While the Game Was Young

Turning twenty years old is a momentous thing: the turn of a decade, the final ignoble kick on the bottom from childhood to a last bloom of youth.

I am a twentysomething now. There is no rounding down to eighteen. If murdered, I will be a "woman, aged 20," in papers no one reads. Balanced on the cusp between naiveté and failure, between acne and wrinkles, I am facing a world kinder than it will ever be again.

On Sunday night, as I pulled on boots and a short tunic, eyeliner and earrings, dressing up to watch the Confederations Cup finals from a trendy bar where face paint and enthusiasm would be frowned upon, an older roommate had these words of comfort: "At least you're still young enough to admit your age."

But I have reached my full height, I almost reminded her. My brain and my bones are in decline. I will never be a prodigy.

The bar was empty. Our gaggle of eight stretched over a closet of a private lounge where a projection screen had been hung. We sat across each other on soft benches and leaned against the stuccoed walls, knees and shoulders touching. We drank bottles of Castle and Black Label beer, admiring but not envying the players' desperate, sweaty bodies: Altidore, age 19. Adu, 20. Kaká, 27.

You shall, above all things, be glad and young.

In the first half, the U.S. scored twice, and we blew lurid yellow horns in glee. In the second, Brazil seized control, and R. sat at the edge of his seat, tense, as a chain of announcers counted down the minutes and the score in four languages: Thirty minutes remaining: 2-1. Twelve minutes remaining: 2-2. Five minutes remaining. 2-3. We lost with a predictable and banal finality. "At least," C. said, shaking her head, "we were ahead while the game was young."

I pretended to mind. Warm and sleepy in the haze of cigarette smoke, I felt like a child again: well-fed, comfortable, safe. Race, poverty, injustice: just words, here. The future: better left for tomorrow.

For that way knowledge lies, the foetal grave called progress, and negation’s dead undoom.

We finished our last beers and left just before midnight, waving off a man who had come to wash the windows of our cars and beg for change, already making plans for the next weekend: clubbing on Thursday, bar-hopping on Friday. On Sunday, a jazz club in Soweto. How easily we laughed and leaned on each other's shoulders, how well became us the heady privileges of the free and young.

Soon, I was turning up my electric blanket and smearing the last clumps of mascara from my eyes. I slipped off my boots, real Italian calfskin, nearly worn through.

One-quarter of a lifetime, over, and a day less perfect in life than in memory. The sun was setting on the east coast, on Pittsburgh and Boston, on anyone I might have known and loved. An ocean away, I fell asleep before I'd scrawled two lines in my diary: How terrified I am of growing old. I don't deserve my friends.

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.

Women in Trousers

It is well-known to backpackers the world over that a hostel is not only a cheap place to sleep on a dirty bunk and take a much-needed shower, but also a handy party spot when the sun goes down and the Cultural Attractions close. C. assures me that this awkward mingling usually begins a full night of revelry at the frenzied discotheques of Europe's sleepless capitals. In rural Swaziland, where the sun sets early and the Sabbath is actually observed, the hostel's courtyard itself must do.

(My mother reads this blog, and who knows who else, so here I must note that the drinking age is 18 both in South Africa and in the tiny land-locked kingdoms cut away from its preindustrial heartland.)

But all of this is a long-winded introduction to the tragic scene that befell us Sunday night: at 5:28 pm, less than half an hour after the liquor store had closed, we realized that our new German-Afrikaaner friends from Pretoria hadn't picked up beer for the braai, either.

Given that a braai without good South African beer is like a wedding without champagne -- that is, beside the point -- this was a problem indeed. As a couple of the Pretorians built up a blaze in the open charcoal stove, R. and C. interrogated the Swazi hostel manager: Was he sure that there were no liquor shops open? Any bars? What about -- and here R. paused briefly -- any shebeens?

A shebeen is a bar, but the kind most often frequented by black African men -- locals -- and traditionally without any frills of "white" bars: glasses, napkins, tables, or roofs. Shebeens sell alcohol and the rest is optional.

At this request, then, the manager could only grin. You want to go to a shebeen?

Anywhere, R. said. We're desperate.

We'll go to the King's Palace, said our guide. He glanced at C., and at me, and at the two German girls from Pretoria. But no women in trousers allowed.

The blue jean-clad German girls shrugged and promised to stay in the car. I stood up, delighted to be wearing a skirt of grey plaid that just skimmed my knees. You know what that's code for, right? R. asked me, frowning. It means, dress like a slut.

More worried than I wanted to admit, I sat down again. The group departed.

Later, over Hansa lagers and roast beef, I heard the story of this King of Swaziland: of his fourteen wives, and of the hints that a fifteenth might soon be found. But also: that the king himself could not choose his heir, that a son would be chosen from the most virtuous and worthy wife, and that she would one day rule together with her son.

