A Single Swallow Read Online Free PDF Page B

a while, whenever we kept pace with a truck or a car, the isolation seemed only to grow around us as our machines kept company.
    The dining car was the first mixed-race place I had eaten in; behind me, a table of large men discussed business and put away pounds of thin chicken, fat chips and Coke. We stopped at Beaufort West in the early hours. Smokers drifted up and down the platform. A small boy did a handstand and the station lights were thronged with insects.
    Kimberley was cool, briefly, at seven a.m. A man in tattered clothes who lived near the station and happened to be on the lookout for opportunities got out of his car (telling his dogs to shut up and his wife and a daughter that all was well) and drove me to the airport, where he was in charge of security.
    â€˜I do this because I have kids,’ he said. He said a little about what it was like to be ‘coloured’ and talked about his brilliant daughter. Amazing to me, he seemed to pine for the apartheid era – for the certainty of its order, and the strength of its leadership.
    â€˜Things were better before,’ he said, with an awkward laugh. So many said the same in the same way. The ultimate heresy is spoken all but freely, in a kind of chant.
    â€˜At least we knew where we stood.’
    At the airport I sat in and out of the sun while it got hotter and waited while the hire car was made ready. The car, a rendezvous in Bloemfontein with a swallow expert and the visas were the only pieces of organisation I had put into the otherwise vastly empty map of Africa.
    When it was ready I got into the car, a nondescript thing which made me feel like a travelling salesman, pointed it toward Bloemfontein, and drove. I set out across the vast emptiness of the Free State, feeling myself a tiny speck, smaller than a swallow in the gulfs of space which began at the roadside and lifted over flat land, which rose and filled with nothing but weather light and clouds as far as the furthest horizon. What a privilege and a pleasure it is to be alone in so much space! Tiny and inconsequential in the car, I had nothing to be concerned with, no obligations to fulfil. I felt a strange mixture of freedom and pointlessness. The self-containment of the solitary traveller gives you an other-worldly, off-to-one-side lightness of being. You have not the slightest bearing on events. You cannot even converse about the business of the day, supposing you have heard about it on the radio. You do not matter. The irrelevance of the traveller, your absence of responsibility, most of the time, for anything but yourself is a strange condition. You might as well be a ghost.
    The country stretched away without break or end, its vastness echoed and dwarfed by the greatness of the skies. On the horizon low outcropped hills surfaced above the gold-green plains. Here and there was darker land: bare earth absorbs more solar heat, which causes thermals of rising air, but otherwise I supposed it would be as monotonous to fly over as to drive. To imagine a swallow flying across it all: to think ahead, to see the journey in its entirety would be to beat your wings against forever. They must look at the next contour, and surely anticipate the next change in the wind and the air currents, but do they see further? To the next night, the next roost, the next river? Or do they exist wholly in the present, propelled and pulled by urges of instinct?
    Crossing the veldt the world seemed distant, as vague andcontingent as the day after tomorrow, but I came to Bloemfontein in the early afternoon. I became lost not long after reaching the town, meandering from black areas, where a market filled the road with an Africa I recognised – hundreds of people, colour, buses, exhaust, food stalls, cooking smells and the noise of voices – to white areas, where low houses hidden behind fences were laid out in a spacious, apparently deserted grid. I was rescued by a solicitous couple in a big white bakkie