How to Be a Revolutionary Read online

  Beth was about to walk back to the bus stop, kicking the dirt-brown sand as she’d done all the way there, when she saw a girl she recognized from school seated at the top of a flight of stairs, framed by the wooden doors of the community hall and a dusting of late afternoon light. It took some kind of courage for Beth to walk up to her.

  “You going to the meeting?” Beth asked, laid-back as she could.

  “Yip. You?” The girl evaluated Beth carefully as she shielded her eyes, a row of black rubber bangles swinging from her wrist to her elbow.

  “Same.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Beth.”

  “You have a entjie, Beth?” she said, beneath steady, charcoalladen eyes.

  “Me? No, I don’t smoke,” Beth said. “I mean, I smoke sometimes, but I don’t carry with me,” she added, frisking her pockets as proof, wishing she’d just stopped at no.

  The girl was dressed in multicoloured pants that flapped languidly in the midsummer breeze; harem pants, Beth thought, matched with a bright orange vest. Her hair was cut as short as a boy’s and her arm rested on a pile of books beside her.

  “What you reading?” said Beth, who might have walked away, had she not found herself incomprehensibly rooted to the spot.

  “Things I found at the school library. Mrs. Adams is oulams, she won’t let us take more than three books,” the girl said, and showed Beth the covers. Oswald Mtshali’s poetry, some sort of a pamphlet, and Buckingham Palace, District Six by Richard Rive.

  “Isn’t that book by Rive banned?” Beth said, swallowing a gasp.

  “Dunno … maybe,” the girl said, “Anyway, what you doing here? I never imagined I’d see anyone else from school.”

  Beth straightened her back against the girl’s gaze. Didn’t she know she was wearing the wrong outfit entirely to be a revolutionary?

  “Saw a poster at school. Took some doing to get where it’d be held from the comrades smoking at the back of the school,” Beth said.

  “What, people actually read the posters?”

  “Wait … you’re the one that pastes them everywhere …” Beth said, forgetting to disguise a tone of awe. The posters had become a site of conflict at Water Falls High. Despite Principal Salie’s decree that nothing was to be stuck onto the school walls that ruined the façade, the notices reappeared regularly, stealthily.

  “Ja, but you gotta keep it a secret between us. This shit can get a girl killed. I’m kak scared of the boere … and also Salie,” she added, laughing, so Beth noticed her uneven smile that stretched to below her cheekbone on one side, stopping far short on the other.

  “I’m kak impressed,” Beth said, loosening her tongue, catching on fast.

  “Toss for secret.” She offered her small finger. “Toss. Are you going in?” asked Beth, who was sure she’d felt a quiver run through her pinkie as the girls locked.

  “Ja, but they always late. The township comrades have to travel far when the meetings are held this side.”

  “Sure,” Beth said, nodding so hard her neck started to ache.

  “And sometimes they have to walk deurmekaar to get to a meeting. Throw the cops off their scent. Walk one by one from the station, take different routes.”

  “Obviously.”

  A rowdy group came around the corner just then in complete defiance of what the girl had said, filtering in through the door as many as would fit at the same time.

  “Comrades … discipline!” She shouted after them.

  “You know them?” Beth asked.

  “Come,” she said, rising and following the group into a small room at the side of the community hall.

  “Check you later.” She directed Beth to a chair beside a boy wearing an oversized green jersey in the process of unknitting itself at the cuffs and collar. “We can take the bus back to Water Falls together.” Beth nodded dutifully, not even bothering to fight the sense of wonder that was now creeping up her back.

  The girl did a rough count of everyone, jotted it into a black hardcover book, and when she had finished raised her fist high into the air: “Amaaaandla!” her voice cut right through the cacophony, simultaneously leaping like wildfire into Beth’s heart.

  ~

  Her name was Kalliope but everyone called her Kay.

  Probably just as well Beth hadn’t known who she was—chairperson of the student’s congress at their school and on the executive committee of the region—else she would never have spoken to her. Kay, at all of sixteen, already had a reputation. The story had become legend. A girl in Beth’s class said Kay’d had an argument with Mr. Salie at the last Student, Parent, Teacher meeting, calling him a coward to his face. A parent had retorted.

