Tales of the Metric System. Imraan Coovadia

lamb had begun to sizzle. Ann opened the door and admired it, watching the creepers of flame rise and fall at the back of the oven, and the burned brown crust appearing along the sides. The kitchen was warm with the smell of the meat. She rinsed a handful of mint leaves, tore them up, and mixed them into a pat of Crown butter. Outside it rained out of a clear sky, pouring for ten minutes, chattering on the roof.

      She stood at the window to watch the dark rain, which disappeared to reveal lines of white and blue stars across the heavens. On the far side of the harbour, where the seaside lights hadn’t yet been turned on, she thought she saw the flash of a shooting star. You didn’t often see them so close to sea level.

      The lamb was done long before Neil returned, along with an amount of potatoes, carrots, and turnips, which Ann placed out on the table under upturned dishes where the entering members of the Free University came to admire them.

      Every two or three minutes somebody rang the bell and she would go and escort them to the sitting room, where they waited for the session to begin, talking quietly among themselves or coming to ask her if they could use the telephone for some emergency. She didn’t mind the telephone bills, although she didn’t show them to Neil either. He would have been shocked, but then, like many people who were old-fashioned at heart, he couldn’t adjust to changes in the value of money. The rand was not as stable as the pound. It was a harbinger of the metric system.

      The Free University was open to anybody who wanted to expand his understanding, from government workers and municipal clerks to students from the Philosophy Department and others from Black Consciousness groups.

      No register was taken. Often, several Anglican clergymen arrived, both black and white. They had asked the permission of their bishop to attend. There were some young photographers who had started to document the townships, taking pictures of the magistrates’ courts and the municipal beer halls, as well as following the Black Marias in their patrols around the giant locations of Umlazi and KwaMashu. There was a young man, Lelo, who worked as a security guard at the petrol refinery on the Bluff and made it to their house by taking three different buses, and John Mantis, who wrote poetry and drew cartoons for the newspapers and collected books and pamphlets concerning freemasonry and demonology.

      Communists and liberals refused to participate. Nevertheless, Neil had recruited a number of workers and strike leaders from the councils that had appeared on the Durban docks and in the textiles factories.

      Some participants in the Free University had become friends. Archie Msimang, in his late fifties, had manners as impeccable as any of the Hunters’. Employed as a machinist in a workshop in Pinetown, Archie was the product of a former mission school, a barrel of a man coming to her shoulder, almost purple on his large and expressive countenance. His way of speaking, his way of halting halfway through a sentence to survey it to the end, reminded her of the priest who officiated over her wedding to Neil.

      The friendship went in both directions. Archie came to consult with Neil on a matter that had nothing to do with the Free University, some issue to do with his pass book or opening a savings account, but ended up sitting in the kitchen with Ann and talking, slowly and courteously, about his dilemmas until the afternoon vanished from the windows. She knew about the wife who had died suddenly on Boxing Day, his brother who left the country after Sharpeville and had never been heard of again, the woman he had begun to court who worked behind the counter of the bp garage.

      Ann was pleased when Archie came to see her. He was wearing a white shirt that bulged over his belt, and polyester suit trousers that must have been bought second-hand from his employer. Many of the small-business owners around Durban weren’t rich, having come with nothing from places like Edinburgh and Belfast to join in the boom. They brought their frugal habits, supplementing their income by selling their old clothes to their workers.

      Archie stood in the corridor, waiting for her to invite him inside.

      —Comrade Ann, good afternoon. Or I see it is already good evening.

      —Hello, Archie.

      He smiled at her and sniffed the air ostentatiously. She saw that the heel of his shoe was bound with Sellotape. He must be the same size as her son. She had bought extra pairs of shoes in Paris for Paul and was keeping them in boxes until he wore out the others.

      —I have been sent by the other comrades to inform you that, while we are waiting for Neil, you have truly awakened our appetites.

      —It’s a leg of lamb, Archie. It’s done and I am still waiting for my husband to pitch up. You think I should make everyone a plate?

      —I believe it would be appreciated.

      Archie came inside and took his usual chair at the table. He helped her to carve the lamb and put it on plates. She thought that Archie didn’t seem to have distinct political views. He seemed to be listening and trying to make up his mind. He was unusual by the standards of the Free University, which ran the gamut from outspoken communists to Christian socialists, pan-Africanists, black nationalists, revolutionary Muslims.

      There were the more practical members of the Free University who believed in a non-racial future, but pursued their business in the interim. That meant Royal Saloojee, the dentist who also had a stake in an insurance brokerage. Roy had latched onto Neil when he sold them life cover. Now he was selling insurance for fire and water damage, for illness and death benefits, to comrades, not to say doing their teeth on the side. He had put a bridge in for her.

      Archie helped Ann take the plates to the living room. He gave everybody a serviette, knife and fork, and then sat down to eat in front of the telephone. Nadia arrived and made herself at home. She sat beside Roy the dentist. He had brought some forms for her to sign dealing with the annual renewal of her policy. She tried to read through them while keeping half an ear on the proceedings. The discussion, which had been scheduled on Fanon, began without Neil.

      Ann watched without wanting to take part. She didn’t have any ideas of her own. There was some other principle in her heart today. She saw that, in each hour of this day, she had been unwilling to concede any defeat, whether to Lavigne or the Jaguar. Not to the Rabies nor to Curzon College, not to Neil, not to her son Paul, who needed to drink at sixteen and had landed them all in hot water. It was only at the spectacle of Nadia that her heart had turned over. She was sure that she had lost even before she started to resist. Her husband wouldn’t leave her in the lurch. At the same time he was capable of making her leave him.

      What was there to do? Her adversaries had the upper hand. Curzon College was as secure in its mentality as the Vatican. They made her ashamed to use the same language. The degeneration was there in the schools, in the misery of offices where they fingerprinted native men and where young white men scolded older men like Archie, and in the drumhead courts, and the racial signs posted along the beaches and in the bus stops, enforced by the Black Marias, which carried a dozen men in their cages.

      Neil appeared as the members of the Free University had begun to drift away. Archie had already left in Roy’s car. Lelo, Nadia, and John Mantis were at the door, where Neil talked to them for a few minutes and walked them to the end of the driveway. Then he came into the kitchen, looking surprised as if he had heard something unexpected, and unbuttoned his jacket to put it over the back of a chair. He sat down.

      In his shirt Neil was thinner and younger than the image fixed in her memory, his beard scarcely speckled with grey. He was again the man she had married in an Arniston church. In London or Paris, at thirty-five, Neil would count as a young man. Here he had Methuselah’s responsibilities.

      —I’m sorry, Ann. I should have warned you when the day went to pieces.

      —You should be sorry.

      She forgave him at once.

      —I really didn’t have time to get to a telephone. There was the issue of bail money. I had to go to the bank to get a draft. Some of the students had to be ferried between the police station and their homes. One lived far into Springfield, next to the power station. He says all the youngsters have asthma. He wanted me to write a petition for them. But forget about all of that. Tell me what happened with Lavigne.

      —He