Dreaming of Light Read online

  Dreaming of Light

  Jayne Bauling

  Tafelberg

  For my family, and for all the real life Spike Maphosas, giving hope.

  Chapter 1

  There’s a shoot-out in the mine tonight.

  One of the new Mozambican boys speaks awkward English. He’s the one who gets excited when we hear the gunfire. He sits up and switches on his miners’ lamp. Then he nudges the smaller boy he keeps close to him most of the time.

  They must be thirteen or fourteen. I’m only eighteen, but I feel thirty, forty years older than these two.

  The bigger boy is saying something to his friend. I don’t know their language, but I can tell from the lift in his voice that he thinks the shooting signifies something good.

  “Your lamp won’t last if you waste it on this,” I warn him, using the harsh voice I’ve taught myself since Papa Mavuso put me in charge of his recruits.

  Recruits. That’s what he calls them, expecting me to believe him. He’s forgotten that I was one of his recruits four years ago.

  The boy turns his head my way, but he doesn’t switch off the lamp. You can’t see people’s faces properly down here. The lamps we use create too many shadows, but I remember what this boy looks like from the day Papa Mavuso showed him and the other one to me and told me it was time to go down the mine again. That was two months ago. The smaller boy looked nervous that day, but not really scared. That could have been because the bigger one kept talking to him in their language, laughing and encouraging him.

  He had no idea what was coming. When he switched to English to talk to Papa and me, I understood that he was eager to start his new job, proud that he’d be doing men’s work, earning good money. His eyes were shining and he smiled nearly all the time, a fat, happy smile that puffed up his cheeks into smooth rounds.

  I hadn’t seen the two boys before so I knew they must have been brought through to the Barberton mountainlands during the night, after I’d locked the other boys into the shed where they sleep when we’re up from the mine.

  I used to be one of those locked-in boys, but Papa Mavuso trusts me now. I’m the oldest one left, so I think he has to. He has even let me go home to Swaziland twice in the last two years. That’s because he knows I’ll be back, like the other men. That’s the difference between men and boys. It’s only the children, the very new ones, who want to run away, back to the places where they were stolen.

  Maybe this boy thinks the gunfight will provide a chance for him to escape.

  The shots are coming from somewhere past the place where the men sleep. It’s tradition that they always take the wider spaces and the boys and I must make do with whatever else is available.

  “What’s your name?” I ask the boy with the lamp.

  Two months and I don’t know their names. That’s the way it is in the mines. I don’t really know why I’m asking now.

  “Me, I am Taiba Nhaca,” he says, and I can hear that he’s smiling. “And my friend, he is called Aires.”

  Smiling, just because I’ve asked his name. There must be something wrong with the kid. People don’t smile underground. What boys do underground is grow up fast, but this Taiba seems like a child still.

  “What do you think it is?” I ask. “The shooting?”

  Most of the time I don’t want to know anything about anyone down here. Especially, I don’t want to know anything about the children. The recruits.

  So I’m not sure why I’ve asked Taiba that question. Maybe just so I can kick him into reality, force him into the jump from boy to man that most of them make in their first few weeks.

  “Police maybe?” he suggests, and I understand that he wants it to be the police. “They come get us out from here. Take us home, me and Aires.”

  “Don’t be stupid. The police won’t come down into the mines. They’re not paid enough and it’s too dangerous. When the big companies shut down a mine, they pay for private security firms – big bucks. They’re supposed to catch us. Then they hand us over to the police.”

  “So it’s same?” Taiba doesn’t get it. “For me and Aires, also the other boys from home and from Swaziland. And that other one, Zimbabwe?”

  I didn’t know I could laugh underground. It’s an ugly sound, meant to crush the stupid innocence out of him the way a rockfall would crush out his life.

  “Better hope it’s just our guys and men from another syndicate shooting each other. Wena, trust me, you don’t want it to be security. I’ve seen them in action. It doesn’t always work the way it’s supposed to. Anyway, it sounds like the shooting is stopping.”

  There has been just one shot in the last thirty seconds. Now there are only angry male voices, voices I know from every day down here – our men, with one of them groaning and crying out in pain. I don’t even wonder if anyone is dead. It makes no difference to me. It would only make a difference if another syndicate took over the mine.

  Or if the security people cleared us out.

  I used to be like Taiba Nhaca. I also thought there would be an end to the heat and the darkness. For some it does end, almost as soon as it starts. I’m one of the lucky ones. So far. Luck doesn’t last, only the darkness does. I will probably die down here, in a rockfall or from trapped poisonous gases. Or I might be shot. Soon the syndicate will start arming me like the older men. I’ll have to shoot then, and there’ll be someone shooting back at me.

  Best would be arrest and jail, even deportation. Then I could still come back, like all the others do. It’s the zama zama cycle: underground, jail, back underground. Some of the men down here have been in prison two, three times.

  “But me and Aires, we must go home.” This kid is obstinate. “Our families, I think they are . . . worry?”

  I lift my shoulders, though I don’t think he can see me.

  “I was also trafficked into South Africa,” I tell him. “Four years ago. After a time you stop thinking about home so much.”

  “But that first man, at my home there in Mozambique? He say is good work for us in South Africa, one month only, but big money to take home. For me very big, because I learn English helping the people from South Africa when they come make holiday in my country.” Something like longing vibrates in his voice so that I know it’s a good memory. “And that Papa Mavuso, the first man he give us to him when we cross. Papa, he say men’s work in the mine and men’s money. But we get nothing, us boys. We cannot buy food and drinks like you and the men when those other people come selling. The food Papa send down for us, it is bad food. I think Aires get sick. Also from that Faceman beating when we don’t bring enough . . . This is why we must leave here and go home.”

  “Papa Mavuso didn’t let me have money for the first two years,” I say to let him know he won’t get me to feel sorry for him. “Be patient. The money will be good when it comes. That’s how Papa knows he can trust me to come back. He only sends some of my money to me here in the mine; the rest he holds for me. Sometimes he lets me take it to my mother in Swaziland, and then I come back and go down again, three months, six months the one time, and up again.”

  It’s half true. I keep doing it for the money, but also because it’s all I know. In 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. Th
ey’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, sometimes replaced by capering creatures made of rock and shadow, with fire for eyes.

  Sometimes I think it’s better not 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 rese
ll 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.”