  “Show some bladdy respect for your principal.”

  “And when will you show respect?” Kay had shot back without a quiver in her voice. “Doing nothing while your countrymen get shot almost every day. But you go to church and ask to stay meek?” A glint of madness and danger had shone in her eyes, it was said, which the woman must have seen, because she sat down and said nothing else.

  Kay’s father was serving ten years on The Island for treason. Kay said he’d been arrested for trying to bomb a police station. This explained a lot to Beth. Like why Kay wore whatever she wanted, rejecting the go-to Struggle fashion trend of jeans, T-shirt with slogan, and Arafat scarf, opting instead for a decades-old style that no one—or at least no one not as brave as Kay—would be caught dead in. She was the real thing. A child of the revolution. A revolutionary in her own right. After their first encounter, Beth wanted to see Kay again. But the next meeting was weeks away.

  That Tuesday Beth saw Kay reading at the top of the stairs, refusing distractions or to give way to the march of school shoes. At least she wasn’t surrounded by the comrades arguing passionately and smoking as they usually did behind the school. No way would Beth walk up to that group ever again. Beth rushed to the library hoping the book was in. After that, she climbed past Kay twice, who was still resident on the steps in an untidy mix of legs, lunchbox and bag. Immovable.

  Finally, on her third rotation, Beth said, “Erm … Kay?”

  “Ja. Beth, right? Been thinking about you … haven’t seen you on the bus. Wanted to tell you about a meeting.”

  “Oh, ja, my father picked me up whole of last week. Old man was on leave. Heard the next meeting was two weeks away …”

  “Those are the official meetings. We got unofficial too.”

  “OK … great, can do … so, you like to read?” Beth said, checking the spine of a pale pink volume that Kay was holding. “I was about to re-read this … here … from the library.” Beth picked the book from her bag: The Color Purple, still new, with a tight thick plastic coat, checked out twice before.

  Kay received the book with both hands. “You read this?”

  “Ja. Maybe you’ll like it … I mean if it’s your thing. It’s not politics-politics but it’s not not politics …” Beth said, and shut her mouth so forcefully her teeth clattered.

  “I love this book,” Kay said so softly Beth had to move closer in.

  “Oh … I thought cos no one had taken it out … been there for months.”

  “I took it out once.”

  “Then, I was the other time …”

  “Thank you,” Kay said, holding the book to her chest. “You know … maybe we can talk about books … I don’t get a chance to read besides for politics-politics any more. Hardly anyone reads here. Bring me what you’ve read this year? We can talk when you come to the meetings? You’re still ready to sacrifice your life for the Struggle, right?

  Beth stared at her.

  “Jokes, man. It’ll be lotsafun.”

  Kay lived with her grandmother five minutes away from Beth in a part of Water Falls that no one walked through unless they were unlucky enough to live there, or they had a death wish. Why else would anyone be caught in the Skriwe Flats? The gangs gathered right there on the veld and battled, knife to axe to panga to Maka
rov pistol, whatever it took, because of some territorial discrepancy, or because one of theirs had been arrested on a tip-off, or because the sun had shone too brightly that day, waking them up in a Mandrax-fueled rage. A six-year-old boy had been shot while playing cars in his family’s living room, the bullet exploding from the gun’s mouth, bypassing ten to fifteen men, all of them packing multifarious kinds of contraband, clipped a tin roof, took a left and went through the window of the lounge, finding the boy’s skull.

  “Kak like that always happens,” Kay said as the girls pretended to do their homework. “That’s why we have to fight the system. We have to change it. And it’s not just apartheid but capitalism that’s at the root of this evil. When liberation comes, we’ll give everyone houses, proper houses, and work, even the skollies. Clean up the Skriwe Flats, paint it, make parks for the children, make sure everyone can go to school and have free education. Especially girls and women.”

