draw from Doug. He walked in and did not comment. One of my dogs sniffed it, then rested her head on my lap as I sat at the computer. Later Doug said, ‘What’s with the sheep?’ But the conversation which followed was brief and superficial. The next day I stuffed the sheep into my work bag. In my office, I put him in the seat next to mine. He could not see over the top of the desk, but he grinned anyhow. I tried to get down to some work, but the pall of the reality of my life hung over me. ‘Get on with it,’ I told myself sternly. ‘Other people cope with far worse situations.’ The admonition did not help me concentrate. I was tired of the energy it took to keep going. One of my students walked into my office. I smiled at her. ‘How are you, Mercy?’

‘Not fine,’ she said, dispensing with convention immediately. She slipped into the chair next to the sheep. She did not look well, despite the fresh pink top she was wearing. Her skin looked dull, and strands of her chemically relaxed hair, usually scraped back neatly into a scrunchie, were out of place. ‘I’ve got tonsils,’ she said. ‘Your throat’s sore?’

‘I went to the hospital yesterday and they gave me medicine, but it’s worse.’

‘I don’t think you’re well enough to write the physics test today,’ I said. She nodded. That was why she’d come to see me. ‘I think you should go back to rest and lie down.’

‘My mother says I should go home so she can look after me,’ she said. I nodded. Mercy was close to her mom, a live-in domestic worker in Sandton. But home was in Tembisa, where her uninterested father lived, and where Mercy and her mother and brothers spent some weekends. ‘I’m not coping,’ she murmured. She reached across and fidgeted with the Round Animal Bear’s coat, winding loops of wool around her fingers.

9


‘It’s a horrible thing for anyone to go through,’ I said.

Fresh from a township high school, Mercy had started university two months before. In her first week of lectures, she went to Campus Health because of unexplained abdominal pain. Campus Health sent her to Jo’burg General Hospital. Jo’burg Gen diagnosed her with cervical cancer, and sent her to Hillbrow Hospital. Hillbrow sent her to South Rand Hospital. South Rand sent her back to the Gen. Each hospital visit cost her a day of lectures - to have any chance of being seen in a state hospital, she needed to be there first thing in the morning.

Despite Jo’burg Gen’s initial reluctance, an oncologist there started her on chemotherapy. This worked well, since the Gen was across the road from the Wits Education campus, five minutes’ walk from her residence. The nurses even organized for her to have her treatment during the afternoon, so that she could attend lectures in the morning. But after a few treatments, they sent her on to Tembisa Hospital, ruling out lectures for a day every week.

I knew that state hospitals had an oncology budget of only R600 per patient treatment, but Mercy’s cancer had been picked up early, and her prognosis was good. Still, it was a heavy burden for an eighteen year old to bear. ‘Would you like me to pray for you?’ I asked. Mercy nodded immediately. I got up, moved around my desk, and stood behind her, putting my hands on her shoulders. Her skin was too warm and slightly clammy, and her shoulders were tense. As I closed my eyes to pray for her, I felt a wave of her pain wash over me, and my eyes were suddenly wet.

I prayed for healing from the tonsils and the cancer, for strength, for courage. Then I smoothed her wayward strands of hair back into place.

The universe’s bigger plan dawned on me. ‘Would you like this?’ I said, offering her the Round Animal Bear. She took him immediately, and put him on her lap. She fiddled with the creature, feeling all his different textures, his corduroy face, his soft stubby fur limbs, and his scraggly woollen coat. She pushed back the wool to see his eyes. ‘I like him because, even though he can’t see where he’s going, he smiles,’ I said. I bent down and traced his woollen grin with my finger. ‘He doesn’t know what the future holds, but he’s still smiling.’ I gave her a squeeze, and went back to my chair, ‘I’m going to be fine,’ she said quietly.

‘Yes you will,’ I affirmed, ‘you’re strong.’ I waited for her to leave.

‘I should go now,’ she said. I nodded, but she was unwilling to leave the cocoon of my office, and she sat a little longer.

‘I should go,’ she repeated, and then she left, the sheep tucked in one arm, to face the taxi rides to Tembisa.

10


The following Monday, she bounced into my office. I looked up from work I was making steady progress on. ‘Hi Mercy, how are you doing?’ ‘Much better,’ she replied.

‘Is your throat better?’ I asked.

‘It’s still sore,’ she admitted, ‘but not so bad.’ Her speech was slightly slurred as she endeavoured to protect it. ‘How was your weekend?‘

Her face fell. ‘My mother was sick.’ ‘So who looked after who?’

‘I looked after my mother,’ she said, resignation on her face at the fact that this was the way things were. I sighed for her, then asked ‘When’s your next treatment?’ ‘Oh, next Tuesday.’

‘How’s your sheep?’

Immediately her face brightened. ‘Oh, she’s fine,’ she said. ‘My brother wanted to know what she was. So I said, “Can’t you see, she’s a sheep!” And my mother wanted to know where I got her, so I told her my physics lecture gave me. And then when I left, my brother said to me, “B, are you taking the sheep?”, but I said “I thought you didn’t like her, why do you want me to leave her?”’ ‘Why does your brother call you B?’ I asked, curious. ‘B for Baby.’

A baby who isn’t allowed to be sick when her mother is sick, I thought. ‘Are you the youngest?’ ‘Yes. And because I’m the only girl.’ ‘Ah, right,’ I smiled.

‘I should go now - I just came to say hello,’ she said, and bounced out to her university day.

11


The cleaner Susan Chemaly

When I first met Jim, an elderly man in dark blue overalls, he was in the laboratory, trying to beat a cockroach to death with a feather duster. He was the laboratory cleaner, extremely conscientious in his work but completely ineffectual, partly because he lacked the physical strength. Soon after my arrival he horrified me by asking, “Waar is die water wat die vuilgoed vreet,” - literally translated as, “Where is the water that eats the dirt,” but there is no English word equivalent to “vreet” which applies to animals (not humans) eating. I wondered what this water could be. Concentrated hydrochloric acid, concentrated nitric acid, (both strong acids) a mixture of the two, i.e. aqua regia, which is the only solvent capable of dissolving gold? Chromic acid; strong acid, oxidising agent and carcinogen? No, surely not, that is bright yellow and can’t be described as “water”. I never found out. Whatever it was, it was clearly highly dangerous and Jim had no protective clothing, no gloves or safety glasses. Jim, like most of the black cleaning staff in those days, had no formal education and could not read or write but as I came to know him better, I discovered that he was a stamp collector. After this I saved for him all the unusual or foreign stamps that I received. Once, he showed me his stamp album, a CNA exercise book with the stamps neatly pasted in categories: animals, birds, butterflies, people, buildings........It occurred to me that he had the soul of an academic. Jim retired more than twenty years ago and is probably no longer alive. He was replaced by a contract cleaning service.

12


Participant observer Moyra Keane

I had been invited to present my research into relevant science education at a small conference of researchers, activists, funders and policy makers. I didn’t look forward to speaking but I know my research area thoroughly and have thought about little else for about two years. In the conference hotel reception, Zak introduced me to one of the speakers. In some shyness I fumbled the handshake and instantly forgot his name. I asked again: ‘Just call me John,’ Skumbuzo said.

I had assumed I was an insider. I was part of the research group, though peripherally and by default. I had enjoyed weeks and weeks on field trips over two years and I cared about the research community in a personal way rather than politically or in the abstract. I had thought that that mattered but in this setting the world seemed to have grown bigger and my work naive. On seeing the programme I noted that many of the papers had a Marxist framework. There was also Ngugi wa Thiongo’s theory of African agency; large sub-Saharan reports using socialist frameworks; discursive in-depth studies of liberation schools and critiques of neo-liberal hegemony which impede people’s education in Africa. My small narrative on community-centred science curricula for a remote rural school lacked the same political and philosophical rigour. My references were from science education. They had forgotten to print me a name tag so I had a hand written one in smudged blue koki pen. I propped myself against a dark wood sideboard with some flasked coffee that tasted of store-rooms and bulk orders. I watched the presenters, funders, embassy VIPs, organisers and others – the plastic label tags giving little clue to the silent secret hierarchies. Zak ushered us into the main venue – interrupting animated conversations.

I sat near the back of the large lecture room. The velvet curtains were closed against the bright cheer of Johannesburg in November, and the buzz of the ‘man-on-the-street’ and the ‘people-on-theground’ and other such ‘grassroots stakeholders’: just us in the artificial gloom. The plenary talks were thankfully soon underway so I had something to focus on. An erudite discourse flowed glibly and elegantly in way that I don’t hear in the Science Faculty. Comments moved to ‘problematizing and disrupting the vulgar political economy’; finding more ‘nuanced interpretations’, ‘interrogating agendas and a negation of the negation’. All inputs were curve balls: always passionate, challenging, combative, and lengthy. My mind drifted to understanding the hidden camaraderie seen through the non-verbal. Dress was ostentatiously scruffy: a label nowhere in sight, definitely no suits, no make-up, no jewellery. Thankfully I had guessed this correctly: I was in old jeans and black T-shirt. Each casually confident speaker began with: ‘Greetings Comrades’. There was also a clear presentation style: strictly handsin-pocket, lots of movement, part read, part chat. I wasn’t going to pull that off. I squirmed at the thought of my carefully-designed PowerPoint; so school-nerd; or managerial-edutainment. Or, even worse it suddenly occurred to me: intellectually patronising. I should scrap it if I could. There was no chance of that. The confident veteran project leader who was presenting now was acknowledged to

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be far too clever and authentic to be working at some department at a neo-liberal university. My PhD felt like a disadvantage.

I considered Aikenhead’s theory of hazardous border crossing: he hadn’t meant it to refer to the culturally close, such as social justice research from a Marxist perspective and social justice research from a Participatory Action Research perspective. Aikenhead argues that Western science (and we could apply this to research) is a subculture of Western worldview. Students from other cultures, who wish to access scientific knowledge, have to cross a cultural border that may threaten their identity – hence they may never secure a crossing into scientific paradigms. This conference community was certainly a sub-culture of researchers having their own shared life-world – and for me, crossing into this felt hazardous. So I continued my own internal conference where the discussion went back and forth: “Could two groups of researchers writing about social justice in rural South Africa be in different worlds?” “How is it that there is this seemingly irreconcilable gap between what I know and what everyone else seems to know, and between my vocabulary and theirs?” I had felt that I knew something about participatory and engaged research leading to emancipatory outcomes privileged over knowledge products. I had also imagined I had a range of data to support new methodological approaches to exploring relevant community-centred curricula. I now doubted I knew anything at all, and wondered how I would articulate it. People were laughing. Outside of my head the mood was light and sparkling. Humour was on – if it were fast, spontaneous, clever, with dry insider jokes. My observations were producing perseverating patterns in my inner conversations. I noticed again that the emotional tone in the group was on-the-edge challenging: merciless, all motives suspect. My slot came up.

I was the only presenter from Wits. I went through the PowerPoint, yes it was a crushing flop, the young respondent roasted me to a point where even ‘John’ looked sorry for me. Her rebuttals of my claims, dismissals of my intentions and approach, her criticism of my use of literature went on for longer than my talk.

I was left wondering about research ethics: such great care we take with the engagement and protection of research participants yet with each other we can be quite deliberately destructive with impunity. I mused over the ironies of discipline paradigms that purport to promote inclusivity, even ubuntu.

As we broke for lunch one of the ambassadors who had been funding part of the research, to my surprise came to say something. I realised he was trying to congratulate me. Zak waited to give me a hug. I wasn’t sure if this was in sympathy or was laudatory. I didn’t care. I had one way or another made it and survived. A Postgraduate student asked advice about his research project as we both found ourselves at the vegetarian section of the finger lunch. Talking to students always took me out of my own concerns. Later when I walked though Braamfontein in the dusk of the warm evening and the relative quiet of a peripheral inner-city that empties after office hours, I felt at home and relaxed. I passed the occasional undergrad student and the homeless in the shop doorways. In the

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bigger picture I felt I belonged and understood that perhaps secured border-crossing is not that hard.

15


The hypsochromic shift Susan Chemaly

Hypsochromic effect: shift of the ultraviolet-visible spectrum of a molecule to a shorter wavelength or the ‘blue’ region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Also known as the blue shift. This story goes back to the 1980s, to a Chemistry Laboratory at Wits University, where I was working on vitamin B12. Most of us in the laboratory rubbed along fairly well and made allowances for each other’s little foibles. There was the occasional minor tantrum, usually about glassware left in the sink or empty bottles returned to the chemical cupboard to grow new chemicals. (This last is a particularly male failing - I’ve never known a female to do it.) All of us had nicknames. I was known as Fluffy after a legendary Persian cat who was renowned for having more hair than brains. Our supervisor, half Scottish, was the Scottish Salmon or Sal for short, except when he went on an economy drive and was called something else. There was a foul-mouthed and lugubrious English post-doc who was known as the Chip Butty after his favourite food. Derek, the PhD student, was Flipper the seal because he was always on the ball. Angelina, the MSc student, was the Dormouse because she could sleep anywhere. She was once discovered fast asleep with her head pillowed on the pot-plant, Xena. Flipper had a theory that pot-plants purified the atmosphere, hence the presence of Xena in the lab. We also had a Capybara, the largest rodent in the world, but fortunately she was writing up her PhD and was seldom seen. However when Samantha, who was a lecturer from a University somewhat north of Johannesburg, joined our lab to do research for her PhD, we were completely stumped and she only received her nickname months later. On arrival, Samantha immediately stated that she worked only at night. The Dormouse and I were astounded and admiring because by 5 pm both of us were exhausted. Sal said firmly that for at least the first week she should work during the day so that we could show her the ropes and he assigned her the bench nearest the telephone and the blackboard.

Whenever the telephone rang and someone answered it, Samantha, like one of Pavlov’s dogs, would turn on the compressed air full blast. This made a terrible hissing and roaring noise which rendered completely futile any telephone conversation. In vain we protested, Samantha was adamant - her pipette needed to be dried at precisely that moment. One morning the Chip Butty was speaking on the phone when Samantha attached her pipette with a piece of tubing to the compressed air, turned full on. The pipette, rocket-propelled by the compressed air, shot past the Chip Butty’s right ear and embedded itself, quivering, in the blackboard. He dropped the telephone, which dangled by its cord, squawking away, while he emitted a stream of language punctuated and conjugated by gasps and squeaks. Samantha went to see Sal with complaints - the Chip Butty was using foul language in the presence of a lady and we were all being horrid to her. The Capybara, on one of her rare forays, had

16


told Samantha that carrying her pipette on the horizontal from one side of her bench to the other with liquid spurting out of one end, was highly inaccurate and would mess up her experiment and Flipper had chimed in that it was dangerous. I had the bench next to Samantha and habitually moved as far away as possible because I didn’t like to have my fur splashed. The Dormouse had asked Samantha to please be quieter because she was disturbing her cogitations.

There were four of us who spent a lot of time working on an instrument called an ultraviolet-visible spectrophotometer (UV for short) but the lab only had two of these instruments. Sal assigned Samantha and me to one instrument and Flipper and the Dormouse to the other. Our two UVs were excellent precision instruments, but small and delicate and rather fiddly to use and repair. In fact, the Department’s electronic technician complained that they were built for midgets. All was, apparently, well for several weeks. I worked all day churning out results and pushing back the frontiers of science. At the end of each day, I carefully switched off the spectrophotometer, in order to conserve the lamps. I then switched the instrument off at the wall-socket and pulled out the plug, in order to prevent myself from waking up at 2 am in the morning and spending the rest of the night sleeplessly worrying about electrical fires, the Chemistry Department burning down, the whole University burning down, the whole of Braamfontein and Parktown burning down, etc., etc. One sunny morning, I arrived at work and found Samantha and Sal standing next to the UV. Sal was looking puzzled and Samantha was in a state of only very slightly suppressed fury. Sal asked me what was wrong with the machine. Blithely I answered, ‘Nothing!’, and proceeded to plug in and switch on. Samantha erupted like a volcano. I did this on purpose, she said, in order to stop her from doing the great scientific work of the next generation. She then said that she needed to be shown how to use the instrument. Sal asked me to show her. Using the instrument was fairly straightforward, but it involved inserting a spacer (a rectangular block of solid metal) into its finely machined space in the cuvette holder, next to the delicate quartz cuvette. After this there was quiet for about a week. Then, once again, I found Sal and Samantha standing next to the UV.

I have only once in my life been accused of sabotage. This time, Samantha did not even attempt to contain her fury. The spacer was in its space upside down and the cuvette was smashed. I had never told Samantha not to put the spacer in upside down and now it was stuck. I explained that it was physically impossible to put the spacer in upside down, but in vain, because Samantha had somehow managed it. Sal ticked me off thoroughly for not explaining properly. I called the electronics technician, who spent most of the day taking the machine apart, removing the spacer, fishing out the slivers of quartz with tweezers, and putting everything together again. I put the cuvette in and was fruitlessly trying to insert the spacer as Samantha had done, when she herself came into the lab. Out of sheer bafflement, I asked her how she managed to get the spacer in upside down. ‘Easy, ‘she said. She held the spacer (upside down) above its space with her left hand, made a fist with her right hand and hit the spacer, just once, really hard. She was very strong. In went the spacer and another cuvette shattered into smithereeens. The following morning, the electronics technician at first thought that I was trying to pull his leg, but I eventually persuaded him to take a look and, being a very patient person, he set to and repeated the operation of the previous day. After this, Sal paired me with the Dormouse and Flipper with Samantha.

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Scarcely a week went by before the theme repeated itself, with variations, in rococo style. Sal and Samantha were standing next to the other UV, as before, but this time all the lab personnel, excepting Flipper, were present and they had been joined by most of the staff and postgraduate students of the department. The instrument wasn’t working, in fact, it was completely dead. One of the lecturers, more practical than most academics, checked the fuse and found that it was missing. Everyone turned and looked at me accusingly. ‘I didn’t do it,’ I squeaked. I never heard the end of the story but eventually concluded that Flipper must have removed the fuse. ‘What a clever idea,’ I thought admiringly. ‘It would never have occurred to me in a thousand years.’ Nowadays, we have all kinds of fancy procedures for extracting and purifying vitamin B12 compounds. In those days we used a procedure called a phenol/chloroform extraction. Phenol is the active ingredient in Harpic drain cleaner. I once knew an old lady who drank a teaspoonful of Harpic occasionally and said that there was nothing better to clear the head and the stomach (but that is another story). I gave Samantha my carefully written out procedure. 1.) Take an impure B12 compound (which is bright red in colour) and dissolve it in water.

2.) Add to a mixture of phenol and chloroform in a separating funnel and shake like mad. 3.) Red colour goes into phenol/chloroform. 4.) etc., etc...

….

23.) Put pure solution of B12 compound on rotary evaporator. Samantha cut the procedure short at Step 3 and put the horrible red, corrosive mixture directly on to the rotary evaporator. A rotary evaporator is an instrument for drying a compound by removing water under reduced pressure. Our rotary evaporator was very old and venerable and it was almost impossible to take it apart and put it back together again without leaks. Fluffy, having not too many brains, undertook to clean the rotary evaporator and put it together again. Of course, the phenol had chewed up the rubber seals that held the various parts together and Fluffy was in trouble again for not properly explaining the procedure to Samantha. We had only one rotary evaporator and its demise brought all lab work to a halt. Sal was unable to apply his mind to mundane items such as rubber seals and glassware. He was busy preparing his Inaugural Lecture. The Chip Butty was taking bets on whether or not Sal would wear socks with his sandals when he gave his inaugural lecture and on whether the institutional sherry would be supplemented with snacks. (He did not and it was not.) We all attended the Inaugural Lecture wearing our best clothes. I can’t remember now what it was about.

One rainy Tuesday morning, I came in to work and found the lab in turmoil. There was a large yellow plastic sign that said in big black letters – ‘Caution - Men Working!’ Inside the lab were two Ku Klux Klan look-alikes with gas masks and goggles, wielding an industrial size vacuum-cleaner. At 8 pm the 18 Recovering Academics

previous night Samantha had dropped a 2.5 litre bottle of concentrated ammonia on the floor. She then walked out, closing the door behind her, and went home. The lab was on the second floor. The ammonia ate through the vinyl floor tiles, permeated the concrete ceiling and dripped like a gentle rain from heaven onto the computers in the room below. Simultaneously, it vaporized and filled the atmosphere of the lab with corrosive and pungent ammonia gas. At 7am the following morning, Flipper, eager to start work, opened the door of the lab and reeled back from a barrage of ammonia fumes. After this, even Sal agreed that Samantha was dangerous. He set her to work on methylene blue, which, he said, is a completely harmless dye. Methylene blue is a dark ink-blue powder and dissolves in water to give a beautiful cerulean-blue solution. Methylene blue has a very high extinction coefficient, which means that, in terms of intensity of colour, a little of it goes a very long way. Soon the whole lab was blue. We had blue glassware, blue lab-coats, blue benches and a blue floor. I used to walk about a kilometre to and from my flat in Wanderers’ View and Wits Chemistry Department. One day I got home and found that I was leaving blue footprints on the carpet. I took my shoes off and found that they had developed blue soles. The next morning, when I walked through Braamfontein to Wits, I was able to follow my blue footprints all the way back to the lab. This was the day of Samantha’s christening. She became the Hypsochromic or Blue Shift.

