A Man of Good Hope (Jonny Steinberg) (NF8) (28 page)

“The keys!” he shouted to Abdi once he was back in the shop.

“What?”

“Where are they?”

“What keys?”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw them. They were lying in plain sight, on a table behind the counter. Where to put them? He could throw them in the dustbin, but that was so obvious a place. He stood there frozen—at the time it seemed for some minutes, but it could only have been for a second or two—staring over the counter into the faces of the customers in front of the shop. They stared back at him, their faces quite inscrutable. Did they understand what was happening? Why did they not run away? He dropped the keys onto the floor and kicked them under the counter, the sounds of the robbers' footfalls in his ears.

The three men were in the shop now, and the one who had shot at Asad told him to turn around and put his hands in the air. The moment he did so, he heard the thud of a pistol butt against the back of his head. He felt curiously distant from the part of him that had just been attacked, as if it were the tabletop or the wall that had come in for a beating.

“I told you to lie on your stomach.”

Asad dropped to his knees, then stretched himself flat against the bags of mealie-meal that lay on the floor. Soon, he was joined by the driver, Abdi, and the shopkeeper, whom the robbers had dragged from the toilet.

“Brother, the four of us were lying there side by side on the bags of mealie-meal,” Asad tells me. “And our customers were standing in front of the shop watching. I could hear them talking quietly to each other. The robbers picked up the shopkeeper, took him to the other side of the shop, and asked him where the money was. He said there was no money here, aside from what was in the till. They hit him very badly, brother. They hit him in the face with a bottle. Then they kicked his teeth out. I was lying facedown. I could not see. But I could hear. The sound of a person's face breaking, brother. It is something I do not know how to describe.

“They left the shopkeeper on the floor. He was quiet. He must have been unconscious. They came back to us. They wanted to know where the money was, where the safe was. They checked our pockets.

“One of them grabbed my sweater and turned me around onto my back. He kept shouting, ‘Don't look at me, Somali! Don't look at my face!'

“He asked me for the key to the pickup. I said I didn't know. He picked up a bottle and raised it above his head.

“Brother, here in the Western Cape, bottles are plastic. Up in Gauteng, they are glass. Thick glass. I used my arm to protect my face. I heard a crack. I knew that my arm was broken. I did not need an X-ray to know.”

Asad found his assailant's eyes. It was an instinctive thing to do. A man has just smashed your arm as if you are a carcass. You show him your humanity; you do not even know you are doing it.

“The second our eyes met,” Asad says, “he grew very, very angry.

“ ‘What the fuck did I tell you? I fucking told you not to look! Turn around! Turn the fuck around!'

“He dragged me by my feet away from the mealie-meal bags onto the cold floor. Then he started hitting me on the back of the head with his feet. My head bounced off the floor and he hit it again. Hit, up, hit, up, hit, up, like my head was a ball. I felt dizzy. I started losing my vision.

“But, brother, the thing I must share with you from that time is my mood. I felt no fear. Even as my head was being bashed in, the thought that I might die did not come to me. I was worried about the pickup.”

From outside the storefront, he heard a voice. It was Evelyn's. Unmistakably. It was scratched and gnarled, as if her throat had dried out many years ago, and the words had to scrape their way out.

“Look under the counter,” she said in Pedi. “He kicked them under the counter.”

Asad heard footsteps and then the jangle of keys. And with that, the mood in the shop changed. The voices of the robbers grew light, almost cheerful.

“One of them went to the front of the shop and addressed the customers.

“ ‘Does anyone want anything?' he asked.

“He told them to come around the back. Then he opened the door for them.

“The four of us lay facedown on the floor listening to our customers walk around our bodies. They were helping themselves to bags of mealie-meal, to frozen chickens, to airtime. Some of them took cartons of cigarettes.”

The robbers left. Asad heard his pickup's engine rev. The Somalis lay silently on the floor. Then Asad staggered to his feet and stumbled through the back door.

“Where are you going?” Abdi asked.

“To save my pickup,” Asad replied.

It was as if he had cracked a whip. Abdi and the driver jumped to their feet and followed Asad, and the three men sprinted through the darkening streets. They had not even checked to see if their shopkeeper was still alive.

They found the pickup abandoned three blocks away.

“If you start the car with the alarm on,” Asad explains, “the engine cuts out in a few minutes. And the button to disarm it is in a place you would not think to look; it is right above the driver's head.”

An hour or so later the police arrived. The Somalis were taken to the station, where they made statements, and then the police took them to the hospital. The shopkeeper was badly hurt; his jaw was broken, and one of his cheekbones was cracked. He was missing several teeth.

