A Sport of Nature

Opportunities

Hillela could have been like anybody else. She had the opportunity. The same opportunity as Carole and Sasha. Or Olga’s spoilt children — if that had been what she preferred. She was a white child, with choices; that was the irony of it. Young blacks had no choice, only necessity and plenty of ignorance about how to deal with that, in addition. Alpheus was so ambitious, so eager to better himself, become a lawyer, and now he had to saddle himself with a girl and baby on the way. — The trouble is we’re much too timid in these matters. Scared of appearing to boss them around — but, in the end, it’s not a kindness or a respect. When I saw the girl was living there, I should have told Alpheus straight out that he must take her to a birth control clinic. I should’ve taken her myself.—

Joe always listened to Pauline patiently. — Oh come on.—

— Well, damn it all, I’m paying for his courses, maybe I should use that to stop him making things impossible for himself. Nineteen years old. A baby, and next year another baby, how will he support them on a clerk’s salary? We undertook to subsidise his studies, not a family.—

— Oh ma, it’ll be lovely to have a little baby— Carole had pleaded happily, like that, for a puppy or a kitten.

— Oh lovely. A squalling infant while he’s supposed to be studying for exams. I fixed up the garage so’s he wouldn’t have to live in a crowded location room, so’s he’d have the kind of working conditions you kids have.—

— Bettie says, God has sent a child, what can you do. — Hillela quoted, and she and Carole laughed.

— She knows damn well. I had her fitted with a loop years ago. Alpheus’s poor mother, doing four washes a week—

— And breaking the washing machine once a month. — Joe settled back into his soft chin philosophically.

— Rebecca’s beaming all over, ma, she says her son is going to have a clever son like himself.—

— Poor old Rebecca! Where’s he going to find to live? — Pauline’s defiant eyes, questioning — them all: the room, the walls, and beyond. Philosophers like her husband had no answers, they knew only how to accept problems. Carole was a good enough little girl without the originality to swerve aside and seek answers to her mother’s questioning, which she followed as naturalists say a duckling follows the first pair of feet it sees when it hatches. And Hillela — when did that intelligent girl (more intelligent than her own daughter, Pauline confessed confidentially to Joe; an intelligence more like Pauline’s own than that Carole had inherited) when did the girl receive questions, or the possibility of answers, as addressed to her? — A whole family pushed into a garage in the yard. We can’t have them here living under conditions as bad as those in a location. That wasn’t the intention. Alpheus knows it. Rebecca knows it.—

If Sasha had been there he might have answered Pauline.

When Sasha was home Joe had to think of conversation that would start up their father-and-son relationship again; the battery went flat in the long partings, he himself away where the clamorous struggle between power and powerlessness was reduced to a sleepy hum and rustle of courtrooms through whose high windows light slanted as in a church, the boy away at that school for the future which had to be hidden in a little green African kingdom belonging to the 19th century. Joe had come out of his working cubbyhole on a Sunday morning. They were stretched on the grass drinking beer together. Joe mentioned young Alpheus had moved a girl into the garage and got her pregnant — Pauline felt she ought to have done something about it.

Sasha rolled right over before he spoke. — Emasculate him?—

A response lifted clean out of some five-finger-exercise liberation theology picked up from black boys at the school. It was easy for a youngster like Joe’s to see things that priggishly hysterical way. Joe patiently ignored, patiently explained. — He’s had a poor schooling and it’s a hell of a struggle for him to keep up with the courses he’s doing. She’s absolutely right, the last thing he needs is a wife and kid as well. If he were a white boy, we’d all be calling it hopelessly irresponsible, and that’s what it is. Towards his mother, to us, as well as himself. But what can one do.—

This question was not a question, was the summation of more than the small nuisance of Alpheus. Adults, who always knew what the children should do, at this time were withdrawn, in the presence of the children, into a state of waiting to be told or given a sign. For themselves. In various countries and eras children understand marriage as what it is for their parents in that place and period. Living with Pauline and Joe, the children saw that the meaning of marriage was that Pauline and Joe expected this sign from one another. The volume of the cheerful, restless house was turned down (as Pauline would sometimes stride into the girls’ room, pulling a mock-agonized face, and turn down the volume of their record-player). The rooms strewn with evidence of everyone’s activities were under dustsheets of adult preoccupation. The newspapers Pauline and Joe read and had always let pile up beside sofa and chairs, where they served in place of Olga’s coffee tables, gave information but no guidance. Carole lifted her head like a young buck alert to something — what, it does not yet know — the mature animals have noticed, and Hillela went on with her translation of Tartarin de Tarascon while Pauline read out aloud to Joe: —‘I don’t want to be equal with Europeans. I want them to call us baas. I wish I can live till we rule, I will do the same to them: I will send the police to demand passes from whites. Their wives are going to wash the clothes for our wives. We don’t want to mix with whites, we left the African National Congress because we saw Europeans among us. We are fighting for the full rights of Africans. We do not fight to dance and sit with Europeans.’—

— The government bans a non-racial movement like the ANC, it gets black racists as primitive as its white ones. It bans again; and an even worse reaction will come. Are you surprised?—

When Pauline left the drawbridge down and the watchtowers unguarded she had been at a conference where blacks sat with whites. Only as an observer — she had got in with the help of black friends — the Chief had been a guest in her house. The civil rights organization to which she belonged was one of those that had decided not to take part; they said the All-In African Conference was a front, dominated by communists who had indoctrinated and infiltrated the African National Congress and its allies.

There were chants and freedom songs one didn’t need to know the language to respond to with an almost physical expansion of being; after having been shut away, so white, so long. For herself, she came back home with ‘Nelson Mandela’s words in my ears, something you can’t stop hearing’. Carole and Hillela saw her unblinking hunter’s eyes stilled and magnified with real tears when she played the tape she had run while the man spoke for the first time in nine years (he had just been released from bans) to the assembly of all colours, to the government, and to the whole country. He knew what he could do. He called for a national convention. — Explain to the girls what that is, Joe. — And Joe explained that a national convention would be that meeting to culminate all meetings, one where white leaders from up there in the House of Parliament in Cape Town (on holiday one year, Olga had pointed out to Hillela and her sons the beautiful white building among oak trees) and black leaders emerged from prison, Underground and exile would decide in a proper and constitutional manner upon the dismantling of apartheid. Sasha, Carole and Hillela had been taken to see a court in session, once. While Joe explained, they would be visualizing something rather like that, the solemnity at mahogany tables, the carafes of water, the security men standing round the walls to keep intruders from shouting we do not fight to dance and sit with Europeans.