I eventually left the shelter of the lab for the real world but I kept on finding traces of Samantha, somewhat like the blue footprints. ‘Oh yes, I can tell you a story about her,’ people would say and their eyes would roll up so far that their eyeballs would fall back into their heads. The thought of her could make a strong man turn pale and quiver like a badly set jelly. One mention of her was enough to set the hair of a roomful of women on end. Through all the years, the question that puzzled me was ‘How on earth did Samantha get an MSc in an experimental branch of chemistry, given her complete lack of aptitude for laboratory work and her total lack of knowledge of chemistry?’ At last I had an opportunity to ask the question. At a conference at the Wigwam resort near Rustenburg, I met the eminent professor who had supervised Samantha’s MSc. ‘The answer is simple,’ he said, ‘I did the work for her MSc myself, wrote it up and submitted it in her name.’ A mixture of emotions rendered me completely speechless. In response to my consternation, he explained further. ‘It was the only way,’ he said, ‘that I could get rid of her without committing murder or suicide; it was her life or mine.’

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The acting head

Dale Taylor

I used to think that Frank was dithery but then I realised that prevarication was his chosen management style. Perpetually second-in-command, always acting head but never head, even as heads changed, he knew prevarication to be a way of delaying decision making until the new head arrived. He was good at it, a poet with a well-stocked larder of words. But then I realized that when confronted by a raging woman, he would placate instead of prevaricate and in the process make a decision.

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Rejection Jane Castle

Friday 16h00, September 2010

I arrive at Wits after a ten day sojourn in the platteland, with a feeling of goodwill and wellbeing after lunch at Sophia’s, and a tour of the Kim Sacks gallery with Sigrid and her brother, a sociology professor from Stellenbosch. It is late afternoon on a warm dry day in September, and few people are about. Opening the door to my office releases a great gust of dry stale air, causing me to sneeze once or twice in quick succession, and to rub my eyes, still sore from a visit to the ophthalmologist earlier in the day. I step over the year-planner which has fallen off the wall above my desk, and dump my briefcase on a chair. The vertical blinds begin to clatter as I close the window I left open on my last visit, and the door slams shut behind me. The partition walls shudder. I replace the year planner above my desk, adjust the blinds, and switch on the computer. While it is booting up, I say hello to my neighbours in the offices left and right, and check that the photocopier across the hall is still switched on. It is. I have several jobs to do in the two hours before night falls. I settle in my chair and look briefly over the monitor at the pictures of Yellow Dog sleeping on the stoep of my house in Fouriesburg. Yellow dog has no interest in academic life, and is a lesson in how one can have a good life in the Free State by trading on youth, good looks and a sweet nature. I type in my password and call up Outlook Express. Catching up on email is top of my list. I scan my messages and delete those from Makro, AbsaBank, KalahariNet and invitations to invest in gold mines in Ghana. My eye falls on a message from the Journal of Adult Education. I open it quickly; my heart beats faster with anticipation, because this will surely be a letter of acceptance for the paper I submitted six weeks ago– perhaps with positive comments from readers, or suggestions for improvement. This would be very fast work for JoAE which has always been run in a leisurely manner, like an old boys club, from Durban. Instead, the message says that the editorial board has decided not to send the paper out to reviewers. The decision is final.

A jet of cold, dry air blows down my neck from the window beside me. The blinds jangle menacingly. I say to myself, ‘This cannot be right.’ I must have misread. I try again, but my eyes will not focus. They jump up and down over the lines. I open a new packet of prescription eye drops and squeeze a drop into each eye. Now the whole screen is a smeary blur. I click on the print icon and watch while the printer hesitates, hums, then quickly snatches three dusty pages at once from its tray and grinds to a halt. I clear the paper jam and print again. This time there is no mistaking the message. It is emboldened in a huge font, embellished with symbols which look like an ancient language—Sanskrit perhaps? My paper has been rejected. It is so bad that they have not even given reasons. It is not even worthy of sending to reviewers.

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The weight of failure presses me down on the chair.

I read the message three or four times more until it is burned on my retina. My brain goes into first gear. The editorial board? What editorial board? At the bottom of the page, in tiny print, their names are listed. I know all of them. I cited two of them in my paper. But perhaps the editorial board had changed? It would be like JoAE to use an outdated letterhead in email messages. Some sort of austerity measure introduced in the Faculty of Education. Or perhaps the Dean, an old nemesis, was now the editor? That would explain a rejection without explanation. My brain was running like a hare– back and forth between recrimination and justification.

Recrimination: ‘You wrote a useless paper and now your peers know that you are a fraud.’

Justification: ‘But an earlier version of the paper was received with enthusiasm at an international conference in North America a year ago. ’ Recrimination: ‘It was outdated and you were lazy about revising it. ’

Justification: ‘I kept what I thought was interesting and worthwhile. I shortened it quite a bit to meet journal requirements. ’

Recrimination: ‘You thought JoAE would publish your paper because they’ve published your work in the past. ’ Justification: ‘They’ve published three of my papers in 12 years. They were good papers in themed editions of the journal. ’

Recrimination: ‘But this is poor work. The introduction does not connect with the body of the paper. It is too reliant on a few dated authors. You have not kept up with trends in the field. You have not even kept up with this journal! ’ Justification: ‘You are right, but I thought.... ’

Recrimination: ‘You teach a Research Writing course and you don’t even practise what you preach. Do you think you have any credibility at all? ’ Justification: ‘Well, I don’t actually preach on the course, but you are right. I should know better. I should do better. ’ Recrimination: ‘ Yes, you should. This isn’t the first time a paper of yours has been rejected, is it? ’

Justification: ‘Actually, I’ve only had one rejection in about twenty five submissions- and it was rejected by a local journal on spurious grounds. I sent it to an international journal of much higher standing and it was accepted right away. ’

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Recrimination: ‘So why don’t you do that now? ’ Justification: ‘I might. ’

I logged on again and called up another education journal- Prospects in Education. The journal had a new institutional home, a new editor, and a much more welcoming policy than it had had previously. I printed out the page and laid it on top of the letter from JoAE. I thought about looking for another journal, but another round of recriminations was crowding in. ‘How will you explain in your sabbatical report that your revised paper was rejected and you have barely begun the second paper you promised?’ ‘How will you get Faculty support for the conference in Chile if you haven’t published in the last three years?’

The accusing voice was wearing me down. I felt stiff and cold. I decided to leave the problem on my desk and abandon the office for the weekend.

And so I went home, ran a bath, and drank a glass of chardonnay, made and ate dinner and did stretching exercises for my neck, back and shoulders. I read a bit of Jenny’s thesis and thought what a wonderful writer she was. I read a chapter of On Chesil Beach and thought what a wonderful writer Ian McEwan was. I thought about my ambitions to make a living from writing, and how they had come to naught. I thought about getting old and tired and dispirited and how difficult it is to deal with setbacks when you are on your own because they often seem to be insurmountable obstacles. I thought of ways to improve the paper without actually overhauling it, and came up with nothing. I began to regret watching so much World Cup football in June when I still had months of sabbatical leave ahead of me and could have been writing my paper. I switched on the TV, turned to the Crime and Investigation channel, and wondered whether I would be apprehended if I murdered the entire editorial board of JoAE in a drive-by shooting. But perhaps poison would be slower, more agonizing…. Finally, I took a dose of Rescue Remedy, went to bed, slept fitfully, and woke with a crick in my neck, where a noose might have been. Saturday

I follow my morning routine but feel sluggish. I cough and wheeze as I open my skylight window to let in ‘fresh’ air from the busy street alongside my apartment block. I take a double dose of vitamin C and antioxidants to ward off flu. I think about how much supervision I have done in the last three months and start to write my sabbatical report, though I still have six weeks to go before the sabbatical ends.

The new prescription eye drops are working. I see clearly what needs to be done. I will write to the JoAE editorial board and find out why they rejected my paper. Then I’ll be able to rework it. I heat up a beanbag in the microwave and lay it on my neck and shoulders as I settle into a pile of marking.

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Monday

I email JoAE and ask politely why they have rejected my paper. The production secretary, whom I’ve known from years of reviewing for the journal, advises me to speak to the editor and gives me his number. I call him up and he says that he, personally, liked the paper, but his colleagues on the board had vetoed it, and he felt he had to abide by his colleagues’ recommendation. I say ‘I understand,’ and thank him for his time.

I decide to present the paper at the Kenton conference in Golden Gate in October, get feedback, then revise it and submit it for publication elsewhere. I will use the remainder of my sabbatical leave to write the second paper I have undertaken to do– the one to be presented at the conference in Chile in January. October

I present my paper in a parallel session at Kenton in Golden Gate, and the audience seems interested, even though my power point, on a memory stick, doesn’t work on the conference laptop, and I have to busk my way through the presentation. I had made photocopies in Clarens of a summary table for distribution to the audience, but the printer couldn’t do colour copies, and the table was difficult to interpret without colour. Nothing seems to go right with this paper! In the evening I return to my home to Fouriesburg, driving along the magnificent Maluti route, mulling over my next steps. I pull into my driveway and discover that the tree feller I’d hired for the day to remove a huge pine tree had roped the tree onto the power lines, cutting the electricity supply for half the houses in town. He’d then thrown his chain saw into his bakkie, dismissed the workers and driven away at high speed to avoid a confrontation with the municipality. So I had my own confrontation with him, and another with the municipality. I made a financial contribution to the upkeep of the town and got the power restored the same evening. There was peace in the neighbourhood, but I had no further ideas about the paper. November 2010

Although keen to work on the paper, now that my sabbatical is over and I’m back in Johannesburg, I’ve had to put it aside while I re-engage with committee work and planning for 2011. Mid November

I submit my sabbatical report and make no mention of the rejected paper. Instead I say I revised it and presented it at a conference, which is true. The Dean is visibly annoyed when I submit my

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sabbatical report and announce that I cannot take early retirement in June 2011 as planned. The recession is impacting negatively on my pension. ‘But we planned for you to be gone,’ she says testily. End November

Two of my colleagues have applied for work at other institutions. Encouraged by their initiative, I start to fantasize about spending a gap year in Europe. Mid-December

I have very little time for research writing as two PhD students and five M.Eds are preparing to submit their work for examination. There is a lot of reading, commenting, and paper work to do. I vow never again to spend my Christmas on supervision and editing. I struggle to find time for writing my paper for the conference in Chile in January. January 2011

I talk too much when it is our turn to present our paper at the conference in Santiago. We run out of time and finish in a scramble. Still, the audience is congenial and appreciative. My confidence is restored. The workshop Moyra designed is a big success. Buoyed by this victory, I decide to abandon the paper rejected by JoAE and discard my neurosis about it, too. May 2011

I take up a two-year secondment in the Centre for Learning, Teaching and Development at Wits. They seem pleased to have me. I receive a huge bouquet of fresh flowers on arrival and they light up my office for more than a week. I am invited to choose new office furniture from a catalogue. I get a new computer with a screen rather than a monitor. Not only do they have flower vases, a fridge, a microwave and a cappuccino machine in the kitchen near my office, there are matching coffee mugs and even wine glasses in the cupboards. There is a fishpond in a sunny courtyard with café tables and chairs, camellias and roses, and two cats who share a dog kennel. There is a circular walking labyrinth which reminds me of a hop-scotch game girls played in primary school, and a cosy library where meetings always turn out well. There is a smile at reception, laughter in the corridors, pretty young women offering assistance and support. I think I have landed in heaven. After a few months, when the backwash of teaching and supervision left from over from the School of Education is almost complete, there is time to start writing again. I do so eagerly.

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December 2012

It is two years and four months since my paper was rejected by JoAE. I have written several papers since then. I even submitted one of them to JoAE. I hope for favourable readers’ reports, but don’t waste time agonizing about it. I now have a plan A … and B and C. And that is the end of the story. It may be an ending. It feels like a resurrection.

26


Travel

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Let’s Go … Kaiserschmarrn and Sachertorte Sigrid Ewert

It is winter, sometime between Christmas and New Year. I am studying Computer Science in Bonn. Most students have gone home. I cannot afford to fly to South Africa, but I also don’t want to spend the dead time between the years with the leftover students from Africa or Asia. I manage to get to Prague with a lift and a bus.

In Prague the snow lies thick and the wind from the river drives slivers of ice into my skin. On the Charles Bridge the snow has been turned into mud by innumerable feet. I sometimes slip, but don’t mind, because I would never experience this at home. My embroidered blue bag, made in some South American country, but bought for a few Deutschmark in Bonn, is hidden under many layers of clothing. It is slightly too small for my passport and traveller’s cheques and therefore frayed at a corner. Its long green string goes round my neck and chafes. My skin has become raw along that line. Fingers clumsy with gloves and cold, I try to move the string over my scarf, but it always manages to work its way back to the red line. Many of the tourists are young, often American. I cannot help but overhear their chatter: ‘I must see that clock in Munich,’ ‘I got lost in the Louvre,’ or ‘Did you sit on the square in Siena?’ I wasn’t aware that there is a clock with special significance in Munich, I think, irritated, but I guess after a few weeks on a Eurail pass, the churches and clocks of Europe start blurring into one. Why talk about a clock in Munich if there is such an exceptional one in Prague? I check myself. It doesn’t matter. They are having fun. Perhaps I should try to be spontaneous too. I decide to go to Vienna, even though I cannot really afford a visit to a West European city. There is a train at two o’clock, another at six. I decide to take the latter; ignoring the voice which points out that midnight is not a good time to arrive in a strange city. The voice pipes up again as the train slowly empties on the way. I stare out the window at passengers who step off, usually into a circle of friends, and disappear from the platform. Then I pick up my Let’s Go again.

Just before midnight the train halts in Vienna. The station is almost deserted, apart from a cleaner, and some drunks. I have no accommodation booked. To my dismay, the office for tourist information is closed, also the booth for cashing traveller’s cheques.

I have a list of youth hostels, but no Austrian money and cannot buy a tram ticket. Without a ticket I cannot get past the turnstiles. For a moment I consider climbing over one, but I don’t dare. I go in search of a taxi instead, and ask the driver if I may pay in Deutschmark. He takes me to an area where there are several hostels. I go from one to the other. Each hostel is full. A receptionist tells me that Vienna is hosting a convention for young Christians, and one hundred thousand have come. I begin to wander aimlessly, wondering what to do. I pass a club for women only. Here I would be safe until the morning. I am also curious, since I have read about the glamorous nightlife in this city. I

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think about the sophisticated hairstyles and clothes mentioned in the article, look at my muddy boots and realize that I cannot go in.

I go past a hotel. The lights of the reception are very inviting, and I hesitantly ask about the price of a single room. I cannot afford it.

By chance I find myself back at the station. Two young Italians sit in sleeping bags on the stairs. They say they have given up finding a bed for the night. I talk to a man at a ticket booth. He suggests that I try the Caritas dormitory for the homeless, but warns that it is unpleasant. I decide to spend the night on the streets. I happen upon a café. According to the menu on the door, I could buy a cup of coffee with the change from the taxi fare, so I go in. I order a small Brauner, and ponder the unfortunate name. It is, after all, a common term for fascists. I take very small sips of the liquid, and dissolve the tiny biscuit on my tongue.

A young woman talks to me. She is a student, Sabine. I tell her about my predicament. She offers me a mattress in her flat, but adds that she wants to go to a disco first, and after that we will have to walk home. Moreover, I should know that she has a pet rat at home, some South American breed. I think of the alternative, and accept her offer. At the disco she buys me a beer, then disappears. I see her among the dancers, exchanging money and a small packet with a youth. I draw my backpack and coat closer to me. A man chats to me, offers me drugs, also a bed for the night. I decline both.

At three, or perhaps four, we start walking home. Soon my feet are numb, except for the red heat of blisters. Every step is agony. My backpack has become unbearably heavy; the straps cut into my shoulders. My nose runs, but I have used all my tissues, apart from the supply at the bottom of my pack that I cannot reach. After two hours we arrive. I have a rudimentary wash, and then slowly unfold my frozen limbs onto the mattress. I’m afraid that if I sit down too suddenly, a part of me will splinter away.

Finally, I can lie down; finally, I am warm. I drift off to sleep, and wake with a start. Something has dug sharp teeth into my toe. It dawns on me that the rat is not kept in a cage. I stuff my pyjama pants into my socks, fold the blanket tightly under my feet, and drift off again. I wake up, shocked. The rat has bitten me in the face. Stories my mother has told me, of rats attacking babies in the ruins of post-war Germany, crowd in.

I curl into a squashed question mark and draw the blanket over my head. I drift off again. I wake up gasping for air, rip the blanket from my face, and then lie back with my arms protecting my face. Soon the rat is at my head again. My brain has become a hard knot that chafes against my skull. My eyes burn. I am desperate for sleep, but the rat won’t allow it. I fantasize about swinging it by its tail and then smashing it against a wall, but it is my host’s pet.

I am relieved when Sabine begins to stir, and I can get up. Her flat-mate Uli joins us for breakfast. Sabine tells us how she cannot stop herself from terrorizing her previous boyfriend with phone calls. He left her for another, and she cannot bear to picture the two together.

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On the previous evening she had gone to the café in the hope of picking up someone for the night; instead she found me. Uli shows me photos of their summer holiday in Greece, bare-breasted on the veranda of their rented house. I thank them and leave.

I manage to change money and make my way to the tourist information center. They are not prepared to find budget accommodation for me; they only work for hotels. From a public phone I call one hostel after the other, trying to have a conversation despite the noise around me, and finally find a place in a dormitory in the Brigittenau hostel. They tell me that they had beds available the previous night. I don’t want to hear that. After another tram journey I can check in and deposit my luggage. However, I may not take a nap, since the dormitories are closed during the day. I wander around, find a branch of Lidl, not difficult thanks to its trademark garish-yellow, and buy some cans of tuna and a few rolls. On a park bench I have a late lunch.

In the evening I stretch out happily, clean and warm. Finally I can rest. However, sleep comes in snatches only, since every hour or so someone slams the door. In the early morning it slowly becomes quiet.

At six the silence is shattered by a waltz piped over loudspeakers, followed by an announcement that everyone has to leave the dorms by eight. I line up for breakfast, still tired and footsore. Only the thought of coffee can keep me moving. A stout man behind the pots greets me cheerfully and asks if I would like some goulash. I can barely suppress a shudder, but try to be polite. Armed with my Let’s Go, I set out for the city center, determined to see the sights.

Every station and every tram are crammed with young Christians. The authorities have organized extra staff to keep order on the platforms. I cannot quite suppress the thought that it would be nice to throw a few Christians to the tramlines. The jostling confuses me so that at first I cannot find the St. Stephen’s Cathedral. Thus I look around for a McDonald’s and from there let my eye wander. The logic works: where there is a yellow ‘M’, there is a sight.

The museums are as crowded as the stations. At the Belvedere Palace there is a scene at the ticket booth. A young Christian with a German accent complains that she has to pay the full price, while the Polish Christians get a reduction.

I manage to weave my way to The Kiss by Gustav Klimt. It is breathtaking. Then I move on to Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, two of my favourite artists. Their work is not as pretty as that of Klimt, and here the crowd is thinner. For a while I almost forget my headache and blisters. I have heard much of the Volksgarten, especially of the roses. After some searching, I find it. There is no one. What a relief. Neither are there any roses, only a few bushes covered with snow and mud. I laugh at myself for expecting roses to bloom in winter just because the modern tourist in an allweather jacket expects it. My next stop is the Secession with its golden cupola, so rebellious when built. I love the building. I look for a long time at the Beethoven Frieze, then have a cup of Wiener Melange in the basement

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café. Apart from a small group of locals at a nearby table, I am alone. It seems to me the best cup of coffee I have ever had.

Sometimes, when passing a restaurant, I look at the menu in the window. Wiener Schnitzel, goulash and Brathendl are the main options. The sweets are quite tempting, but for the moment I restrict myself to rolling their names in my mouth: Kaiserschmarrn, Sachertorte. One day, when I have graduated and earn money, I’ll come back and taste them. New Year’s Eve arrives. As I make my way to the St. Stephen’s square, trying to read my map in the light of a street lamp, I overhear an Austrian saying: ‘Today is Tuesday, so this must be Vienna.’ I am tempted to ask him in German to repeat that, just to show that I have understood him.

On a stage, a group performs a modern dance. They finish shortly before midnight; then the Radetzky March bursts from the loudspeakers. One of the dancers, a big black man with gleaming muscles, jumps down and asks an old woman who is all on her own, to dance with him. I am happy to be there, at that moment.

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Lecturer glasses Dale Taylor

‘My bag’s gone,’ said Erna.

‘No, that’s not possible,’ I said. ‘We’ve been with the vehicle the whole time.’ My mind worked to reconstruct the past fifteen minutes. We’d stopped for petrol at Malelane, on our way to a research winter school in sunny Maputo. We were a group of fifteen in two hired Quantums and a Golf. We’d stood in a circle next to the vehicle while it was filled. Then I’d moved the vehicle across to a parking bay. I’d jumped into the back to change into shorts. But Erna’s magnificent large red leather hand bag was nowhere to be found. She’d left it behind the driver’s seat. Our holiday mood evaporated. Everyone checked on their own possessions and wondered what to do next.

Erna was more together than the rest of us. I tailed her as she went to find the owner of the petrol station. He was not surprised. But he sent a couple of his staff to check nearby dustbins. He played back the video of the security camera which was mounted quite high on the building. The video showed nothing more than us standing in a circle while the attendant filled the vehicle. The sliding door was closed. Then the Quantum moved out of the video as I parked it. The owner explained to Erna where she could apply for a temporary passport. The staff who checked the dustbins came back empty handed. We rearranged our travel plans. The golf and its driver would stay behind with Erna, together with Meg who had been to Maputo before and thought she could find her way to the hotel. The rest would go ahead in the Quantums. Some of the Quantum party needed visas at the border, so that would delay us anyhow. If Erna could not get a passport then she would have to make another plan to get home. The border was busy but the queues were short. We had to purchase third party insurance from one of the stalls which balance on the cliff above the Komati River. We left the border with no news from Erna.

