[Tsotsi’s] knowledge was without any edge of enjoyment. It was simply the way it should be, feeling in this the way other men feel when they see the sun in the morning. The big men, the brave ones, stood down because of him, the fear was of him, the hate was for him. It was all there because of him. He knew he was. He knew he was there, at that moment, leading the others to take one on the trains.
[Tsotsi’s] own eyes in front of a mirror had not been able to put together the eyes, and the nose, and the mouth and the chin, and make a man with meaning. His own features in his own eyes had been as meaningless as a handful of stones picked up at random in the street outside his room. He allowed himself no thought of himself, he remembered no yesterdays, and tomorrow existed only when it was the present, living moment. He was as old as that moment, and his name was the name, in a way, of all men.
They stayed that way until the street cried, then laughter, and Soekie started her song again at the beginning, staying like that, Boston still, Tsotsi seemingly the same as always, the one in disbelief, the other at the explosive moment of action, and this moment precipitated when Boston whispered: ‘You must have a soul Tsotsi. Everybody’s got a soul. Every living human being has got a soul!’
The knife was not only his weapon, but also a fetish, a talisman that conjured away bad spirits and established him securely in his life.
He didn’t see the man, he saw the type.
This was man. This small, almost ancient, very useless and abandoned thing was the beginning of a man.
Tsotsi knew one thing very definitely now. Starting last night, and maybe even before that, because sitting there with a quiet mind to the events of the past hours it seemed almost as if there might have been a beginning before the bluegum trees, but regardless of where or when, he had started doing things that did not fit into the pattern of his life. There was no doubt about this. The pattern was too simple, too clear, woven as it had been by his own hands, using his knife like a shuttle to carry the red thread of death and interlace it with others stained in equally sombre hues. The baby did not belong and certainly none of the actions that had been forced on him as a result of its presence, like buying baby milk, or feeding it or cleaning it or hiding it with more cunning and secrecy than other people hid what they had from him.
Gumboot had been allocated a plot near the centre. He was buried by the Reverend Henry Ransome of the Church of Christ the Redeemer in the township. The minister went through the ritual with uncertainty. He was disturbed, and he knew it and that made it worse. If only he had known the name of the man he was burying. This man, O Lord! What man? This one, fashioned in your likeness.
It was the awareness of alternatives that disturbed Tsotsi and seemed to paralyse his will. Up to that moment he had lived his life as the victim of dark impulses. They had been ready, rising to his moments of need all through his life. Where they came from he never knew, and their reasons for coming he had never questioned. What he realized now was that something had tampered with the mechanism that had governed his life, inhibiting its function.
[Morris] looked at the street and the big cars with their white passengers warm inside like wonderful presents in bright boxes, and the carefree, ugly crowds of the pavement, seeing them all with baleful feelings.
It is for your gold that I had to dig. That is what destroyed me. You are walking on stolen legs. All of you.
Even in this there was no satisfaction. As if knowing his thoughts, they stretched their thin, unsightly lips into bigger smiles while the crude sounds of their language and laughter seemed even louder. A few of them, after buying a newspaper, dropped pennies in front of him. He looked the other way when he pocketed them.
Are his hands soft? he would ask himself, and then shake his head in anger and desperation at the futility of the question. But no sooner did he stop asking it than another would occur. Has he got a mother? This question was persistent. Hasn’t he got a mother? Didn’t she love him? Didn’t she sing him songs? He was really asking how do men come to be what they become. For all he knew others might have asked the same question about himself. There were times when he didn’t feel human. He knew he didn’t look it.
What is sympathy? If you had asked Tsotsi this, telling him that it was his new experience, he would have answered: like light, meaning that it revealed. Pressed further, he might have thought of darkness and lighting a candle, and holding it up to find Morris Tshabalala within the halo of its radiance. He was seeing him for the first time, in a way that he hadn’t seen him before, or with a second sort of sight, or maybe just more clearly. […]
But that wasn’t all. The same light fell on the baby, and somehow on Boston too, and wasn’t that the last face of Gumboot Dhlamini there, almost where the light ended and things weren’t so clear anymore. And beyond that still, what? A sense of space, of an infinity stretching away so vast that the whole world, the crooked trees, the township streets, the crowded, wheezing rooms, might have been waiting there for a brighter, intense revelation.
