Man on the Move

by Otto de Kat, Sam Garrett, Sam Garrett

Genres: Coming of Age; World War II; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

In January 1935, Rob leaves Holland for Cape Town, a young man thirsting for adventure and wanting above all to leave his family's suffocating hold on him behind. After a brutal stint in the diamond mines, he sails to Java to join the Dutch forces in their last stand against the invading Japanese. Here he finds Guus, a fellow countryman and the best friend he will ever have. Elegant, painterly and poetic, Man on the Move is an unforgettable portrait of friendship, and the heart-wrenching story of a journey away from family into lonely adulthood, through war and captivity.

Release date: January 7, 2010

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 92

Sample

He leaned against the rail of the Cape Town, the ship of his flight. From below, the engines throbbed, he saw the water turn to foam. Untied. On the quay they were waving. In the group that had come to see him off, his father and mother stood at the front. Blocking his view. He had to leave, get away, he wanted to be gone.

The waving became more frantic, its spell unavoidable. He caught his name: “Rob … bye!” It was his mother. His father, watching in silence, doffed his hat almost solemnly then snapped it back in place. He meant to wave, but instead stuck his hand into his inside pocket. The small bundle of letters with places he could go, references, people his father knew. He tore them very deliberately in two, not angrily, only relieved. His goodbye.

In the cold, hazy January light the shreds went fluttering down. Would his father understand what he was saying? How could he know that those little shreds of paper would float through his father’s dreams for ever. That his mother, for the rest of her life, would see the hand that tore the letters. Who can tell what another person thinks and understands.

Two worlds slid apart.

January, 1935. The shore was too distant now to identify details. The skyline of Rotterdam became indistinct, the endless rocking set in. He turned from the rail, strangers walked past on the darkening deck. Cold wind from England. But he was for South Africa, for summer. The old Cape Town had made the journey many times; for him it was the first. South Africa was his escape, his chance to become the adventurer he thought he was, the soldier of fortune he had dreamed up. Unrest had housed in him since childhood. Cross-grained, not at ease with the commonplace, never settling for what others seemed to want. He was never the one to follow everyday rules. “Heads down!” he cried to his classmates, then pulled out an air pistol and, through an open window, shot a crow out of the tree in the schoolyard. Just before his final exams, which he would have passed easily, he gave it all up. He lived by impulse, even at an early age no-one could keep him in check. He climbed out of the window of a moving train and arrived at the next station lying on the roof. For no good reason, just because. He bought a motorcycle, drove it all night to see a girl across the country. After exchanging a few words, he turned round and rode back. He collected sweethearts, the Clark Gable of the Rhine. His unrest only grew.

The weeks at sea lulled him to sleep, to indolence, to irksome memory. But as soon as the ship reached a port of call he would roll ashore with the crew. Hunger for where he had never walked before – Lisbon, Casablanca, Dakar; thirst for the stories of the ship. After thirty days it was over. With sea legs now, a hardened stomach and two suitcases, he disembarked in Cape Town. No-one there he knew. The heat took him in its arms, a leaden heat he had never experienced before. The whiteness of the houses blinded him. The customs officers detained him for a long time, endlessly it seemed. Why did he want to come ashore, where did he plan to go? Whom did he know? The letters, damn it, he had torn up the letters. Hostility was in the air of the half-darkened port office with its slow ceiling fan. He persevered. Nothing was going to keep him out of this country. He told them how for years he had dreamed of Africa. No, he could not come in just like that. No, he would have to find a job if he wanted to stay. He was looking to make his life in Johannesburg, he wanted to work in the goldmines. Surely he had not spent weeks at sea only to be sent back, back to the crisis in Europe. Surely he had not spent years longing for a different life only to let this life be shattered in the first immigration office he came across. With his textbook English and a great deal of charm, he talked his way into the country. Impelled by the officers’ words, he set out to find the railway station, bought a ticket to Johannesburg, and was on his way within the hour.

“Well driven, Engineer,” he would hear his father say whenever he got off a train and passed the drivers’ cabin. His father, who seemed to control the world, big man in little town. His father who tried to rein him in, and against whom his resistance had grown.

