The Impostor Read Online Free PDF Page B

didn’t used to be prostitutes.’ He slurped fiercely at his drink.
    ‘Not only to truck drivers,’ the older woman said, and the ginger man sank between his shoulders, because he took this as a reference to himself.
    ‘Now crime is starting here too,’ Fanie Prinsloo said gravely. ‘Two robberies last year. Never had that before up here. That’s also the road. It’s people passing through.’
    A sad-looking woman spoke up from behind the bar. She’d been sitting there the whole time, but Adam only now realized that she must be Fanie Prinsloo’s wife. ‘It isn’t our coloureds,’ she announced. ‘Our coloureds behave themselves.’
    ‘Except for the mayor,’ Fanie Prinsloo said, and silence fell again.
    In recent years, Adam had been experiencing a curious ambivalence when discussions of this nature came up. In the distant past, he had always been clear about his moral position, but that wasn’t the case any more. These days, he found himself taking the opposite stand to whatever political point had been raised. If people liked the new road, he would start to wonder what vices and problems the road might bring. On the other hand, if people said the road was a bad thing, he would think of it as progress and development. His ambivalence was genuine; there seemed to be both a radical and a reactionary buried in him. More than anything, it was this fault-line in his psyche that he thought of as his new South African self.
    In this particular conversation, the people in the bar were too uncertain themselves about the merits or dangers of the road for him to take a contrary position. But now that the mayor had been mentioned, the focus of the talk hardened. Everybody in the room seemed to dislike the mayor.
    ‘You have a coloured mayor?’ Adam asked, astounded. It didn’t seem possible, not here.
    ‘Oh, yes,’ Fanie Prinsloo said. ‘He’s with the government. An angry hotnot . Always shouting about this and that. Nothing is ever right.’
    ‘It’s because of him they’ve changed the name of the town,’ the thin man said. ‘Everybody was happy with the old name. So the place was called after a Afrikaner hero–so what? Everybody’s got their heroes. You start taking away people’s heroes, then you’re in trouble.’
    ‘That’s what they’re doing,’ Fanie Prinsloo’s wife said. ‘Taking away our heroes.’
    ‘Now the town’s got a African name that nobody can pronounce,’ the thin man said. ‘What’s the use of that? What do we want a name like that for?’
    There were nods and exclamations of dismay. What was happening was terrible; it shouldn’t be allowed.
    ‘But the road,’ Adam said. ‘Surely you’re grateful to the mayor for the road?’
    The silence came again, but it was charged now with suspicion. After a few moments Fanie Prinsloo said darkly, ‘The road came before the mayor. The mayor’s got nothing to do with the road.’
    The conversation unravelled again into monologues and moody introspection, and not long afterwards Adam paid up and left. He didn’t want to hang around with these sad, lost people, nursing their bigotry and their drinks. As he slipped out the door he heard the gaunt woman saying, to nobody in particular, ‘I don’t like the road. We got along fine before the road was here.’ The television rimed her face in an icy blue frost.
    He didn’t go back to the hotel again, but there weren’t a lot of other options for entertainment. At the far end of the main street he discovered a bed-and-breakfast place run by two women from the city who had recently moved up here. They had a bar too, but the clientele there upset him in a different sort of way. They were mostly visitors passing through, though there was a scattering of local people too, and all the talk was of crystals and energy lines and reincarnation. Charmaine would have felt at home in this company. All of these people, in their vague and apolitical way, thought that the mayor and the road and