The road between the border and Maputo is wide, straight and quiet. It should have been Erna’s turn to drive. I drove the whole way, alternating between worrying about Erna and praying for her. We arrived in Maputo in time for the afternoon rush hour. We came to understand that Mozambique’s economy has recovered sufficiently to supply more than enough cars for a tedious rush hour.

We arrived at Kaya Kwanga hotel very late for the first session of the research winter school. After the session we made our apologies and greeted the other PhD students. Some were young but most were middle-aged like me, full-time lecturers and part-time students. They came from across Southern Africa – Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Malawi and Mozambique. The week’s programme included

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input on the various aspects of doing a PhD in maths or science education, as well as time to work on our research, or talk to one of the seasoned maths or science education academics who made themselves available for the week. A PhD can be a lonely journey but the winter school provided a community which extended beyond the bounds of the week together. At about nine that evening the Golf arrived. We were relieved to see Erna. She reported that after we’d left Malelane, they had looked at the video again. This time they noticed the driver’s door being opened on the far side of the vehicle, and then closing again. But the person doing the opening and closing was not visible on the video.

Erna and I shared a rondavel at the hotel. I offered her my phone to SMS her husband to let him know she’d arrived safely. As we got ready for bed, she realized more of the bits of her life that had disappeared with her handbag. First she asked me if she could borrow tweezers. Then dental floss. ‘I can’t believe I was so stupid to leave my bag in the car,’ she said. ‘We all left stuff in the car,’ I said. ‘You can’t blame yourself.’

‘I know. But I was stupid. Why didn’t I just take it with me?’ South Africans like to blame ourselves for being victims. The next morning we had an excellent workshop on analysing data. But Erna looked a little dazed. In part this was because she could not read without her reading glasses.

At lunchtime I offered to take her into Maputo to buy a pair of glasses. She could have driven herself but of course she no longer had her driver’s license. We asked a local at the hotel where we could buy glasses, and headed into town. I parked on the island in the middle of Eduardo Mondlane Avenue. We got out and looked for the chemist. A street vendor offered us batiks in Portuguese. We shook our heads. We were looking for reading glasses. But he lowered his price in Portuguese. I made glasses with my fingers around my eyes. The street vendor nodded. He understood. He looked disappointed and left. We wanted a pharmacy because in South Africa that’s where one is sure to find cheap reading glasses. But we discovered the local at the hotel had directed us to an optometrist. An optometrist which was closed for siesta. There were people inside but they waved us on. So we went to change money. I had not brought a lot of cash with me, but I loaned R200 worth of meticais to Erna. It seemed it would go fairly far in Maputo. We asked about a pharmacy. The money changer called someone from behind who spoke careful English. But she could not tell us where we might find reading glasses.

The batik vendor caught up with us. He had brought us a fellow vendor – one who sold sunglasses. We shook our heads. Erna said ‘No, reading glasses.’ She held up her hands to make a book. ‘Ah, leitura,’ said the street vendors in unison. They understood. They looked disappointed and disappeared.

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Erna and I had other items on our shopping list. Bottled water and bananas for a colleague. We needed a supermarket. But Maputo’s population shop at the large covered market elsewhere in town. We did find a small shop which passed for a supermarket in the posh Polana mall. It had bottled water. But no fresh food. We left the mall and walked back into the coastal sunshine. Even if our shopping spree was not going according to plan, it was good to feel as though we were in summer – a week long respite from a cold Jo’burg winter. Our batik vendor reappeared. This time he had yet another vendor with him. This one had reading glasses displayed up and down his arms. We were familiar with sunglasses vendors at Jo’burg intersections. But this was our first experience of a reading glasses vendor. Erna looked at the numbers on the glasses, and tried on a blue pair labelled 2.5. The vendor whipped a pocket bible out of his back pocket and handed it to her.

Erna read opened the bible and read the tiny print easily though without comprehension. ‘Aquele que habita no abrigo do Altíssimo e descansa à sombra do Todo-poderoso.’ She smiled. ‘They work.’ She started to negotiate the price. I turned my attention to the batik vendor. For the first time I listened to his price. He was asking about R40 for a batik which was nearly a metre square. I asked to see his other batiks. In fact he only had about half a dozen batiks with him. But I liked the colours and the composition of the one – elephant and giraffe around a water hole dyed in rich browns with a red sun. We climbed back into the Quantum with reading glasses and a batik. ‘We should have just given a vendor our shopping list then waited at a coffee shop for it all to come to us,’ said Erna. As we drove back she spotted a street stall with fruit. I pulled up and Erna bought bananas.

That evening I noticed Erna had dark rings under her eyes – probably caused by the strain of the past twenty four hours. But the bridge of her nose also looked bruised. Had she fallen or been knocked somehow, in addition to all she’d already been through? ‘What happened?’ I asked, gesturing.

‘Ah,’ she laughed. ‘That’s just the blue from my glasses. Leitura glasses.’

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Saffron Walden Penelope Cummins Dears

This is not a circular letter, just writing group, in the hope that you are meeting this coming weekend, so am sending you love and updates.

As you may know I was in Europe in August, then came back to SA to await an interview for a Wits post, and didn’t hear, and didn’t hear, and decided in early Oct to return to England and Get a Life.

Haven’t actually gotten that far yet, but by now have sort-of unpacked, both mentally and practically. Still a way to go on both counts, but both are ok for immediate functional purposes. But I want to give you a small flavour of life as it is- am giving myself an hour and a half, as in a writing exercise. Not much less than the time at Mary’s house between settling down after coffee-chatarrivals and starting to sniff the air for lunch. Some of you know that I have a little cottage in a town called Saffron Walden- my first-ever mortgage, acquired when I was past 40, so it’s v. amazing to me to be a home- owner. It was rented out while I was in SA, both at Wits and on a previous contract in CT, so it’s eight years since I have lived here. Eight years stretches your connections quite thinly, and I wasn’t sure I would ever return to the cottage or to the town- and indeed depending on jobs I may well move away, but that decision is in the murky future.

To my great surprise it’s been a delight to return to Saffron Walden. I fetched up in the town originally by happenstance—moving south after university in Leeds in the 1980s, there was a Quaker School here, where my son could be a dayboy rather than a latchkey child while I was working. Once he left school, the purpose of being here faded away, and it’s not terribly practical as it’s a long commute from London. So I’ve long been ambivalent about it, as it’s mostly a town of families with 2.4 children, and active pensioners, and I’ve never been either of those.

Saffron Walden is at the top end of Essex, just 11 miles south of the Cambridgeshire border (those 11 miles are deeply chagrining to the 4x4-driving-puffa-jacket-wearing wannabe country set, as Essex is Not Posh). It used to be a market town—it received a town charter in the 14th century, hence the right to call itself a town, even though even now the population is only 13,000- and that includes some of the surrounding villages. And yes, saffron used to be grown here- also C14 or thereabouts. Later, in the C18, there was a silk weaving industry. Right until the 1980’s there was a pig market (now the Waitrose supermarket) and a cattle market (where Boots the chemist is now). On Saturdays and Tuesdays there is still a market in the town square, in the middle of which is a drinking fountain shaped a bit like the Albert Memorial, but predating it, as it was bought at the Great Exhibition of 1851. The town is at its best on a Saturday morning – still rather idyllic, with everyone out, carrying baskets, greeting each other, buying flowers, veg, free-range eggs from Simon who also sells nuts and dried fruit and elderflower cordial,

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or olives, cheese, organic sausages, cheap clothes and slippers, etc. But by 2pm the centre is tawdry, the vendors are tired, and there are cardboard boxes blowing listlessly along the gutter.

Even when I first lived here, this used to be a town of small family businesses – but the landlords, mostly I think Cantab Colleges and the odd bank, are hell-bent on high rents- so there are now too many empty shops and a lot of interchangeable chain stores: Curry’s, WH Smith, and since my last absence, Starbucks and Laura Ashley. There are far too many charity shops- but this is such a naice town that there is a naice class of junk in the charity shops- hence my new raincoat, impervious even though it is pink and purple, and another wild recent purchase- a small lustre teapot. Local politics is venal, and most of the local politicians have interests in the property sector. So the current cause for Bristling is the politicians’ decision to favour a planning application by Sainsbury’s (this will be the third big supermarket in the town- there’s already an out-of-town Tesco which yearns to expand), yet they have turned down an application by the County High (a massive high school, more than 2,400 kids- mostly from out-of-town) for a concert hall, even though the school can already offer the number of parking spaces required by the government for this kind of venue. All this is increasing the suburbanisation of the town, and making it more of a commuter-dormitory and less of a place. To my amazement, visits of two or three days every couple of years have actually been sufficient to keep several friendships warm enough for rekindling, and I’ve already had two People to Supperssomething I’ve hugely missed in Jo’burg, as staying in a backyard cottage was not guest-conducive. The first dinner party (not actually worthy of that grand title, as it was merely a comforting chicken stew, followed by foamy baked apple) was amazing: the same group of chums who I used to feed ten years ago, having a remarkably similar conversation to the ones we used to have: venal town council (Sainsbury’s again), Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment, venal labour party, allotments, perfidious Tories, the Victorian Society and Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB), Afghanistan (used to be Iraq), the Lunar Society, more venal labour party and do you remember the word ‘socialism’, and Anish Kapoor at the Royal Academy.

I was so joyous to cook for that supper – I’d just retrieved from the cellar a big green saucepan in which I have cooked for many previous gatherings, so the chicken joined an honourable procession of past festive meals. I hadn’t yet acquired a full quota of dining room chairs to replace lost furniture, so the oldest member of the gathering (72 and just returned from hiking in the Hungarian mountains) sportingly perched on an African stool, and had supper on a tray as he was too low to reach the table. Since then I have scoured the local second-hand shop and now have two more chairs, one of which is frightfully uncomfortable and I personally plan never to sit on it. But it does look ok- a very simple chair with a rush bottom (which you sink into and which traps you) like the one next to Vincent van Gogh’s bed, which maybe he painted also because it was too uncomfortable to sit on and therefore available to be an object in a still-life. The SPAB gossip was especially juicy, as a couple of days earlier had been to a talk by one of their officials, who has just bought for himself, not for SPAB or the National Trust, a building called the Sun Inn, which is a 14th century inn-turned- cottages in the centre of town, once the headquarter of

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Oliver Cromwell, and the site of a stunning piece of pargetting work. The vernacular architecture includes a lot of pargettings- a plaster decoration, in this case a very wonderful and amazing pair of human figures, a shield and a stork, and no, no-one knows their significance, but both Nat Trust and SPAB have been nattering since the 1960s about acquiring the building, and now they have ben scooped by a spy within their own ranks. Especially after the searing shenanigans of Wits, I am bemused but delighted to be recognized and welcomed with warmth. But even resuming background-acquaintanceships has been a delight. For instance, this morning I went to the shops, fifteen minutes’ walk away, and stopped to natter with one dog-walker (a reprise of the Sainsbury story), the plumber (now retired, he and his wife have just been to New York to celebrate her 70th birthday) and with Chris-the-traffic-cop (her daughter has just graduated and is now an administrator at an Outward Bound school in the north of Scotland).

This has been an amazing couple of weeks – such a big transition from SA. I feel incredibly blessed to have had such an easy landing. Also it’s been such a beautiful autumn, which has also made the transition easier- a long Indian summer, very mild until this last weekend, glorious autumn colours from the day I arrived, peering out of the coach from Heathrow, looking at the trees and shrubs on the motorway verges. Today, walking to town, kicking through drifts of huge golden and bronzed leaves on the common. This coming Saturday evening the whole town will be out on the common- it’s extraordinary, a real return-of-the-dark- months- fire-festival. Because this is such a commuter town, Guy Fawkes is always a mutable feast, and is a Saturday event, not November 5 (mind you, Newport, a mere 5 miles away, always manage to stick to the correct date). I remember one year bumping into a Canadian friend on Guy Fawkes night- shaking his head in wonderment at the primordial nature of this fire festival. For most of the year Britain may be a post-Christian society- but not on bonfire night, then it returns to its pre-Christian, pre-Roman atavistic self. Actually, there’s yet another layer of meaning in this place re bonfires- in the market square three recusant Catholics were burned at the time of King Edward, but that’s a fact mostly forgotten.

That was the last flutter of Catholicism here for more than 300 years until a Catholic church was bravely opened in a disused tithe-barn at the top of the town, just above the very beautiful perpendicular-style Anglican church. St Mary’s is very eksie-perfeksie and actually I think not nearly as beautiful as the church at Thaxted, six miles away, also a wool church (i.e. endowed by rich wool merchants competing in conspicuous giving) , which was run in the early C20 by Conrad Noel, a Christian socialist (that word again), who was known as the Red Vicar of Thaxted, and whose ministry to the local agricultural workers gave the rich parishioners the hump, so they took their carriages and endowments off to Saffron Walden on Sundays – and St Mary’s was burnished and fretted and improved up to the nines, and the Thaxted church, with its beautiful angel-rafters, and a Christmas crèche populated by recognizable farming characters, including St Joseph in a (plaster) fair-isle jersey and gumboots, and a somewhat alcoholically-addled expression, was left to gather dust and unobtrusive virtue (it’s also got a wonderful acoustic for music and singing, and also thanks to Noel is the epicentre of Morris dancing in this part of England).

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I don’t know what the future holds, but after the last couple of months ricocheting between hemispheres, it’s good to have landed. Now for the next chapter, which must very quickly hold some form of employment, and who knows what other practicalities…. Blessings, Pen

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In transit Moyra Keane

I’d arrived in Dubai at 4:15 am. This was not a convenient route from the conference in Greece back to Johannesburg but was the cheapest flight. I flop down onto the hard chair in Starbucks for a croissant and coffee: a medium-black is a bucket sized soup-bowl-shaped thing. Good: it will allow me to sit a while of the 7 hour wait. My eyes are red and scratchy but I’m more wired than weary. I have had a good fortnight. One week at the conference in Athens where my presentation went well, and then a week with Sigrid on Amorgos. I settle my small backpack on the chair pulled up close and take out the thick volume of conference proceedings that I am looking forward to reading. People begin to arrive and start to queue for a seat. I become restless and disorientated so prefer to look about.

I think of the Restaurant at the End of the Universe: such a variety of humanity. There are many black-burka covered women. I notice the sequins on the hems of the sleeves and the fine silk scarves – I suspect there is a whole fashion-class-age-designer statement being made that I cannot read. There are the men in white dhotis scurrying now – they had been sleeping along the walls covered in Emirates blankets; suited Swiss executive types in yellow or maroon silk ties carry miniature laptops; small Chinese men with neat haircuts stride purposefully towards the travelator; two Arab sheiks saunter out of the first class lounge. A statuesque African woman in traditionally colourful dress and head-dress proudly brushes past into the Business centre. Oh, two huge men in short-shorts push their way to the neighbouring table. Their barrel-bellies wobble over the straining brown belts. Although it is about 5:30am and no sky in sight, they are wearing peaked caps. Both their faces have that damaged florid sun-scorched skin – like a pealing wall of dried flaky paint of various worn-out colours. I recognise the type of muddy-blue short sleeve shirts with big pockets in a contrasting dark grey. Two women with long artificial nails and matching bags and shoes join them. Orange-hair with black roots, thin red-painted lips, low-cut sequined T shirts and gold bangles. The two men talk loudly in Afrikaans while staring at the wall-mounted TV. My ‘home-boys’.

The vision of the blue and white cleanness of Amorgos is still fresh in my mind. Sigrid and I had found a simple spacious apartment close to the sea. We had sauntered out for morning coffees and baklavas late when the sun was well up already. We had walked across the rocky scrub of the mostly deserted inland, past the occasional shepherd’s cottage and lonely donkey. I had felt deeply happy and content. Suddenly I feel a sinking resignation at the prospect of arriving again in noisy, crime and stress-filled Jo’burg, complexities of identity and belonging. I get up heaving my daypack onto my back, and head off to window shop and stretch my legs.

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One night in India Moyra Keane

There are thirty years between the 17- year old who dreamt of India, heady with marijuana, Lobsang Rampur, Ram Das, the Bhagavad Gita and the tales of the Mahabharata, and this somewhat less idealistic woman. But at last I had pushed life aside. This adventure had been dreamt all these decades. Maybe even longer: perhaps this desire arrived with my DNA. My mother and grandparents were born in India: my mother in Luknow and grandmother in Puna, my grandfather in neighbouring Burma. Maybe this has nothing to do with it. A lot of my generation did this trip in the 60’s but I had got waylaid by life. As I considered that now, in my forties, the adventure seemed possible. I paged through the beautiful travel brochure pictures of the Taj Mahal, the picturesque scenes of decorated cows, severe sadhus with ash-smeared foreheads, colourful temples and sublimely beautiful women. This fitted with my yearning for some aesthetic mystery. The divine should be clean, beautiful, spacious, safe: something like the yoga adverts in Melrose Arch yet not quite so commercial. I could visualise a bit of chaos and colour: I had an open mind after all. This will be only my second time out of South Africa – the first on my own. Perhaps the jet-lag doesn’t help but as I stagger with my too-big back pack out of Mumbai airport I feel that odd and sudden violation we get in Jo’burg when our bag is snatched: bewildered and out of breath, scared and lost. Stepping out of the contained safety of the plane I am stunned by the burning colours, spiced air and crawling rash of people; I fancy I could even feel the unseen gods as a seething mass of contradictions, along with the cows, beggars, touts and traffic.

The timeless crush of bodies jostles, limps, accosts, drifts, stares, slumps, sleeps, or chatters all around in an organic soup of unending variety. I hold both myself and my bag tightly so I don’t disappear in the seething stream. After all, I’ve come to find myself not lose myself – or so I think. The baking humidity hangs like incense and is seeping into me with a sweet-acrid-fragrance that will become familiar. I am both exhausted and spacey in that way one is after getting off a long flight and not feeling quite up to the challenge of negotiating transport, a room, money, water. Cerise, blue, turquoise, purple, yellow, garish trucks, push past a mostly naked rikshaw-walla, his load crammed with silk-saried mothers, sick brown babies, chickens, parcels and machinery parts. This cacophony of colours and smells all halt noisily while a Brahmin cow languidly blesses the passing madness, fecund earthiness, sacred-ness, not-here-ness, and ancient mystery with her eyelashes and marigold necklace. And even with my African birth I gasp at the expanse – the neverimagined reality of the Dream – and my vulnerable place in it. I try to hold the semblance of a traveller, confusedly aware of my conditioning, ideas, values, timeframes, space notions, body needs (for goodness sake)! My façade is out-there on the street like the bizarre colours and the toddler crapping in the road. I’m only more ridiculous and selfconscious. My English sense of privacy, reserve and ubiquitous embarrassment - embarrassing me

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even more. Even my ‘Eastern beliefs’ don’t fit. Like a clumsy child banging the plastic cube against the round hole, my mental Tupperware toys are doing a Dali-esque morph as my sacred beloved elephant-headed Ganesha appears in red polystyrene with flashing green neon lights to loud-beat music. Well it is all madly psychedelic: that bit is reminiscent of my 17-year-old life. A raggedly dressed, thin man with highly polished shoes, and brass-decorated teeth loads me into a taxi. I think about some rather dodgy taxis in Johannesburg and try to assess whether he is reliable. I have no clue: there are the funky-hinged neck movements as he talks and the oiled black hair; his car is falling apart. It is already midnight and I am not geared to finding a bus. Two hours in the taxi brings us neither to centre nor edge of the city: just circling this grip on the earth of 15 million people. Yes: I had been warned – but I still believe the taxi driver was really lost. Eventually not finding the Lonely Planet-recommended backpackers he dumps me at some random dive of a hotel. I supposed it was random. ‘Here, this right. You get out here. Very good, yes. Nice place.’ I hand him 100 rupees. He looks at the once stapled, grubby note and refuses it.

‘What?’ I stammer about getting it from the bank like that. My anger rising. Here where everything is dirty beyond belief I find only pure clean notes are accepted. I have a whole wad of apparently useless stapled money. ‘What to do?’ The driver takes the money rolling his eyes and gesturing pathetically.

The hotel foyer is electric green, chipped with loose wiring running down smudged walls. There are three men hanging about: all with shiny black hair and moustaches, staring at me. Old newspapers are piled on a broken wooden chair next to the dusty plastic flowers. I quickly look away from the picture of the familiar devas in naked interlocked embrace and fumble for my passport. This involves lifting my shirt a bit to get at my money belt. Even ‘a bit’ seems to create too much interest. My ever-present default embarrassment level rises. I had been told India was do-able on R40 a day. The room costs R440. I am exhausted and stretched to the edge of my known world. ‘Just one night of indulgence with my own bathroom, please!’ I beg myself. I drag my bag up a single flight of stairs to my room at last. As I flick the light-switch the single bare bulb glares onto a sea of gleaming brown and scurrying cockroaches as they race off the stained bed-sheet - under the mattress – wherever.

Sometimes it’s better to be in the dark: not knowing. When you’re in a shallow strictured society. Both ways it’s better: not seeing and not being seen. That’s been the theme. Now I was here to see. Here I would connect. Here all was possible: everything that I had missed. Yet, it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Here, instead is the great con-trick of the universe: what was mystical about being leered at, ripped off, lost, exhausted and miserable? Never mind enlightenment: I’ll settle for a hot bath.