Mandela’s voice said that should the government fail to summon a national convention before declaring a republic, all sections of the population would be called on to stage a stay-at-home, a general strike, for three days. This would be a protest against the establishment of that republic based completely on white domination over a non-white majority, and also a last attempt to persuade the government to heed blacks’ legitimate claims. The last day of the strike would coincide with the day on which the government intended to proclaim the republic. Pauline read out something again: Nelson Mandela’s statement to the press that these demonstrations would not be anti-white, and would be peaceful.

Round about the Easter holidays — must have been; Sasha was home — a heavy brown paper parcel arrived at the house. Joe saw it first. — What’s this?—

— Leave it to me. — Pauline slit the wrapping with a bread-knife, taking care not to penetrate the contents. Inside were piles of leaflets with the terminology that brought comfort, a confirmation of what that house was, as the art dealers’ catalogues, giving evidence of the survival of rare and beautiful objects, did in Olga’s house. All freedom-loving South Africans are called upon to make the next six weeks a time of active protest, demonstration and organization against a Verwoerd republic. Carole went round the neighbourhood stuffing the leaflets into people’s mailboxes and racing embarrassedly away while their dogs barked to get at her; Pauline kept a pile in her car from which she stuck sheets under the windscreen-wipers of other cars all over town, wherever she happened to park. Joe could not make any unprofessional outward show of partisanship but even Sasha put up a leaflet on the door of his room. It was discussed at table that blacks were stock-piling mealie-meal, sugar, and cheap tinned fish, in some rumour or premonition of being starved into submission while the police would hold the townships under siege.

Sasha was in a phase of anxious concern for physical fitness; he and Hillela played squash at a health club, that month before the stay-at-home. So it was known where Hillela was passing her time. Sasha and Hillela also went very often to the cinema together on those Highveld autumn afternoons when there is no wind, no cloud to move across the sun, summer growth has ceased but no leaf falls: the day stands still. A crime to be inside a dark stale cinema on such an afternoon, Pauline would have said. There were few other people; expanses of empty seats separated dim figures. Sasha’s forearm stayed aligned, rigid and tight, against Hillela’s along the single armrest between them. They saw any film, many films; neither ever told Carole, Pauline or Joe about these films.

Sasha did not accompany his cousin again to her warehouse haunt; no-one was surprised that that sort of thing did not have much appeal for him. He played chess with his father, instead. One evening Joe got up in the middle of the game the moment Pauline came home. In Joe’s pale face expression was buried in complicated folds; even urgency did not show.

— You’d better get rid of those leaflets.—

— I don’t think there are more than a dozen or so left … why? What’s happened?—

— Get rid of them now, tonight. It’s what might happen. There are raids all over the place. Four whites have been detained in Pretoria. Liberal Party people. They’re watching everybody.—

— Are we going to burn them?—

Pauline didn’t answer Carole; her big head was lowered, not seeing her invisible audience, now.

— Put them down the lavatory, do whatever you like. Only get rid of them. And Pauline, we’d better go through other papers arid stuff we may have. If they come, there isn’t anything they won’t manage to find incriminating, at the moment. And don’t use our dustbin. They grub everywhere.—

Joe took two cartons of papers away in his car before he and Pauline went to bed. But nobody noticed that Sasha had not taken the leaflet off his door. All freedom-loving South Africans are called upon to make the next six weeks a time of active protest. Only Hillela. — What about that? — She was passing him in the passage.

— What about it?—

It was not for her to say. She was accustomed to different practices in the different houses where she was taken in as one of the family.

He did not like to linger with Hillela just outside his bedroom door. He went inside and closed it.

On the Highveld in May the sun is still bright — always bright, up there, while the air enters the nose with a whiff of winter’s freezing ether; something to be remembered in tropical parts of Africa, where much of the time it gives great heat but no light, buried in soggy cloud. May was the month when Olga changed her wardrobe. When Hillela used to come back from Rhodesia to spend the holidays with her, she would help Olga carry silky dresses and delicate-coloured sandals to the store-cupboards, and bring back from them garments of suède and angora against which she would pass her cheek. Olga still regarded it as her pleasure and her duty to fit out the girl at the same time as she shopped, each change of season, for new fashions for herself. An arrangement had been made for Hillela to come shopping with her, but she telephoned to postpone their date. — People say there’s some trouble in town. We’ll put it off until things settle down again.—

It was the appointed day for the beginning of the stay-at-home. As young freedom-loving South Africans Carole and Hillela had been kept home from school.

— Olga planned to take you shopping this afternoon? Today?—

Pauline smiled, shook her head, shook her head, over her sister. — Hundreds of people are being arrested, but of course they’re black, and so far as they’re concerned, she only knows her treasure Jethro and her treasure the cook and her treasure the gardener. Meetings are prohibited. You can be detained without trial. The place is swarming with police. And Olga’s shopping trip is postponed.—

Hillela went to the city, anyway — with Carole and Pauline, to see how effective or not the strike was. Joe had told Alpheus not to come to the office but the black servants went about their work and moved as usual along their own backyard network, placing ten-cent bets with the Fah-Fee runner and borrowing a cup of sugar or an onion in the exchange of plenty from white kitchens. The garbage had not been collected but rot doesn’t begin to smell in one day. All the white suburbs were quiet.