Johannesburg, city of gold – fifty years ago nothing but a camp where men with picks and shovels had dug themselves into the ground. Slowly he followed the crowd off the platform and outside, little man in big town.

This was the moment, here he would live, in the wilds, without references, without a community, alone. For as long as the station hall sheltered him, it still seemed possible to turn back. Then he was out on the street, in a riot of noise. Once more the sweltering heat surprised him, as it had in Cape Town. Black people everywhere, blacker than the few he had come across in Holland. Indians, white men in top hats. Manhattan in Africa, he knew the city’s nickname, but as he walked there now, looking up, Johannesburg closed in on him. Was that a trap he heard slam shut? The sea suddenly seemed an implausibility, his long journey had come to an abrupt end. His suitcases felt heavy as gold ingots. But he scarcely had a shilling left. “Hey, Boss, can I help you?” offered a boy of fifteen or so near the entrance to the mine. He turned, looked at him and asked the boy’s name.

“Yoshua, Boss.”

“O.K., come along, but stay behind me, you won’t yet be used to finding your way down there.”

Yoshua’s brand new boots with their metal caps glinted in the dusky cage that took them underground. Within minutes they had plummeted more than a kilometre and a half.

The first time he himself had gone down the mine he had been perplexed, but not afraid. Disbelief at the lift cage that kept going down and down, for a seeming eternity. It could not be, no-one could dig that deep, it could not be done. Utter darkness, from before the Day of Creation. His mouth went dry, his skin beaded with sweat. It was a reverse birth, like being buried alive. The electric light when he stepped out disoriented him even more. Slowly, half-blinded, he shuffled behind his crew, along galleries, more galleries, around the corner and again more galleries. Into the hairline cracks of the mine, clambering and crawling. Till there was no light left save that of his own lantern. His first eight-hour shift below had made his head spin. The darkness prowled around him, in the distance was the rattling of machines, the thumping of ore cars on their rails, the shouts of fellow miners. Tossed away into a forbidden universe, unravelled, filthy. He had been numbed, just as on his wild escapade through the Dutch night. Electrically up, electrically down, eight hours on, eight hours off, eight hours sleep. His first weeks, his first self-planned days, his unsettling new life.

Into the mine he went, the boy behind him. He sensed Yoshua’s confusion, and looking back he saw his cautious movements, the sheen of puzzlement across his boyish face. Calmly and without hesitation he led him to their new night task. They had left the bulbs behind them, the pitmen had spread out, there were not even rails in this narrow corridor. He set his lantern on a rock.

“Where do you live, boy?”

Yoshua answered in short sentences, speaking of his family in a muddle of English and Swazi. Snatches of it were comprehensible, but most of it was not. Fifteen years at ground level, always out on the streets, not much to hope for, the life of a young black kid, proud of the work boots he had been given. His scheme had worked; he had found a white boss to offer him protection and a modest wage.

Yoshua had stayed. He was there every morning, waiting so that they could go into the mine together. And every morning Rob passed him the lantern, cigarettes and some water. The boy belonged to him. The guards at the gates waved them through with a gesture that said: Good going, Dutchman. But he had done nothing, it was the boy who had presented himself, who just turned up. Sent by a foreman as a spare hand. In the weeks and months that followed, a tenuous friendship came into being. Yoshua carried the lighter tools and their water. He pottered around his boss, ran to him whenever his cigarette needed lighting. “Kunjani, Boss?” he said each day at the mine entrance, “How is it going?” He taught Yoshua to work the acetylene lamp, and warned him over and over never to drop their matches. Matches were vital, darkness one of their enemies. The mine became their shared adversary, almost strangling them with its innumerable corridors. The treacherous, deadly mine, the lurking beast. Yoshua knew all about beasts. He knew the mountains around Johannesburg, had crossed the fringes of the Kalahari with his father. He had avoided serpents’ bites and walked ravines where the sun never shone.

He told his boss that his father travelled all the time, sometimes for more than a year. And his mother worked for white people.

They talked while sitting on a rock, eating their lunch, or taking the cage back up. But in the early morning they were mostly silent, steeling themselves against a day underground. They learned each other’s ways, respected each other’s silences. And, although he was the master, he always remembered that the boy was more a part of this land than he. His own youth, in a provincial town on a river, was an abyss away from th. . .