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I am a little awed that hundreds of cockroaches can disappear so quickly. I dare not investigate. It’s not only awful but perhaps the greatest disappointment is in my own feebleness. I throw my backpack on the linoleum floor and put my head in the bathroom. A broken tap juts out the wall next to a dirty squat toilet. Tears well up and I push them down. I fish out the chain and padlock to tie my backpack to the bed (as advised by experienced friends). I feel ridiculous as I realise that anyone could simply empty the entire backpack. There is a wooded window that looks out onto a wall. Nothing to see, right. I pull out a kikoi and spread it over the bed. I lie down in my clothes and leave the light on – too afraid of the cockroaches in the dark. Exhaustion is no guarantee for sleep. I lie tensely on the bed but sink deeply into despair, self-disappointment, and money-worry, and make plans to leave the next day. Or rather today – it is already the early hours. The door handle is moved down: not gently but pumped violently. The whole door rattles. Now fear adds itself to the complexity of horror. There are loud steps on the floorboards of the stair. Someone is moving away. Perhaps it was just a mistake? Not an intruder after all. Ten minutes later the heavy footsteps approach and the handle rattles precariously. I hold my breath. I’m angry again: for Heaven’s sake, I live in Johannesburg, the crime city of the world. How dare I be threatened here? How absurd, unfair, ironical, feeble of me; cruel of the universe. So the lousiness of this life is everywhere: even in my precious magical-imagined India. The handle holds, to my relief. And then I sob in between plotting to go home. Perhaps I could go straight to Cape Town and not tell my friends I’d spent all of one night in India. I note my ego is still intact.

So things often look different in the morning. I’m in India! Wow! Minor setback last night that’s all. I’m pleased with myself that I’ve packed nuts and raisins though my water is almost finished. I go downstairs and try to pay the exorbitant bill with the defiled notes. The oily-headed man looks at the money with aggrieved contempt and simply refuses to accept any rupees with a tiny staple hole in them. ‘This is how I got them!’ I shout, which is English for ‘What about the fucking dirty room with no water!! What’s your problem? Are you all mad?’ He didn’t get the subtext or even the literal one. I pull out my credit card. I’m feeling dirty: not only physically – obviously – when did I last wash? But I feel defiled by the night and the stares. At last I’m on the street. I’m ok and I have a plan. Well: in this I missed again the first lesson offered by mother India. ‘Ah! A plan? For you, special one … etc.’ But I didn’t see that then. Oblivious I continued with my own sense of agency: I’ll get my bearings, check where I am on the map, get some tea, catch a taxi to the station and get out of Mumbai. I’ll sit on a bench and check out the Lonely Planet. Go to that little town in Goa, Candolin beach on the Arabian Sea. Not an outlandish plan. How was I to know none of this was possible?

Arriving is not a matter of getting off a plane, nor a matter of immersing into local life; there is something else involved. Maybe it was symptomatic that I could find none of the street names or landmarks around me on my map. No taxi driver seemed to speak English, no one could direct me to a train, nowhere was there a place to sit. It took five hours of walking to stumble onto a railway station. Here a tugging on my sleeve made me turn to a young boy with a grass basket. He lifted the lid and a yellow cobra reared out towards my face. I turned but found myself wedged against a leper who held up her half-eaten-away hands to me.

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That’s what did it. I simply gave up. Something in my mind just let go. Well: India just wasn’t going to be how I expected it. Life was not how I insisted on seeing it. The universe gaped into a huge space empty of all my ideas; no expectations, no wishes, no control.

I saw a man approach out of the crowds. He walked directly up to me and remarked confidently: ‘You want to sit down. Come with me.’ And of course I went. And that was how India came to meet me. That is how I came to arrive into the mystery which unfolded with the same uncanny synchronicity again and again.

I was offered tea in an upstairs lounge. My new guide led me to a kiosk down the road from the station where he persuaded me to buy a train ticket. I suppressed my doubts about buying an expensive ‘ticket’ (no actual ticket) from a cardboard stall. I was told to come back in an hour. I felt faintly amused. My guide suddenly lifted me into the air to avoid a delirious sick man leaking all sorts of body fluids who lurched at me. He missed. Yes, I went back to the cardboard stall; yes, I got a ticket; no, my guide did not even hint for a tip. I tossed my backpack into the luggage hold and jumped on the bus – moving to the back – I was the only foreigner. We sat in the afternoon heat for an hour before circling the neighbourhood a few times to see how many people we could cram in. Then we crawled through the traffic, heading south – I supposed. I realised I had no water. A small urchin ran alongside the bus shouting at me and holding up water bottles. I leant out and bought one. Not realising that this was not ‘real’ bottled water – of course. Three hours later the bus broke down in the settling dust and dusk.

Sometime in the night as I mellowed slightly I realised I had no idea where I was to get off. Goa is a big place. Like saying I’m going to KZN. I pulled out the travel guide. I could not even remember the name of the place I had intended to stay at. I had been told it was a tiny place to the south of the main tourist beaches. Where was this bus actually going? How would I know when to get off? Noone spoke English. Now and again people in the front seats turned around to stare at me. Strangely I was content and happy. I had nothing to worry about – I had no control, no plan, no idea where I was, and no idea where I was going. This was deeply peaceful. I smiled into the night and at the passing villages. The bus stopped more frequently in the pre-dawn light – the driver making inaudible announcements in Hindi. I wondered if I would just leap off somewhere. A couple of stops later a man climbed on the bus and came directly to me announcing ‘You want to go to Candolin. Come with me.’ Of course I followed the man. His companion grabbed my backpack from the hold and loaded it into a rickety car. I started stammering something about ‘where were we going...’ but gave up as the men looked aggrieved. So we headed off into the pale morning, through palm groves, quiet paddy fields and the smell of the ocean. I was deposited at a pleasant boarding lodge which cost about R12 a night including breakfast. The man promised to visit me later to see that I was fine and if I needed anything. I was indeed in Candolin – right where I had intended to be. The room was large and clean with a small balcony and functioning shower. I was brought tea.

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Now this is a long story and winds its way through strange meetings, caves, hill-stations, Puna – to pay tribute to my grandmother’s roots, and on to war-besieged Kashmir. I was protected as well as ripped-off, happy and often bewildered, and strangely at ease: Mother India.

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Romania Sigrid Ewert It is August 1999. An important workshop in Computer Science will take place in Iași, Romania, and I am due to present a paper there. I arrive at Otopeni International Airport in Bucharest. A man in a black uniform scribbles a number on a scrap of brown paper and pushes it towards me. He doesn't explain why. As a matter of fact, he doesn’t say one word. Fortunately I know from my travel guide that I may not lose that slip under any circumstances. At the train station in the city center I enquire about accommodation at the tourist information booth. A well-spoken young woman suggests several hotels. One room costs hundreds of dollars a night. This must be a major source of income for the government. I just shake my head. She gives me the names of pensions; they are distinctly more affordable. I take the metro. My heart sinks when I notice no other tourists on it. Sometimes it is comforting to find another who speaks the language of traveler’s cheques, budget accommodation, and places to avoid. The locals look very poor. Their complexions are sickly, their clothes synthetic and well worn. I notice that some are returning from a trip to the mountains. Their rucksacks and sport equipment look preWorld War II. I get out at a major square. As far as I can see, everything is a shade of grey. The buildings surrounding the square are lovely, but dark with soot. There are a few straggling trees, with the odd leaf or two. The only color comes from four huge billboards, each attached to the front of a building. The boards advertise Western luxury goods: Claudia Schiffer for L'Oreal, ‘You’re worth it’; French perfume. I try and get my bearings. I walk past a couple of stalls flogging second hand stuff, a bit of everything. A man in a vest shouts something in a language I don't understand. I can understand the tone, though, and the taunting laugh. I try to pretend it didn't happen. On the larger scale of things, I am the more powerful. Finally I find a street sign, and manage to decipher letters under the grime. It doesn't help much. A man approaches me and offers his help. I am rather reluctant; the guidebook has warned me against common scams. However, I show him the name of the hotel and my map. He begins to give me directions. Suddenly there is a second man. He accuses us of dealing in black market dollars. I try to stay calm, and ask him to show me his identity card. He repeats his accusations and I repeat that I

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want to see proof of his identity. He changes tack and threatens to take us to the police station. I accept, very relieved, thinking that I could sort out this matter with his commander or even call the German embassy. He seems reluctant to carry out his threat. The first Romanian assures me that the man is from the police, that he knows him. The policeman asks to see my purse. I know that this is the point where he could steal my money. However, I also know that I have very little cash in my purse, and show him the few notes I have, all Romanian. He says that I must have more money, ‘Dollars, dollars, dollars,’ somewhere in my clothes or rucksack. I deny it, even though I naturally have traveler’s cheques and cash hidden away. He finally goes away, disgruntled. I manage to find the pension and book in. The bathroom and toilet are in the passage. They are the worst that I have ever seen in my many years of budget travel. The toilet doesn't flush and undefined black matter, almost like long thin worms, comes out of the shower. My mood darkens. I try to freshen up; sometimes your dignity is all you have left. Superficially, my room looks neat, but the sheets are stained and torn. In the night I'll discover that there are also fleas. On my way out to see the sights, I glance at the TV at the reception. The 800m at a championship is being fought out, with Hezekiel Sepeng among the athletes. I want to go home. A river runs through the town, currently almost dry. The cast iron bridges and street lamps are beautiful, but terribly neglected. It is difficult to imagine that Bucharest once was called ‘Little Paris’. Many of the buildings I pass are only shells, some clearly abandoned in the process of construction. Every sidewalk is a moonscape of huge potholes. It is as though the city had been deserted after a war very long ago and humans have only just started returning. The locals seem surprisingly cheerful. On Sunday afternoon many are at the bakery to buy cream cakes. At the currency exchange booth I notice young people cashing in wads of Deutschmark; I suspect they have jobs in Germany, perhaps bringing in the harvest, and can live for a long time on their earnings. I visit Ceaucescu’s palace. So many resources have gone into it, and so much bad taste. The tour guide tells us that Nicolae and Elena Ceaucescu wanted a replica in their palace of everything they had liked on their many state trips. The guide seems to not despise them as passionately as I do. Dictators are often loved much more than democratically elected leaders. They are also hated more, of course. I remember a story an American had told me. He was travelling around the world for a year, and often lost track of world events. One day he walked past a newsstand in Turkey, and noticed a picture of Ceaucescu on the front page. He pointed at it and looked questioningly at the newsvendor. The Turk made a simple cutting movement across his throat. No more words were needed.

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I have to buy a train ticket to Iași and know that I won't be able to communicate properly with the ticket seller. Therefore I write all the important words on a piece of paper. When I get to the front of the queue, I hold the note out to the woman behind the glass. She immediately understands, smiles and sells me my ticket. All of a sudden I feel less alien. After an interminable weekend I can leave Bucharest for Iași. There are three other Westerners in my compartment. It is unbearably hot. We try to open the window to get some air, but it falls shut every time. I get the idea of forcing the window open with an empty water bottle. My first attempt doesn't work; the bottle falls out and is lost. The other passengers laugh. ‘I told you it won’t work,’ says one man. My second attempt is successful, and we are slightly more comfortable. At some point I go to the toilet. I open the door and close it very quickly again. A dog wouldn't go in there. I curse myself for having come to this country, especially so soon after long and harsh medical treatment. Under conditions like these I could easily get an infection. After six hours we arrive in Iași. I try to follow the rudimentary map the organizers have sent me, but am soon lost. Some young people offer to walk a part of the way with me. They seem to enjoy the opportunity to speak English, and I cannot help complimenting them on their grammar and accent. My accommodation is a modern student residence, but not quite finished. It stands at a very odd angle to an older one, an angle that only makes sense if the authorities intended demolishing the latter. The old residence has no curtains and I can look straight into a dormitory. One iron bed stands next to the other. There is hardly any space to move. Whether there are any cupboards, I cannot see. The residence reminds me of Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder (Child of the revolution) by Wolfgang Leonhard, in which he describes his student days in Moscow. They had such dormitories, and kept their few belongings in suitcases under their beds. He said they never thought about the complete lack of privacy or comfort. To my surprise, I share a room with an acquaintance from Budapest. She is a well-established scientist and I would have thought that she would be able to afford a single room. It turns out that we are a very bad match, since she cannot sleep with the window open and I cannot sleep with the window closed. Therefore we both get very little sleep. The town is lovely. The buildings of the university flank a broad avenue with tall trees. They are beautiful, but clearly haven't been painted for decades. Two houses stand out, though, like gemstones in ash. They are newly renovated. The one is ochre, the other pink. The one is the Goethe-Institut, the other the Alliance Francaise. The trams going up and down the avenue are also in very good condition. I don’t understand why they carry big advertisements in German for German banks and goods. After some enquiries, I find out that the trams were donated by the twin city of Iași in Germany. Apparently that city was in the process of changing to wide tracks, and had no use anymore for the narrow-track carriages. I wonder

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if one could rebuild this country, and feed and clothe its inhabitants, with all the goods discarded in Germany. Only once do I see a car on the street. It is brand new, a Peugeot. A young woman drives it, a woman in fashionable clothes and make-up, and with beautifully dressed hair. She drives in big curves over both lanes and laughs and calls out to friends walking on the pavement. I cannot help but wonder where she gets that type of money. Are her parents among the new elite who are dividing up the resources of the country and selling them to the highest foreign bidders? I sign up for a four-day trip into the mountains and need to buy warm clothes. I find no clothes shops, except some with a smattering of second hand clothes from the West, well-worn second hand clothes, not the type that people give away without ever having worn them or that shops dump because the fashion has changed. I go to a supermarket to buy food for the trip. Their stock is an odd assortment of expensive chocolate, Belgian or Swiss, all past their use-by date, Danone fruit yoghurt, past its sell-by date, a few shrunken apples and onions, some white bread, which I know will dry within hours, and cheese. I point at something on a shelf; the shop assistant takes it down, shows me it is rotten at the back and puts it back on the shelf. I try to buy a postcard for my supervisor back home, but cannot find any. I realize that a postcard is a sign that a society can afford luxuries. It is very difficult to cope with the money. Other conference attendees have coined the phrase kiloLei, since nothing costs less than a thousand Lei. Most of the time, though, one needs millions of Lei. I buy some bread and cheese in a little shop and the assistant takes great pains to give me the right change for my large bank note, even though I wouldn't have noticed if she had short-changed me. Every morning I pass an elderly beggar in the street. He always stands, upright and proud, never sits down. He always wears a well-pressed suit and tie, and his beard is trimmed. I suspect he used to be a professor at the university. I wonder if Romanian academics don’t get proper pensions, or whether he has fallen foul of the old, or new, government and was booted out without any compensation. I resolve to give him all my remaining Lei on the day of my departure. An Austrian actor, who is at home in Iași, invites all German-speaking conference attendees to the Goethe-Institut. He tells us of the rich history of the country, how strong they used to be in technology, especially in the Western part where there is a large German community. However, according to him, the Ceaușescu regime has ruined the country, perhaps irreparably. He also tells us that the education authorities want to change the university system to the American model, sadly, because the high standard of education is one of the strengths of Romania. At the conference dinner a local academic tells us that they seldom had electricity in the lecture halls, even when the snow piled up meters high. They all sat swaddled in thick coats and shawls in

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lectures. Another tells me that they were not allowed typewriters. A few approved people had typewriters and did all the typing. In this way the state made it very difficult for anyone to write political pamphlets. I present my paper. I am on auto-pilot, because I haven’t slept properly for more than a week. The organizer tells me that my paper was one of the best and would definitely appear in a special issue of a journal dedicated to this workshop. I am so tired that I do not say much more than ‘Oh, that is nice.’ On my last day I notice that the street is full of young people, many with a parent in their Sunday best in tow. Some are studying bits of paper, others are chatting excitedly. I find out that the university is having entrance exams. I am amazed that so many people still want to start a long education among the ruins, but, perhaps, hope for a better future, either at home or as emigrants, is all they have left.

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In Mumbai Jane Castle

When she arrived in Mumbai to work at the Institute of Education, Cherie had taken to feeding the poor in her street, even though Sashi frowned at giving anything to beggars unless they were terribly old or obviously disabled. Beggars congregated on the steps of the Mosque across the road, waiting in anticipation of Eid handouts, or maybe some leftover pieces of goat, sheep and camel that had appeared suddenly and in great numbers, tethered to the trees and gates of the neighbourhood. Soon there were regular recipients of Cherie’s food aid, such as JayMay who made a home for herself in a plastic- lined telephone exchange cage down the street. There was the security guard who stood in front of the house next door for 24 hours a day without a break. Then there was Daisy the neighbourhood cow and the rest of the bovine sisterhood. Sashi laughed when Cherie peeled bananas for the cows, but Cherie couldn’t imagine how they would manage if she didn’t. Finally, there were the stray dogs which always lost out to the cows in the scramble for food scraps at the rubbish dumps. The dogs always got something meaty for dinner-something the cows would turn up their noses at. Sashi warned, gently but firmly, that it wouldn’t be long before Cherie had used up her savings from Wits and had to beg for scraps herself.

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Missed trips Audrey Msimanga

I heard his call from the back of the auction floor where I was busy gathering together my purchases from the day’s auction; among them an old grimy lawn mower which I was not sure how I would transport home. Surely the taxi driver would allow me to place it on the seat next to me and pay a double fare? People did that all the time with their luggage. Except this was no ordinary suitcase or bag of groceries. Who puts a lawn mower on a seat in a taxi? His voice broke through my musings and I think by then he had called my name three or four times.

He was making his way towards the back of the auction floor still calling my name excitedly. I looked up and for a moment I did not recognize him. Who was this white man with a neatly trimmed long white beard? I knew I had seen him somewhere, quite recently too, but where? ‘You made it,’ he shouted. ‘You got the job.’

Then I remembered, not so much who he was but more of that dreadful day four weeks before. I remembered standing at one narrow end of the long boardroom table surrounded by eleven men (ten white and one black) and one white woman. I was sweating in places I had never sweated before. It was the end of an interview that to this day I have no recollection of. And now here was the outcome announced at the auction floors by a man I hardly remembered, one of the eleven that had stood ominously tall at that boardroom table. I had got the job. I was going to be the New Ornithologist, the first woman ornithologist, in fact, the country’s first black ornithologist, male or female. However, neither of us gave voice to that thought. It would not have been appropriate to say that out loud at the auction floors, or for that matter at the office or in the boardroom. People did not talk about things like that. It was not politically correct. It was too soon after liberation, to talk about things like that; perhaps in another five or ten years. He did tell me though that my letter was already in the post. In a state of subdued excitement, I lugged my lawn mower across town to the taxi rank in anticipation of a different kind of struggle: to get my new purchase onto a seat.

The small matter of the transportation of my lawn mower was not the real reason for my conflicted excitement at the news that Jack, my prospective executive director had just shared. In the four weeks following the interview I had received some other news, exciting news actually under different circumstances. At the interview I had been given a job description. One of my tasks in the first month of joining the organization was to go on an expedition to a very important wetland that one of the key funding bodies had identified for conservation. That would be part of my training and probation and the success of this assignment was very important for my future in the organization. But then I had since received this other exciting piece of news and it changed things completely. The situation was quite grave actually. My gynaecologist had smiled as he announced, ‘Congratulations Mrs Msimanga, etc. etc...’. It was wonderful news indeed. After all, our first had turned two some three months ago. It was time for number two to come. As usual the doctor had a long list of do’s and don’ts. One of them was that I was not to travel to any malaria risk areas as I could not be given 51 Recovering Academics

prophylaxis. That was not a problem as we were not planning a trip anywhere anytime soon. It was not a problem until the day of the auction at which I learnt that I had landed my dream job. I was not to travel to any place where I may be exposed to malaria, and yet the very important wetland that would decide my probation was an established breeding place for mosquitos. I had a new job, my dream job; I was pregnant with my second baby, my well planned pregnancy that would make it impossible for me to go on the trip that would decide my fate in the organization. I missed that trip, just like I had missed another four years before in my final year of university. I had come back to university from the long vacation, four years ago into my final year of my first degree, unbeknown to me almost four weeks pregnant. Our final year was the specialization year. I had put down behavioural ecology as one of my specializations. By its very nature behavioural ecology was a field course. One of the requirements was participation in the first, long trip which would be followed by a selection of shorter trips during the course of the semester. A few days after the semester began, I found out with a mix of excitement and disappointment that I would not be joining my class on the big field trip. I was pregnant with my first baby. I missed the trip. Twenty years later, I finally made the trip. It was at midday on a Thursday, a typical Johannesburg October day, simmering hot, promising a stormy downpour later that afternoon or in the evening. A few days before I had received a letter congratulating me on the award of a PhD Fellowship in Marang. I was to meet with the director of Marang on Thursday at 3pm to sign the contract. Since I lived and taught at a school 60km outside Johannesburg I had taken two taxis to get to Wits, reminding me of another taxi ride twenty years ago. Once again I rode in the same subdued excitement and anticipation, except this time I sat with human passengers – not a lawn mower. I could not hold back the excitement; I was on my way to enrol for a PhD at Wits. What more could a forty-six year old mother of two ask for? Two hours and two taxi rides later I arrived at the Wits School of Education and sat on the only chair outside the Marang director’s office. It was then that the thought hit me. I had travelled 1300km from my home country to this foreign land on the ultimate field trip and I was not pregnant! I had finally made the trip, my two babies on tow.

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The great woman Dale Taylor

Mary arrived at Wits as a big name. We watched to see what she would do, what issues she would tackle head-on. She came all guns firing and tackled the staff room, a room barely used except for annual staff meetings. This great woman was concerned about tea and coffee. We were surprised.

But I came to see her wisdom as time and again I serendipitously encountered colleagues on my way to get a sandwich from the canteen satellite which she orchestrated alongside the filter coffee. Or planned a meeting with a colleague in the cheerful revamped room, neutral ground away from both our phones.

