BY JAMES ROTH
Copyright is held by the author.
SHE GOT the wrong impression of me right off, but I couldn’t stop myself from watching her. What she’d do was venture out into the street when the cars had come to a stop for a red light, using her aluminum crutches to go down the lane between the cars. As she did, she’d hold out a stainless steel tumbler. A few of the drivers, all men, rolled down a window and stuffed some rand bills in the tumbler. She was attractive in a rough, streetwise kind of way, tall and small-breasted, with a prominent chin and sad eyes, the look of many Cape Coloureds, as they’re called, a person of mixed race. It’s not a pejorative term. They embrace it. Trevor Noah is a Coloured. This girl’s jeans were hemmed up to the stump of her leg, and her long, tangled, knotted-in-the-Cape-Town-wind-hair looked like burnished copper wire.
When one of the men who’d stuffed a bill into the tumbler said something to her, she scampered off. Even using crutches, she was remarkably fast, how she got away from those men who wanted something in return for the money they’d given her. The crutches were those kind in which a person slips their forearms through a cuff and grasps a pair of handles.
The light turned green, the cars started to move, and she sought safety on the corner where I was and looked me over suspiciously. Her eyes were a bluish-grey, and, set in her sun-parched face, they glowed like two bonfires on a night beach. I’d never come across a panhandler who’d looked at me that way, or had eyes like hers, and never one with one leg. There were beggars on every major street corner in Cape Town, asking me when I tried to get past them, “A few rand, captain, for the children. To eat. Captain?” I never gave them any money. It would be like giving a stray dog food. There were soup kitchens they could go to, and, besides, most had a reputation as being drunks, thieves, and drug addicts.
I had to get away from those eyes and somehow managed to continue on down the street to a Food Lover’s and bought a lasagna dinner and bottle of King’s Blockhouse IPA. While checking out I saw some gift certificates for Food Lover’s by the cash register and thought about her and decided to buy her a 100 rand one, which would be good enough for a few days of meals, if she budgeted.
I made my way back up the street. She was working a line of cars and came up on the corner again when the light turned green and the cars started to move. I showed her the gift certificate. She looked at it cautiously, as if it were a conman’s business card, or that of a would-be sex trafficker who wanted to add a woman amputee to his collection.
“It’s for buying food,” I told her, “at Food Lover’s, right down the street.”
I held up my shopping bag. When the smell of the lasagna apparently reached her, she took the certificate, studied it, and then said, “Thank you, sir.” She kept a soiled backpack in the entrance of a boarded up storefront in which newsprint, dirt, and shopping bags had gathered. She propped up the two crutches against a wall of the shop and lowered herself on one leg, in what could’ve passed for a yoga pose, it was so graceful, and tucked the certificate away in a pocket of the pack.
“You’re new to this corner,” I said.
She said something, but I didn’t understand her. Coloureds have a way of speaking very fast, no pauses between the words. I got her to say what she had again. “My boss,” she said, “he decide here.”
Her being there on this corner begging was like something out of a Dickens novel, the way beggars were managed by a boss, who had to take a considerable portion of their daily haul.
“What is your country?” she asked. She was studying me now as closely as I had been studying her.
“I’m American,” I said.
We stared at each other for a while before she asked me how I’d ended up in Cape Town. I told her. I’d been on a cruise ship that went up and down the west coast of Africa, stopping at ports along the way to allow passengers to take tours of a city or visit an animal reserve or to buy some souvenirs to prove to their friends back home that they had actually been to an African country, if only for a few hours before returning to their staterooms and the dinner buffet. I told her I played the guitar and had been in a band on the ship, which was only a slight bending of the truth. I hadn’t been in a band.
She looked out at the cars going by, and when the light turned red and the cars stopped she didn’t bother to go out into traffic but stayed there near me for the longest time. The light must’ve changed from green to red and back to green again six or seven times. She was close enough to me that I could see that the bridge of her nose was parched pink from the sun.
Then to my surprise she began to hum to herself, but I couldn’t place the melody. She hummed softly and eloquently, as if in prayer. Her humming made me think of my ex-girlfriend, Melanie, who I’d been playing backup for on the cruise ship. She sang standard jazz love ballads, like “The Man I Love,” “Summertime,” and “Cry Me a River.” She’d been quite popular, both because of her voice and her looks. She was always decked out in a blue or red evening gown and glittering bracelets and necklaces. Her hair was as black as a crow’s wing. I don’t know if anyone ever noticed me, not with a woman like that standing in a spotlight before them. And then along came Covid. The gig ended. The gig had paid quite well and had included a stateroom and meals and a chance to see some of Africa, but Melanie had grown weary of seeing the same faces for too many nights in a row and especially having to deal with the drunken men who hit on her. Covid was her way to escape all that.
