"Sit here, sir."
He looked. The voice belonged to a slender man in a trenchcoat ridiculously at odds with the filthy woolen cap he was wearing; the coat might have belonged to a movie star, but the cap you could see on any street cleaner or garbage man at work in the city from June through August. This bloke, his thin face almost cadaverous in the dark, scooted over and patted that part of the cracked seat cushion that his skinny bottom had already warmed.
An invitation. A friendly invitation.
Myburgh spurned it. Unfamiliar people-strangers-didn"t sit next to each other when there were plenty of seats to choose from. It wasn"t racial; it was personal, a way to keep one"s ident.i.ty intact, a means of securing a helpful modic.u.m of privacy. And yet it wouldn"t do to stupidly insult the man, even if his pigmentation suggested purple spray paint under a sheen of preserving lacquer. Myburgh eased into the seat in front of the African"s, pointedly hugging the aisle.
"Excuse me, sir," said the slender young man, leaning over the seat back as if Kabini had introduced them. "Did you really have an accident?"
What colossal cheek. Myburgh reined in his temper. "What do you think, I staged it?"
"Possibly."
"Why in G.o.d"s name would I do something so stupid-not to say expensive-as that?"
"Forgive me," the man said, placatingly touching Myburgh"s shoulder. "I thought you might be a member of-or, possibly, an advisor to-a Faking Club."
"Faking Club?"
"Yes, sir. A few years ago, until caught without my stinker"-his pa.s.s, he meant-"and endorsed out, I lived near Cape Town. At the universities there, students staged accidents-b.l.o.o.d.y ones-to test public awareness of first aid. Faking Clubs."
"I"m not a member of-or an advisor to-any Faking Club. Why, out here, would you even a.s.sume that?"
"So queer an accident. Your car was smashed, but with no sign of any other banged-up vehicle to have caused such damage."
"I hit an elephant."
The man-to Myburgh"s relief-withdrew his hand, then simply gazed at the banker sidelong. "My name is Mordecai Thubana, sir. Glad to meet you."
Myburgh grunted. But Mordecai Thubana"s gaze was so implacable that he glanced away and began rubbing his thigh as if a pain there had distracted him.
"The blow to your head," Thubana said, nodding at him, "is it bad? Did it make you delirious?"
"Who are you to question me?" Myburgh snapped. "Who are you to imply I"m lying?"
"Mordecai Thubana, sir. And I"m not meaning to be questioning or implying anything."
"If you don"t mean to, don"t do it."
"No, sir, I won"t. Except, you know, courtesy would hint that maybe you should-forgive me-tell me your name."
"Because you"ve told me yours?"
Thubana grinned. He had strong, straight teeth. His grin was almost fetching. "One man, one name." He leaned nearer. "When I was in Cape Town, I attended university. I"m not just an ignorant construction worker, sir."
Myburgh pursed his lips. His own name would reveal more than he wanted. Grim Boy"s Toe was hardly the nave of a Dutch Reformed Church, and its pa.s.sengers certainly weren"t Voortrekkers. But why not tell? Did fear or shame restrain him?
"My name is Gerrit Myburgh," he said defiantly. "My family had a huge farm out here once, on a healthy remnant of which my brother Kiewit continues to live. Three Ndebele families-more than twenty people-still work for him."
"Ah," said Thubana. "But now the government wants it?"
"Yes."
"To make the Ndebele "homeland" bigger?"
"I suppose."
"And you and your brother are fighting the government"s plans to take your land?"
"Kiewit is. I"m not. I think we should sell."
"For the sake of Grand Apartheid?"
"Because we"re not likely to get a better offer, and they"ll end up taking it anyway. Kiewit"s a stubborn a.s.s."
"Ah. You argued."
"Would I be out here in the G.o.dd.a.m.n bundu at such an hour if we hadn"t?" He meant, as they both knew, Would I be on this Putco bus with all you kaffirs if there weren"t a d.a.m.ned good reason?
"No, Mr. Myburgh. I guess not."
Conversation lapsed. Myburgh was grateful. He didn"t know why he"d indulged Thubana as far as he had. Under most circ.u.mstances, he would have ignored the man or fixed upon him a withering, mind-your-own-business stare. But Thubana"s interest in his plight had seduced him into talking. Weak. Shamefully weak.
Myburgh faced front, clutching his own upper arms. Grim Boy"s Toe was a real kidney bouncer, even on asphalt, and now the bus was b.u.mping down a dirt track among enkeldoring trees to another pickup point.
His bruises had bruises. During the accident, he"d apparently bitten a chunk of mucus-coated flesh from the inside of his mouth, and now that slimy flap of skin was overlapping his tongue. He bit down on it and swallowed. His facial muscles tightened.