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Out of the office

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Yellow dog Jane Castle

A yellow dog walked through the half open gate to my house in Fouriesburg and looked beseechingly at us having a celebratory lunch on the front stoep at the end of a writing retreat. The dog flopped down under the Stinkwood tree, squashing a couple of Agapanthus plants beneath him. Then he stood up again, and circled a few times, like a cat, before finally settling neatly in the dust. He looked up hopefully. ‘He looks thirsty,’ said Dale.

‘Hot and tired,’ Sigrid remarked. ‘Look at him panting.’

I fetched a bowl of water and put it down in the shade beside him. We continued our lunch on the stoep. The yellow dog drank the water and took his place on the Agapanthus again. I refilled the bowl.

‘He’s probably tired of doing too much,’ Dale continued. ‘Owners expect too much from their dogs.’ ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘Well, they get a puppy, like this one here, and expect it to do everything: be a security guard, a burglar alarm, a nanny, a companion. It’s just too much responsibility.’ Dale frowned for a moment, thinking of the dogs and their owners who attended her training classes on Saturdays. ‘So of course the pup runs off to find other dogs to play with. Dogs are pack animals, after all.’

We finished lunch and packed the dishes in the dishwasher, then put the luggage in Dale’s car. A little later Dale and Sigrid left for Johannesburg. I gave the yellow dog yet more water and left the gate open for him to leave when he’d recovered. But he didn’t leave. Instead he followed me to the chaise longue under the apricot tree where I proposed to spend the afternoon reading a novel. He settled at my side and I stroked his chin and behind his ears. Remembering Almondine in The Story of Edgar Sawtell, I rubbed his ruff. He smiled and yawned, and sighed contentedly. When I turned back to my book, I saw from the corner of my eye that he had laid his head neatly between his front legs and closed his eyes. As evening drew in, and Yellow Dog remained at my side, I began to think I should do something about finding his owner. But first I warmed some basmati rice and vegetables left over from lunch and poured a glass of wine for myself. I added raw eggs to Yellow Dog’s bowl to give him some protein. He gobbled the rice and eggs, but eschewed the carrots. He raced around the rose garden three times in delight and then took up sentry duty on the kitchen stairs.

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In the morning, he was still there. I gave him some breakfast and he settled on the shady side of the house. Isaac Ramolota came to mow the lawn and looked disapprovingly at the crushed Agapanthus and a pile of earth Yellow Dog had dug up in the night, perhaps on the trail of a mole or an ancient buried bone. ‘Is he sick?’ Isaac asked, pointing at the dog at my side.

‘No,’ I said, ‘he is healthy. He is young and friendly. He came yesterday afternoon and spent the night here. Do you know this dog? Do you know his owner?’

‘No, I don’t know it,’ said Isaac, and went to the garage for a rake and spade to repair the messes Yellow Dog had made.

I pulled on my walking shoes and sun hat. Yellow Dog met me at the gate, smiling and cocking his head, as if we did this every day. We went to Lucinda’s house and were greeted noisily by her fierce Alsatian. Lu was drinking coffee on the stoep, but came to the gate with her mug when I asked her if she knew Yellow Dog.

‘He’s been here a couple of times. I give him a meal when I feed my own dog and a few others that come round in the morning. I think he’s a stray—but look at his collar.’ We looked at the frayed red and green striped cotton belt strapped too tightly around Yellow Dog’s neck. ‘Perhaps the kids at the hostel have taken him in and he’s got away.’ So I walked past the Hoerskool Fouriesburg, emphatically closed for the summer holidays, and on to the hostel, an odd-looking place which I’d always thought of as a witch’s house because it had narrow windows and a steep conical roof, like a witch’s hat, on a turret at the entrance. It was the kind of house that seems to have cobwebs and dust everywhere, and in the evenings, it is dark and gloomy. Bats and rats flit through the fruit trees. There were a couple of kids looking bored in the garden. No sign of a witch. The kids didn’t know the dog, or his collar, but suggested I try the house belonging to the manager of the farmers’ co-op. But I had no luck there, either.

I decided to walk on through the new town which overlooks Meirings Kloof. A number of dogs and their owners greeted us, warily or curiously, as we walked along the hot streets, but no one knew Yellow Dog’s owner. Finally, a Boerboel rushed at us through an open gate, barking mad and snarling. Yellow Dog ran away, with his tail between his legs. I thought that might be the last of him, but he was waiting for me at home next to the gate which Isaac had closed to keep him out. He wagged his tail with such joy when he saw me that I let him in again. We both had a drink of water and sought the shade of the apricot tree for the rest of the day.

In the evening we went to the Windmill Pub where a lot of the locals gather. We walked through the garden to the bar, where some leathery men in khaki and velskoene were drinking beer and watching rugby on TV. One of them, Christo, jumped up from his stool and told me I couldn’t bring a dog into the pub. I told him I was looking for the dog’s owner. The dog was perfectly trained and well-behaved. He must have an owner somewhere. But no one at the bar recognized Yellow Dog.

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Christo escorted us outside and explained that many owners abandoned their pets at Christmas time when they went away on holiday. They even dropped them out of the car on a highway far from home so that the pet could not make its way back. He suggested I should ask around at the campsite at Meirings Kloof if anyone had lost a dog. I should also try the local vets. And so it went on. No one knew the dog, but everyone commented on his gentle disposition and probable parentage. He had a Labrador head, Boerboel eyes, and Ridgeback back. He would grow into a big dog. He looked as if he had been cared for. He had been trained to sit, to heel, to wait, and to fetch, all in Afrikaans. He was playful and protective and polite. He raced with children on their bikes. He befriended a neighbour’s bulldogs. He learned to watch birds rather than pounce on them. He never barked, except when he thought there was danger. He endeared himself to Isaac by frightening off a beggar who came to the house asking for a Christmas box. He caught a large, though harmless, mole snake in the empty plot next door and brought it home to show Isaac and me. He endeared himself to me by keeping me company on walks, and while reading and writing, cooking and gardening, swimming and driving, and listening to music. When I went to Bethlehem for supplies, I bought a big bag of expensive puppy food, a brush and a collar. The food and the brush were well received, but the moment I freed Yellow Dog from the belt around his neck, it was impossible to get another collar on him, even a loose one. The problem came when I had to leave Fouriesburg to return to work in Johannesburg. Yellow Dog ran behind my car for block after block until we were on the outskirts of town and someone threw a stone at him. I had to return home and ask Isaac and a neighbour to hold Yellow Dog back until I’d left town. I felt as if I were leaving a child or a dear friend behind. A few weeks later, when I returned to Fouriesburg, I had hardly reached my gate when Yellow Dog appeared again. It seemed he had been waiting for me all this time. He smiled widely, hopped on two or three paws at a time, jumped and wriggled and twisted and turned around my skirts. He pushed against the gate and rushed into the garden, as if entering paradise. He returned to the gate and pressed his head first against my knee and then against the gate to open it wide. He tried and failed to get into the car with me, and thumped his tail against the door on the driver’s side, making it difficult to drive in. He bounded ahead to show me where to park, trotted back and forth as I took my bags into the house, and lay across the steps to the kitchen door so that I couldn’t leave the house without his knowing it. What an exuberant welcome!

And so we went on, with rapturous welcomes and dreadful, heart-wrenching separations for several months. Each time I saw him he looked a bit the worse for wear. He had cuts on his head and ears, and his coat was sometimes matted. He became a bit thinner and had ticks on his belly, which were difficult to remove, but it had to be done, and he knew it. He was still a handsome dog, with a good nature and easy manners, rather like my partner Alex, in fact. And also like Alex, he resisted wearing a collar or going to the doctor. I thought about taking Yellow Dog to Johannesburg with me, but I lived in an apartment complex where pets were not allowed. In any case, he was a grasslands dog, not a city animal, and it seemed wrong to take him from his natural habitat. I tried to foster him with neighbours and families in

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Fouriesburg, but had no lasting success. It seemed that Yellow Dog was a rover. The only person he wanted to stay with was me. And then, a year after our first encounter, I came to Fouriesburg, and Yellow Dog wasn’t there to greet me. I walked about the town, hoping to find him in someone’s yard, but got no sight of him. I asked the vet, my neighbours, but no one had seen him. Lucinda said she hadn’t fed him for a long time. She said a resourceful creature like Yellow Dog would find another kind woman to look after him.

On another trip, Isaac said he’d seen a dog like Yellow Dog with an old man who grazed cattle on the Ficksburg road near Mashaeng. We went to look, but it was a smaller dog, cowed and thin, with a plastic coated wire wound tightly around his neck. And then, one day when I was reading a student’s work in the thin sun of winter, I looked up from my desk and saw Yellow Dog trotting down Fleck Street towards town. I ran to the gate in my slippers and called him. He turned his head uncertainly, as if searching his memory for a reason to respond. He was thin and nervous. His golden coat had become a dusty hide. I ran back to the house for some food to lure him back to me. As I approached him again, telling him how glad I was to see him, offering the food, beseeching him, he backed away, his tail between his legs, until finally he turned and ran towards the edge of town and Mashaeng. And that was the last time I saw Yellow Dog. I still have my sandstone house with the birdbath and the rose garden. I sit on the stoep with friends and have lunch; I write stories and read my students’ work under the apricot tree. But it is different now, without Yellow Dog.

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On letting go Cynthia Kros

I knew I had recovered one day early in September. On the spur of a crazy moment I had signed up for a dance class.

At the first session I watched myself guardedly in the mirror. It was of course a different self from the one I had seen in the mirror when I was at dance classes as an undergraduate student, thickened now by age and child-bearing. Nobody wore leg warmers anymore; the sun was shining, worried a little at the edges by an early spring breeze; the leaves on the creeper over the wall next to the studio fluttered in turn like keys on a mechanical piano. As the music started up and the instructor – a small black man with an incredibly toned body – shouted over Michael Jackson’s double: ‘Ow!’ – ‘Ow!’ again - ‘One, two, three, four and… from the top!’ I waited to see what my body would do. ‘Kick, kick and step, one, two, three four and gooi!’ He walked over to my side: ‘And, gooi! You say the gooi! And it helps you. More energy, please, more spark!’

Oh, it was a question then, not of igniting my body, but of finding my voice. The music started to pull at my legs like a small child imploring me to play. I began – kick, kick and step… I got the wrong leg for the gooi! ‘And turn and turn and pas de bourree, pas de bourree!’ I almost lost my balance. ‘From the top!’ If only we could keep on starting from the top every time we put the wrong foot forward or lost our balance. ‘One, two, three four and gooi! Turn, turn and pas de bourree, pas de bourree. Good, good, now put a smile on your face. Enjoy! Relax! One, two, three, four and gooi!’ And suddenly my body remembered that it had hips and it released them from its keeping. ‘Pas de bourree, pas de bourree’. I got the wrong leg again but as I turned, my head recalled that it should lead and bring everything back in its wake. ‘Step, step, a-huh! A-huh! Down!’ My foot angled awkwardly as I tried to sink down on one knee. ‘But again,’ said the instructor, who had no time for middle-age and thought that white people should attend obligatory rhythm classes. I found I liked his authoritarianism. ‘From the top!’ At this stage one of the other women in the class began to complain: ‘You’re going too fast! I can only get in one pas de bourree!’

The instructor folded his exquisitely honed arms and looked at her quizzically. ‘You must try harder,’ he said.

‘But look,’ she said shrilly, demonstrating in her slightly too small Billabong tracksuit, ‘I do one pas de bourree and then you’re already on the second step and then I’m still stepping and you’re down.’ The other people in the class started to murmur, half irritated with her, half consoling: ‘It doesn’t matter, there’s no exam, it’ll come with practice.’ But the instructor clapped his hands. ‘We all try

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harder, we keep up with the music, we kick when it says kick, we gooi! Like it’s a workout, we stretch our legs on the pas de bourree, isn’t it? And we go doWN. And once again!’ ‘But I can’t do it that fast,’ wailed the women in her Billabong tracksuit, ‘I can’t.’ The instructor had turned his back on her – not cruelly, just firmly – and was lightly slapping the thigh of his right leg to indicate that we were about to begin again. ‘Kick, kick and one, two, three, four!’ The music was getting the better of me. I gave in to it, my shoulders gave up trying to support my head and all its wearying thoughts; my head decided to focus on turning and its jarring old portcullis suddenly flew up and let the countless details and the enumerated ones fly out into the spring sunshine. ‘Pas de bourree! Pas de bourree!’ I got the right leg this time and my feet began to acquiesce with the rhythm. ‘Step, step, a-huh! A-huh! Down.’ My right foot held its ground, my left leg bent perfectly at the knee. ‘And up and Ho! Ho! – now you step and you laugh from your diaphragm so that your upper body shakes – watch – and up and Ho!’ ‘No,’ cried Billabong lady, ‘no, I can’t do that.’ ‘You laugh from your diaphragm.’

‘What? What’s that? That doesn’t make any sense to me.’ Billabong lady had never laughed from anywhere and yet nobody had told her before that that wasn’t a good thing.

‘You must grab the steps now,’ said the instructor – he felt the supplies were running out. Everywhere he looked he saw precious steps to be captured and here was this foolish white woman standing still, pretending that his explanation was a difficult scientific riddle when all he was talking about was breathing and laughing. But he had an inexplicable soft spot for foolish white women or he wouldn’t have been here. Indeed he thought that foolish white women could be cured of their foolishness and that the god of dance had sent him to do it. Or perhaps not. But Michael Jackson was belting out his song from beyond the grave – ‘It don’t matter if you’re black or white’ and I imagined we were supposed to take comfort from that. ‘Are we ready? Look, if you don’t do it right, I stop and we start again. And dum! Dum! Dum! Kick, kick and step…Don’t fall behind! Relax! Enjoy!’ ‘No, really,’ shouted out Billabong lady, ‘you can’t expect us to do everything at once!’ ‘From the top. You make a mistake we start again, kick, kick.’

Billabong lady pulled a face. ‘Step, step, one, two, three, four and gooi!’

I gooied. I gooied. I spun; I did the delicate trot-trot of the pas de bourree. I sank down; I rose up like a momentary devotee. ‘From the top!’

‘Perhaps you need to break it up for us. Perhaps you need slower music,’ Billabong lady pulled at her Billabong top in a vain attempt to get it to cover the sausage of her midriff, ‘I can’t do it at this pace.’

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‘Kick, kick and step…’.

I kicked, I stepped, I stepped, I kicked, I spun, I stepped, I sank down, I rose up, I stepped, kicked, kicked, stepped, spun, down, up, stepped, stepped, kicked, kick, kick and then I laughed – Ho! Ho! I laughed. I laughed. ‘Very good, much better,’ said the instructor and he wiped a long line of sweat that had started at his temple and then slid down the fine, raised cheekbone, and the hollow of his black, black cheek.

‘I still don’t get it,’ said Billabong lady, ‘I don’t get it and it’s no use my coming to this class if I don’t get it.’

The instructor turned on his heel to face her. ‘You have come before,’ he said – not in a particularly angry voice, more as an observation - ‘you have come before and she,’ he suddenly pointed at me, ‘has only come today and she is much better than you.’

I wanted to own up then – to say that I had danced before – with a teacher who was the sister of a famous choreographer. Every week we had gone to a dance class with a woman who was semifamous through sibling association. Of course I was better. But, said the kinder voice inside my head – what was left now that everything else had flown out – that was more than thirty years ago. On my way out of the studio I stopped to thank the instructor for the class. ‘What do you do?’ he asked me.

‘I’m a historian. I work at the university,’ I replied. I found that I said it with a rare conviction and without hesitation. But I also knew that he had expected me to say something else and, as I reached the studio door, I felt a little thrill of something – oh it was happiness, it was that laughter that came from the diaphragm- I am quite capable of being something else. It doesn’t end here.

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Being and becoming

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On the edge of beauty Cynthia Kros

At first I had felt sorry for her for the usual reasons. She was middle-aged, divorced with no reasonable prospects, slow on her feet and unable to finish a paper on James Cameron’s Avatar that she had begun several years ago at the dawn of 3D. Of course, as in all such cases, she embodied my worst fears about myself, including the paper that was filed under several versions and had recently made the transition – still unfinished – to my new Mac. She had that plaintive tone common to women academics who feel aggrieved because they haven’t found the right man or been published in the right journal. Her PhD years in the US had given her that characteristic, false note of interrogation at the end of every second sentence. She sounded simultaneously unsure of what she was saying and determined that it should be so. Periodically, she made an attempt to work what thirty years ago might have been something on the edge of beauty. Her great-grandparents had arrived from India at the beginning of the century and built up what became a thriving business, mostly immune from forced removals and political persecution. She retained their complacency and sense that they had suffered nonetheless.

I had been going through a phase of reading Deleuze and Guattari with their wonderful invocations of the accelerating rhizome. I thought that she looked like their rhizome gone to seed. I’m not sure why it took me so long to realise that she was more than all this – not just seedy, heavy, slightly pathetic, but evil. I saw it all at once in a meeting in which she had decided on destroying a very dear colleague of mine. I saw it in the dilatory flicker of an eyelid moments before it was too late.

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Writing retreat Dale Taylor

Cynthia fetched me one crisp Highveld winter morning. The frost on my dead lawn was still crunchy. I apologized to my dogs and tossed my bag into her car. We headed towards the Magaliesberg - the opposite direction from the Wednesday morning traffic. Cynthia chatted about her first novel which had been shortlisted for an EU prize. The last time I wrote so much as a short story was in matric. I wondered what on earth Dale the physicist was doing going on a three day creative writing retreat. Perhaps there had been some cosmic mistake.

Cynthia drove across the last river and we arrived at the stone serenity of de Hoek Country Hotel. Gentle attendants directed us to the conference room. It was airy and elegant. The tables were set out in a U with a fresh flipchart at one end. At each place there was a new journal, a gel-ink pen, aromatherapy playdough and a place name. I knew from the email list that I did not know most of the other writers. But I did know that I was about the only one without Dr or Prof in front of my name. Jo-Anne Richards was leading the retreat. She was a published novelist. But her manner was warm and encouraging. She gave us our first task: free writing for ten minutes. Only rule: you may not lift your pen from the paper.

I breathed out. I could do this: I could cope with the first task. I did a half hour of free writing most mornings – Julia Cameron’s ‘morning pages’. I hadn’t read the rest of The Artist’s Way, but I had embraced her morning pages as a way to help me cope with my life. A first-thing-in-the-morning emotional dump. When Jo-Anne told us to stop, I leaned back ready for the next task. But Jo-Anne asked us to share our writing with the person next to us. Oops, I thought the freewriting was just a warm-up. Well it was, but Jo-Anne had a different idea of ‘warm-up’ from mine.

I cringed at the thought of someone reading my dump. But I had chosen to participate in this retreat, and if that’s what it meant …

I handed my page to Sigrid. Sigrid was a computer scientist and a rated researcher. I’d met her less than an hour ago. Sigrid had written about an intriguing conversation she’d overheard on a bus somewhere in Europe. I wanted to know more.

Jo-Anne’s voice broke the silence. She asked us to comment to our partners on their writing. Poor Sigrid managed to find something positive to say to me. She noted my random comment about the luxury of writing with a gel-ink pen.

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The final stage of the warm-up was an opportunity to read our writing to the whole group. I kept quiet and listened. My enjoyment of my colleagues’ writing was tempered by awe.

Eventually Jo-Anne moved on to the next task: write your life as myth. She described how the main character in a myth has to face a challenge, and is changed in the process. ‘Go out and enjoy the garden and come back at noon.’ But first we had cream scones and tea. I sat on a rock under a tree. The myth was an interesting task. What was my life? The past three and a half years loomed far larger than the rest of it. Although he had been in remission for eighteen months, my husband was defined by his cancer – it came into his every conversation. Was I now also?

What is a myth? A sort of fairy tale? Fairy godmothers and castles and ogres perhaps. Cancer had turned Doug into something of an ogre. A monster with a smelly wound in his back. But did I really want my life defined by the past few years? As I wrestled with this question, the myth took shape. I gave up trying to imagine a version of my life that wasn’t only about the cancer years. I polished my myth. I titled it The Grumpy Monster. As we regrouped in the gracious conference room I felt I had coped well with the task. Redeemed myself. This time I would read it to the group.

I listened to other myths and joined in the positive comments after them. Then I volunteered to read mine. I read confidently. And then I waited for my feedback. And waited. Jo-Anne said ‘Sjoe.’ And nobody else said anything. Nothing good and nothing bad.

I was devastated. I did not know what to make of the silence. I did not even know what to make of Jo-Anne’s ‘Sjoe’.

Someone broke the silence by volunteering their myth. I half listened. I fiddled with my brown playdough. I did not join in the comments afterwards. After the myths Jo-Anne talked about voice. ‘The only way to get it is by constant chatting with your page.’ She explained our next task. ‘You’re going to write a quick story about a relationship. I find rules make it easier to write. So here are the rules for your story. The main character must be between 30 and 45 years. The subject must have to do with parenthood. Anything to do with parenthood. It can cover the lack of children or having them.’ She smiled, ‘Enjoy!’ I retreated to my beautiful hotel room. I sat on a chair on the balcony with my pad on my lap. Parenthood. Well, it would have to be about not having – I had no experience of anything else. Except that I’d considered the possibility. I wrote The Question of Children at the top of the page. JoAnne was right; the rules did make it easier. But this was not a story I was going to share. Which was fine, Jo-Anne always made sharing with the group voluntary. I sat looking into the naked air above the willow trees. I took myself back to the conversation Doug and I had on Plettenberg beach. I tasted the sea air and heard the gulls cry. I wrote easily, for this was not for an audience.