When the pandemic shut down the cruise ship gig, Melanie told me she needed to fly back to Vero Beach to be with her mother, who was getting on in years, to do her shopping for her so she could remain safely at home. We agreed that I would stay in Cape Town, waiting for the ship to start up again, and that she would fly back to be with me when it did. We Skyped daily for several weeks, then once a week, then not at all. The end was a tapering off of sorts, not a sudden one.
***
Olive stopped her humming and looked up at me with those fiery eyes, but I managed to ask her her name. Her surname was Coreejes. I told her mine — Kyle Rosenstein — and asked her where she lived. I knew it wasn’t anywhere near Vredehoek, where I was renting an Air BnB room. Vredehoek is one of the more expensive Cape Town neighbourhoods, right at the base of Cape Town’s iconic Table Mountain. Clouds come off the summit of the mountain and flow down it, spilling into the upper reaches of Vredehoek. Many of the homes there date back to colonial days, more than a hundred years ago, and have a distinctive Dutch design with gables and sharply-pitched roofs .
Olive told me she lived in a section of Cape Town called Langa. I knew it. It had potholed streets, and the only views from the windows of homes there were of the wall of the place next door, often a squatter’s shack slapped together from scraps of sheet-metal and plywood. Some of these shacks had used tires on the roofs to prevent the howling Cape Town wind from tearing off the plastic or tar-paper.
“You’re a long way from Langa,” I said. Langa was about 45 minutes away by what are called taxis, Toyota Hiace vans, which gather at the train station.
“What am I to do?” she said.
Standing there on one leg, she had the look of one of those graceful water birds that goes along the shoreline of a pond. I asked her for her phone number and she gave it to me and we connected on WhatsApp. That was as far as I wanted to go on our first meeting. I didn’t want her to think I was like that man who’d hit on her. I said, “My dinner’s turning cold.”
“Goodbye,” she said. “Thank you for your talking with me.”
“Be careful,” I said.
“I try.”
She smiled a doleful smile, and I walked off, heading up the hill and went over a pedestrian bridge to the house I had a room in and unlocked the security gate, then the front door, and once I inside sat at the community dining table and took out my lasagna and garlic bread and beer and had dinner. After that I went to my room on the second floor. Across the street there was a park. Now and then someone would set up a makeshift tent there, and the police would come along and run them off. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for them, but, well, Cape Town was overrun with homeless people and those in the more affluent neighbourhoods didn’t want them in the parks.
During the day of those pandemic days, I had nothing much to do but practice my guitar, but as I did Olive often occupied my thoughts. I passed by that corner every day or so and spoke with her. She’d lost her leg in a taxi accident when she was twelve. She lived with her mother and two brothers and a sister in a two-room shack. Her father had walked out on the family, her mother had told her, which might not have been quite true. Olive got to suspecting that her mother had run him off by poisoning him, in an attempt to collect survivor benefits. But he hadn’t died. He caught on to what his wife was doing and vanished. He’d been scratching out an income by working construction, even with one hand. An I-beam had smashed the hand of the other. Olive’s mother was able to collect some child maintenance money from the government after he disappeared, and then, when Olive was 15, she told Olive to get out and find work or find somewhere else to live. Olive, like many Coloureds, had few skills. She was lucky not to be pregnant and married. Many Coloureds were by that age. She decided to panhandle. She was 22 when we met.
One day after I’d given her a few beef pies she began to sing “My Man,” that famous Billie Holiday song. When she’d finished, I said, “Your voice is very warm.”
She stared back at me. Had I crossed a line? I wondered. Then, to my relief, she finally said, “Thank you.”
“Maybe we should have dinner together one night?” I said.
“Why?” she asked.
“I want to talk with you.”
She looked down at her stump, then at me, and said, “Many men want me.”
She’d suddenly become a bit guarded but managed a smile, though an enigmatic one.
“Maybe one day,” she then said.
I said goodbye and went back to the house, thinking there was no hope of a future with her.
Desdemona, a large black woman from Johannesburg, also had a room in that house. She’d come to Cape Town to look for work, got stuck there because of Covid, and spent most of her days drinking wine and talking about how bored she was.
