South African Fable

...over Jan Smuts Airport great jet-planes from Europe circled and turned north, unable to land, their pilots unable to make sense of what they heard on their radios...

...Yet, considering that within a couple of hours everyone in the country was totally blind, there were relatively few fires, few floods...

...they tumbled out of moving trains on to embankments and into tunnels...

...on railway lines, airports, oil refineries, building sites, fuming refuse heaps in the middle of the shanty-towns...

...They were blinded at first by it, as they had been previously by darkness...

...The crowds rose from their segregated dwellings and went in their segregated trains to work, as on every other day, in the jobs allotted to them by the Reservation of Occupations Act...

...Watchmen dozed over their braziers on city corners, telephone operators nodded in front of their quiet exchanges, policemen slumped over the counters of their chargeoffices, maintenance men on mines yawned in brightly-lit offices and took their eyes off the dials they were supposed to be watching...

...Safe, protected, segregated, the whites stretched themselves out on their beds, and their servants did the same in the backyards of houses or in dormitories on the top of blocks of flats...

...The country was revealed, as on every other day, in a strong, clear, unmodulated light...

...The sky lightened slowly...

...long silver streaks appeared in the east, wavered, fell back, sprang forward again...

...and no one knew why it left him and his neighbors...

...they strained to hear known voices and were grateful for the sympathy expressed in unknown ones...

...Demented by terror, some drove home in their cars and did not stop for the people they crushed in the streets...

...the telephone exchanges were deluged with calls that went unanswered...

...Machines clattered and roared in the printing-works of the morning newspapers, but long before dawn most of the people who had been working in these offices were asleep too...

...they drowned themselves in their private swimming pools...

...A strange calm fell upon particular houses, farms, streets, even on whole towns and villages, as the first terror the day had brought began to give way to exhaustion...

...And millions nodded their shamed agreement...

...what had been black before was now grey...

...Trees, houses, factories, trains, ironstone koppies, pillars, walls, flickered and then were still, in place, standing there as if they had never been lost, never become so many unknown, unidentifiable surfaces and weights...

...they repeated to each other the rumors and stories they heard...

...devout theologians, who night after night conned their scriptures for texts to justify these laws, closed first their heavy tomes and then their weary eyes...

...The night was cloudless, moonless, starlit, silent on the veld, silent even in the cities, where only an occasional police patrol car moved about with its headlights brushing the empty streets before it, or some lover drove back reluctantly to his bachelor room...

...How long the calm lasted in each place none could say...

...They tripped down flights of stairs...

...no mines collapsed...

...Under thornbushes, on the verandas of houses, in parks and roadsides and beds, men and women welcomed whatever was soft, gentle, nourishing, delicate, that came to them out of the darkness...

...The cry of thanksgiving rose again and again...

...they were burned in the fires they started...

...people uttered endearments they had not known they could use...

...Then, with that sharp crackling sound that a bolt of lightning makes when it is directly overhead and is heard as well as seen, sight returned to them all, in an instant...

...Food was passed from hand to hand, and people drank together at running taps...

...The fulfillment of their longings revealed to them what their longings had always been...

...men tore at their eyelids and found that they were open—yet they could not see...

...The above story also appears in the British New Statesman...

...Announcers on the radio, who had earlier uttered appeals for calm that no one had asked them to deliver, were now shrieking obscenities over the air...

...All over South Africa people went to sleep in the usual way...

...Now that it was over, even the indefatigable cabinet ministers, who worked so hard making laws to segregate white from black, put down their papers and rested...

...most of them shrieked with a strange kind of relief when they found that they too had suddenly been stricken by blindness...

...no trains ran into one another at high speeds...

...Then people shrieked and flailed around them as they had done in the first terrible minutes after waking to their blindness...

...on the mine dumps of Johannesburg and the white coasts of the Peninsula...

...Many people lost their lives within minutes of waking...

...the living rose and breathed, hardly daring to blink, lest they should again be plunged into darkness...

...they fell down lift-shafts and died in hospital beds because there was no one to attend to them...

...This last fact was striking proof, the government declared in one of its numerous official statements after the catastrophe, of how necessary it is for the protection of both white and black that the two groups should be segregated from one another even more carefully than in the past...