Twelve people came aboard at this pickup. All gave him the eye as they b.u.mped down the aisle; all made a point of not sitting next to or across from him. The bus chugged off again. A hubbub of African dialects led Myburgh to suspect that some of these people were talking about him. He refused to turn around. Why give them the satisfaction?
Grim Boy"s Toe made three more stops.
At the last one, rows and rows of sc.r.a.p-wood and corrugated-tin bodoks-shanties-grew like crooked architectural cancers. Smoke from Primus stoves billowed into the sky, mistily visible, while a throat-scalding stench eeled into the bus through window cracks and holes in the floorboard.
Although Kabini kept telling the new pa.s.sengers to move back, move back, several of them bunched at Myburgh"s seat. He realized that he would either have to stand, as two dozen other people were already doing, or scoot over and share his seat with one of the intimidating construction workers or mechanics waiting for him to make room.
"Hey, my baas," said a man in an overcoat, tapping Myburgh"s knee, "you saving that spot for your lady?"
"Maybe he"s got a disease," said someone else.
"You may have this seat," Mordecai Thubana told the man. He came forward and levered Myburgh over against the window with his hip. The man in the overcoat grunted approval and sat down. The logjam of bodies broke. Myburgh watched as several people placed folded newspapers on the floor, dropped down cross-legged, and gave in, almost instantly, to sleep.
One man in particular drew Myburgh"s attention, for, although still young, he was as bald as a stone. Moreover, he held in his lap what appeared to be half a rubber volleyball.
"Hey, Mpandhlani," Thubana greeted the bald-headed man. "How goes it?"
"No reception," said Mpandhlani cryptically. "No reception. A relief, Mordecai. I"m almost grateful." He held the volleyball-half in his lap like a vulcanized begging bowl.
The bus jounced off again, through the midnight bush.
Although there were now at least ninety pa.s.sengers, a third of them in the aisle, conversation had ceased; most were dozing or staring numbly into the Transvaal wastes. One man had affixed a large sponge, or rectangle of foam rubber, to the seat back in front of him, lowered his forehead to its padding, and fallen asleep. Perhaps he was also snoring lightly; the bus"s unceasing rattle made it hard to tell.
d.a.m.n Kiewit, anyway. With just half the money they"d realize from selling Huilbloom (as their great-grandparents had dubbed the family farm), they could emigrate to Australia or Texas and begin life anew, in a place free of the threat of Armageddon.
Suddenly, Myburgh noticed that Thubana had taken a book from a coat pocket and begun to read it with a penlight balanced over his ear and aimed downward. Clever. Or semiclever. Thubana probably hoped Myburgh would ask what he was reading. Africans sometimes liked to impress whites with a show of educability, a demonstration of their debatable love of learning.
Well, the clap on that. If Thubana was reading something, it was probably ANC or PAC propaganda or a book of trumped-up stories about oppression in the townships or an old copy of Drum, and he"d be d.a.m.ned if he"d rise to the kaffir"s bait. Let him pretend to read all the way to Marabastad.
Thubana spoiled this plan by lifting the book off his lap and holding it up so that Myburgh could see its cover-including t.i.tle and whimsical three-color ill.u.s.tration.
SUPERSTRINGS, said the yellow caps above the ill.u.s.tration. And below the t.i.tle, in more compact upper- and lower-case letters, A Theory of Everything? The book was in English, a smooth-skinned paperback, already visibly creased and battered. Myburgh recoiled from it as if from a contraband AK-47.
"Have you read this yet, sir?"
"What are superstrings?" Myburgh said. "Ordinary strings with impossible ambitions?" Perhaps this subtle insult would sink into the kaffir"s pretentious brain, stymieing further talk.
"No, sir. It"s physics, Mr. Myburgh. Very deep, fundamental physics. It answers deep questions about how the universe is, and why, and what we may expect of it."
"So you"re a physicist, Mr. Thubana?"
"No, sir. I"m a-"
"Every day, you do physics at the university, writing equations with which to solve colossal mysteries."
"Nowadays, Mr. Myburgh, I"m a roofer. At a housing site west of the city. After number 496, I must catch another bus."
"A roofer?"
"Yes, sir."
"Then where did you get this book?" Myburgh rapped it with his knuckles. "And what makes you think you can understand it?"
"I understand it," Thubana said mildly. "Under a different set of circ.u.mstances, maybe I would be a physicist."
"And if I weren"t an Afrikaner," Myburgh said, "perhaps I"d be traveling on the next Soviet Mars flight."
Thubana explained that his immediate boss, an Englishman named G.o.dfrey, had given him the book-as well as the upscale trenchcoat- and that he had been reading and thinking hard about superstrings for over a month now.
"All right, then," Myburgh said. "Tell me what you know."
