Module ENG1501

Year of Publication 2007

Title of Publication Omnibus of a century of South African short stories /lcM. Chapman
Edition
Publisher AD Donker Publishers
Chapter number
Chapter title Omnibus of a century of South African short stories (Various pages) /M.
Chapman
Page 428-431; 792-796

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A M atter of Taste
From: A Walk in the Night: Seven Stories from the Streets of Cape Tow11 (1962)

The sun hung well towards the west now so that the thin clouds above the
ragged horizon were rinm1ed with bright yellow like the spilt yolk of an egg.
Chinaboy stood up from having blown the fire under the round tin and said,
'She ought to boil now.'The tin stood precariously balanced on two half-bricks
and a smooth stone. We had built the fire carefully in order to brew some
coffee and now watched the water in the tin with the interest of women at a
childbirth.
'There she is,' Chinaboy said as the surface broke into bubbles. He waited
for the water to boil up and then drew a small crushed packet from the side
pocket of his shredded windbreaker, untwisted its mouth and carefully tapped
raw coffee into the tin.
He was a short man with grey-flecked kinky hair, and a wide, quiet, heavy
face that had a look of patience about it, as if he had grown accustomed to
doing things slowly and carefully and correctly. But his eyes were dark orien-
tal ovals, restless as a pair of cockroaches. 'We'lllet her draw a while,' he advised.
He put the packet away and produced an old rag from another pocket,
wrapped it around a hand and gingerly lifted the tin from the fire, placing it
carefully in the sand near the bricks.
We had just finished a job for the railways and were camped out a few yards
from the embankment and some distance from the ruins of a one-time siding.
The corrugated iron of the office still stood, gaping in places and covered with
rust and cobwebs. Passers had fouled the roofless interior and the platform was
crumbled in places and overgrown with weeds.The cement curbing still stood,
but cracked and covered with the disintegration like a welcome notice to a
ghost town. Chinaboy got out the scoured condensed- milk tins we used for
cups and set them up. I sat on an old sleeper and waited for the ceremony of
pouring the coffee to commence.
It didn't start right then because Chinaboy was crouching with his rag-
wrapped hand poised over the can, about to pick it up, but he wasn't making
a move. Just sitting like that and watching something beyond us.
The Port Jackson bush and wattle crackled and rustled behind me and the
long shadow of a man fell across the small clearing. I looked back and up. He had

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 come out of the plantation and was thin and short and had a pale white face cov-
ered with a fine golden stubble. Dirt lay in dark lines in the creases around his
mouth and under his eyes and in his neck, and his hair was ragged and thick and
uncut, falling back to his neck and around his temples. He wore an old pair of
jeans, faded and dirty and turned up at the bottoms, and a torn leather coat.
He stood on the edge of the clearing, waiting hesitantly, glancing from me
to China boy, and then back at me. He ran the back of a grimy hand across his
mouth.
Then he said hesitantly: 'I smelled the coffee. Hope you don' min'.'
'Well,' Chinaboy said with that quiet careful smile of his. 'Seeing you's here,
I reckon I don' min' either.' He smiled at me, 'You think we can take in a table
boarder, pal?'
'Reckon we can spare some of the turkey and green peas.'
Chinaboy nodded at the stranger. 'Sit, pally. We were just going to have
supper.'
The white boy grinned a little embarrassedly and came around the sleeper
and shoved a rock over with a scarred boot and straddled it. He didn't say
anything, but watched as Chinaboy set out another scoured milk tin and
lifted the can from the fire and poured the coffee into the cups.
'Help yourself, man. Isn't exactly the mayor's garden party.' The boy took
his cup carefully and blew at the steam. Chinaboy sipped noisily and said,
'Should've had some bake bread. Nothing like a piece of bake bread with
cawfee.'
'Hot dogs,' the white boy said. 'Huh.'
'Hot dogs. Hot dogs go with coffee.'
'Ooh ja. I heard,' Chinaboy grinned. Then he asked: 'You gomg some-
where, Whitey?'
'Cape Town. Maybe get a job on a ship an' make the States.'
'Lots of people want to reach the States,' I said.
Whitey drank some coffee and said: 'Yes, I heard of money and plenty to
eat.'
'Talking about eating,' Chinaboy said, 'I see a picture in a book, one time.
'Merican book. This picture was about food over there. A whole mess of fried
chicken, mealies- what they call corn -with mushrooms an' gravy, chips and
new green peas. All done up in colours, too.'
'Pass me the roast lamb,' I said sarcastically.
'Man,'Whitey said warming up to the discussion. 'Just let me get to some-
thing like that and I'll eat till I burst wide open.'
China boy swallowed some coffee:'Worked as a waiter one time when I was
a youngster. In one of that big caffies. You should've seen what all them bas-
tards ate. Just sitting there shovelling it down. Some French stuff too, patty grass
or something like that.'