She was at the community dining room table with me, where I was eating my chicken diner.
“Something wrong?” she asked.
I ate some chicken, some chips. “No,” I said, “Nothing, really.” I drank some beer.
Desdemona sipped her Chenin Blanc, staring at me over the rim of the glass. “How long has it been?” she asked. I’d told her about Melanie and me. Also, there was a Danish couple who’d taken a room in the house because they, too, had gotten stuck in South Africa. The Dutch government wasn’t allowing its citizens to return home if they were in South Africa. The couple went at it every night and made no attempt to conceal the orgasmic howls coming from their room, which adjoined Desdemona’s.
I finished up my chicken and beer, said good-night to Desdemona, and went to my room and washed my hands before picking up my guitar and playing a Cole Porter standard that Melanie had sung. I whispered, “Night and day, you are the one/Only you beneath the moon or under the sun/Whether near to me or far/It’s no matter, darling, where you are/I think of you/Night and day, day and night, why is it so/That this longing for you follows wherever I go?”
The next day on my way to Food Lover’s, Olive wasn’t at the corner, as she always had been. I’d been thinking of her, even dreaming of her, the night before. But I wasn’t so troubled by her not being there, just disappointed. I did have her phone number. So I sent her a text. She never read it. Instead, she blocked me. I was, if not heartbroken, certainly puzzled and dejected. Perhaps it had all been a pipe dream, I thought, my expectations.
One afternoon a few days later I saw a man at that corner. His face was badly burned. It looked like melted plastic. The burn had closed one of his eyes, and the other was just a sliver above a crescent of red. He was a Coloured, too.
I went up to him and asked, “Where is Olive?”
“A few rand for the children, sir, to buy some food? Please, captain?” he said.
“There was a girl here before you. She had one leg.”
“For the children, captain,” he said, pressing his hands together, as if in prayer. What could I do but hand him a ten rand note, less than a dollar?
“Thank you, sir,” he said, “thank you.”
He then took a pack of cigarettes from a shirt pocket, tucked one into a corner of his mouth, and cupped his hands around it to light it in the wind.
That evening my loneliness became more acute. I had a curry dinner with Desdemona; we drank her wine and laughed and made jokes about the Danish couple. The wine loosened me up and I was about to suggest that we continue our conversation in my room but resisted, fortunately. You see, I happened to come across Olive on Upper Kloof Street the next day in an area where there is a concentration of bars and restaurants, clubs and liquor shops, and, what went along with these, pickpockets, thieves, panhandlers, and drug dealers. I’d gone to Upper Kloof now and then to look for a gig.
When Olive saw me, though, she turned and went on up the street as fast as she could, which was amazingly fast, almost as fast as I could run. She purposely crossed in front of a MyCiti bus, just as the bus was coming down the hill from Camps Bay, but I wasn’t going to let up. The bus driver, a Xhosa, blasted the horn, then stuck his head out a window and shouted, “Stupid Coloured!”
The bus went by, and I crossed Upper Kloof behind the bus and caught up with Olive, a bit out of breath by then, and put a hand on her shoulder and, between gasps for breath, said, “Why?”
She leaned up against a stone building, her crutches dangling from her arms, her head turned down, but not even then could she hide the blue crescent in the socket of her left eye, which had remained swollen. The bruise was tinged yellow. Because of me? I wondered. Had her boss heard about us? Why had he done this? She then looked up at me, and I was paralyzed by those beautiful eyes. They had the most unusual mixture of bitterness and remorse and regret and anger. I couldn’t walk away from her. I just couldn’t. It would’ve been so much easier if we’d never met again, but that possibility was far behind us now, dashed by coincidence, of all things. What remained between us was the future.
Perhaps to frighten me off, she said, “My boss is watching.”
I didn’t believe her but asked, “Where?”
“There. He wearing blue tracksuit.” She pointed to him with the tip of her crutch, as if it were now not a leg but an arm and the tip a finger at the end of that arm.
I saw a man with another man under a staircase to some second floor shops in a complex of shops across the street. He and the other man looked to be engaged in a drug deal. Heroin, I’d heard, was plentiful in Cape Town.
He finished the deal and looked up the street and saw me and started my way. I should’ve done what a sensible man would’ve done and run, but I couldn’t.
“Go!” Olive said. “Go!”
“I can’t,” I said.
“Why?” she said.
“You know why,” I said.