"Superstring theory," Thubana said, taking Myburgh at his word, "holds that the building blocks of the universe are not atoms, but tiny strings-tiny strings that twitch and twitch." To ill.u.s.trate their twitching, Thubana repeatedly crooked a finger.
"Why? To what end?" Myburgh asked only because it was more amusing than staring out the window.
"I don"t know, exactly. But the twitching generates matter and energy at the submicroscopic Planck scale. It does this throughout the entire cosmos."
These terms and explanations were unintelligible to Myburgh, as hard to untangle, as indigestible, as a platter of cold spaghetti. "What complete rot. You"d do better to have Mr. G.o.dfrey give you books on bricklaying, tilework, vehicle repair. It"s criminal he"s encouraging you in this... this nonsense."
"Because my mind is too dim?"
"Because it"s useless, young man. Because it"s castle-in-the-air elitism."
"No, Mr. Myburgh. It isn"t. It"s elegant physics. If it"s open to attack, it"s only on the grounds that experiments haven"t yet been able to back it up. Also, the mathematics of the theory require that one suppose ten rather than four dimensions-nine of s.p.a.ce and one of time."
Myburgh snorted. He couldn"t believe that Thubana had fallen under the spell of such stuff.
"Listen, sir. Six of the spatial dimensions must be curled up-"compactified," my book says-into a geometrical object called the "Calabi-Yau manifold." Otherwise, you see, the mathematics of superstring theory, and its ability to make predictions about the world we live in, fall apart."
"You"re giving yourself to utter claptrap, Mr. Thubana. Does it make you feel superior to"-nodding at the other riders on Grim Boy"s Toe- "your sleepy comrades?"
Thubana turned so that the penlight over his ear shone directly into Myburgh"s eyes. "It makes me sorry, sir. And-forgive me for saying so- angry. Quite angry."
"At yourself, I hope," Myburgh muttered, turning his face to the window. Outside, the landscape was graying, quivering like a cloudy aspic in a huge inverted bowl.
Thubana, to Myburgh"s surprise, dropped one hand to his knee, his grip like a lobster"s claw.
"Let go, kaffir," Myburgh whispered. He took the penlight from behind Thubana"s ear and dropped it to the floor.
Thubana released him and picked up the penlight; then he leaned into Myburgh as if they were old chums at a sporting event. But when he turned the penlight on again, no beam shot forth. "That"s all right," Thubana hissed. "Darkness is exactly what you want for us, isn"t it?"
"Leave me alone."
"Okay. No need for light. I"m not an unintelligent man, and I remember my reading. All of it."
He"s crazy, thought Myburgh. A woolhead twice over.
"A superstring expert at Princeton in America-a theorist named Edward Witten-said something profound, sir. He said, "To have the energy to face a difficult problem day after day, one needs the att.i.tude that victory is just around the corner. But probably it isn"t." Light isn"t necessary to remember that. I can remember it just as well in the dark."
"Leave me alone." Myburgh hated the weakness in his voice. It sounded as if he were whistling in Thubana"s shadow.
" "The att.i.tude," " Thubana grimly repeated, " "that victory is just around the corner. But probably it isn"t." "
Suddenly, from the vicinity of the center aisle, a barrage of martial music poured forth. This music-drums, bells, trumpets-was so loud that it easily overpowered the continuous rattling of the Putco vehicle. Everyone noticed. Men and women, a moment past slumped and dozing, straightened and looked around: the man who"d rested his forehead on a sponge, the newspaper yogis, a woman who"d scrolled her turtleneck up over her eyes. Everyone-every dead-to-the-world-pa.s.senger-was instantly resurrected.
Then the music ceased, and a nasal English-speaking voice, made both tinny and scratchy by atmospheric conditions, said, "This is Radio Freedom, broadcasting to our comrades in Azania from a site we are not at liberty to divulge."
"Mpandhlani!" cried someone far to the rear. "Mpandhlani, for G.o.d"s sake, close your mouth!"
"Tonight, we address the issue of education. The policies of the apartheid regime not only deny our people their inalienable rights but also access to universal education. Therefore, hundreds of thousands have left the country just to seek education abroad. The Pan Africanist Congress of Azania, in order to cater for the students and refugees, established the department of education and manpower training so that-"
"Your hat, Mpandhlani! Put it on!"
"Close your mouth! Have pity! Close it!"
Myburgh was at a loss. First the music, then the pontifical radio voice, and finally the shouts of various pa.s.sengers that the man called Mpandhlani do something-shouts that seemed to have no relation to these other events. Looking past Thubana, Myburgh saw that the bald pa.s.senger, crumpled in the lotus position not far from Thubana"s aisle-side knee, had his eyes closed and his mouth wide open. Nothing bizarre about that. The poor fellow was trying to sleep. In fact, he was succeeding in the effort, the only wretch aboard number 496 managing to do so.