A Single Swallow Read Online Free Page A

live Blacks, here Whites, here Coloureds. Wealth, poverty and danger are distributed accordingly. All cities are segmented, but nowhere I have been are the lines so sharp and hard, or the penalties for crossing them so dangerous. I give up counting the ‘Warning! Twenty-four-hour Armed Response!’ signs, and the private security vehicles and personnel.
    â€˜We used to go down there and bring up lobsters, boil them in seawater and sell them on the side of the road,’ my father smiles.
    We are pausing on the way to Chapman’s Peak; I am on the lookout for sharks and whales, grinning and baffled by the sun and the wind and the Cape’s geography: while my father is entirely at home I cannot even grasp which way is north.
    â€˜You’re a South African, Dad!’ I blurt.
    He is momentarily amazed, then starts laughing. He was a schoolboy and a student here before his flight in 1963, when his friends and their friends were being shot, arrested, tortured, tried, imprisoned or banned. He was banned for over twenty years (they would not let him back even when his father was dying) but has returned several times recently, like the other ‘swallows’, as some Cape Town residents call those among their friends who reappear between November and March, for the southern summer.
    We went to a poetry reading where one of Dad’s friends was performing. It was held in a bar called ‘A Touch of Madness’ in the Observatory district, which is supposed to be ‘mixed’. There were two black customers among all the whites. Dad’s friend read a poem about interrogations by the Security Police. The audience nodded, ruefully. An open-mike session followed: a young man read a long, chaotic, hip-hop/beatnik piece in the style of William Burroughs. The audience shifted in its seats. Then an Irishman stood and sang, plainsong, Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘On Raglan Road’. The audience stilled and listened.
    On Raglan road on an autumn day I saw her first and knew
    That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue.
    I saw the danger yet I walked along the enchanted way
    And I said let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.
    On Grafton Street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge
    Of a deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion’s pledge,
    The Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay
    O I loved too much and by such by such is happiness thrown away
. . .
    There were thirty people in the room, thinking different thoughts of different lovers, but as the song ended there was a single note in their faces, a melancholy for something lost, or something that never was: whether it was enchantment, happiness or harmony you could not tell. I thought of her, again. The dream of all romantics, the dream you should perhaps have grown out of, by now; the one, the realised mystery, your own equivalent of Kavanagh’s dark-haired girl, waiting for you, somewhere along the road of your life, with a spell of certainty attending her: the promise that the moment you see her, you know.
    We went looking for the birds in a place called Zeekoevlei, ‘Sea Cow Marsh’, a little nature reserve between the Cape Flats and the sea. There was sun and wind and tall reed beds, there were hides for birdwatchers and high viewing platforms which we climbed because they were there; the wind made you hold tight to rails and posts. There were the tracks and droppings of hippos, there were ducks and stilts and all sorts of other pretty things I did not care about. There were no swallows.
    â€˜Seen any swallows recently?’ had become Dad’s catchphrase, but he was not saying it now. Where were they? I had not seen one since late last summer, in Britain. My appallingly expensive, near-unbeatable binoculars, light in their skeletal frame, their lenses hand-ground in eastern Germany, wobbled across crisp blue air.
    â€˜Try the sewage farm,’ said