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When we resumed our seats in the U of the conference room, I sat still. ‘Well, how was that?’ asked Jo-Anne. I decided to answer her question, since I was not planning to read. Then I would have made my contribution for the session. ‘The rules really helped,’ I said.

‘Oh good,’ said Jo-Anne. ‘Will you read what you wrote?’ She beamed at me.

I sat stunned. This was not part of my plan. I hesitated. How could I turn down her warm request? I was participating in this retreat of my own volition. ‘All right,’ I consented ‘but on one condition. That I get some feedback.’ ‘Sure,’ said Jo-Anne.

And so I read. I kept my eyes down until the very end.

I looked up. There it was: my dysfunctional life painted in shocking multicolour in the air. The crushing colours hung in the U-space and ran together messily.

My fellow academics did give me feedback, and it was both positive and useful. Cynthia loved the beach and wanted to spend more time on it. Sigrid was shocked by Doug’s ‘we decided’. Jo-Anne pointed out the ending would work more powerfully if I stopped a sentence sooner. Somehow my murky mess resonated with the colours in other people’s lives. And in that moment I started to experience the healing of that resonance.

Late afternoon I took a walk alone along the stream. Birds danced and chirruped their soprano above my head. The stream played the alto part. I was ecstatic. The myth of my life had taken a sharp right turn. I was astounded by my aliveness. My numbness had evaporated. I was only aware of it now it was gone. What had happened? In part it was the royal treatment in this enchanted space. But mostly it was the healing of writing for a hearing audience.

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Cheap tea

Audrey Msimanga

I listen with fascination to discussions about the language of teaching and learning. Discussions about how second language speakers struggle to learn because they are taught in a language that is not their own often bring a smile to my face, not because I do not sympathise with their plight but precisely because I empathise with them. I recall incidents in my own life where learning failed to happen or a relationship was almost ruined because of language. One such incident stands out from my second year at university.

Although I was born in the city, I was raised between the city and the village, in our family home where I lived with my mother and my brothers and sisters until I was ready to start school. Both my parents spoke the same language, isiNdebele, so I had only one language to learn as a child. People often speak of their mother tongue, but for me both my mother tongue and father tongue were the same. The whole village spoke that one language and so I never struggled with language, I just spoke it. At age seven I was enrolled in a township primary school in the city where my father worked. I was in class with my friends from three or four adjacent streets, so we knew each other long before we came to school. Class was therefore just a continuation of friendships from our streets. Although I knew that some of my friends spoke a different language at home it never occurred to me that that might be a problem. After all we all spoke the same language in the streets when we played. They were so fluent in my language they could have been my brothers and sisters. So I never thought about how it was to learn in a language that is not yours. I was in this blissful state for all of my foundation phase education. Then in the third year things changed. We had been reading words and sentences in English in Sub-A and Sub-B but our teacher always spoke to us in our language and she gave instructions in isiNdebele, my language. Now in Standard 1, we started reading whole stories in English and we did sums in English and we did nature study in English. We now learnt to write letters not only in our language but in English too. This was a milestone achievement for us because back in the village reading and writing in any language was an important measure of a child’s education. In the village it was important for a child to be able to read and write a letter, as well as read the Bible to the elders. Letters were the only reliable means of communication between wives in the village and husbands in the city, or between parents in the village and their grown children working in the city. The mail came on a bus which came through our village from the city on Friday, Saturday and Wednesday nights. It stopped at the grinding mill and we loved going down to the bus stop to wait for the bus and bring home the mail. Then when we got home the best reader among us would be asked to say whose letters they were. Then the child would sit with each recipient and read their letters to them. Often she would be asked to help write a reply to the letter. So she would sit on the floor, pen and paper in hand, feeling important and the elder would dictate the reply. When the letter was done she would be asked to read it back to the writer to check that all their thoughts had been captured accurately. For the most

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part we wrote what the elders dictated. There were however, times when we were naughty and tampered with the contents of the reply. This happened mostly with letters from or to some adult who had once mistreated us and we had never forgotten. In those cases messages really could be distorted. I could tell stories and stories about that, but that’s for another time.

So in class we would try our best to learn the English language. By the time we reached Grade 6 we were expected to communicate in English all the time in class and our teachers used various strategies to get us to master the language. Some insisted that we speak in English not only inside the classroom but out in the play field as well. So for the last two years in primary school I spoke English daily in class. Then I went to high school and there was no compromise there, everything was in English. In fact my Principal, my Deputy Principal, my English language and literature teacher, my Physics teacher and my Biology teacher were all English from England. So I learnt the English language from English teachers. So there was no reason to doubt that I could communicate well in English, or so I thought, until I got to university. I had an encounter there that was to remain in my mind for many years. This troubling experience did not happen in the normal course of a tutorial or lecture. I was a Biology major and could speak the special English for Biology quite well. I was in a multiracial class for the first time and had to make many adjustments at many different levels. My unforgettable incident took place in one of my multiracial Biology classes. I think it was a comparative vertebrate physiology class and there were eight of us, four whites and four blacks. As part of our social interaction we wanted to organise tea and each of us would contribute a certain amount per month towards buying the tea and other supplies. A girl named Vanessa volunteered to buy the supplies. Vanessa and I had only just met but we got along very well and a friendship was just starting between us. So we all gave our contributions to Vanessa and off she went to buy us tea. When she returned she gave us a report on the expenditure. She had managed to find bargains and had bought us quite a good supply and variety for the little money we had given her. So everyone thanked her for the good job. As a way of expressing my thanks I said to her, “Thank you for buying us such cheap tea Vanessa”. Vanessa’s face went red and I heard her catch her breath before she walked away. I looked around at my classmates for help but none was forthcoming. Like me, the three other black students did not have a clue about what had just happened. Vanessa would not talk to me for days after that. I worried about it day and night but did not have the courage to confront Vanessa. What if I said something to offend her again in my attempt to make things right? I had no idea why she was so angry with me. After a couple of weeks I started avoiding tea time with the group. I scheduled my labs so that Vanessa and I would not be in the lab together. I just did not understand this white girl. I soon realised we could not go on like this for long, I wanted peace and I had upset Vanessa so I had to find a way to make things right. So I approached another friend, a white boy called Iain, and explained to him what had happened. As soon as I got to the cheap tea part Iain’s facial expression changed and I knew that had to have been the problem statement. But what was wrong with thanking her for buying us cheap tea? She had bought the tea for a lot less than we had envisaged; surely it must have been cheap where she bought it? Iain tried to explain to me how the tea was not cheap but

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had just cost less, because the tea cost less that did not make it cheap in the way I had said it. I struggled to see the difference. Where I came from if something cost less it was cheap.

The incident never left my mind and for years I tried to understand what Vanessa’s problem had been. How could she have misunderstood me so badly? It took me many years to finally come to understand that if something costs less it is not necessarily cheap. I began to understand why Vanessa felt insulted when I said her tea was cheap. I had thought I knew the English language, after all my English language teacher had been English. I had learnt it from the horse’s mouth so to speak. I put the incident down to experience and it was forgotten until I joined the education research community. I had never before thought about how students learn let alone how their cultural and other contextual baggage may impact their learning. For the first time I came to understand what happened with Vanessa and me that day many years ago. I had learnt about cheap and expensive in my grammar class from my English teacher. My teacher had even tried to contextualise the terms for us. She had us use the terms in sentences and she had us write paragraphs or essays. Surely that was contextualisation? However, it took an experience in a social context in which first speakers of the English language used the term for me to understand its other possible meanings. This is the basis of my interest in the role of social interaction and language on the teaching and learning of science. Sometimes I wonder how much of this passion for classroom talk is rooted in my own Vanessa-like experiences, for there were many of them.

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Joie de vivre Cynthia Kros

1.

His innocence, kindness and fragile beauty had somehow gone on surviving the endless round of cocktails. Almost Botticelli (and you don’t know quite how beautiful his angels are, excuse my snobbery, until you’ve seen the real thing) so that drugs, alcohol and middle age could not scotch the sweetness of that face.

We had worked together for a couple of years on a survey course of nineteenth and twentieth century South African history. We spent a lot of time talking about what it could all mean and why tell the story one way rather than another. Sitting on the couch in the common room long after everyone else had gone home, after a few, self-conscious false starts, we started talking about history and story-telling and whether or not they were the same. I had the strangest sensation. Layers of self-protective cladding that I’d accumulated after years of being in the university started to fall away. I found that our shoulders were touching and then, as we gesticulated to make a point, our hands brushed.

He was gay, of course, as my colleague, who noticed that we had become close, pointed out emphatically several times. But there was an energy between us that wasn’t entirely explained. Then he left the university to pursue a freelance career as a consultant. The first week he was gone I was subject to seizures of loss. Once or twice a day I entirely succumbed to the pain. Then I became habituated to the old routine, picked up my discarded cladding and wrapped it around myself again. I didn’t see him much and, after a while, forgot that I missed him. The last time I saw him his lovely face was jaundiced with the sombre colour of High Renaissance, and he wore a red bandana to cover the indignity of the chemo. He was very thin.

Later, when I traveled to Venice, I thought of him often and recalled him telling me that he hadn’t liked the Grand Canal. I guessed it was because it had been darkened for him by the premonition of death. Where else to feel it, but in Venice after all? Secret pestilence stalking all our dreams of loveliness. People say that Venice smells bad, but it doesn’t any more, that’s just part of the necessary lore otherwise its beauty would detain you forever. I spied his ghost there, better reconciled to the city, eating black pasta and drinking beer in Santa Margherita. He waved and called out to me. On the way back to my rented apartment, I had to cross over the Grand Canal, and then, walking ankle deep through the sea-water in St Mark’s Square, I saw his face again reflected among the lights. I rode the vaporetto through the truly dark waters back to my island, alone. I’d been sitting in my favourite café in Melville that day when he came along to tell me that he was ill. I was on my sixth cup of coffee and eating cold, French toast. For some reason, although he was

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giving me the shockingly low statistics of a person in his condition surviving the treatment never mind the disease, I didn’t know that he was dying. He didn’t even make it to Christmas that year, which was only three months away. Sometimes I think I see myself the way he saw me then, bright and intense through the fever and the drugs, with the rest of the world spinning round me wildly into the oblivion he feared. He didn’t want to die. He said that if he lived he was going to enjoy his life a hundred times more than he had in the last forty years – and he had always enjoyed life. That was probably why I didn’t know that he was going to die, and even after I knew that he had, when I came back to my favourite café in the New Year after Venice, my heart lifted when I saw his cabriolet parked outside. The proprietor had bought it from him ‘oh just a few days before he went’. Funny, I never saw his ghost on his home turf. I asked one of my discreet colleagues if she knew of a ‘clever’ therapist. I wanted a clever therapist since I was worried that I would outwit a stupid one, or at least that one of my personae would. I had begun to miss him unreasonably and to start out of my sleep at night.

‘You have no joie de vivre,’ was what she said – my clever therapist - in one of our first sessions. That made sense to me. I thought of the pale reproduction of Picasso’s Joie de Vivre that hung over the fireplace in my favourite café. A band of centaurs and fauns with a top-heavy goddess rising out of their midst shaking a tambourine whose sibilance you almost heard. Whatever your reservations about this pagan gathering you had to allow them some license since they came out of Europe in 1946. If you could hold the contradiction, hearing the panpipes float out over the brightness of the Mediterranean, then you could feel the spring in their cloven steps. You could aspire to joie de vivre. I always looked over at them hopefully, but they froze, they paled. You could see they weren’t at home in Melville in the twenty-first century. The sailboat out on the Mediterranean was moored in the two-dimensional urbanity that had somehow been channeled in from below. 2.

I had to teach the Second World War although it wasn’t my area. We had a new Head of Department who thought specialization was pretentious and that anyone could teach anything. I wrote out my lecture: ‘For a long time Primo Levi believed there was a chance of understanding Auschwitz. While he believed that, he could live with it, and recreate it as faithfully as he had promised himself he would while he was in the last circle of the inferno. But, after several decades it seemed that it could not or would not be understood. Despite his belief that the Holocaust had inoculated Europe against genocide, it seemed possible that it might happen again. Rational argument and evidence had no power against the denialists who looked at his tattooed camp number with indifference. That is why, all those years later, he threw himself into the stairwell and ended it.’ It was only the beginning of my lecture, but I saved it abruptly and shut down my computer. Then I began to cry. ‘What is it?’ called out my ever considerate and kind husband. ‘I’m having a mid-career crisis,’ I sniffed. I didn’t say ‘mid-life’ for fear that he would think of me as old. My daughter often told us we were too old even for mid-life crises. ‘I’ve been teaching History

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forever,’ I continued, pitiably, sounding old anyway, ‘But does it make people any more considerate, consistent, thoughtful?’

‘I told you you’d been over-working,’ Tony said, still kind, but a touch exasperated, coming to the door of my study. ‘You take your students too seriously,’ he added, although he knew I couldn’t help it. Unlike many of my colleagues I still prepared for lectures and had regular consultation hours. ‘Why don’t you go back to that piece you were writing about the French village? Remember how happy you felt when you were working on that?’ he went on.

Of course he was right. I had been happy when I was writing my French history. I had had joie de vivre. I started hunting down my file. ‘Why did you give up on it, anyway?’ he said, as I muttered: ‘It was in the red file, wasn’t it? I mean the hard copy. I have to find the hard copy to get me going on it again.’ I always felt intimidated by Microsoft’s little red and green scribbles pointing out execrable grammar and un-American spelling.

‘Here it is,’ he said, bending down to take it off one of the shelves near the door, being, not only kind and considerate, but also neat and precise, ‘It’s in the file labeled “French work”. But, you didn’t answer my question.’ ‘Because – I gave it up’, I said, breathing heavily and being aware that I was sounding cross for no apparent reason, ‘I gave it up because I couldn’t think of how to fucking end it, of what the point was.’

‘Well, don’t be angry with me,’ he said, ‘Why are you angry with me?’ He walked up to my desk and rested his hand lightly on the back of my neck.

In his world nobody got angry without good reason. In mine irrational anger had a long history. I spent my childhood dodging it, and then I found it hard to live without it. If there was too long a lull I manufactured it. But, as usual, I tried to deny that I was angry. Irrational anger was like that. By now I was practically hyperventilating, and sobbing again a little when I could catch a breath. Tony squeezed my shoulder while I leafed impatiently through the file, scattering loose pages and an illegal poppy I had pressed after our visit to the First World War battlefields. Eventually I found my piece about the French village – about the French village and memory. It soothed me to see that, after all, it was in its place in the red file, waiting for its conclusion.

‘What’s wrong with maman?’ I heard my big, handsome son call through, and then he appeared at the door of my study, arms akimbo, smiling ironically.

‘Your mother,’ said my husband, distancing himself as he did when I was acting oddly, ‘is upset that she didn’t change the world today.’

‘Not again, maman,’ chided my son. ‘I told you ages ago to change your career and to get a life.’ My son (like my daughter) had been perfectly brought up to follow his heart and not to do or say anything just because it was the right thing.

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But, while I felt a swell of the old maternal pride, I had also begun to cry quite openly again. It was something about my husband’s phrase. It reminded me of how my dear late colleague and I had always begun the working day. ‘What shall we do today, Pinkie?’ I would say, in imitation of a popular children’s cartoon that the kids watched when they were little. ‘Take over the world,’ he would respond, and we would laugh and whoop because in some way we really thought that was going to happen. We were really poised to do it. But, now he was gone and I would never speak to him again. Without him I wondered if I had the courage to finish my study of the French village. I could imagine my colleagues’ disapproval when they found out that I had strayed away from my patch of South African history into some obscure corner of France and French theory.

For a week I lectured on the Holocaust and Primo Levi. On the Friday I got into trouble with my Head of Department. The students had been complaining that I had begun at the end with the stairwell, instead of following through chronologically. As I blustered my way through a pathetic explanation, she looked over her glasses at me and said: ‘You know that I am filled with admiration for your innovative methodologies, but surely you can’t dispute the fact that History is fundamentally about chronology?’

‘I wanted them to see the point; I mean to understand that there was an enigma that had to be solved. It’s what his latest biographer does. After he had done everything to survive the camp why, years and years later, did he kill himself?’

‘But, we don’t begin with the stairwell,’ she said in the tone of a kindergarten teacher, ‘we don’t know about the stairwell until that day. His wife has just left to do her shopping and he is alone. Then we are there, with him, standing at the top of the stairwell which until today we did not know existed, asking the questions, looking down into something which, perhaps, must remain unfathomable.’

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Roedean reunion 40 years on Moyra Keane

‘We little recked, when we were coming, What fearful dangers we did run…’1

My first visit to Roedean was when I was 13 years old, at the end of my primary schooling. I was sent for an interview with the Headmistress after completing the entrance exam. I had pleaded to go to Hyde Park High School with my friends but Mum and Dad had misgivings of government schools. Dad made it clear that Christian National Education was abhorrent as anyone should be able to see from its name alone. A private school was not a comfortable alternative. Dad worked for the Chamber of Mines in Johannesburg and grew increasingly bitter and cynical with what he saw as the moneyed bourgeois privilege of the old-boys club that apparently held on to the entitlement of their managerial positions and their exclusive class and race networks. He would never have a happy relationship with my new school and indeed only visited it once. Both Mum’s and Dad’s insistence on pushing me to the interview at Roedean seemed yet another of those illogical and confused things that parents did for some not-to-be questioned motive. Mum had been a member of my primary school PTA but was now less at ease at the prospect of joining the exclusiveness of the Roedean Old Girl network. The advice she gave me on taking me to the interview was in a hushed whisper: ‘Don’t mention that your mum works.’

The entrance through Princess-of-Wales drive was neither overbearing nor simply functional – rather it was forested and calm on the inside of the huge wrought iron gates – which in those days were never locked. We entered the ivy-covered building through the side door next to the principal’s office. My clumsy black school shoes sounded coarse on the creaking old wooden floors – I wanted to tip-toe in. Yet the worn kelim of the small foyer was homely and Mum was ushered into the cosy and warm sitting room with pale blue sofas. There were real oil and watercolour paintings on the wall – not the laminated ‘motivational posters’ you see in smart administration offices. Four big tapestry-embroidered cushions had stitched on them: ‘Trouth’, ‘Honour’, ‘Fredom’ and Curteisye’. The wood-panelled room smelled like granny’s house: a little musty, with oak and brass polish, as well as fresh roses. I suppose it had a feminine feel compared to my big and recently built co-ed school across town. I was directed into the Headmistress’ office. Mrs Raikes sat behind a large desk and looked at me over her spectacles. Her grey hair was severely waved and combed to one side; she wore a colourless blouse and short jacket: she was more forbidding than my grandmother. My life was flashing before me ominously: I felt as if she knew that I had rung people’s doorbells and run away; that I had once been on top of the roof of the neighbourhood shops at 5am and smoked a cigarette 1

From ‘Song of the Houses’ - Roedean

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with my friend; that I played soccer with the boys after school; and that I had deliberately served my brother raw fried eggs when I was forced to cook for him. Instead of interrogating me on these, she asked me some questions about my rather poor arithmetic achievement. She acknowledged surprise at my English marks, - ‘considering your background’ – I later found out she was referring to my government school education. She expressed disapproval at my lack of either French or Latin. She handed me a heavy book and instructed me to read aloud. I stood in front of her – in that way children have when they are trying to be bolder than they feel – still and upright - and woodenly uttered one incomprehensible word after another in a state of dismal terror and excruciating shyness. I had no idea what I was reading. I looked up. She smiled for the first time and announced: “We shall be pleased to offer you a place at Roedean. Of course, you will have to work on your mathematics – that is of some concern.” Congratulations from the family were muted. I was not to be seen to outshine my brother who had been accepted into St Stithians as it was the one boy’s school which did not require applicants to sit an entrance exam. Mum, who kept the family finances, looked pained. Fees nowadays are more than it costs for an MBA at a top university. I expect it was comparable then. I tried to show appreciation where I felt guilt and reluctance.

I barely made it through the next five years: the guilt over the strain to the family budget and not wishing to add more stress to my parents’ lives made me stick it out. Kevin had dropped out of St Stithians and then out of Damelin – a cram college that was supposed to get him through matric. I didn’t think the family could bear another disappointment. I did just as badly as I could without being thrown out. I participated as little as possible. My less-than-enthusiastic take-up of all the school offered was sometimes out of shyness, sometimes out of precocious cynicism, and often out of soul-tearing existential crisis. I never could understand how weekly tests, house competitions, birthday parties, netball, and even trips to Beacon Isle, could fill up a person’s life. What was the point of it all? Memory, I acknowledge, is selective: I’m sure I have forgotten happy moments. Often enough we sang: ‘…glad and melancholy days. They were great days and jolly days, At the best school of all.’ So it must have been.

I remember the melancholy days. Having to read in class remained a prospect of dread. Miss McNair, by far our best and youngest teacher, would make us take turns reading Much ado about nothing. I loved Shakespeare, but took the day off when it looked like it might be my turn to read. Sport was always weird for me. I was selected for the A team in hockey but couldn’t understand how the team turned on one other if we were losing. I thought it was supposed to be a game. I should have known from our singing of the cricket first eleven: ‘Tis the one above all others. ‘Tis the best in all the land.’ There was nothing casual about this. I watched the best tennis players cry if they lost a ‘friendly’ match. The sports mistress was astonished when I asked to be demoted to the B team. Neither the joys nor sorrows of this place made sense to me. Thank goodness I was to endure only five years as I was unravelling fast by matric. I bunked often, smoked marijuana occasionally, and realised I couldn’t catch up on years of work to pass the final exam. I had not read the set books, had effectively given up maths that year – the teacher refused to mark the occasional work I did. My geography note book had only about three pages of notes.

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When the French and Maths teachers told me not to write the matric exam, a stubbornness kicked in and I decided I would pass just to spite everyone. So I did. I then drifted on to university and out again, until after a long time I managed to launch a slight academic career. Perhaps that was the school’s ironic legacy. While I was at Roedean I noticed that a few girls who did not belong somehow left after a short stay. Those of us who stayed could hardly escape the sense of bond developed through the shared rituals, symbols, rules and of course language. I have even, in retrospect, developed a sense of sentimental nostalgia. I notice this when I see young Roedean girls with their mothers in the local shopping mall in the afternoons. I cannot help myself reflecting how we would never have been allowed to walk about without our blazers and panama hats! And their hair! Not even tied up – never mind with the regulation blue ribbons.

Somehow I have arrived at a semi-moulded old-girl’s identity from years of this insider talk and the well-remembered, often absurdly, strict discipline. Who would know that lower-five; uppers; ante were our own terms for Grade 8; 10 and 11. Or that Lambs means St Agnes; or that pleasance was our ‘playground’. Girls still wear the dark blue jibbah with beige stockings. They greet one with ‘Good morning, Ma’am’ and curtsy when accepting a prize. We have school songs in praise of The Cricket First 11; in praise of The Founders; in praise of The Houses; The Giants - who were praised in the chorus: ‘For all of we, whoever we be, come short of those heroines old, you see!’. Gradually the novice is inducted through the prefects, old girls, Founders, traditions, teachers, and the buildings themselves into this community of Being and belonging. I admit it is seductive.

The club of belonging is helped through the typical initiations: holidays at a school friend’s farm or Beacon Isle holiday home; travelling through Paris and Florence with friends after school; being sent to relatives in Canada or Geneva to learn Cordon Bleu cooking or German literature; the 21st birthday party at the Country Club; and then the frequent attendance at Foundation Days. I hadn’t done any of this of course. I did not get married to the CEO of DeBeers, I did not send my son and daughter to Roedean and Michaelhouse, I didn’t play bridge or golf, and my parents didn’t have a farm in Africa. I had done the opposite. I had agreed to join the Forty Year-on reunion: mostly thanks to the kind communications of Maz who has been keeping the class contact details from the various parts of the world. I thought it was time I grew up and healed old wounds (as my Sri Lankan mentor had encouraged me to do many times). Bad memories lie around in the mind like worn-out clothes – they serve no purpose except to attract fish moths and take up space and remind one that it’s hard to let go. Perhaps there was enough distance now to feel more detached, less intimidated, I liked to imagine the shyness and angst had worked their way out through decades of adventures and trials, working in really awful schools, travels and disciplined work (surprisingly: yes!), - though the promise of all this was not evident at school. Funny then on Saturday morning, when I parked my tiny, dented second-hand Ford outside the school, between a black Prado and silver Jaguar, and when I met the half-forgotten faces of old class

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acquaintances, I felt quite at home. The grounds were beautiful, the tree’d walkways steeped in peace and fragrant sunlight, the little grey stone otter reclining in the shaded Koi pond, and the feminine abundance of flowers everywhere reminded me that there had been times of ease and joy. The white walls had a few decades more of thick creepers around the large wooded windows; the hall with the dark brick interior and portraits down the sides looked just the same as I stepped in from the sunny colonnade. Only now, of course, the school was multiracial and it seemed the girls were happily free from even noticing this. Instead of the old traditional choir there was a group of saxophonists, an electric guitar, bass player and a beautiful Ugandan singer with a microphone. The skirts were a little shorter than of old. Only a little. I saw Maz amongst a small group and with a glass of champagne in my hand walked across the thick grass to introduce myself to those who did not recognise me. An odd scene of 17 ‘old girls’ giggling and lined and looking pretty good – and sometimes just pretty, as we used to do. At least now we know not one of us got it all right, that it didn’t all turn out quite as expected, that some of the most beautiful have passed away, that the most caring have suffered acutely, that the cleverest gave up careers to look after children, and that the timid have ventured far. ‘We little recked, when we were coming, What fearful dangers we did run…’2

2

From ‘Song of the Houses’ - Roedean

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A white man in the army Cynthia Kros

In his mind he was still on the ‘Border’ and he used to ambush me – leaping out from behind a tree as I walked unwarily to my office with an accusation of how I had neglected to answer an email or treated his commanding officer (his mentor) with sufficient respect. No matter how many times he did it, I was always unprepared – the worst adversary on record. I’m not sure why he got any pleasure from the contact. Usually all I did was blush and stammer and hurry to get away.

In meetings he would always try to catch my eye and I would always try to keep my gaze fixed on the old Catholic church across the way where we said goodbye to our good friend Mary Rorich. My mind would drift from the budget or minor academic developments to the memorial service. I wore white instead of black and it was, surprisingly, only the second time I ever cried while I’ve been at Wits. He would draw attention to himself by loudly disputing a budget line or space allocations and then, involuntarily, I would be drawn to look at him. He was shell-shocked, alright, I always thought, with an intensity to his eyes and an expression between grimace and grin that he must have acquired somewhere out there on a secret battlefield fighting the losing war. He breathed inwards through his teeth. His face grew redder as he spoke. Everything represented a mission to him. He had been entrusted with beating a path to a more efficient distribution of resources or to exposing the mistakes in the Minutes.

‘But, you must understand,’ I said to one of my foreign colleagues, ‘what it was like to be a white man in the army in the time of apartheid.’ I didn’t know then that my foreign colleague had seen far worse things – or not – how did I know what was worse?

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My official name Audrey Msimanga

I realised I was the only one left at the assembly point when Mr Mkhwananzi said, ‘What about you little girl?’

He was the headmaster of my new school, my first school, actually. Of course I did not know then what a headmaster was. All I knew was that I was here to start school and for some reason my name had not been called for me to go into the Sub-A classroom with all my friends. We had walked together excitedly from home this morning in anticipation of our first day at school. We had played together in the streets from since we were very little and we had grown up together. Today we were ‘big’ girls and boys going to school for the very first time. We did not have pre-school or Grade Zero back then. All you had to do was grow tall enough to pass your right arm over your head and touch your left ear and then the headmaster could let you into school. We had spent most of the previous year helping each other check if we could now touch our left ear. And now all my friends had gone into the Sub-A classroom without me. I could not answer the headmaster’s question, my lips were trembling uncontrollably, my eyes were beginning to burn and my knees were too weak to keep me standing. How could my name not have been called? I had seen the lady write in her big book when my mother and I and all my friends and their mothers had come in the previous week to have our names written in the school books. I learnt later that this was called registration. It was the same big book from which Mr Mkhwananzi had read everyone’s names today, so my name had to have been there too. But why had he not read my name? Mr Mkhwananzi asked again, ‘What about you little girl? Did your parents not come to have your name written in the school books?’ ‘They …they did, Sir,’ I replied with lips that were now shaking visibly and two big tear drops fell from my eyes.

‘I do not think they did little girl, otherwise I would have found your name in this book. Please go back home and ask your parents to come and have your name written down for next year because the class is full for this year,’ he advised as he turned around to walk away to his office.

I could not believe that I would not be attending school with all my friends. I would have to stay at home for a whole year while they had fun at school without me. What was I going to do all alone all day all year while my friends were at school? I was going to die; I would not survive this tragedy.

Suddenly, he turned around and said the words that were to change my life forever. He said ‘Let me just go through this list again and see if I did not miss your name,’ at which he ran his finger down the page. ‘I did call all the names that I have here,’ he said to himself, ‘and only one was absent.’ Then he looked up from the book and looked down at my small seven year old face and asked, ‘What is your name little girl?’

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‘My name is Ottie, Sir,’ I answered hopefully.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I do not have that name here my child.’

Once again he made as if to walk away and then once again he turned around and said, ‘The only child who did not turn up is Audrey.’

It took a few seconds for his words to sink in. ‘Of course; that’s my school name,’ I whispered more to myself than to him, but he heard me. It started as a smile, then a soft chuckle and then an outright bellow of real wise adult amusement. ‘You forgot your own name little girl?’ and more loud laughter. He had called my name and I had not answered because I did not recognise the official name. I was waiting for my real name to be called.

Then he said, ‘Come, follow me’, and led me to my new Sub-A classroom. I quickly wiped the tears off my face and scampered at a safe distance after him. A new me entered the Sub-A classroom that day, the official me.

To this day I do not know what made Mr Mkhwananzi change his mind, not once, but twice. I would have missed out on the joy of the first day of school; all because he had called me by a strange name, a name by which I had never been referred to directly before today. Of course I had heard that name some years before when my parents brought home the certificate, my birth certificate. I learned later that the government clerks did not like to write ‘real’ home names in the birth certificate; they only wanted the ‘official’ or ‘school’ name. So my real name was not recorded in my birth certificate, only my official name, my school name. And that official decision had almost cost me the joy of the first day of school, perhaps a whole year of schooling. For the entire thirteen years of my schooling I answered to Audrey at school and Ottie at home.

After I left school I found myself referred to by various variations of my official name. There was, firstly, the official name that I was to answer to for many years in the classroom and in all official functions. I was reminded of this official name in pretty much the same circumstances as my school name. It was the first day of term in another school and as I stood in the corridor waiting to open the classroom door a voice said, ‘Good morning Mrs Msimanga.’ There was a moment of silence as the girl waited for my response and none came. Just like Mr Mkhwananzi, sixteen years before, she turned to walk away. I suddenly realised that she was addressing me; I was Mrs Msimanga now. I had recently been married and acquired a new official name. Again my official name had been written on a certificate, the marriage certificate. As I returned this little girl’s greeting, I recalled my own little girl experience on that first day of school many years before. I opened the door for this other little girl to enter the classroom. I was her new Biology teacher, with a new official name, my married name.

This was only the beginning of changes in my name. Not long after the experience with my Biology student, I acquired yet another name, one that I will probably carry for the rest of my life. This name was acquired under different circumstances from the first two. It is not ‘official’ since it is not recorded in any certificate but it feels more official than the two that are. I had watched with the excitement of a first time parent as my first baby learnt to sit and soon was crawling around and pulling at anything his little hands could grab. On this momentous day I heard my baby utter his first

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lucid word. He shouted, loud and clear for all to hear, ‘Mama’. Unlike with my two official names, my response was instant, no delayed processing. This was the new me, Mama! This became my new official name. I answered to Mama at home and to my other official names elsewhere. Various versions of this name were ascribed to me and adopted in time. As my boys grew older Mama evolved into Mother, my official name at home for over thirty years now. I have answered to calls in this name to pick up a boy stranded for transport in the middle of the night after a movie or to bring an ice pack to take care of a headache in the middle of the night. I have been called by this name in endearing ways when one boy or the other needed money to buy airtime or in acknowledgement of a good meal. I have received praises and encouragement in this name and I have admonished, praised and offered advice in this name to both of my own and to the many other children who have adopted me as their ‘Mother’. I have come to love the sound of this name and would not trade it for any other. I had begun to think this would be my last name change until the most recent name change happened.

Twenty-five years after my name change to ‘Mother’ I had decided to further my studies, and one day, five years later, I was in the faculty office for final submission of my thesis. I could not sit down nor could I stand still, so I walked up and down the faculty office. I was grinning from ear to ear, repeating ‘Thank you, thank you,’ to excited congratulatory calls from my colleagues. We were raising a raucous riot right inside this university office, my friends calling out ‘Congratulations, Dr Msimanga!’ I had done it; I had just handed in my thesis, corrected, checked and signed off by my Professor. I had a new official name, again. The name has since transformed into various forms such as ’Dr Mother’ to my children, ‘Dr Sis’ Ottie’ to my siblings, ‘Dr Audrey’ or ‘Dr M’ to my friends, ‘Doc’ to my students and simply ‘Dokotela’ to my elders.

What names are next, I wonder? Professor, Granny perhaps? And will I recognise myself and step into the roles they invite?

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The harem Margaret Orr

Through the looking glass somewhere, they all meet. The harem. At Marrakech, perhaps, a beauty spa in Parktown. Sitting on fat crimson couches with saffron pillows, their feet in brass bowls of water, floating with rosepetals. A low table in front of them, mint tea steaming in tinted Moroccan tea-glasses with gilded rims. The walls are painted in azure and sapphire, tiled in lazurine and cerulean; the windows arching and latticing the sunlight in bars of light and dark falling across the terracotta tiles. Outside in the courtyard a fountain plays a glissando of tinkling and splashing. Acolytes in white robes crouch at their feet, applying fragrant unguents and rare oils, scrubbing at scaly heels with pumice stone.

Perhaps their therapist has sent them here, for an afternoon’s self-care and some group therapy. Maybe she has set the appointments up for them. They have not met each other before. Salome’s day is Mondays, Tess is Friday mornings, Eleanor is Tuesday afternoons. Hester and Khwezi both go on Wednesday, straight after each other, but thanks to the crying door, and the 50-minute therapeutic hour, they have never actually bumped into each other. But all of them have been in that room above Mary’s garage, its balcony windows open to the lifted arms of the peach tree outside. Eleanor has seen it through blossoming, greening, fruiting, bare branches and back again, unpacking her pain to the syncopation of Mary’s sympathetic nods and sighs. The others have yet to witness the full cycle of the seasons of woundedness, but have still done their time in the armchair, used the tissues from the box beside it, drunk the chamomile tea in the waiting room. But here they are now together in time. They have survived the self-consciousness of arriving, sinking into the couch, and removing their shoes. The have exchanged names, smiled warily at each other, flipped through the magazines (Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Shape, Elle, Fair Lady, True Love), sipped at the mint tea. Who will start?

It is Salome. Dean of Law, she is accustomed to running meetings. She leans against an archway to the courtyard, arms crossed, legs outstretched, smoking, her cigarette scribing curlicue fumes of Arabic script into the outside air. She is sinewy, angular, all knobbly legs and arms in a black shoulder-padded power suit. She contemplates her bare feet with tufts of cotton wool between the painted toes – Passionate Persimmon, the shade is called. At that angle, the sunlight outlining her sharply against the cool gloom of the interior, she looks older than she is, her eyes cradled in cobwebs, her mouth a thin gash of chalky crimson lipstick, deep downward parentheses on either side. Her hair is gray, cut short, raked into wild spikes by vigorous, impatient hands. She studies the women on the couches, and smiles, wryly. ‘So, ladies,’ she says. ‘Want to hear my story? We worked together. At the university. He was my boss.’

Eleanor snorts. ‘Aren’t they all?’ she says. Tess nods, nervously. Hester laughs. Khwezi is impassive, but puts down her magazine, fingers her bangles, waiting.

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‘Ja, well, I never really liked him. We just didn’t get on. He’d always try to wind me up in meetings. Put me down.’ ‘Wind me up. Put me down. Sounds like a song,’ Eleanor smiles at Salome.

‘Not a nice song, let me tell you,’ says Salome. ‘And he used to tell really rough jokes. You know the kind that are just so tasteless, but you don’t know how to object.’ ‘Tell us one,’ invites Hester, closing her eyes and leaning back as the acolyte massages her insteps. ‘Ok, but I warn you …’ says Salome.

It’s the time of the Anglo-Boer war. And there’s a farm somewhere in the Transvaal. The men have ridden off on commando, and left at the farm are the granny, the mother, and the daughter. And the young son, too young to go off with the men, and left behind to look after the cattle and the women. They are hiding a cache of weapons for the Boers in their cellar, hidden behind the pampoene and the waatlemoenkonfyt.

One day, a group of British soldiers arrives. They ride up the lane of eucalyptus trees, clatter into the yard. The leader dismounts from his horse, kicks away the barking dogs, bangs on the kitchen door, and pushes it open. The soldiers crowd into the kitchen. “The workers tell us you’re hiding weapons for the Boers here. Tell us where they are.” The women are silent. The boy stares at the soldiers with burning eyes.

“Come on, now, tell us!” The captain addresses the boy directly. “Tell us now, or we will rape your sister.” The boy says nothing. He folds his arms over his chest, and shakes his head. So the soldiers rape the young girl.

“Now,” says the captain, “now tell us, tell us where the weapons are, or we will rape your mother.” The boy spits at them. And so the soldiers rape the mother.

By now, the captain is sweating and staggering. He wipes his brow, glares in frustration at the youth. “Will you speak now, boy? Will you tell us where the weapons are?” Silence.

“Well, then. We will rape your grandmother, unless you tell us.”

The boy gasps, cannot bear it. “Nee, nee, asseblief. Stop. I will tell you. Dit is te veel. I will show you …” The grandmother shoots out a hand to silence him, steps forward hastily.

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“Nee wag, boetie,” she says eagerly. “Nie so vinnig nie. Oorlog is oorlog.” There is a slightly appalled silence. Salome blows smoke through her nostrils. Watches them.

‘Delightful, né? And so interesting. I mean here’s a black man, telling an Anglo –Boer story …’ ‘And misogyny, and ageism, and … God … what a disgusting mix,’ says Eleanor.

‘Ja well, anyway. There were lots like that. All told at meetings, and all the old boys would laugh and egg him on. And I just shut up. Or smiled – or didn’t smile, or sometimes objected, it didn’t make any difference. But, one night, after a late meeting, I offered him a lift back to his hotel. My jirre, hoe kon ek so simpel gewees het?’ She is silent for a moment. The other women wait. Tess murmurs a small reassuring noise.

Salome stubs her cigarette out in a flower pot, looks up at them almost defiantly, continues in a rush, wanting to get the facts out, get it over with. She regrets speaking. Do they really need to hear her tacky little story?

‘So, when I stopped in the parking lot, he leans over, pushes his hand up between my legs and shoves his tongue into my mouth. Sommer net so. No preliminaries, no flirtatious warm-up, no compliments about how attractive I was …’ she laughs. ‘Ag hemel, why should he, I know I’m no beauty queen.’ ‘And what did you do?’ asks Tess.

‘Well, toe sê ek vir hom, very politely mind you, moenie vir my vra hoe’t ek dit reggekry, I mean, hier’s hierdie hand in my panties and I won’t tell you where his finger was, maar ek sê vir hom “Listen, sorry, I don’t think this is appropriate.”’ ‘And then?’ Hester asks.

‘Oh well, then he got out, and went inside. En die volgende vergadering is hy so mak soos ‘n lammetjie. Didn’t look at me once. Hy’t dit ook nie weer probeer nie, let me tell you.’ ‘And did you tell the VC?’ asks Eleanor. ‘Ja well.’

There is a long pause. ‘Ek het ook ‘n bietjie whisky gedrink, jy weet. And I was wearing quite a short skirt. And I thought, Ag, it’s just a one-off. But I told the VC. I wanted him to know. But I couldn’t make it – you know – formeel. But then I applied for promotion. And who’s chairing the Selection Committee? Mr Finger Man. And I didn’t get the job, of course. Didn’t even make the shortlist.’ Salome collapses onto a couch, her legs and arms askew in an untidy tangle of bony knees and elbows. She runs her hands irritably through her hair.

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‘And when I asked the VC why, he said that the Chair of the committee – old guess-who, of course had raised questions about my professionalism. Made comments about my drinking at social events. And then it was too late to make a formal complaint. Ag, you know, it would just have looked like sour grapes. So I resigned, but kak, man I felt like such a failure. Still do, actually. I felt like it was my fault. Stupid, stupid woman.’

Tess clears her throat. ‘I’m sure you’re not stupid,’ she says, diffidently. She sits with her hands folded in her lap, neatly. Her hair straggles into a fading blonde bob, with an optimistically tonged fringe. She wears a floral blouse – lemon and cream, with little pink flowers, a modest string of pearls around her neck. Cream crepe pants sag over narrow hips. A Timex watch on her wrist, a thin gold wedding band with a chip of diamond. Her face is pale, ecru-colored tissue paper scrumpled and then smoothed out, but creased, still. A smear of pink on her lips, her eyes an evaporated blue, faded eyelashes and brows disappearing her gaze to almost invisibility. She stares at her lap, fingers her pearls. ‘It doesn’t make any difference if you don’t drink,’ she says softly. ‘It doesn’t make any difference that you’re married.’ She swallows. ‘It doesn’t even make any difference if you do make a formal complaint.’ Eleanor leans forward. ‘Did you?’ she asks. ‘Did you make a formal complaint?’ Tess sighs. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘But only after it had been going on for a year.’ ‘A year!’ says Hester.

‘A year,’ nods Tess, abashed. ‘I thought … in the beginning I thought I was imagining things … you know?’ The other women nod. They know.

‘I’m good at my job,’ says Tess, fiercely. ‘I … I really work hard. My staff used to say I was the sunshine in the office. So … so he would … I don’t know … single me out … and want to have meetings with me alone because he said I was … I was the star of the office, and … and I wanted to help, and I was so proud … ‘. She stops. ‘But then it started getting, I don’t know, uncomfortable. He’d want to meet late in the afternoon, when my secretary had gone home. And then he’d want me to drive with him to visit a church in Heidelberg …or Secunda … or…’. ‘A church?’ asks Salome.

‘Yes, I work for a religious organization. He was … he is a minister … on the governing body of the church.’ There is a small disillusioned silence. ‘God,’ says Eleanor quietly.

Tess smiles wryly. ‘Christians aren’t better than anyone else, you know,’ she says, ‘they just try harder. Or … well … I thought they did. But anyway, then he’d start putting his hand on my thigh when we were driving. And then he started sending me notes in meetings. Just a little piece of

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paper …’. She marks out a small square space in the air with thumbs and forefingers. ‘And on it he had written ‘JMMJ’.’ She looks around the group, expectantly.

‘JMMJ?’ says Hester. ‘Jeez, what’s that supposed to mean?’

‘He told me,’ says Tess, “he told me it meant “Jy Maak My Jags”.’

There is a collective breath above the heads of the bent acolytes plying nailpolish. Are they listening to this? What are they thinking? ‘Oh, please,’ says Hester. ‘Oh how gross. In meetings!’

‘And what did he think you would do?’ erupts Eleanor. ‘Pass a note back saying, “Oooh yes, me too”? What did you do?’

‘Oh, I just threw them away. I told him … I kept saying to him, please stop, I’m married, you’re married …. But it just got worse. He started … he’d go to the loo halfway through these … these private meetings , the meetings when my secretary was gone , in my office, late, you know, late in the afternoon, there’s no one else there, and I’m staying late, because … you know … because I work hard and I’m a perfectionist about getting the work done … and he’d get up and go to the loo and then he’d come back and his zip… you know … his fly …’ she gestures down at her lap, her crossed legs, ‘his zip would be open, and he’d lean back in the chair and he’d start, start .. start playing with himself. Looking at me, looking, watching my face … and I’d get up and try to get out of the room, but he was so clever, so clever, he’d learnt, he’d learnt to move his chair between me … my chair and the door,’ and she marks out the barriers in the air. The other women follow her hands, see the battlefield, the traps, visualize the splayed serge thighs, the sweating meaty face.

‘Oh, Tess, oh my dear,’ says Eleanor. She has a sudden, startlingly irrelevant picture in her head of Leda and the swan. All those women, visited by gods, their humiliation made into myth, art, poetry (”A sudden blow: the great wings beating still / Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed / By his dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, / He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.” ). ‘So is that when you laid a complaint?’ Tess shakes her head, takes a deep breath. No. Not then. ‘Only when my husband found out,’ she says. ‘He couldn’t understand, he couldn’t understand why I was so stressed, why I was crying all the time, why I didn’t want to go to work. He kept asking me, he kept … but I couldn’t tell him, I couldn’t. The longer it went on … how could I tell him? I knew he’d be so angry with me. But then … the man … he … he started phoning me at home … obscene calls you know … and my husband came home early and saw me holding the phone and crying and then I had to tell him. And then he made me lay a charge.’ ‘And …’ prompted Hester, leaning forward, eager for a happy ending. ‘And then?’

Tess sighs, rubs her mouth fiercely. ‘Oh well. They had a hearing. He was demoted. But so was I.’

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‘You?’ erupts Salome, almost levitating off the coach in agitation, striding to the archway – Stuyvesant in hand - scattering puffs of cotton wool in her wake. ‘You?’ she says through clenched lips as she holds the Zippo to her fuming cigarette. ‘My fok, how did that happen?’

‘He admitted it,’ says Tess matter-of-factly. ‘He admitted it all, but he said it was an affair. That we had both been …um … messing around together. That I was … I was his … his lover. So they demoted both of us. For improper conduct and unethical behaviour … it’s a church organization, remember?’ ‘Would you ladies like some wine?’ One of the acolytes stands up, a brimming brass bowl in her hands, a white towel draped over her forearm.

‘Oh, not for me, but more tea would be nice,’ says Tess politely, calmly, her voice drowned out by Eleanor and Hester. ‘Yes, please, I think we need it …’ / ‘Bring us a bottle! No, two.’ ‘Tea and wine, then,’ says the acolyte, and leaves.

There is quiet when she leaves. Eleanor’s stomach is hurting. Khwezi wipes a hand over her eyes, her bangles chinking faintly. She keeps her hand on her forehead, stares with hidden, shielded eyes at her lap, her other hand folding and unfolding the indigo folds of her shweshwe gown.

‘You are brave, though,’she says softly. ‘I couldn’t, I didn’t … . I just ran away. I told no one. I was so scared.’ Tess reaches out a hand, pats Khwezi’s pleating fingers. ‘It’s okay,’ she says. ‘We’re all scared.’

‘It was my first job,’ Khwezi says, gaining courage, but still guarding her eyes. ‘I was his PA. I was pretty then, and young. And he also started with, you know, compliments. “You are so beautiful.” “It makes my eyes glad to look at you.” Those kinds of things. And then, then we had to go away together, to Bloemfontein. And he asked me to come to his room, in the hotel, after supper, to dictate some letters. And I said “No, I’m tired … it is late”; I tried to make excuses, but when your boss tells you to come, you can’t …you can’t refuse. You can’t be unwilling. So I went. I took my pad and my pen with me,’ she shakes her head, sniffs. ‘Aeysh, stupid. A pad and a pen. Better it was a knife.’ She sighs, deeply, drops her hand from her eyes. Tess passes her a tissue, and she wipes her nose gratefully.

The acolyte enters and sets out glasses for four, a teacup for Tess. She fills the wineglasses; they dew with condensation as she pours. Eleanor, Salome and Hester take deep reflective sips. Khwezi ignores her glass, continues. ‘So, well, he’s drinking. Whisky. All night he was drinking. He tried to give me some but I said no. And then he makes me sit on the coach next to him, and he starts telling me what letters I must send. But it’s all rubbish, you know. Nothing important. But I take notes, I write it down, and then … Wha! … he moves up right next to me, right against my leg,’ she wipes her thigh, pressing hard. ‘And he leans over me, and he takes my hand and puts it in … in his “fly”?’ She looks at Tess. Tess nods. ‘His fly …’ Khwezi shakes her head. ‘I didn’t see …’ she looks at the women around her ‘I

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didn’t see the zip was open when I came in the room. We … I … in my culture … good women don’t look there, normally. And inside, inside there’s this thing.’

She begins to giggle, nose running, eyes tearing. The others begin to snicker, too, almost unwillingly. ‘This … thing …’ Khwezi splutters. ‘And it was so … so small… and, and … squishy, and I pulled my hand out …I was so … so surprised,’ she mimes the yanked withdrawal, the repelled fingers.

The laughter has grown. ‘Oh my God,’says Hester. ‘Can you believe it? Didn’t he even have … you know … an … um …’ ‘Ja, where was this throbbing manhood stuff they fooled us with in Mills & Boon novels?’ asks Eleanor, with mock outrage.

Tess looks at them, an unwilling smile on her lips. ‘And then …,’she prompts Khwezi. ‘Then what happened?’

Khwezi rubs her hand vigorously over her face. ‘Then he tried to push my face down, into … into his lap. I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was going to die. I was struggling. But he was so strong. He had his hand here,” she clenches the back of her neck,’ and he was pushing, pushing. But then – thank God - I was lucky. He had ordered room service, and they knock on the door, and they shout “Room Service!” And he gets a fright and he lets go my neck. But now he’s sitting there on the couch with his, his thing sticking out, so I jump up,’ she twinkles at them. ‘Like a good secretary! And I say, “Wait, wait … the door, I will open it”. And I go to the door and the waiter comes in, and I ran, ran away. And he couldn’t chase me, well because there’s the waiter standing there, and the trolley, and …’ ‘And his thing is sticking out …’ finishes Eleanor, gulping at her wine with vicious satisfaction. ‘Mmm,’ nods Khwezi. ‘And the next day I resigned.’

The mirth is silent, the exhilaration of the humiliation of the beast, the high farce of impotence and the thrill of escape doused in reality. ‘You resigned?’ says Hester. ‘Why?’

‘Oh, I couldn’t work for him anymore. Next time maybe there’s no room service, no waiter. Next time I wouldn’t escape. And he would be humiliated, and angry with me. It would have got worse.’ Khwezi is matter of fact. ‘And I couldn’t complain. He is a powerful man. He knows everybody in government. He was in exile with them. He could destroy me. So I resigned. And I left. And it’s behind me now.’ Eleanor looks at her, at the tracks of tears down her cheeks, at the weight she’s clearly put on over the years. ‘Is it?’ she asks. ‘Is it behind you?’

Khwezi shrugs. ‘I was stressed for a long time. I got fat – better that way. They don’t try anything if you’re big. My husband left me. I didn’t want to have sex with him anymore, and he couldn’t understand. He was also angry that I left the job. We were struggling, financially, and he thought I was just being too lazy to work. But now he’s gone, and I’m alone, and fat. And I have a job, and my

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child. And I’m ok. I work for POWA, I counsel other women – and they have much worse things happen to them. We’re lucky, you know. Very lucky. At least none of us here was raped.’ Hester clears her throat. ‘I was,’ she says.

She is the youngest of all of them – about 25? Eleanor thinks - wearing jeans and a white shirt, her hair pulled roughly into a ponytail, strands falling in her face, the tail straggling over one shoulder. Her Nikes lie kicked off to one side. Her heavy Breitling watch is loose on her wrist, her nails bitten to the quick. She has clean young skin, no makeup – she’s never really needed it, and she’s a mining engineer, after all - but there are dark circles under her eyes, and her lips are chewed and chapped. ‘Tell us,’ says Eleanor.

‘He raped me,’ says Hester. ‘In the parking lot. In his car. After a function. My boss.’ She studies her bitten fingernails. The manicure hasn’t helped much. ‘We were at a work function. He walked out with me … I was going to my car … but then he grabbed me. He was just … like … all over me. And so, ja, so he raped me. And then I got in my car and went home. And the next day I laid a charge, and they suspended me …’. ‘You? Ag no I just give up,’ says Salome, reaching again for her cigarettes.

‘Yes, me,’ says Hester, nodding. ‘But there was a hearing, all men, and he said … he admitted it all, but he said it was consensual.’ She smiles ironically at Tess.

‘Seems like they all have a handbook,’ explodes Eleanor. ‘A manual. A step-by-step guide. How to do it, and then how to get away with it. Either deny it completely, or admit it and say it was consensual. And what proof do you have? How can you counter any of it? Did you fight? In the parking lot, I mean? Did you protest?’

‘Of course,’ says Hester. ‘But I was … I don’t know, so surprised, so taken aback. I said “No”, I said I was married, I said he was married, I said it was disastrous for our working relationship. I tried everything. Well, not everything. I didn’t kick or bite or scream. I had this ridiculous urge to save his face, not to make a scene, you know? And I couldn’t believe it would really happen. I couldn’t believe he would really … like really … do it. And he was just so much bigger than me, gross,’ she shudders. ‘And then I just blanked out. I still can’t remember all of it. There’s like … this … this gap in my head. Like I wasn’t there. Like I went away.’ She thumps her thighs with her fists. ‘So … so feeble. I feel so … stupid,’ Hester says urgently. ‘Why stupid? Why do we all feel so stupid … so ashamed?’ She looks around the group. ‘All of us, all of us. What are we supposed to have done differently? I mean look at me. I’m an engineer. I’m smart. I’m, I’m strong, tough … you know. I thought I was tough. So together. And look at me now.’ ‘And in the hearing?’ Salome asks. ‘Did you tell them that you objected, that you said “No”?’

‘Oh ja, of course. And he admitted it too. He said I said “No”, he said he knew I was married, and all that, but he thought I was just playing hard to get, and he really believed I was into it.’

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‘Into it,’ says Tess wonderingly. ‘Into sex in a car in a parking lot …’ ‘With a gross man …’ says Eleanor.

‘With a gross, drunk, married man,’ says Salome.

‘Yup. Sex in a car, in a parking lot, with a gross drunk, old, married man,’ says Hester. ‘And the lawyer at the hearing asked why I was at the function without my husband, and that that had sent out a clear message, and that it must have been consensual because I didn’t look traumatized enough for it to have been rape.’

‘What is traumatized enough?’ asks Eleanor. ‘What in heaven’s name is traumatized enough? That you’ve lost weight? That you cry all the time – in the shower – where no one can hear …’ ‘You too?’ says Tess. ‘I thought it was just me.’

‘That you can’t sleep with your husband, anymore,’ says Khwezi. ‘That you’re too scared to go to work. That you have bladder infections and headaches and an upset tummy all the time …’. ‘That you have panic attacks in your car …’ says Tess.

Hester looks around at them, gratefully. ‘But you don’t want to show that, do you?’ she asks. ‘You don’t want to sit at a hearing with another whole group of gross old men, and tell them about your bladder infections, about crying? That’s like being raped all over again.’

‘It’s a Catch 22 of course,’ says Salome. ‘If you look too together, too composed, they can say “Oh well, clearly it wasn’t traumatic and clearly you were probably into it, and clearly there’s no case.” If you look like too much of a basket case, on the other hand, then they can say “Oh but of course, look at her, she’s a neurotic wreck, probably over-hormonal and hysterical.” And bewaar jou siel if you’ve ever made any similar complaints before because then they decide you’re just a professional victim who’s out on some manhunting, castrating crusade.’ ‘So what will you do now?’ Tess asks Hester.

‘Oh, I don’t know. I have to go back to work. I have a bursary, I can’t pay it back; I have to work for them for another five years. I just …. I don’t know … I just have to get a grip and carry on. My husband is freaking. I think he’ll probably leave me.’ She empties her glass. ‘More wine anyone?’ Salome and Eleanor hold out their glasses. Tess proffers her teacup for some Chardonnay, she needs it. Khwezi gets up off the couch, goes over to Hester and wordlessly enfolds her in a hug. ‘You are strong,’ she says. ‘You are. You will survive.’

Hester closes her eyes, briefly, smiles a brittle smile at the others.

‘Of course,’she says. ‘Of course we’ll all survive. But don’t you wish you didn’t have to? Don’t you wish you could have your life back? The way it was, before? That we could tell the story differently? That we didn’t have to have got the role as … as harem member?’

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The room is darkening. The sounds of the fountain are submerging in the drone of BMWs, Mercs, 4X4s, idling in the traffic down 7th Avenue beyond the umber walls and latticed arches of Marrakech. Their feet have been washed, their toenails painted, their stories told. And now they will go home to the world of men.

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The nine scrolls – a myth Dale Taylor

Once upon a time a healer from a small village went to the citadel to share her knowledge with other healers. The chief healer welcomed her, and took her into a cave. The cave was lit by a million glowworms, so that the ceiling of the cave looked like the Milky Way. In the corner of the cave were a table and a chair, and next to the table were nine blank scrolls. The chief healer handed the healer a quill and a bottle of ink and said turned to the healer and said, ’Write everything you know on the scrolls.’ The healer sat down and opened the first scroll. She started writing. She started to write everything she knew about remedies for skin complaints. The healer despaired, because she knew much, and she wrote slowly. Eventually she rolled up the scroll and set off home to her village. She had walked half a day when a young girl caught up with her. ‘Here,’ she said and handed the healer a bag ‘the chief healer said you were to have these.’ The healer looked in the bag and saw the nine scrolls and the bottle of ink and the quill. She took the bag and it weighed her down, but she continued home with it.

She opened the door to her house, and people came to be healed once more. Soon people queued outside, for she was a good healer. An old woman who had waited half a day asked her why she didn’t share her knowledge, so that there would be enough healers so she wouldn’t have to queue. She decided to try writing once again. She took out the scrolls. Every day she healed during the day and wrote during the night. She made slow progress. When villagers invited her to the spring ball, she said, ‘I’ll come next year, when I’ve finished writing.’ And the next year she said the same thing. And the next. Initially her mother, also a healer encouraged her writing. But her mother grew weary of the time it took, and so after a while, the only question her mother could ask was, ‘When will you finish?’ When she said ‘Next year,’ her mother said ‘But that’s what you said last year.’

The healer despaired. But then she heard of other healers who were also writing up, and they started to meet together. Each would read their writing aloud and then they would talk about their ideas. They met four times every year.

Seven years later the healer returned to the citadel, bearing her precious scrolls. She took them to the chief healer. The leader regarded her without saying anything, and took the scrolls. ‘Wait here,’ he said. She sat and waited. Nightfall came and she fell asleep. Three days later the chief healer returned and said ‘There are some corrections you need to make.’

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The healer took the scrolls into the cave with a million glowworms, and took out her quill and ink. She pored over her scrolls, finding the annotations of the chief healer and attending to them. Three days later she emerged from the cave and took her scrolls to the chief healer. The chief healer took the scrolls and nodded.

The chief healer gave her a red robe, so that other healers would know she was someone they could learn from. And so at last the healer was able to walk amongst the healers and teach them.

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Age and sorrow Cynthia Kros

She was slight and blonde, folded her thin legs under her during seminars and talked seamlessly about philosophy and literature. Well, not entirely. It suddenly became fashionable to reintroduce seams and to be seen tugging at them. Then she would gesture with her long, thin hands and the words – ‘what I’m searching for… it’s become so hard to articulate …’ would catch in her throat. She ached to be able to say what could not quite be said – what was ‘incommensurate’. I was filled with admiration for her ability to present inarticulacy as an epistemological rupture.

I tried, at first to be friendly. Once I met her at Woolies between the veggie aisles and tried to make small talk about courgettes. She smiled and slightly, deftly, side-stepped me. Another time, after the seminar, I asked her how she found living in Jo’burg and she said it was great, great and then looked over my shoulder towards the train tracks. I thought perhaps she was shy. But her eyes were very cold. And, a year or so after she had come to our university, I was sitting in the seminar looking at her and saw that a long, deep line had driven a furrow down her left cheek. I was fascinated by how quickly age or some unspoken sorrow had made its mark on her.

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PATT.01151A compass Margaret Orr

His stall was sad, shabby, out on the cheaper fringes of the fields at Newark Antiques Fair. There was a broken Edwardian collector’s chest, filled with birds’ eggs in a fragile jumble; a Bakelite radio; a teddy bear raising leathern paws in doleful surrender; some cranberry glass lampshades; odd machine remnants rusting resignedly together. It was beginning to rain in a persistent dreary mizzle. Settled on the teddy bear’s lap was a satisfying round of brass, coldly heavy as I lifted it, with a precarious glug of liquid. It fit the bowl of my hands with a weighty sense of responsibility.

‘A ship’s compass,’ he said, ‘from World War II. Salvaged from the bottom of the ocean, that was.’

I smiled at him, put it down and walked away. I had no need of a nautical compass, after all. I get seasick, easily. The rand–pound exchange rate was giving me vertigo. It weighed a ton. It wasn’t even a prime specimen – over the years, a bubble had crept into the casing, and now rocked across half the surface. Ten minutes later I trudged back through the thickening rain and the gluey quagmire of the field, magnetically drawn (hah!) back to the stall. I didn’t even haggle over the price.

That evening at the pub, I show it to my sister, who has bought far more marketable items in her day on the field. She is polite, if puzzled. Neither of us has ever been interested in war memorabilia. I think it reminds her of the deadly boring early days of television when my father had us all watch The World at War, so that Sunday evenings, already fairly dire with their essence of end-of-weekend, toppled into dreary black and white remorselessness. The compass survives the trip south, wrapped in my underwear. I imagine its startlement in the depths of my luggage as it traverses latitudes and crosses the equator at great speed, swathed in pink.

Now it sits on the desk in my coaching room. It is a silent reference point in conversations weaving over its head, as it always has been. And the conversations are still about ‘Where are we?’, and ‘Where are we going?’ ‘Are we on track, or are we lost?’ Sometimes I pass it to a coaching client. ‘Here,’ I say, ‘hold this in your lap.’ They run polishing hands over the chilly brass, watch the gulp and tilt of the bubble inside. Sometimes they try to catch it unawares, shaking it roughly and splintering the bubble into turbulence. I hand it to Reinette, who is blind. ‘See what I found,’ I say. ‘Can you guess what it is?’ Her face uplifted, she wonders her fingers over the cold bolts and rimmed edges, flattens a questing palm over the glass, feeling the water move underneath. ‘How strange and wonderful,’ she says.

I love that it always settles to North. It has survived a war, lived underwater for a while and then been dredged up to the surface again, changed hemispheres, passed from the hands of men and sailors to the desk of a woman. Unflustered, it keeps finding the way back. Here; here is North. That way. Where it always has been. And you may lose your way; waiver and lurch sideways into

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inappropriate relationships, dumb career choices, thoughtless erratic tacking across the ocean of your life. But the needle always points to the star. Quand la mer est obscure et brune Qu’on ne voit ni etoile ni lune Donc font l’aiguille allumer,

Puis n’ont garde de s’egarer Contre l’etoile va la pointe. Guyot de Provins 13th C

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Eventually Jane Castle

It wasn’t a gold watch. Not even silver. It was a shiny aluminium ‘ladies’ watch’ with a small round face surrounded by sparkly granules on a non-expandable bracelet. It winked at me from a black velvet cushion in a hard plastic box labelled Lanco. My jaw dropped at its inappropriateness.

I glanced over at Christine Mendell, veteran Dean of the most deranged faculty of the university. She had opened her box and drawn out a similar watch. She looked as surprised as I felt. Neither of us could get our large reptilian hands through the shiny, girly bracelet of the watch. ‘Perhaps we can exchange them,’ I said, and searched in the box for a receipt. A guarantee from a jewellers in the Oriental Plaza was tucked under the black cushion. The university had clearly bought a bargain lot from a friendly Indian uncle in Fordburg.

The DVC droned on about our years of loyal service. Some of us had served thirty years. A dignified elderly cleaner had completed forty years. Christine and I packed our watches away in our bags and ate some oily samoosas and spring rolls, accompanied by sparkling wine and fruit cocktail, served warm in fluted glasses. The DVC picked at his own lunch of fresh fruit and vegetables on skewers and left early. ‘Better get back to work,’ said Christine, as we crammed into the lift with other long-serving staff and descended the eleven floors to ground zero.

Later I phoned the jewellers and found out that the watch was worth ‘R500 max’. It could be exchanged but not refunded. I decided to keep it as a Christmas present for Margaret, my cleaner. She was delighted, and it looked lovely on her slender, dark arm.

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