I must give him something, he thought. I must give this strange and terrible night something back for all it has given me. With the instinct of his kind, he turned to beauty and gave back the most beautiful thing he knew.
‘Mothers love their children. I know. I remember. They sing us songs when we are small. I’m telling you, tsotsi. Mothers love their children.’
After this there was silence for the words to register and make their meaning, for Tsotsi to stand up and say in reply: ‘They don’t. I’m telling you, I know they don’t,’ and then he walked away.
So she carried on, outwardly adjusting the pattern of her life as best she could, like taking in washing, doing odd cleaning jobs in the nearby white suburb. Inwardly she had fallen into something like a possessive sleep where the same dream is dreamt over and over again. She seldom smiled now, kept to herself and her baby, asked no favours and gave none, hoarding as it were the moments and things in her life.
On she came, until a foot or so away the chain stopped her, and although she pulled at this with her teeth until her breathing was tense and rattled she could go no further, so she lay down there, twisting her body so that the hindquarters fell apart and, like that, fighting all the time, her ribs heaving, she gave birth to the stillborn litter, and then died beside them.
Petah turned to David. ‘Willie no good. You not Willie. What is your name? Talk! Trust me, man. I help you.’
David’s eyes grew round and vacant, stared at the darkness. A tiny sound, a thin squeaking voice, struggled out: ‘David…’ it said, ‘David! But no more! He dead! He dead too, like Willie, like Joji.’
So he went out with them the next day and scavenged. The same day an Indian chased him away from his shop door, shouting and calling him a tsotsi. When they went back to the river that night, they started again, trying names on him: Sam, Willie, and now Simon, until he stopped them.
‘My name,’ he said, ‘is Tsotsi.’
The baby and David, himself that is, at first confused, had now merged into one and the same person. The police raid, the river, and Petah, the spider spinning his web, the grey day and the smell of damp newspapers were a future awaiting the baby. It was outside itself. He could sympathize with it in its defencelessness against the terrible events awaiting it.
‘Last night I was sad and I bent on my knees and did pray for something and a voice said, “Why should I give you what you ask me for, when you got no milk for babies.” Please give him to me.’
‘What are you going to do with him?’
‘Keep him.’
‘Why?’
He threw back his head, and she saw the shine of desperation on his forehead as he struggled with that mighty word. Why, why was he? No more revenge. No more hate. The riddle of the yellow bitch was solved—all of this in a few days and in as short a time the hold on his life by the blind, black, minute hands had grown tighter. Why?
‘Because I must find out,’ he said.
‘Why Boston? What did do it?’
A sudden elation lit up Boston’s face; he tried to smile, but his lips wouldn’t move, and his nose started throbbing, but despite the pain he whispered back at Tsotsi: ‘You are asking me about God.’
‘God.’
‘You are asking me about God, Tsotsi. About God, about God.’
To an incredible extent a peaceful existence was dependent upon knowing just when to say no or yes to the white man.
‘Come man and join in the singing.’
‘Me!’
‘I’m telling you anybody can come. It’s the House of God. I ring His bell. Will you come?’
‘Yes.’
‘Listen tonight, you hear. Listen for me. I will call you to believe in God.’
It was a new day and what he had thought out last night was still there, inside him. Only one thing was important to him now. ‘Come back,’ the woman had said. ‘Come back, Tsotsi.’
I must correct her, he thought. ‘My name is David Madondo.’
He said it aloud in the almost empty street, and laughed. The man delivering milk heard him, and looking up said, ‘Peace my brother.’
‘Peace be with you’, David Madondo replied and carried on his way.
The slum clearance had entered a second and decisive stage. The white township had grown impatient. The ruins, they said, were being built up again and as many were still coming in as they carried off in lorries to the new locations or in vans to the jails. So they had sent in the bulldozers to raze the buildings completely to the ground.
They unearthed him minutes later. All agreed that his smile was beautiful, and strange for a tsotsi, and that when he lay there on his back in the sun, before someone had fetched a blanket, they agreed that it was hard to believe what the back of his head looked like when you saw the smile.