As for Asad, his arm was X-rayed and set in plaster, as he had expected. But it was his right eye that bothered him most. It had throbbed throughout his police interview, and when he closed his left eye he realized that the injured one was almost blind. He raised his hand to touch it and felt a thick, rubbery swelling. He pressed gently against it to feel if it was as soft and liquid as it felt; a spear of pain shot deep into the inside of his head.

“Something there was broken,” Asad says, “something around my eye. As the evening went on I felt it closing. By the time I woke up the next morning, it was closed shut like it had been stuck with glue. I went to the mirror. I did not recognize myself, brother.”

The following morning, Abdi and Asad opened the shop for business at about nine o'clock, some two hours later than usual. Asad stood at the counter and, with his good eye, looked out onto the street. Bra Sam's door opened, and the old man stepped unsteadily out of his home. Asad looked at his watch. A couple of weeks earlier, he had started to time the old man's journey to the shop. Now it had become a habit. While he waited, a young woman came to buy milk. Two men who were strolling past stopped and bought loose cigarettes. Each time another person stepped up to the counter, Asad went cold. He could not recall seeing any of them during the robbery. But each surely knew what had happened. Why did they not say something? Why did they not comment on the state of Asad's eye? Why could they not at least say that they were sorry that the people from whom they bought food every day had been hurt?

He imagined the days ahead. He imagined life just going on as if yesterday's events had never happened. He could not stand the thought. The robbery would soon be swallowed up by the passage of time. Would he require a permanent injury to remind himself that it had happened at all?

At about ten o'clock, Evelyn appeared. With downcast eyes, she asked for half a liter of milk and half a loaf of bread. The end of a crumpled ten-rand note spilled out of her closed fist.

Asad stared at her in disbelief. He was frozen. He could not move.

Evelyn looked up at him quizzically and asked again for milk and bread. He examined her a moment longer, then turned to fetch her purchases.

He placed the bread and milk carefully on the counter.

“You are
abris,
” he said softly.

“What is that?” she asked. “Why are you talking to me in your language?”

“
Abris
is a kind of snake,” Asad replied. As he spoke, he heard the pitch of his voice rise. He struggled to contain it. He did not want to lose his cool. “Most snakes have a head and a tail. They can bite from only one side. An
abris
has two mouths, one in the head, the other in the tail. It bites when you think there is no danger.”

As he spoke, he watched her indignation form at the sides of her mouth and climb into her eyes. She began shouting at him in a stream of Pedi that he did not understand.

“Brother,” Asad recalls, “she wanted to fight me. There and then on the streets of Mabopane, she wanted the two of us to fight each other with our fists.”

Asad left the shop in disgust. With his good arm and his good eye, he drove himself to the hospital in Pretoria and asked to see an ophthalmol
ogist. After waiting two or three hours he was seen by an elderly man who appeared incapable of communication. He gave Asad two injections but could not say what they were for. He also gave Asad tablets to take home with him but did not explain what they might do.

When Asad woke the following morning, the puss around his eye had crusted. He ran a finger over the space where his eye had once been, and it felt like cracked, grainy earth. He found the name and number of an ophthalmol
ogist in Mayfair and got his driver to take him to Johannesburg.

On the journey, Evelyn's image infested his thoughts. The more he tried to shake her free, the more tenaciously she clung. He hated her as much as he had hated anyone. As much as he had hated Yindy's father when the old man decided to leave him in Wardheer.

His eye throbbed. He kept touching the swollen ball above it. It felt enormous, as if it were protruding several feet from his face, as if his arm would soon be too short to reach the end of it. The idea of Evelyn and the pain in his eye swirled together and became inseparable. It seemed that Evelyn herself was the pain; she had taken residence in the side of his face and was beating him with her fists from the inside.

In what had happened the previous morning there was a darkness more insidious than anything he had experienced; more insidious, even, than the aftermath of Kaafi's murder. As grim as it was, one could understand that Madoda's people wanted to protect him. In their treachery there was something to which Asad could relate.

But this was something else. To watch the Somalis being tortured and then walk over them and steal their stock; to arrive the following morning and behave as if yesterday had not happened. He felt a surge of hatred. For Evelyn, for Bra Sam, for every single South African with a black skin. They were something less than human. He did not know much of the history of southern Africa, but he guessed that for generation upon generation, their ancestors had been slaves. Their masters had beaten them into a new shape, a subhuman shape. They had become submissive, treacherous slave-beings, beings without self-worth, without honor. And then the whites had come and made them slaves again. Now they had been freed, but such beings could not handle freedom.

The ophthalmol
ogist in Mayfair told him that there was nothing wrong with the eye itself. It would get better once the wound above it healed. He injected an anti-inflammatory into the area above the eye and gave Asad a cream and some tablets to take home. He also wanted payment up front. When Asad saw the bill he swallowed hard. This robbery was going to cost him, he thought to himself. In the following days and weeks and months, he would keep paying for this robbery.