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 I said: 'Remember the time we went for drunk and got ten days? We ate
mealies and beans till it came out of our ears!'
Chinaboy said, whimsically: 'I'd like to sit down in a smart caffie one day
and eat my way right out of a load of turkey, roast potatoes, beet salad and
angel's food trifle. With port and cigars at the end.'
'Hell,' said Whitey, 'it's all a matter of taste. Some people like chicken and
others eat sheep's heads and beans!'
'A matter of taste,' Chinaboy scowled. 'Bull, it's a matter of money, pal. I
worked six months in that caffie and I never heard nobody order sheep's head
and beans!'
'You heard of the fellow who went into one of these big caffies?' Whitey
asked, whirling the last of his coffee around in the tin cup. 'He sits down at a
table and takes out a packet of sandwiches and puts it down. Then he calls the
waiter and orders a glass of water. When the waiter brings the water, this
fellow says: "Why ain't the band playing?"'
We chuckled over that and Chinaboy almost choked. He coughed and
spluttered a little and then said, 'Another John goes into a caffie and orders
sausage and mash. When the waiter bring him the stuff he take a look and say:
"My dear man, you've brought me a cracked plate." "Hell," says the waiter,
"that's no crack. That's the sausage."'
Mter we had laughed over that one Chinaboy looked westward at the sky.
The sun was almost down and the clouds hung like bloodstained rags along
the horizon. There was a breeze stirring the wattle and Port Jackson, and far
beyond the railway line a dog barked with high yapping sounds.
Chinaboy said: 'There's a empty goods going through here around about
seven. We'll help Whitey, here, onto it, so's he can get to Cape Town. Reckon
there's still time for some more pork chops and onions.' He grinned at Whitey.
'Soon's we've had dessert we'll walk down the line a little. There's a bend
where it's the best place to jump a train. We'll show you.'
He waved elaborately towards me: 'Serve the duck, John!'
I poured the last of the coffee into the tin cups. The fire had died to a small
heap of embers. Whitey dug in the pocket of his leather coat and found a
crumpled pack of cigarettes. There were just three left and he passed them
round. We each took one and Chinaboy lifted the twig from the fire and we
lighted up.
'Good cigar, this,' he said, examining the glowing tip of the cigarette. When
the coffee and cigarettes were finished , the sun had gone down altogether, and
all over the land was swept with dark shadows of a purple hue. The silhouetted
tops of the wattle and Port Jackson looked like massed dragons.
We walked along the embankment in the evening, past the ruined siding,
the shell of the station house like a huge desecrated tombstone against the sky.
Far off we heard the whistle of a train.