...They sat in great rings in the streets, hands interlinked, or apart in couples that clung to one another...

...Dan Jacobson is a South African novelist who now makes his home in England...

...they bruised themselves against walls, blundered into parked cars...

...Other Africans slept in their new, mass-produced huts in the townships around the cities, or in their old hovels of flattened iron, sacking and mud on farms and shanty-towns...

...they gassed themselves in their kitchens, electrocuted themselves in their bathrooms...

...they clutched at one another in passageways...

...not even those whose work usually had them up by that time...

...Fewer screams were heard...

...The dead and injured lay still...

...outbursts of laughter were followed by sighs, the touch again of hands, lips, legs, bodies...

...A great cry of relief rose to the sky, to the sun itself, which stood over the country at high noon...

...But, though the calm might leave one group, one street, one dorp or town, it passed on to another, which no longer resisted the darkness, but submitted to it patiently...

...Men and women got to their feet slowly, their hands across their brows...

...Hands caressed faces lingeringly, following contours seen but never felt...

...Switches in factories were accidentally thrown by the fumbling hands of watchmen who had slept, and the machines began to devour the boots and blankets and car bodies they had been making the previous evening, and then began devouring themselves and the unfortunate people who stumbled into them...

...Mothers screamed for their children, and children lay in their beds and yelled in terror at the darkness around them...

...some raped, stole and clubbed at the people around them in a frenzy of horror at their clumsy crawlings and clawings...

...incorruptible judges, who punished the breakers of the law, were able to relax at last...

...The visitation was over...

...In disgust, remorse and fear, more murders were committed, and more people took their own lives, after sight had been restored to them than when they had been in darkness...

...then changed into one of fury...

...Some of them heard their alarm-clocks ringing, opened their eyes, saw how dark it still seemed to be and went back to sleep...

...And the cry of relief became momentarily one of regret for what they were losing...

...people clung to one another for company...

...But hardly anyone saw this...

...Those who were safe groped about cautiously—touching, feeling, calling to one another, resting where they lay or sat...

...But the streets, the roads between dorps in the country, the dusty double-tracks that ran through the veld from farm to farm, all remained deserted...

...on the sugar plantations of Natal and the tangled bush of the lowveld...

...they waited for help from the outside world to come...

...And the Almighty, wearily foreseeing this unwelcome conclusion to the lesson He had intended to give His people in South Africa —a conclusion utterly familiar to Him, in its essentials, from many other times and places—changed His mind, and let the South Africans of all races wake up in the morning with their vision unimpaired, after all...

...People working on nightshift wondered irritably when their reliefs would be coming, drank coffee from their vacuum flasks, and fell into a doze...

...The stars lost their glitter...

...it shone on the mountains of the Drakensberg and the bald earth of the Karroo...

...so familiar that to all of them it was as if they had experienced this darkness before and dreamed in it of the touch of fingers in their hair, of the sound of the voices that whispered hoarsely in their ears, of the smell of sweat and perfume in their nostrils...

...It was impossible for them to see at once what was around them: each single thing their eyes fell upon seemed to jump separately into its place, as if the world were reassembling itself before their startled eyes...

...and then it died away suddenly, as people saw whose hands they were holding, who it was that had comforted them and whom they had comforted, with whom they had exchanged their entreaties and endearments...

...Until, groping, staggering, crawling on hands and knees, shrieking, cursing, praying, men and women emerged from their houses and huts...

...sightless, shameless, beyond loss, they gained what they had not known they had missed until it was given to them...

...as they recognized what the longings were that they had fulfilled in the secrecy given them by darkness...

...The sun rose clear above the horizon...

...Men and women plunged to their deaths from balconies...

...and remained asleep, for no one came to wake them...

...they sank into the darkness, unable to help themselves, forced to put their trust in it and in each other...

...No one could come...

...And as dangerous as those who had lost their sight were the few who had not slept and whom the plague of blindness was slower in striking...

...And much of what they touched, heard and smelled was new to them and yet deeply familiar...

...they stumbled over curbstones and fell into the streets...

...They comforted each other, sang hymns, huddled together closely, and more closely still, as close as they could get...

...no gasworks exploded...

...they echoed each other's prayers...

...faintly, tenuously, other colors appeared, blue and rose in the sky, brown on the earth...