  They started to see each other every day, even though Kay was a year ahead. Kay’s abrupt ways and quickness to confront usually meant other girls avoided her entirely. Beth brought books and small talk about what was happening in the rest of the school, while Kay took care of political education and carrying the world on her shoulders. It was an unequal union to be sure, but Beth didn’t mind. Not yet, anyway. No, they hadn’t known until after they’d met how much each needed the other to stand straight, finding strength in the number two.

  In their world, which they decided was theirs to shape no matter what Principal Salie and the government said, there were no worries over getting knocked up (or for that matter beat up) at nineteen, or finding jobs as semi-permanent cashiers, or dreams of white weddings. No. Their conversations sparked currents that ran from here, now, and lit the future all the way.

  Beth quickly realized that only Kay knew the things she wanted to know. Like how to get more than three books out of the library right under Mrs. Adams’s portrait’s stare. Or how to light a new cigarette from a stompie. How to argue dialectical materialism. How to kiss a boy. How to apply lessons learned from Communist China to South Africa. How to flick a Zippo lighter with one hand. How to lead a toyi-toyi so it actually sounded and looked like a battle cry. How to do a fish plait. How to erect a barrier of burning tires across the main road. How to get the stupid cool boys to listen to you without them looking down your top. How to write a rhyming couplet. How to apply lessons from Communist Russia to South Africa. How to get the nerds to care about the Struggle as much as about their books. How to make Salie lose his temper so he started swearing like a bergie. How to lead a group of students to a mass rally. How to stay out past midnight. How to get the teachers to leave you alone. How to shout Amandla! without sounding sturvy. How to down a shot. How to be a revolutionary.

  3

  SHANGHAI

  I saw my typist days later, reverse-walking through the public gardens across the road.

  Usually as I readied for work in the morning, I’d watch the spectacle of dozens of retired Shanghainese striding backwards as they took their exercise en masse. Decades earlier Chairman Mao had insisted that body and mind receive equal attention, and he’d introduced a vigorous routine via two radio broadcasts each day, so people were expected to stop what they were doing and begin the dutiful task of calisthenics. From my window I watched a group perform tai chi in its extravagant slow motion. Some waltzed together on a strangely located band of asphalt, mostly women pairing off as a stereo blasted tinny-sounding Mozart into the early day. I spotted him then mid-moonwalk.

  I dressed quickly before racing down the ten floors of my building, past the narrow girls at reception, then the guards and drivers—not one without a smoking sixth finger as they waited alongside glossy black sedans, drawing hard, exhaling, repeat. Dodging a stream of yellow taxis, I reached the other side of the road and entered the immense public gardens. On the left were hedges that had been coiffed and clipped in exquisite symmetry. A Parisian summer garden. To the right a row of Balinese statues: stony women beckoning from a rhombus of cool water.

  I caught up with him just as he entered the maze back to front, swinging his arms and pacing into the unknown. I slowed down, straightened my skirt and called out, “I have that word.”

  He greeted me out of breath, neither stopping nor slowing, so I had to walk quickly alongside him as he retreated or advanced (I didn’t know which).

  “Melancholy: could that be the word you were looking for?” Since he’d come to my door two weeks earlier, I’d not heard him typing—I felt responsible—and offered the word by way of regret. What else? Was there actual curiosity about him? Worse, was I seeking friendship?

  “Melancholy.” He paused, rolling the word over his teeth. “I know this word, a little like music,” he said. “But no, too long.”

  “What about depressed?”

  “Isn’t this a doctor’s word?” he said, circling his temple with his fingers.

  “Unhappy?”

  “Too simple.”

  “Dejected? Miserable? Disconsolate?” I’d made a list and was running through them as we performed our ungainly dance, my tapering grey skirt threatening to rip or pull me to the ground.

  “Will … think … about … words …” he said, between breaths, before he began a series of squats, exhaling loudly as he stood back up, squatted and repeated.

  I spun on my heel, more ashamed than angry. What had I been thinking?

  “Wait,” he called when I’d almost reached the gate. “You drink tea?”

  “I do,” I said, holding on to the gate as I decided whether to capitulate or resist.