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 'This is the place,' Chinaboy said to Whitey. 'It's a long goods and when she
takes the turn the engine driver won 't see you , and neither the rooker in the
guard's van .You got to jump when the engine's out of sight. She'll take the hill
slow likely, so you 'll have a good chance. Jus' you wait till I say when. Hell, that
sound like pouring a drink!' His teeth flashed in the gloom as he grinned.Then
Whitey stuck out a hand and Chinaboy shook it, and then I shook it.
'Thanks for supper, boys,'Whitey said.
'Come again, anytime,' I said, 'we'll see we have a tablecloth.' We waited in
the Port Jackson growth at the side of the embankment while the goods train
wheezed and puffed up the grade, its headlamp cutting a big yellow hole in
the dark. We ducked back out of sight as the locomotive went by, hissing and
rumbling. The tender followed, then a couple of box-cars, then some coal-cars
and a flat-car, another box-car. The locomotive was out of sight.
' Here it is,' Chinaboy said pushing the boy ahead. We stood near the
train, hearing it click-clack past. 'Take this coal box coming up,' Chinaboy
instructed. 'She's low and empty. Don't miss the grip, now. She's slow. And
good luck, pal!'
The coal-car came up and Whitey moved out, watching the iron grip on
the far end of it. Then as it drew slowly level with him, he reached out, grabbed
and hung on, then got a foothold, moving away from us slowly.
We watched him hanging there, reaching for the edge of the car and haul-
ing himself up. Watching the train clicking away, we saw him straddling the
edge of the truck, his hand raised in a salute. We raised our hands too.
'Why ain't the band playing? Hell!' Chinaboy said.

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MAUREEN ISAACSON

I Could Have Loved Gold

Dad talked about gold all the time. Gold standard and shares and world
markets and creating work for the masses. The intonation of his voice acted
as a soporific on mother and her already pale countenance and air of absence
further dissolved. My little brother Jonathan would dip his middle finger into
the butter and my aunt would yawn. But sometimes she'd say something and
the two would hiss like prize bantams in a sparring match.
Into the spotless order of our Houghton mansion, Aunt Sal would bring
the smoke and jazz of the streets ofSophiatown. It was in her walk and in her
talk and in her eyes. She vibrated with the sax of Kippie Moeketsi and the
huskiness of Dolly Rathe be and all the musos she heard there. As soon as Dad
got going, she'd lose that bluesy cool; she'd talk and move fast, like a train
chasing its own steam.
'Do you know what happens in the gold mines? About the hostels where
there's no place for loving and precious little money to show for it when the
miners do get back to their families?'
Dad would swell up with argument and a watery silence would envelop
mother. It seemed that this dissension was irrelevant in the face of having an
Anglo magnate husband who swathed her in rune carat this and twenty-two
that.
She wore it burnished in her ears and round her neck, her wrist~ and waist
and in her teeth. Her eyes were dull with it, with easy living and the loneliness
of Dad being away so often.
Aunt Sal adored Jonathan and me.Whenever one of us felt sad she'd say that
nothing stays the same and she'd sit with us until it went over. She'd tell us
stories; it was only through her that we ever got to hear of cottages in woods
and baskets to be taken to grandmothers and people like Rapunzelletting down
their hair. She told her own version; with syncopated rhythm and high drama.
Dad believed in facts. When he did tell us stories they would invariably be
about gold.
'The Incas of Peru; he said, 'believed that the tears of the Sun fell in golden
drops. They wore huge golden circles in their ears, just like the wooden ones
the Ngum natives wear in South Africa.