So was the city; but it was a different kind of quiet. There was only the static cackling gibberish from radio communication in passing police cars. Without its volume of blacks the city had gone mute. Without its blacks it was a place of buildings. — Like Sunday. — Carole was right; on Sundays the blacks were in their ghettos, that was where they were supposed to be, then, but this was a Monday, and they had not come back. The rhythm of life of this city, that had its black morning spate and black afternoon ebb, was withheld. The half-empty streets waited for a drama that was still to be written. For the present, there was an aspect strange as natural disaster, about which there is never anyone to question: the few blacks in straggling queues at the bus-stations, in the streets, looked the woman and two girls in the eye without a flicker of any acknowledgement. Why they had come to work, whether these white people approved them as the good kind of black or thought them traitors to their cause — that was not whites’ business.

Pauline drove out in the direction of Soweto but could not risk getting too near, with the girls in the car. There were police patrol cars everywhere. From the vantage point where Pauline, Carole and Hillela stopped, the distant cubes of Soweto houses were miles of tombstones in a vast graveyard; yet all the life that was gone from the city was down there; if you had been able to get near enough.

Alpheus and his girl were walking out of the yard gate as Pauline and the girls arrived home. He opened the gate for the car, and Pauline paused as it passed him. — The stay-at-home seems to be fairly successful. We’ve just been into town.—

Alpheus and his girl were dressed to stroll out on a public holiday. He had a way of standing quietly as if waiting to be dismissed. He smiled. — Thank you.—

In the yard, Pauline sat a moment with her hands on the steering-wheel. — What does he thank for? The information? He’s always like that. If every black were like him, nothing would ever change. If Joe hadn’t told him to, he wouldn’t even have supported the strike. Maybe it’s a mistake to have removed him from the condition of his own people. I don’t know, anymore.—

Carole and Hillela also stayed at home when the school held its prayers and celebrations for the Republic. On the day, Pauline and Joe kept open house for friends as depressed and confused as themselves; when Hillela left to go and lunch at Olga’s (a compensation offered for the postponed shopping trip) they were arguing over Mandela’s reasons for calling off the stay-at-home on its second day — as for the national convention, no-one had ever expected for a moment the government would consider that.

— This is the lovely young daughter I didn’t have.—

It was too chilly to swim, but in Olga’s pavilion beside the pool Jethro carried round a whole poached salmon — the stately pink corpse laid out with the cook’s radish roses and swags of golden mayonnaise — and Hillela was allowed a glass of the French champagne served in honour of some guests, in the way of Arthur’s business, from another country. The lady was settled in her chair like a beautifully-marked butterfly — amber hair and the deep blue oval of a sapphire on each earlobe, pale fingers banded with gold and diamonds and tipped with red nails. She made soft noises of approval over Hillela. Jethro paused in his procession to beam on the girl, while everyone except Arthur smiled at them both. — Miss Hilly, you been there to my country again? You staying all the time here in Jo’burg now, you don’t like go there sometime see you daddy?—

Olga charmed, speaking to him in the third person. — Next time Jethro goes home, he’s going to take Miss Hilly with him, isn’t that right? — And Jethro bowed his way round, laughing.

— He thinks of the children in this house as his own.—

— How wonderful. You can’t get anybody loyal like that, not in Europe, not at any price.—

Olga took care not to neglect her young niece in the presence of distinguished company. She turned aside from talk of the villa in Italy, belonging to these guests, which she and Arthur were being pressed to visit, and had a confidential moment with Hillela. — How is Pauline … I worry about Pauline. What is the point of all the things she gets herself involved in. That bus boycott — they had to pay in the end, surely. The Republic — it’s been declared … And she neglects herself. She used to be so striking-looking. If you live here you must abide by the law of the country.—

Olga and Arthur believed you must abide by the law of the country but were once again making contingency plans not to go on living there.

— There’s a delightful place on the market, not far from ours. I think the position’s even better than ours. Why don’t you buy a little pied-à-terre in Italy? It’d be lovely to have you as neighbours now and then—

— The way things are going, it might have to be more than that! — Olga laughed when she said it, and the butterfly lady did not pause to take in the inference: —Though I can understand, if I lived in this beautiful country, with those wonderful vineyard estates at the Cape, and those marvellous beaches, so clean — not like Europe — uncrowded, I wouldn’t see much reason to go anywhere else—

Arthur broke in when he saw an advantage in doing so. — We’ve got a place at the Cape. Nice place right on the best beach in the country. You can come out and spend as long as you like there, any time.—

— I still think we should take up Michael’s offer to look round for us in Italy.—

Arthur had a way of blinking, refusing to acknowledge the regard of others, conversely, as Pauline always felt that regard, sought it. His head hung forward from his thick shoulders while he chewed — like an ox, yes.

Hillela had her first driving lesson on the day a republic was declared; the day on which one drives for the first time is like that on which one first found one’s balance on a bicycle — something never forgotten. Her cousin Clive had just passed his driving test. Stopping, starting, giggling at herself, with Clive sitting beside her she went up and down Olga’s long drive the whole afternoon, pausing only when admiring Jethro came over the lawn with the cream scones and tea, and finally ending her first journey only when Olga called out that drinks were being served, and the car must be ‘put to bed’. Very carefully Hillela drove it successfully into its bay beside Arthur’s two other cars.

Clive presented his pupil, an arm across her shoulders the way he would walk off a sports field with a fellow player. — You should just see how quickly Hillela caught on. She can even declutch properly, already. — By some quirk of heredity, he had Pauline’s black, demanding eyes, and the red, live mouth of the handsome male. No-one took a photograph. But Olga kept the image of the pair, the children belonging to her sister Ruthie and herself, so full of their little achievements, so happy, so innocent in their burgeoning, although she could never place the day, the year when it was imprinted.

Olga drove her niece back to Pauline’s house. She embraced her and held her hands before letting her leave the car. She seemed saddened by something she could never say — all children who are sent to boarding-school know this mood in adults, who have exiled them.

— I’ll see you next Monday, then, Olga. And thanks for a lovely day.—

Olga took comfort and forgiveness. — Oh yes, darling. And I know exactly what we’re going to buy. Monday — if everything’s all right. But I’m sure this whole business is over now.—

Nelson Mandela went Underground after the All-In African Conference Pauline had attended in Maritzburg. When he surfaced he was tried and imprisoned; and when he was taken from prison and tried once again, this time for treason, and sentenced to life imprisonment, no-one was allowed to record the speech he made from the dock; so the schoolgirl Hillela, present when her aunt played a tape-recording of his speech made at Maritzburg, was one of the few people to hear the sound of Mandela’s voice for many years, and perhaps to remember it. She had the opportunity to do so, anyway.

Through the high hum of the blood in adolescence, that distances the voices of adults, the tense discussions between Pauline and Joe continued as if taking place somewhere else and from time to time breaking in with a name or phrase overheard. It was cold; the snug of a sweater round the neck; a fire at night; it must have been June. Mandela was the name. From that Underground where he had gone he sent portents and messages like those the Latin writers Hillela was having to construe for the winter exams said came from the flight of birds or from sibyls speaking through the mouths of caves. Pauline supported Mandela’s call for an international economic boycott of South Africa. ‘Supported’, when obtruding from adult conversation at Olga’s, applied to whether or not a divorced wife received alimony from an ex-husband, or whether a relative was adequately provided for by her family. (For example Len — his daughter understood from oblique references — did not ‘support’ her.) ‘Supported’, in Pauline and Joe’s dialogue which plunged into tunnels of silence or absent attention to other things but never ceased, perhaps not even in dreams, meant that one or both of them thought they had found some sort of sign. Not the sure and certain instruction they had been waiting for, but something to which one could attach oneself, and feel the tug of history. Pauline supported economic boycott as a way out: for the thousands of blacks imprisoned and banned as, it seemed, the dismal only result of the politics of protest; for the whites, her friends, braver than herself, who were also banned or imprisoned as part of the same tactical failure Mandela admitted. And for herself, companion of the blacks’ route, with nowhere to go now that marches were banned, fearful of and not free to enter (a family, a husband’s surer contribution within legal opposition to consider) the unimaginable darkness of the Underground — for her, rescue from being stranded, from ending up white as her sister Olga was white.

There was the unaccountable doubt of Joe to set Pauline’s hands raking up through the electric crackle of her hair.

— But what are you talking about? Who will suffer? People who work in towns and have shoes on their feet and drink bottled beer and spray their armpits with deodorants? Or the ones on the farms and in the ‘homelands’ who live on dry mealie-meal? How much more can they suffer than they do already? What will boycotts deprive them of they don’t already lack? What’ve we got we couldn’t do without if it means bringing down this government — if we really mean we’re ready to sacrifice these wonderful privileges everyone’s afraid we’ll miss so much—

— And what do those rural people use to buy that bit of mealie-meal? Money sent home by the labourers in the mines and the factories, the construction workers. And if — if — what an hypothesis that is, when has economic boycott ever been fully imposed — and if American and European investment were to dry up, what would happen to those mines, factories, building projects? What happens to the men they employed, the men who sent back the money for mealie-meal?—

— You sound like a member of the Chamber of Commerce. I can’t believe it. As if you were trying to explain economics to a five-year-old. For Christ’ sake! I know the consequences as well as you do. They’ve made the calculation because there’s nothing else left to do — except kill. Don’t you see? They’ve made the decision — one generation more to suffer, but if it’s going to be worse than it’s ever been, it’ll be for something.—

— Pauline … you can’t even pass a starving cat in the street.—

— I’ll leam. I’ll learn.—

— No, my girl. Against your own good sense and reason, you actually imagine it quite differently. You dream the American bankers will all band together in the name of FREE-DOM for South African blacks and the boys in Pretoria will take down the flag and tear up the statute book.—

Pauline’s hair fell across her cheeks, flew back. — Hah, you’re the one who doesn’t face facts. Everything’s going to come right through the loopholes you manage to find in disgusting laws. The government stops up one mouse-hole, you find another. You work yourself to death, but what’s changed? What will you be at our Nuremberg? — In her face was the cruel pleasure, already distressing her while indulged, of turning her fears for Joe into hurt inflicted on him. — The one who tried to serve justice through the rule of law, or the one who betrayed justice by trying to serve it through the rule of unjust laws?—

Yet soon the controller of the four winds in that house was back in self-conflict again, a state felt by others in the house as a change in atmospheric pressure, in diet, rather than understood. The Swazi fruit bowl was often empty; Bettie borrowed the girls’ pocket-money to buy soap flakes on Rebecca’s ‘day’ because she had told Pauline ‘two time’, without result, that the supply had run out. Another sign had come from the Underground. It was a spear; the shape of the object itself, its clear and familiar associations (the dates of Kaffir Wars to be memorised, the mascot shields and assegais sold along Len’s roads in Rhodesia) pierced the half-attention with which the new phase of the Pauline-Joe dialogue was registered by the children. Umkhonto we Sizwe: translated for whites as ‘The Spear of the Nation’; the voice from nowhere and everywhere — Mandela’s — announced it.

— Why should whites be told they can join Umkhonto when we couldn’t be members of the ANC? I mean, if there’s been a change of policy, why doesn’t it apply to ANC as well?—

Joe had a special, almost sorrowful tone for use in court when it was necessary to suggest to an evasive witness that he was in fact well aware of circumstances of which he claimed ignorance. — But, Pauline, isn’t it just exactly in order that no-one will be able to say there’s been a change of policy. Controlled, symbolic violence — that’s the business of Umkhonto. ANC doesn’t change; it retains its principles—

— Yes, yes, non-violence, that’s all the difference is. He was talking about its stand against violence—

— Wait a minute. If it were to retain its non-violent principles but yield another, it would be impossible to deny officially that it had not changed at all, impossible to refute the charge that Umkhonto or the Spear of the Nation or whatever you like to call it is proof that the ANC has abandoned non-violent tactics. ANC hasn’t changed, can’t, won’t change; not at this stage. ANC is what it always was, the classic non-violent, non-racial liberation movement. Its claim for support from the West depends on its clean record — victim of but not prepetrator of violence. Credibility with black Africa and black Americans depends on its clean record — a revolutionary movement by blacks for blacks. These two principles are the moral basis. If you accept the need for violence, you lose credibility with the West from which, though god knows why, help is still expected to come. If you let in whites, you lose credibility with the blacks outside — and some inside, as we know.—

The exchange is suspended by the disruption of the end of a meal, the need for sleep (the fire crumbling down; Carole and Hillela sauntering off to bed) or the time come for a return to Joe’s office. But the preoccupation continues, present as the creak of floorboards in the night, and sounds now from here, now from there, in the house and from the garden where, on Saturdays, Alpheus earns his lodging by the token of weeding the grass or burning leaves.

If Olga had seen Pauline during that winter she would have noticed with concern the skin, darkened like bruised rose petals, and the minute cysts, grains of waste her body was not eliminating, under Pauline’s eyes; the impatient flick of the lids with which she monitored thoughts she did not want to have.

— So we are invited to join in the dirty work.—

— No. On the contrary. It’s a recognition that you don’t have to be black to have the revolutionary temperament.—

— That’s fine. But blacks who don’t have the revolutionary temperament may still say ‘I support the ANC but I won’t join a violent movement’—and keep their self-respect.—

When friends were present, voices rose and clashed. Lying on her bed in the room filled with all the sentimental sexual totems of young girls who go to good schools, Hillela heard the drum-roll and piercing notes of adult ritual, produced by a preoccupation and passion remote from the yearnings, wild anticipations and dreads that do not come from outside but grow like the bones and flesh, the tree of self.

— What about ’60, that leaflet the communists put out? The police were picking them up from gutters everywhere … The Party called upon communists, then, to work with the Congress Alliance. They’d found a way to get round the national versus socialist revolution wrangle. For whites, South Africa is an advanced capitalist state in the last stage of imperialism; but for blacks, it is still a colony. So a traditional national movement like the ANC has a ‘progressive function’ that a workers’ party can support. Well, now they’ve got where they wanted to be; the government’s done it for them. Protest politics has come to a dead end. The time’s come when blacks must think about revolutionary tactics. Whites are invited to join Umkhonto, and who’s going to join? — the CP whites, those in the Congress of Democrats, and those Underground. ANC’s become a front organization, a national monument, and the white communists are entrenched in its avatar, Umkhonto. So they’ll make sure the national black revolution is a red one.—

— Oh my god, here’s another who sees a red under every bed.—

— We all made a mistake, not joining the Congress of Democrats.—

— But why?—

— We should have got in there and kept it what it was supposed to be, kept the communists out of control.—

— And what would you have made of it? Another dead end?—

— Oh Joe, I know you think we’re all dodos—

— No, no, I know I am. My wings are atrophied; I don’t expect anything, of myself—

Their laughter prodded him; they were drinking wine as part of their ceremonial palaver.

— But we do! I do! — Pauline’s fierce cry. — I wish I’d joined COD when I nearly did, after Maritzburg. Then I’d be in it up to the neck now.—

— You’d be prepared to see things blown up?—

— Things, yes. Buildings. Their white House blown up, there in van Riebeeck’s garden; that would shift their backsides if nothing else will.—

— And people?—

— Controlled violence against symbolic targets doesn’t take life.—

— Oh no? Some old nightwatchman who gets in the way? Passersby? There’s no such thing as completely controlled violence.—

— Oh I don’t know … Of course you’re right. I just don’t know.—

— It’s necessary to demystify, always demystify. Controlled violence is a sanitized term for killing. Killing anyone who gets in the way of your symbolic target. Including your own people, if a bomb blows up in their own hands. Yourself. Killing is killing. Violence is pain and death.—

— The police have been handing those out to blacks, year after year.—

— Yes. Let the blood be on the government’s hands.—

Killing is killing. Violence is pain and death. Torn streamers from the fabric of adult life, drifting across the imaginary scenes and dialogues in the busy consciousness of a seventeen-year-old girl match nothing there. To kill or not to kill: her urgent choices are not these, could not even conceive of these. Indecision is between which group of friends she should choose to ‘go with’ more steadily than the other; whether to enjoy being swayed by some dominating personality in the one, or to enjoy being herself the boldest, the brightest, the most magnetic, in the other. She would be smouldering over some piece of injustice meted out to her at school and seeing herself — where? — anywhere she has never been, some apartment in a city never seen, Los Angeles or Paris, as comfortable as Olga’s house but of course not at all like Olga’s, or Pauline’s or anybody’s, with good-time friends (but not like the friends she makes do with now) or just one person, a man older than herself who adores her and makes love to her and takes her all over the world. Or perhaps with a boy her age whom she has not yet met, but who would have a certain family likeness without being in any way connected with, not even speaking the same language as any family she knew — a boy with whom she would play the guitar and grow vegetables, make love and have babies the way ordinary people (even Alpheus and his girl) did.

Violence is pain and death. That was an after-world that might not exist at all, like heaven or hell, for her — a girl who did not have the Jewish faith under which one school had listed her, nor the Christian faith in the promises and threats of morning prayers at the next school; at most, something like old age, in which no seventeen-year-old can believe for herself. They — the voices elsewhere in the house — had thoughts that did hot reach her; and she had some — and some experiences relived and pondered not more than the thickness of a room’s wall away from, but unknown to them: inconceivable. The girl must have known that: they never made the emotional show Olga did, but she knew she was their own child to them, just as their son was.

It is unlikely that Hillela will have remembered at any time the exaggerated emotions and highly-coloured scroll of unrolled life that absorbed her totally when she was seventeen. It is the torn streamers that were to come back to her: killing is killing, violence is pain and death.

Sasha worked in a bottle store that winter’s school holidays and his cousin and her current band of friends came in one lunchtime to buy beer and a yellow concoction they had a craze for, called — the sort of useless detail that is all that remains of a period — Neptune’s Nectar, made of cane spirit and synthetic passion-fruit flavouring. Sasha, stacking wine bottles, lifted his head from behind boxes only to meet Hillela’s eyes (she gave him an imitation of himself for Carole’s sisterly amusement, later) and then disappeared as if he had not seen the band. For her it was the old game of shop, from the occasions when all the cousins played together. The band surrounded him. It was his turn as shopkeeper; but Sasha refused to serve them. — You’re under age.—

Sasha changed so much each time he was away at school; once it was his voice, now it was his jaw which, anticipating the man’s face it would one day support, had set out the structure of a squared chin dented where the two halves of his face had joined in Pauline’s womb. It always took a few days for Hillela to forget what he had looked like the last time he was home; to find him again.

— Oh don’t be wet. — She balanced between irritation and wariness, and he knew it, knew Hillela. By claiming family influence over him, she would gain prestige if he gave in, but if he refused, she would on the contrary be associated with his ‘wetness’.

— Go and ask one of the others. — He indicated, eyes on his uninterrupted activity, two men attending to customers along the aisles of bottles glaucous as cabochon rubies and emeralds.

— The hell with it, let’s push off.—

— There’s another place right on the corner.—

Hillela stood willing him to turn round and do her bidding. Two girls and a boy began pulling bottles at random out of cases and clinking them onto shelves all around Sasha, pushing and laughing. — Let’s give him a hand, man. — Slow’s a funeral.—

Hillela looked at them as if she had just walked into the shop and had had her attention to her own errand momentarily distracted by an incident taking place there. The cashier’s head was turned; the pudgy ears of the man behind the counter responded with shopkeepers’ alertness, specific to petty theft as a hunting dog’s to gunshot. They were Hillela’s friends; Sasha could have turned, now, and cried out—Hillela …! To save his pocket-money job, schoolboy well-fed by Pauline and Bettie, being educated for higher occupations at a school open to all races? (There were things Sasha was cursed, from the beginning, to know beyond his years.) Or to give her ‘friends’ the satisfaction of confirming that he didn’t have his share of their mindless boldness, happily, swaggeringly defying harmless conventions of behaviour while remaining perfectly safe within the terrible conventions of this country. Hillela! He didn’t cry. She didn’t hear.

Hillela walked out of the shop. The manager came down the aisle, his male breasts spread by shoulders drawn back authoritatively. — These are your friends? I don’t want them here.—

— Calm down, old man. We don’t want to be here either, old man. — They talked all over him agilely. Looked for Hillela, but she was gone; out they sauntered.

Only when they had left did Sasha commit his kind of disloyalty to her, that she would never know. — I don’t know any of them. They walked in and started.—

That evening brother, sister and cousin gathered in the girls’ room; Hillela was at home, for once. Carole was grateful and shyly expressed her pleasure in whatever small ways she could when Hillela stayed in; they did not listen to, but she played again and again a record singing about love in a hoarse, laryngitic style that had become her unconfessed mating call. Carole was working in the library of a newspaper; Hillela was a temporary hand in a depot for a photographic laboratory. Like rookies in an army, these recruits to the world of daily bread-winning compared and gossiped about their holiday jobs. — I’d rather dig ditches. Anything’s better than selling people stuff for more money than you’ve paid for it. — The great-grandson of a Lithuanian pedlar was generations away from his progenitor’s necessity; and he was also Pauline’s son. — What about writing out dockets for little rolls of film all day long—‘Why aren’t they ready?’, ‘This print’s got a scratch’, “There’s something wrong with the colours’.—Well at least developing film is a service, it’s doing something for the money — But Hilly’s not the one who does it, is she? She’s just in between. — Most of the people in the big cities are just that. Taking money, handing over something they know nothing about. I’d rather dig ditches.—

The record had come to an end and Carole glided to place the arm at the start again without the other two noticing. Hillela addressed her male cousin’s lowered eyes and the mouth that adults interpreted as sulky but was an expression of need for answers they could not give him. — Most people know nothing about anything they do. About why they do anything. It’s just because they feel like it … it’s fun. Doesn’t mean anything. They just go ahead.—

If that might have signalled the surfacing of what had happened at the bottle store in her lunch hour, a confession or a defiance, how could one tell, with Hillela — incidents of that magnitude in the adolescent world which would have caused a family rumpus at Olga’s, where political passions were the politics of family relationships, at Pauline’s could not expect to attract any attention. Certainly not in comparison with what was about to happen in her house that night. Before Sasha could respond — if he would have responded at all — Bettie came in (Bettie never knocked on the children’s doors, even though they were grown up, now). — There’s someone who wants Miss Pauline. I told him she’s out but he says no, then he wants someone else to come.—

— Who is it? Man or woman?—

— A boy. (Bettie’s way of indicating a black man.) I think I see him sometime here before … He won’t say the name. — She was used to Pauline’s semi-clandestine black visitors; pulled a you-know-the-kind face: these people always got money out of Pauline, while she had to work for hers.

Sasha followed her, but came back at once. — He says he knows you, Carole. I’ve never seen the guy.—

He sat at the kitchen table with his elbow resting on it and the chair turned away, legs stretched and spread, smiling, a man in the self-confidence of his rotundity and charm. It was as if the three young people were arriving before him by appointment, for an interview. He leaned forward and held out a hand. — Carole, how’s it? Your mummy not here? You remember me, mmh?—

Carole’s voice rose to cover embarrassment at Bettie’s confining a friend of the family to the kitchen. — Oh yes! But come inside!—

— Donsi. Donsi Masuku. And I’ve seen your sister, too. So this’s the young man of the family—

In the livingroom he made himself comfortable. — When do you think she’ll come, your mother? Okay, whenever it is, that’s all right — I’ll wait. What’s your name? Sasha. Sa-sha. That’s a Russian name, ay? Sasha, can you get me a beer — why don’t we have a beer together? What kind of records have you got — I heard some music going … You got any Duke? How I love that man. I used to play trumpet, I used to play drums, one time … I was even with a group. Did you ever hear of the Extra Strongs — the name comes from those peppermint sweets, you know them, XXX Mints. Yes. That was our group. We took part in the Big Band shows, Soweto, Cape Town, Durban. We cut a disc. Old seventy-eight. One day if I find it, I’ll bring it to play for you, Carole, you’ll see. But nowadays I haven’t got the wind (slapping his belly) or it’s got stuck there inside (making them laugh at him). Haven’t got the time, maybe haven’t got the heart for it … Now — come on, Donsi, what’s the matter with you, man! Must never lose the heart, you know that — I’m telling you, kids, never lose the heart, because if you lose that … they’ve got you!—

Pauline and Joe walked in on him dancing with Carole and Hillela. Pauline’s eyes had a moment of stillness, hesitation, when she saw who he was: one of those whose followers said things, now, she had read out aloud. I want them to call us baas. Their wives are going to wash the clothes for our wives. I don’t want to be equal with Europeans. We left the African National Congress because we saw Europeans among us. But the innocent bodily warmth, the faint odour of black beneficed the house, absolved whiteness; she came forward in irresistible pleasure of release. Joe offered more beer and then excused himself; he had work to finish. — You legal men do your best for us, we know. — Joe smiled his creased smile. The compliment tossed at him was a convention of guestly graciousness, total insincerity innocent of critical innuendo: the delightful man knew Joe was aware he was an initiator of a move that blacks should not take bail and should refuse defence in the white man’s courts against the white man’s laws. — Lovely kids you’ve got. They’ve been giving me a good time. Really nice. And she can play the guitar — this one!—

— I’m so glad they looked after you. How are you, Donsi? Good god, you come out of detention looking as if you’ve been on holiday — I saw your name listed in the paper and I was so pleased … but I didn’t know where you’d be — somebody told me your wife and the children had gone to her mother somewhere in Natal.—

— Yes, mealie-pap, mealie-pap, nothing but mealie-pap, you put on weight, they fatten you up for the kill.—

— Well, you were never exactly dainty.—

— But it was muscle, you know? I’ve always been keen on body-building … but in there, man! Look — can I talk to you now? — He leaned in a swift sketch of urgency and confidentiality, then looked up beaming dismissal at the three young people. — Bye-bye girls, and thanks, hey. Bye, Sasha.—

As they left the room sharing the mood of his good nature he was already speaking at a different pitch, his chair pulled close to Pauline. — Bongi and our kids are there in the car. Outside your house.—

In the passage, Carole stopped. — All this time, in the car! Ma’ll be furious with me. Why didn’t he say … — Her brother, at once irritated by his sister’s subservience to their mother, left them, and her cousin soothed her by closing their bedroom door on the adults and making her giggle: —Can you just imagine Pauline sitting for an hour in a dark car while Joe was inside dancing?—

They read in bed. Then Pauline was there, as a window flies open in a storm. — Now listen — you are not to mention this to anyone. D’you understand? Anyone at all. Give me the extra blankets out of your cupboard. You don’t need two pillows, Carole … They’re going to sleep here for a couple of hours and then they’ll be gone. If ever anyone mentions his name, you’ve never heard of him, all right?—

The wind of pursuit, of exposure, the wind snuffed by police dogs entered the frail shelter of personal talismans, blew on the Imari cats and the records of love songs. In the night, there was the refugee wail of a baby; very early, the unmistakable sounds of Pauline, her pace, her pattern of movements producing clinks and clatters in the kitchen, accompanying dreams with the sound-track of consciousness. Carole probably woke as well, but did not speak. Before she sank back to sleep again, or perhaps in the precious shallows before it was time to emerge for school, Hillela heard with the obscure anguish of the subconscious, Donsi Masuku’s laugh. Happy dangerous laugh, affirmation that, like the baby’s cry of protest, could prick the ears of straining dogs and vibrate the antennae of police cars.

Sasha had slept in the livingroom. The wife had neatly made up again Sasha’s bed after she and her husband had occupied it. There were still-warm places on the rug where the black children had been bedded down. One of them must have been a boy; a small toy car with one wheel missing was left where it had rolled. Sasha did not hoard souvenirs, posters and photographs the way the girls did. When he was away at school, there was nothing of him in his room at home that could not as well have belonged to the household in common: books, chess set, squash racket. He rescued the little car from some other small boy’s childhood, and kept it on his desk.

The house had the air of having been suddenly quit. Joe always left early; Pauline was not there. The night visitors were gone; Carole went into the yard to feed the cat: —Their car’s still here. — A horn of hair stood up on her brother’s unbrushed head. She twirled it, he batted at her hand. — You look like a unicorn. No, a cross rhino. — Leave me. — But the girls’ teasing attention was a kind of homage. His cousin came to the breakfast table in pyjamas. Her softness rose and fell here and there against the pink cotton knit, thinned by many launderings, as she helped herself to jam or juice. She spoke with her mouth full, smiling and gesturing, instinctively choosing her moment. — You should have seen him yesterday, when a couple of us went to say hello — he stuck up his neck behind a pile of boxes just like an ostrich, you know that snooty look they have, looking down at you.—

While the family were eating the early supper Bettie had cooked, they heard a familiar car rattle into the yard; Pauline’s imminent presence was, as always, like the turn of a tide. Expressions changed. Then she was among them, her hair smelling of dust, a streak of red from inner corner to pupil in one of her great eyes. No-one asked where she had been. — What has Bettie given you? Chicken and rice and potatoes — nice and starchy. Oh, I bought a box of avocados on the road — Carole, let’s have a salad — there’s a dear. — Sasha was suddenly smiling at his mother in amazement, amusement, in love; another benediction on the house. He left the table and came back with a glass of wine for her. — I don’t know if it’s all right. There’s a bottle open in the fridge.—

Someone must have come to fetch the car Masuku left behind. Next evening Carole remarked that it was gone, to Sasha and Hillela, who seemed to have forgotten it was ever there.

Pauline kept the mood, like a heightened colour rising to the cheeks, of having allowed herself to act purely on the impulse of her nature, which was simply to give. Principles, political allegiances with their attendant reservations were the rational and intellectual restraints laid upon this instinct; she revered them, and so the mood alternated with a kind of nervous shame. She had commandeered all the money in the house that night — her own, Sasha’s first week’s pay, even got Joe to drive to his office at midnight to fetch whatever might be in the petty cash kept there — to give to the family in flight. The spectacle of the woman with her open-mouthed sleeping baby on her back, trooping into the kitchen, the two other children dressed for the journey to exile in white knee-socks, as if for the only occasions the young woman had to go by, roused in Pauline some sort of atavistic consciousness of like journeys she herself with her children could have been propelled on — the panic of pogroms, the screech of cattle trains leaving a last station, the crawl of the homeless along the roads of war. Alone in the kitchen at five in the morning, she cooked food for the family to take along; she prepared a suitcase of medicaments and clothes. Without comment, at her request, Joe helped Donsi Masuku siphon petrol from his car to fill the tank of hers.