  “Come, we take tea,” he said, almost charmingly.

  The teahouse was in a traditional style of building that was hard to find, most of them demolished by the thousands decades earlier when youthful bands of Red Guards tried to cleanse China of a culture they believed repressive—a style which had made a contemporary comeback in plastic and plaster rather than stone and marble.

  We sat awkwardly, two strangers who didn’t know each other’s names.

  “Beth.” I stretched a hand across the low wooden table, its carved legs and clawed feet brushing against my own.

  “Huang Zhao.”

  It was eight a.m. and I was going to be late for work. Facts that didn’t dissuade our waitress, impossibly lithe in a traditional qipao dress, from performing the tea ceremony drama. The woman’s hands fluttered over the table, sterilizing and warming the cups before she dropped dried leaves into each and then in a seamless circular motion poured lukewarm water, so soon our cups beckoned with pale green blossoms. I reached out, but Zhao’s hand halted me in the lightest of ways.

  “Tea must rest,” he said. “You know why Chinese take tea?” he asked, waving his hand with a flourish.

  “It is traditional, no?”

  “Tsst,” he flicked his tongue off his palate. “Tradition …” he said dismissively, passing me a cup. “Chinese take tea for respect, for family. Sometimes for discussing important matters. Even, sometimes, to give a apology.”

  I called the office to say I was going to be late.

  ~

  I was a consul now, but had started in government decades earlier, soon after leaving university and applying for a job in communications with the presidency. It was a lower-order job that I’d hoped might one day lead to the real work of governance. And back then, pushing papers and occasionally getting to the meatier stuff of pre-reading speeches or glimpsing the president’s head or heels as he was ushered past in a tight entourage seemed adequate.

  Early into that hopeful career, I’d met Andrew: a young lawyer who could switch in a beat, sometimes maddeningly, between putting up a sweeping defence of worker’s rights to slapstick humour. Though his desk was on a higher floor of our building, he managed to walk past me once or twice a day. Back then I’d been uninterested; more, consciously against the idea of an office romance, despite evidence of Andrew’s charm and brilliance; his steady ethics. So much h
ad happened and I no longer wanted, didn’t need by then, to explain myself to anyone, least of all a workplace suitor.

  Yet how quickly I saw that Andrew could be picked from the crowd. He wasn’t like the guys I’d dated and certainly like none of my young (or old) colleagues in American sunnies and Italian brogues who insisted that I smile … just this once for me, come on man? There was no hint or spirit of the comments—ice-queen/ frosty/frigid/bitch—which I heard after refusing them.

  After months of ignoring Andrew’s subtle attentions I found myself alone with him, everyone else on an extended Friday lunch. Listen, you seem really interesting and actually, you know, I like you … I have for some time, he said, failing to shove his hair away so I took the unguarded moment to look fully at him. And then, hours later, over a drink, his head resting in his palm: What mechanisms are ticking beneath the quiet surface, mmmh? Finally: I love this severe shirt-and-skirt combo you always wear, he said, pulling me closer by my waist, undoing any, all, reserve.

  Even if it had been a ruse (it wasn’t) I was smitten and relented: My seriousness and single-mindedness for your wit and that curl, I proposed. Done, he said.

  In my career, excelling brought with it unwanted scrutiny and questions about my past. I preferred quiet diligence. Invisibility at the margins, Andrew said. Every few years I swapped roles, moving from communications to economic affairs to energy, settling finally in the diplomatic corps. A permanent mid-level civil servant.

  When did it start? That creeping, unnerving corruption that seems immovable now? When did it start to settle in to our departments and, it seemed, onto everything in the country, like a layer of grease? Right under my watch?

  After a while Andrew changed jobs. And soon after that he refused to represent or work with anyone in government, gravitating closer to groups that opposed the ruling party, soon serving only those who were not in the act of betraying the revolution, he said.

  It was a cruel arithmetic: the more we fought about it as the years progressed, the greater the divide between us. The small house we’d bought together in a diverse mixed-income suburb slowly growing old, losing its shine and becoming more lopsided along with the country: