to let myself fall into that listening-sleep. So then I lie and think about real things that I remember. Mostly I think about light, especially the sun’s light, but also all the other sorts of light there are. The light you get when you’re up there and outside at night – the white brightness from a big moon, or the thin smile of light when it still has to grow. The bristly points of light from stars, whole masses of them clustered close together, growing into a swirling spill like milk dropped in water. Warm orange light from candles and lamps at home. Light from an electric bulb and how you still see its shape if you stare at it and then look away.
The other thing I think of a lot is coolness. The way rain is cool, or the soft mist in the mountains near my old home. I want to walk through the Pass and shiver.
Then I think about girls. The way their voices and hands are so soft, and the sweet smell of them, like flowers and sugar.
What else? My mother and the children.
But it is weak to do this. I mean, it makes me weak for when my next shift comes, because then I don’t want to do the work. That’s because I’m wanting other things, the things from my thinking.
I’m not supposed to want anything. It’s weak and dangerous.
Chapter 2
Some of the South African zama zamas are talking about getting out of syndicate work. “Going independent,” they call it. It’s the same talk most days.
“How does it work again?” Takunda always asks this question, I think because he wants to believe it’s a new scheme and not the same old plan that’s never going to happen.
“Sell direct to the buyers,” Mahlori says. “Regional buyers. They take the gold to Jozi and resell to the national guys. Selling direct, we’re our own men, not working for anyone. That’s the only difference from now. We get our own foreign fools, use them for the dangerous work.”
Mostly I don’t think anything about what they’re saying, but this time I have the thought that their dreaming talk is not so very different from Taiba Nhaca’s. Maybe men as well as boys need to believe that there will be a change, that their lives will get better. They’re fools, and I’m a fool to be thinking about them, letting myself be interested.
They’ve stopped talking because Faceman is coming. He gets angry when he hears such talk. He’s the syndicate’s main man underground, but he’s not underground all the time. A lot of the South Africans get to go up.
They’re on top another way too. They tell everyone what to do. Then men like Mahlori and Takunda assign the most dangerous work, in the really bad places, to the foreigners. They’re mostly Mozambican. When they first come, they don’t know anything much about the way it goes, so they only discover it’s the most dangerous work when they’re doing it, except when they don’t live long enough to learn that.
Next the work gets divided up again. Moreira and Juvenal and the other foreign men send us boy zama zamas into the worst places. Me and the recruits. Papa Mavuso says to go along with it, and that one day it will be us sending new recruits.
If we’re still alive.
Everyone is careful around Faceman. We stop talking when he comes among us and try to work harder, keeping our heads bent, not looking at him, everyone hoping his attention won’t fall on them.
Everyone except Taiba Nhaca.
“That one, he is not afraid of anything,” he says, breaking into English so I know he’s talking to me or else to some of the other recruits, the ones from Swaziland or the Zimbabwean boy.
Or maybe he doesn’t want his friend Aires to understand.
“At least you understand that,” I say, quick and low but rough with it. “Shut your mouth! Do you want another beating?”
“I tell you, Regile.” It’s as if Taiba doesn’t hear me. “He beat up that big man Takunda. Same way he beat us.”
“What’s the matter with you?” I’m fierce with him.
I don’t say any more, though. If he wants to bring trouble on himself, he can. I’m not sharing it with him.
“That old man, that Papa Mavuso? He know how Faceman and the other big men beat his boys? How they say no eating, no sleeping because we don’t dig enough? Last shift, Faceman, he beat us, me and Aires, and he take the water I have to drink –”
Taiba must be crazy talking and talking like this. Faceman is already here, standing over us.
I don’t know why they call him Faceman. We can never see his face properly. The lamp he wears shining from his forehead is bigger and brighter than any of ours. It puts his face, and especially the eyes, in shadow. If I make the mistake of looking up at him, all I see is the wet shine of his bottom lip, maybe a gleam from his teeth if he’s talking. Not smiling. Never smiling. Sometimes there’s a flicker of something where the eyes are, and then you know you’ve looked too long.
I keep my head down. Keep working at the rock. The muscles in my shoulders and back are on fire, but that fire is nothing next to the heat pressing in on us from all around. It’s the earth’s inner heat, too hot for humans. We shouldn’t be here.
Words are still coming out of Taiba, like it’s an illness he has suddenly got.
I send him a sideways look. I don’t know why. I don’t care about him. It could be that I want to see if the madness shows or if he still looks the same.
Not the same as before we came down here. That shining roundness of his face has no business in this place of boiling shadow that is only ever lit with the fever-glow of our lamps or the lighting the men sometimes rig up in the main tunnels.
Taiba’s mine-face is now the same as all the others: hollowed out and hungry.
He still smiles, though. I don’t understand that. I think his brain must be damaged or something.
I can’t see if he’s smiling now, because he’s looking at Faceman.
The thing I do see is that Taiba hasn’t been working close to Aires like he usually is.
That’s when I understand what he’s trying to do. He doesn’t want Faceman’s attention to fall on Aires, because if he sees how badly Aires is working, Faceman will give him another beating for sure. It won’t matter that the reason Aires can’t work properly now is because of the savage way he beat up both boys last shift. Aires is smaller than all the other boys anyway. I don’t think Aires will be coming underground a second time. He’ll stay down here this time unless someone troubles to take his corpse up.
I suppose Taiba might try.
I’ll always be one of the foreign fools, so I’ll never rise to have Faceman’s power, but if I survive long enough I could be like Moreira and Juvenal. Then I’ll remember that a bad beating will only make a slow worker even slower. I don’t understand why Faceman doesn’t get that.
As it is, I didn’t expect Aires to last this long. He wouldn’t have, if Taiba wasn’t helping him. I think it is about three months now that we’ve been down here, but it’s hard to be sure with no real day or night, just our shifts and rest times, every one the same as the one before. I heard one of the local men say
