those first two years I stopped wanting, stopped caring, because wanting and caring made it worse – being half naked in the heat and dark, getting beaten, listening to shoot-outs and thinking I was going to die. Most of all, I stopped wanting to survive because the wanting could turn your terror to madness.
“No.” This Taiba is obstinate, like I said. “Aires, I must take him home.”
“Wake up, bhuti.” I’m surprised to hear myself calling him bhuti. “You know Faceman and those others, how they call us foreigners fools and send us into the most dangerous parts of the mine. They’re not going to let you out of here. And when you go up, Papa Mavuso will keep you locked in while your body and eyes get better, and then it’s back down again. The police? There’s a whole system of bribery up there . . .”
“Then Spike Maphosa, he must help us.” Taiba sounds so confident.
I laugh for the second time tonight. “Where did a raw boy from Mozambique hear about Spike Maphosa?”
“All the boys, they know. They say he lives not so far.”
“They say. All the new zama zamas say. The Lesotho boys are probably saying it in Welkom.”
“No, Spike Maphosa, he was in a mine here. Barberton.”
This boy is unbelievable.
“It’s just a story. There is no Spike Maphosa. There never was.”
“I believe in him.” Taiba waits a few seconds, but when I don’t say anything he asks, “What is your name?”
“Regile. Regile Dlamini.”
It feels strange to be saying my own name. I can’t remember the last time anyone asked me for it. I sometimes feel as if I don’t really exist. When I’m not down here, I’m like a ghost. I keep away from crowds and trouble and the sort of people who want things like names and pieces of paper and bits of plastic. I have no documents. When I’ve been home to Swaziland, I’ve crossed secretly. The first time, I was hungry to be inside my country, so I went over just along from the Josefsdal/Bulembu border post, but then it was a long walk home through difficult veld. By the next time, I knew my way to a crossing nearer the Jeppes Reef/Matsamo post.
“Regile.” My name sounds even stranger spoken with Taiba’s accent. “You say to me you are . . . trafficked? Stolen? But now you go home to your country? Your people, the mother, the father? What they say?”
“There’s only my mother and the younger children.” I don’t want to be talking about my mother here underground; it’s even worse than thinking about her. “She doesn’t know I’m in South Africa. She thinks I have a good job in Manzini . . . like the job I was promised by the man who brought me over the border to Papa Mavuso. You see, our stories are the same.”
I want this boy to shut up about dreams of going home and help from Spike Maphosa.
“But you say two years?” Taiba’s curiosity is as persistent as his childish belief that he’s going to escape or be rescued from here. “Two years, no money, nothing? Your mother, what she think, where you were all those two years?”
But I never let myself imagine my mother’s thoughts, her fears, during those years I was gone from her with no way of sending her a message.
I only remember what I told her to believe afterwards.
“I told her the work was hard in the beginning. She believes I didn’t have enough money to get home from Manzini. I was young, remember. I said I didn’t know the way to walk.”
I sense more than see that Taiba is shaking his head. Beside him, Aires is lying down again now that the shooting has stopped. He’s always tired. Like me and one or two of the other boys, Taiba is still sitting up.
He says, “I don’t tell lies to my people.”
“You say that now.”
Taiba doesn’t speak for a bit. I swear I can feel him thinking. Maybe he’s trying to decide whether or not to challenge what I’ve said.
He switches off his lamp at last and the only light is a brownish glow coming from where the men are still talking angrily. I can hear that one of them is looking after the man who has been shot, but even he speaks roughly, telling the man to shut up when he shouts out in pain.
Taiba says, “This mine, Regile? The people owning it?”
His voice reaches me from a level that tells me he is still sitting up.
“I don’t know.” All these questions are making me impatient. “One of the big mining companies.”
That’s what the men say. Only the big companies can pay for security firms.
“Why they leave the mine open?”
“They don’t. It’s not used – all the entrances are closed up. That’s why it’s so dangerous. It hasn’t been inspected for years. But the syndicates always find ways to get in. They break through fences, smash up concrete barriers. There are plenty of these mines. I wasn’t always in this one.”
I’ve been feeling a lot of strange things tonight, all in response to Taiba’s questions. Telling someone things about myself gives me a wrong feeling, as if some other person is using my voice, speaking through my mouth. I’m not that person any more. I don’t talk about myself to anyone. A younger, earlier me did – not the man I am now.
At last I hear soft sounds which tell me that Taiba Nhaca is shifting around, maybe getting ready to lower himself to the rock floor. My hearing has grown sharp from these years in the dark, listening for the warning creaks and cracks when the earth gets ready to punish us for coming into its deep places. We belong on its surface. We’re intruders here.
I’m right. When Taiba speaks again, his voice comes from floor level.
“Regile?”
“Stop talking,” I say in my harsh voice because the questioning way he says my name enters my ears like an echo from another time when I was the big brother and the younger children thought I knew everything and could answer all their questions and fix anything.
“But Spike Maphosa, you tell me about him.” Doesn’t he ever give up? “The others, they only know small-small. Who is this Spike Maphosa?”
“Spike Maphosa is a story,” I say, also lying down. “A story for stupid children like you. Go to sleep. It’s our shift soon.”
He doesn’t speak again, but I can hear that he’s still awake. Or maybe I can feel him thinking again.
Ever since the first fall, I don’t think I’ve slept in that unconscious way I used to. We had to dig ourselves out and we couldn’t breathe properly because the air was running out.
That was in another mine.
The work and the heat here exhaust my body. I want to sleep, but I can’t. Not properly. My mind won’t let me. I need to listen. I don’t know if mine-sleep gives me real rest. It comes full of broken bits of evil dreams, or maybe they’re visions. In them, nothing is the way it should be. Everything takes an ugly shape. People and things who should be there are missing,
