The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2009

J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 9 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 35 After Kimberley, there was Britstown, then Hopetown, Beaufort West, and the long ride through the Great Karroo — not sure what that was. Then Cape Town. A boy whacked the animals with a pole again and again, herding them frantically off the road, his eyes wide with panic. As we passed, I could hear the slap of the wood on their flanks. It would take about another day or two to get there, I fig- ured. Probably two. “I was in the Congo about a year. It was great,” he said, watching the road. “Simply fantastic. And the girls! There were always girls. As many as we liked. Plenty of young ones. About 14 or 15.” He grinned broadly. “Of course, we always shot them afterward.” He fished around for the canteen and held it in his hand, shaking it. Then he drank. It was a long drink, and he strained his eyes down toward the road as he tilted his head. I looked at him as if for the first time: broken teeth; stub- ble; sharp, jutting jaw; blue eyes the color of faded enam- elware; unkempt, thinning hair cut short. After a moment he caught my glance and dropped the canteen clattering on the floor. He pounded the steering wheel. “Of course we shot them! We always shot them! Ha! Wasn’t anything else we could do. Their families would never take them back.” The Orange River was playing cat and mouse with the hills ahead of us. Now it was plainly visible, a broad, brown stream in the distance. Clouds were piling up. I thought of Joshua in the back of the truck. He’d be getting off soon, maybe before it started to rain. The driver gave me a sullen stare, angry I was not more impressed. Then we were crossing a bridge. “That’s the Orange River,” he said. “The biggest river in this country.” The sun was getting low. It was big and white, falling slowly through a dark sky. I had hitched down from Europe. It had been more than a year since I left the States, 12 days since I crossed the Rhodesian border. I pulled out my passport and looked at the newest stamp: March 31, 1970. Back home was the war. OK, so I’d make a few bucks in South Africa; then I’d see. An Australian told me about a construction company in Cape Town just before I left Uganda and crossed into the Congo. It was a big country. Dirt-poor. At that moment there was a hard tapping on the roof of the cab. Cursing, the driver pulled the truck off the road. It was Joshua. He spoke to the driver in Afrikaans from the back of the truck. The driver arched his neck out the win- dow and twisted in his seat. I think he was saying, “Baas, I want to get off after a few miles.” Cursing, the driver snapped his head back inside and put the truck on the road. “Stupid bastard!” he said, stamping his foot. “That dumb kaffir has to tell me where Hopetown is? I know where Hopetown is!” Joshua and I had met at dawn about a hundred miles from Joburg, near Christiana. My last ride the day before had left me outside a small town at 3 in the afternoon, and I hadn’t moved after that. When night came, I camped out in the open a few yards from the tarmac. A crazy wind came up after midnight, blowing freezing dust all over the high veld. Slowly, the sky began to lighten. I was miserable and cold in my sleeping bag waiting for the sun, wondering how long it would take me to get to Cape Town at this rate, when I saw him lying a few feet away wrapped in newspa- pers. “Hey! Hello,” I said. “Hello.” He lifted the pages around his head to look at me, and they flew away. The wind was blowing so hard I had to shout. “It’s freezing,” I yelled. “Aren’t you cold?” “Freezing!” I got up and saw a fire flickering in the distance. Wrap- ping the sleeping bag around me, I walked toward it, then turned around, shivering. “Come on. Let’s go over there.” He let the newspapers fly away and got up, and we walked toward the fire. His name was Joshua. He was an African youth, slight, with short hair and honest eyes. His clothes looked new, but they were dirty, and he had a raggedy suitcase with him and some odd-shaped bundles wrapped in burlap he said were for his mother. I said, “If it was any colder, I would have frozen to death last night.” He gave me a questioning look, but then said, “Oh, I am suffering in this cold. I do not like it.” I suddenly realized that his newspapers couldn’t have been nearly as warm as my sleeping bag. As we came up to the fire, I could see the men around it were coloreds. They huddled together and piled trash on the fire, but it gave very little heat. They smelled of cheap wine. Joshua stood close to the fire rubbing his hands and arms, hunching his shoulders and squeezing his hands between his legs. Thin cotton shirt. The sky was F O C U S