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 'If you 're going to tell kids something, make sure it's useful,' he said. He told
us tales of ancient Roman gold mines. He talked about gold leaf death masks,
thin as gossamer, used by the early Greeks and said that gold was civilised; it
was something to believe in. It had changed his life. 'I didn't make it big
through fairy stories. Nor jazz for that matter,' he said.
Aunt Sal laughed at the way my parents listened to the sounds of Elvis
Presley and the Everly Brothers, when there was all that going on just around
the corner. My parents weren't interested in what was going on round the
corner, and told friends that Aunt Sal had a basic problem that made it neces-
sary for her to go into the world of the 'Natives' .
She brought us Glen Miller records and blues and marabi, the sounds of the
shebeens, and we'd dance until we dropped. It gave mother a headache, she
would say, then she'd go and lie down.
Once I heard Aunt Sal say to mother, 'You weren't like this before, Sarah.'
'Well now I am,' mother said.
I was at primary school at the time, and my experience of the world was
limited to our Houghton mansion, our many servants and mother's golden
unhappiness. She remained passive and inert, it was as if she'd been alchemised
into some mystical substance, and was no longer with us. She looked into
mirrors for a long time and I wondered what she was thinking; if she was
thinking. She was always around, but I missed her.
We waited for Aunt Sal's jazz; she brought us records of Miriam Makeba,
the H arlem Swingsters and Zig Zag Zakes. 'I bring you the Bantu Men's Social
Centre special,' she'd say. Then she'd roll up her red trousers and she'd ramba
and samba and talk about th e way people lived in the townships.
'Eight people live in a house the size of this kitchen, minus the breakfast
nook, no kidding.'
I couldn't really see how they did it. It all seemed so strange to me, like
some foreign country somewhere.
I spent hours playing with mother's jewellery and holding it up to the sun
to see what Dad meant when he talked about the purity of gold, the essence
of it. I studied the gold plates and vases he brought back from his travels and
encased in glass , the gold-bound books, and thought about being as good as
gold and silence being golden. I would have loved gold if it wasn't for Aunt
Sal.
When r think about the mansion now, maid-polished and ordered, it
echoes with a drab silence. Into the odourless shine, Aunt Sal sped; alive with
the fumes and stains and conversation of nights in shebeens. Crazy with tales
of dark side-streets where gangs of men with American clothes and accents
flicked knives and tongues. Talking about the way these guys would ruin con-
certs and break up cosy evenings in shebeens.
'Aren't you scared?' I asked.

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 Then the corners of her mouth lifted slightly and turned, and the green of
her eyes deepened and she took a draw of her cigarette. She said nothing, but
I often saw that expression again.
It was the expression she got when she talked about music and about a
friend of hers called Albie. Although I never met him I knew exactly how he
walked, hand in one pocket, cigarette dangling; hat cocked, because Aunt Sal
would show us. Albie played piano and sang in one of the shebeens where
Aunt Sal had her heart torn apart by the blues of Snowy Radebe and the late-
night throb and bebababerop she came home singing. It was where she drank
the home-brewed spirit skokiaan, a bout of which Aunt Sal said could knock
your head right across the nation.
'Hardly suburbanite stuff,' she said.
My parents' friends were other mining magnates and their wives, and some-
times Jonathan and I would be allowed to join them for dinner. It was the only
time mother would come alive. On such occasions Joseph, who cleaned the
floors and served at table, would wear a white jacket with a diagonal sash, red
as a wound.
The wives would ask us how we were enjoying school and if we liked our
teachers and what our friends' names were, then they'd talk to each other about
clothes and hair and Italian gold collars with streams of half-point diamonds
and say things in very hushed tones. The men would talk loudly and clearly
about gold exports and foreign exchange and balance of payments and South
Africa's economic role in the world.
Mother said that our cook, Sanna, was a genius at whatever she turned her
hand. She cooked Fish Soup Basquaise and Lamb Charlotte to perfection.
Mother loved to surprise the guests with treats like black truffies in Italian rice,
fresh foie gras or watermelon in glazed wine. Imported white wines were a
favourite; their chill glistened from generous crystal glasses.
One such evening,just as mother was saying, 'Children, don't you two think
you should be getting to bed now?' Aunt Sal burst in.
'No thanks, I've eaten,' she said. 'How do you do? How do you do?' she
greeted everyone, and kissed Jonathan and me. The wives touched their half-
moon gold earrings and chunky bracelets and stared at Aunt Sal.
Suddenly, without warning, she shouted, 'Yaabo! Yaabo!' Everybody
stopped talking and father said, 'C'mon Sal, not now.'
Then she smiled and said, 'That's what the small boys shout when the
police come near the home-brewed beer in the townships.'
'Sal ... ' said Dad.
'They keep it in tins underground and cover them with sand and wet
sacks -it's illegal to brew beer because of the liquor prohibition for blacks, you
know. When the police come they pierce the tins and everyone runs away
before they can be arrested.'

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 'Have some wine, Sal,' Dad said.
'Thanks. Very nice, what vintage?'
'Forty-nine.' Dad looked relieved and everyone relaxed and started talking
again. Jonathan pinched me and giggled.
'Mm, very nice wine,' Aunt Sal said again. ' Nothing like Tswala.'
'Tswala?' asked a magnate's wife.
'Yes, Tswala. It's the stuff they give black mineworkers. A kind of non-
alcoholic beer, rich in vitamin B.'
Mother wiped the corners of her mouth with her serviette. Father breathed
audibly. Then that steam-train speed got hold of Aunt Sal and there was no
stopping her.
'Tswala, loudspeakers, heat and unbearable noise- that's what you get when
you work on the mines.'
One of the magnates said: 'Do you know what you're talking about? To
what do you think the country owes its wealth? Has it ever occurred to you
that the industry provides work for people? The Natives love the mines. They
even call Johannesburg "Egoli", which means "City of Gold". South Africans
have a danm lot to thank the people who discovered gold and the mining cor-
porations for.'
'Egoli safoot!' said Aunt Sal. 'A city built on cheap mineworker-sweat, what
do you know about their lives?'
'The mines provide employment.' He was rigid.
'Okay, so what about th e danger they work with, poison fumes, fires, acci-
dents, rockbursts, and all the people that get killed?'
'Safety measures ... ' started the magnate. He was red-cheeked and every-
one seemed to have forgotten their food.
'Don't tell me about safety and about us having the deepest mines and not
being able to compare with the rest of the world, I know that argument. I'm
talking about people's lives! ' Aunt Sal's voice quavered.
'Well so are we. We 're providing people with an opportunity to eat, people
w ho would otherwise starve.'The magnate was redder.
'What do you know? Have you been there? Have you ever heard of fac-
tion fights? H ave you ever seen the way th ey fight amongst themselves?
Everyone knows they'd kill each other if we didn't put a stop to it!'
Aunt Sal said nothing. Mother called Joseph to clear the plates and bring
in the chestnuts and poached pears.
'It's way past your bedtime, you two,' she said to Jonathan and me. So we
left the table and hid in the passage to see if anything more would happen.
It didn't.
My parents didn't refer to that evening again and neither did Aunt Sal, but
Jonathan and I went over and over the way the red-cheeked magnate who'd
shouted at Aunt Sal had never known that there was a piece oflamb lodged in

795
his beard all the while. And how his wife, the one who asked us how school
was, had cut up three tomatoes into a million tiny pieces throughout the con-
versation.
Mter that Dad and Aunt Sal didn't talk to each other for a while. She vis-
ited when he was away. The ice thawed slowly and things returned to normal
for a while.
One day she came in, eyes heavy as clay. She wouldn't say what was the
matter but I knew it had something to do with Albie.
'Has he gone away?' I asked her.
'Don't talk about it,' she said.
'The shebeens and the bioscopes and the dancehalls were empty,' she said.
'The jazz don't sound and the blues make me cold inside instead of warm and
I want to be at home, waiting, in my little tower, to let down my hair.'
But as she believed that things never stay the same, she smoked and drank
into shebeeny nights, waiting, becoming thin and ashen, a shadow of her silent
older sister.
Time edged along slowly. Aunt Sal's misery encircled her, etching a dark-
ness around her eyes. It weighed down the air. She smoked fifty cigarettes a day,
and another twenty at night. She coughed all the time.
Then she decided to go and live in London. She promised to send for us
when we were old enough. She left us in the mansion with a distant father
who stored gold rings and earrings and promises in a safe for my corning of
age.
He left us, finally, with a weight as heavy as a gold bar, and the price we had
to pay for his contribution to world economy. He left us with a mother whose
sheen was fast fading. She said less than ever, now that Aunt Sal had gone.

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