There Should Have Been Five. Marilyn Honikman
there? I sent money to my grandfather so he could buy those two cows. Sipho, did your mother say anything about gold mines?” he asked.
Sipho shook his head.
“You know South Africa is fighting a war?”
Sipho nodded. “Against Hitler. Against Germany.”
“And Italy,” Job added. “The Nazis and the fascists.”
“My father thought Jan Smuts was right to fight Hitler. Because Hitler’s not a man you can talk to.”
“I agree,” Job said. “But now so many miners are going away to fight that the mines are looking for men. I work at the mine, and sometimes at the dynamite factory, but I stay there at the mine. Come back with me. They will listen to your heart and, if it is strong, if it beats slowly, you can work underground.”
“Am I old enough?” Sipho asked.
“You’re quite tall. Are you eighteen?”
Sipho shook his head, a little embarrassed. “I don’t know. Maybe sixteen, maybe nearly seventeen.”
“I know plenty of miners who don’t know how old they are,” Job said confidently. “And perhaps the mine bosses won’t ask. The mine is dangerous, it’s dark and too hot, and the food is bad. But you need not stay long. Save your money to buy a couple of cows and you can come home in a year. I’m going back after Christmas. Think about it.”
*
And so, on a night in January 1941, Sipho sat on a hard bench next to a sleeping Job as their train steamed through bright lights into a town. The brakes screeched, the coaches clanged together and men shouted. A large white board appeared on a platform.
“SPRINGS,” Sipho read.
Job awoke and he led Sipho through the streets of a strange world. There were men who seemed angry for no reason, and policemen with batons, and other men who looked fearful. Job and Sipho walked out of the town until they reached a large gate in front of the grim compound of a gold mine. Silhouetted against the moonlit sky was a tall metal structure with a large wheel, higher than anything Sipho had ever seen, and with red lights that seemed to float above it. Under his feet, the ground felt unsteady as he gazed up.
“Just until you can buy some cows,” Job reassured him. “If you know it’s not forever, it’s easier. They will check your heart and lungs in the morning and then sign you on.”
Job showed his pass to the mine policeman at the gate and told him who Sipho was. Inside the compound they entered a long room where a light shone through high steel windows onto twenty concrete bunks, and eighteen sleeping men. The men did not stir as Sipho and Job found the empty bunks. Dirty clothes were piled on the floor next to the bunks; Sipho saw that there was nowhere else to put them.
Wrapping his blankets around himself that strange night, he lay awake on the bare concrete bunk, listening to snores and grunts and a high whistling, whirring sound from outside. All night he worried – Will I be able to do this work so deep underground? What will it be like down there in the dark? – until at dawn a bell clanged.
Sipho trained at the mine school for a week. At one point a man from the dynamite factory came to give the new miners a lesson. Job came into the room with him and translated the lesson from English into Funagalo, the strange language they spoke on the mine. Sipho listened, amazed; Job spoke such beautiful isiZulu, and this language was like that of a small child.
In Funagalo, Job told them, “You will not be working with dynamite but, because it is so dangerous, you must know something about it. We don’t ever hurry with dynamite. We get things ready and then we work calmly.”
The instructor showed them what a fuse wire was, and how long it needed to be, and he told them they would all need to stand far away, near the shaft, before the fuse wire was lit and the dynamite exploded. Sipho looked anxiously at the fuse wire as if to memorise its length.
A week later, Sipho became a trammer.
On his first day of work, he entered the mine lift with thirty other new recruits, all wide-eyed. A few were hyperventilating. The lift dropped deep into the earth’s crust, and travelled for nearly twenty minutes to reach the level where he would work. He had expected to be afraid, but, when the lift opened, he stepped calmly out into a thick, woolly blackness, although the heat made his head ache. The lamp on his helmet made a small pool of light: Sipho could see where to put his feet, but nothing else unless he lifted his head. He spent the day loading loose rocks on to a tram, which he had to push to the mine shaft and then back, filling it again and again. He was so tired at the end of the ten-hour shift that he fell deeply asleep as soon as he dropped onto the concrete bunk.
The heat, the dark and the dust underground were grim, but Sipho thought he could get used to that.
I won’t ever get used to the izinduna taunting us with their sjamboks, he thought, or the food that is sour, or the dirty rooms we sleep in. A whole year of this before I can get home?
The explosions terrified him, so he always made sure he was well away from the fuse wires when they were lit, and he counted the seconds before the dynamite exploded. The blast seemed to suck the air out of his lungs, and dust filled them when he breathed again.
Some of the mineworkers spent their Sundays drinking sorghum beer in the shacks behind the mine. Sipho heard piano music and a woman singing in English, a song about a train. As the months passed, Sipho thought of joining them; it might make life feel easier.
“Oh no, not me!” Job told him. “Those guys will have to come back next year because their money will be gone. Stick it out, Sipho, and save your money to buy your cows! The cows will be your bank.”
The next week Job returned to work at the dynamite factory, translating for the trainer. One night he spoke quietly to Sipho.
“I’ve met quite a woman, Sipho!” he said dreamily. “There, at the dynamite factory. She works in the office. Zanele … ” Job seemed to savour the sound of her name. “Her family comes from a valley near ours. She is clever and beautiful, and she has a lovely laugh. I think she likes me. But the lobola! They will want a lot of cows for the bride price … ”
5
General Smuts makes a promise
“Still not enough for lobola, Sipho.”
It was a warm Sunday afternoon a few months after Sipho had started working, and the mine was quiet. Sipho watched as Job paged through his post office book, counting up his savings. Job sat on an empty paraffin can out in the sun, while Sipho sharpened a long-handled razor.
“Cut it short. I like the parting on the left,” Job instructed.
Sipho carefully shaved a straight, narrow parting through Job’s hair, thinking while he did so that he had never known Job to trouble himself so much over a woman.
“Anyone would think you had somewhere special to go … like a dynamite factory,” Sipho said.
Job smiled but kept his head still while Sipho trimmed the edges.
Many of the miners had gone to a dance competition and their buses were shortly due to return, so Sipho and Job did not look up when they heard the rumble of a large motor vehicle coming into the compound. They did look up when, instead of loud laughter and talking, they heard quiet murmuring.
Three men in khaki uniforms climbed out of an army lorry. They set up a table and three folding chairs, and were already sitting at the table when the buses did return.
“Gather around!” one of the men called through the megaphone as the miners milled around. “We have news that will interest you all,” he said.
The man told them their country needed them to join the army to fight Hitler.
“We have contracts with the mine!” one of the miners shouted. “You’re wasting your time. We aren’t allowed