This queen-mother, the Grand She-Elephant of Swaziland, is a woman to be feared and idolized; twenty thousand or more young virgins attend the annual Reed Dance in her honor, and in hopes of becoming her successor in time.

The shebeen, I learned, was a dank gymnasium in an army barracks. And on the parade lawns, the Swazi virgins wear only miniskirts and smiles. But I imagined that the proud matron who watches their gaudy dance, the true Queen in her Palace, laughs and drinks among the men. She claps her bangled hands in mockery or in glee. And if she does wear trousers, who would dare force her away?

In the Land of His Majesty

My first week in Joburg was marked by morning rituals: throwing off two or three blankets at 6:30 and shivering into work clothes, slurping instant oatmeal in the half-light of the grey dawn, catching the 67 bus at 7:40 on the dot, or at 7:43, or at 7:48, or whenever it finally decides to show.

The Ezulwini Valley is not so well-regulated. C., my roommate, and R., a legal intern at LRC, caught a backpacker bus down to the Kingdom of Swaziland on Saturday morning for a weekend of hostel living and "African" culture. Instead of walls and barbed-wire along the road, there are simple fences and acres of dry empty fields. Here and there, tourist traps like "Cultural Markets" and "Cultural Villages" dot the main road, where you can buy beautiful stone sculptures of elephants and giraffes for only ten dollars, or tacky earrings for two. Large, dilapidated signs point to expensive restaurants nestled among one-room schoolhouses and open marketplaces.

At Calabash, lunch with drinks can run $20-$30, more than twice a day's salary for those lucky enough to find jobs.

One strip mall provides the necessary modern conveniences: A Pick N' Pay supermarket, an internet cafe (dial-up, with Windows 2000), a pharmacy, a liquor store. One five-emalangeni (5E=80 cents) minibus trip down the road is a market with ripe avocados the size of a baby's face (3 emalangeni) and papaya quite a bit larger (5 E, or 10 E for the largest).

Not much farther down the two-lane road is one of Southern Africa's many game reserves -- this one well-trafficked enough that you can walk right up to a gazelle or warthog or ostrich and they will not walk away. The people and animals coexist in the way rocks and trees do -- without fences, without feeding or caretaking or exchange. The animals earn their rent by standing idly by, as we tourists pay $25 each for a sunset drive and a few pristine views at the top of the mountain.

A Small Apartheid

Today is my fourth day at work -- my internet connection has finally been set up, which means I have finally joined the rest of the world in productive pursuits: preparing briefings, editing papers, looking up data, and so on, and so forth. I'm living in a backpacker's lodge called Pension Idube for the summer -- at about $20 a night, it's as cheap as a dingy apartment in the states.

I'm often asked the shortest and most complicated of questions: "How's South Africa?" First of all, I can't speak to that -- only to the small corner of Jo'burg in which I live. The easiest way to summarize that existence, for now, is that it's cold -- they don't believe in central heating, here -- and coarse. Things are cheap if you don't mind them dirty, but people are cheaper. Labor of the cheap, unskilled kind can be bought at the rate of $10 a day if you're feeling generous, and quite a bit less if you aren't.

This does not mean that other first-world necessities (such as cab rides) are affordable; the expensiveness of cars and the necessity of background checks for security purposes means that a typical cab ride within the city still runs about $15 USD -- too much. Like all working people, I take the bus.

I lucked out with a roommate from New Jersey, who loves to cook and plan weekend trips. I haven't eaten in a single restaurant since arriving, though I have sunk about $50 in groceries which ought to last us another week at least. (Some of it, like a spur-of-the-moment 10kg bag of rice, will last quite a bit longer.) Other residents of the lodge have included: a Chinese-Australian computer programmer who works for the Communist Party of South Africa and cooks amazing Peri-peri chicken; a silver-blond twentysomething couple from Holland (the husband is beautiful and the wife gravel-toned and fat; the sight cheers me up immensely); a black Swiss academic who is terrified of local xenophobia and blinks rapidly; a smattering of giggly German tourists; and a Canadian mathematics student with a nervous laugh.

Johannesburg, being gritty and real, is not much of a destination; only the programmer and the academic are staying for any length of time. The Hollanders are headed back to Cape Town to play house, the Germans back to their boyfriends in Munich, and I stay here to write memos and draft press statements.

The Plan

I've just arrived in South Africa -- Berea, Johannesburg, to be exact -- where I was overcharged on both cab fare and my hotel room, which costs as much as a dingy motel in the United States. WiFi is also $7 an hour here, so I won't be online much.

More updates to come when my life is better-sorted-out. Every few minutes, I remind myself to count my blessings and my traveler's checks. At least the latter are still im place; that's something.