I stood my ground.
Her boss was a Coloured, too. He came at me with a threatening grinning. All his front teeth were missing, a rite of passage among some Coloureds, to have them yanked out.
“Captain,” he said, “what can I do for you?”
“Olive,” I said.
He looked at her and said something I couldn’t understand, and she went off, down to a street corner, crossed the street, and stood where there were some bars and clubs. The curfew had been lifted on these places by then. People were catching up on their drinking.
“One hour, one thousand rand,” he said. That was just short of a hundred dollars.
“I’m not interested in that,” I said.
He put his face up close to mine. I could smell the mix of liquor and tobacco on his breath. He put a hand in a coat pocket and from it took a switchblade. I suppose he was about to pop it open when we both heard Olive scream.
This fat, drunk white man had his arm around her. His drinking partner, only slightly less fat, was laughing. The two fat men were both wearing black leather motorcycle jackets and had long, white beards that made them look like elves, save for the leather jackets.
I ran off down the street to Olive, crossed Upper Kloof in front of a bus, and got the fat man off her just as his friend fell over from laughter. A few people had gathered to watch. One man came forward and helped me up. “Good on you,” he said. And then I heard a horn sound and the shriek of tires. I turned around, to see Olive’s boss lying in the middle of Upper Kloof. The windshield of a bus was shattered where his head had struck it.
Olive mumbled something and spat in his direction.
***
We were at Camps Bay Park in the shadow of Table Mountain. I was teaching Olive how to swim in a tidal pool pond there. With her copper hair flowing in the clean water behind her, and her one leg, she resembled a mermaid, honestly.
When she got the hang of swimming, she stopped and stood and shouted, “I can swim!” bringing attention to herself. A man nearby said, “Yes, you can. You’re lovely.”
We swam some more and then changed clothes and went up to a park, where there was a spread of grass and several palms and cypress trees, to have lunch. We found a bench that had a view of the sea. Olive’s thick hair had remained wet and was matted down on her shoulders.
“I never think I swim,” she said. Her eyes sparkled.
In the distance were some windsurfers hopping across the blue waves. Sometimes one of them would soar into the air and twirl around and come back down onto the sea with a splash and continue on.
“One day I do that,” Olive said.
What could I say but, “You can do whatever you want.”
Behind us was Table Mountain. A couple of hang-gliders had taken off from it and were circling around in the blue sky. It was that kind of day, rare in Cape Town, when the wind wasn’t blowing so hard and people could sit at sidewalk tables drinking cappuccinos and flat whites and not fear that their cups would be knocked over.
I’d bought some salami sandwiches and crisps and biscuits and a couple of bottles of ginger beer at a Pick ‘n’ Pay on the main street that runs along beside the park. We had a picnic under a cypress tree. Sea gulls squawked all round us, hoping for a handout, but we remained on guard.
After we’d finished our lunch, I took my guitar from its case and began to play “Crazy He Calls Me.” Olive, without my prompting, stood and got in front of me and let her crutches fall up against the bench. Standing there on one leg, she started to sing. A crowd soon gathered. They all had their eyes on her. Now and then one of them would step forward and put some rand in my guitar case.
Olive was like that water bird I’d mentioned earlier, very graceful. On this day she had on a calico skirt and a blue crew-neck sweater that I’d bought for her at an H&M. Her eyes were closed. She might have been dreaming as she sang. I don’t know.
Every now and then a soft breeze would come off the ocean and ruffle the the hem of the skirt and the ends of her copper-coloured hair as it dried in the sun.
***
James Roth, a writer of fiction and nonfiction, has had work published in several international magazines and journals. His first novel, The Opium Addict, is a noir mystery set in Meiji-era Japan. An essay of his, “Black Lives Don’t Matter in Zimbabwe,” was a finalist in a Missouri Review contest, and a memoir in “Open: Journal of Arts and Letters,” “Jacob: a Greendale Garden Boy,” was nominated for a Pushcart. He has recently completed a noir coming-of-age novel set in 1963 Alabama, My Alabama Story, and a second literary/mystery novel “A Prodigal Daughter.” He has travelled widely in Southeast Asia and has lived in Japan, China, Jordan, South Africa, and Zimbabwe but likes to say he was “Made in Japan.” His parents lived there during the American occupation, but he was, to his and his mother’s lasting regret, born in an American military hospital in the U.S. Golf is his game. Motorcycling in the mountains of Zimbabwe is his pleasure.