Bettie had found cupboards left in disorder, the kitchen raided. Pretending not to know, she demanded where the big plastic container was. And the flask to keep the breakfast coffee hot?

To the young people, Pauline added an awkward rider to her warning. — Nothing—to anyone. Is that clear? Not to any of my friends, either.—

This time Pauline had not refused succour; and the man who sought it was not one of those whom she ‘supported’. She had known this Donsi as a young black party-goer at white houses. Everybody knew him, then; a messenger in some editorial office who tagged along with those favoured invited guests, black journalists, for the free drinks, and paid for his presence by his ability to enjoy himself and generate in his hosts the pleasure of getting on well with blacks. He was (to the perception of whites, anyway) too much of a fat and happy light-weight to be of use in the political struggle, which in those circles meant the African National Congress. His name began to come up as a regional leader of those who left the Congress because they did not want to mix with whites until, they said, white power was broken; it was only later it was noticed he wasn’t at parties any longer. His people did not want to dance or sit with whites. But she had found him dancing with her daughter and niece; and she had risked arrest by driving him and his family to a place near the border where someone was waiting to smuggle them across. Donsi Masuku had learnt from a relative in the political branch of the police (there were family connections who betrayed, there were family connections who saved) that he was about to be rearrested and charged, this time in a major trial for treason. What she had done was not something she could explain to friends with whom she supported the African National Congress, and who (no doubt) had heard of her failure to give asylum in a context she might be expected to. Joe had witnessed; but Joe would riot confront her with the paradox. Joe could not, because he himself never would share her fierce faction partisanship or her ferocious doubts: Joe (as she taunted him) defended all who needed defence against a common evil.

As one who has strayed feels a rush of strong and relieved attachment to a permanent liaison, Pauline wanted to be continually among these friends, now. She did not ask Joe to calculate the risk she had taken as opposed to those she had refused; but he volunteered nothing to reassure her that the police might not discover the number of the car that assisted a black man to leave the country illegally. She knew from his silence that the risk existed. The company of friends was something she needed to wrap around herself against dread. Although it was school holidays and she and Joe made it a rule to be at home when their son was, she accepted the chance to go away with friends for a weekend; Carole did not work on Saturdays and would come along, but the other two had the obligation of their jobs to fulfill. It distressed Pauline that Sasha disliked his holiday occupation so much; that she had been too preoccupied to help him find something interesting. She confided him to the care of adaptable Hillela. — Take Sasha along when you and your friends go out. Don’t let him know I asked you.—

The house to themselves. Children with the house to themselves. When they were still children, what wild release that signalled; romping from room to room, all lights burning, bedtime banished, the thrills of outlawry within the safety of home: Bettie’s protests to scatter them, shrieking, only to recommence the game of freedom, because her authority was no more founded than the game.

On Friday night after Pauline, Joe and Carole had left, Bettie cooked the meal of chops and chips (Sasha’s favourite long ago) for which Pauline had left instructions. Hillela sat on the floor untidily as a rag doll propped there, telephoning, all animation gathered into her chance to talk without interruption from others wanting to use the phone. She was making arrangements to go out; Sasha knew. He went away to some other part of the house so as not to listen to another’s conversation. But she did not go out.

Sasha?

He heard her looking for him.

Sasha? Sasha?

She was in the garden, now. He went to his mother’s room, which overlooked the direction of the voice. From the silent observation of the room that held the humming continuum of Pauline and Joe’s lives, he saw her shadow sloping away from her. He waited to hear her call again.

— Sasha?—

The cat came running, as it would to anything that sounded like a summons to food or fondling. Their shadows joined where she stooped to chide and croon to it for being so stupid. He opened the closed window that marked absence and jumped. Out of the stiff cold oleander bushes whose dead leaves smoothed past his legs like blunt knives, his shadow joined hers and the cat’s. For a while the angled, elongated mobile that was the three shadows jazzed, darted, and leant towards and away from the tilted phantom of the house, all cast over the dead lawn by the light of stars in a spill of cracked ice across the sky. The cat’s eyes, as she drew the pair into one of her zany night ecstasies, were moons, rather than the new sliver lifted too high and far in the black clarity of space. Their round phosphorescent gold, the flash of translucence as she pranced in profile, were the moons of summer, the nights of the smell of burning flesh from suburban braaivleis. Then she was gone.

Sasha had on his sweater but like most young males who live in a climate of long summers and never accept the brief reality of winter, he wore about the house, in all seasons, the same shorts and rubber-thonged sandals. The cold steeped his legs palpably as water; Hillela puffed out a breath to see it hang in air. They went through the gate, each with arms crossed, hugging self, and began to walk; to walk the streets of the suburb as people are brought out by a summer night. Block after block; they passed through the planes, bared horizontals and verticals stripped by winter; only among the pavement jacarandas, that do not shed their leaves till spring, each streetlight swam, a luminous fish in a cave of green hollowed out of the night. Although when the three young people were together, or with friends, the adolescent fidgety abhorrence of silence, the need to talk because one is alive, possessed them, the two did not talk much. Hillela hummed one of her guitar tunes now and then. When they did exchange a remark, a phrase or a laugh shattered the clear cold like a stone thrown. At times there was the feeling, in the rhythm of their progress, that they might be making for somewhere, but neither said, nor asked of the other, where; at others (when a corner was reached), that they were looking for a destination. There was none; or none other. They arrived back at the gate. All the lights were burning in the house, except in Pauline and Joe’s bedroom, where a window stood open. Bettie had not locked up, knowing there was no-one to reproach her neglect. The house was one of those legendary ships that sail on, fully rigged, without a living soul aboard.

They stamped in, Hillela putting her hands, warm from her pockets, over red-cold ears. Now she would go to the telephone, now she would put on lipstick, fluff her hair with her fingers and leave him there … Now he waited for her to come and call goodbye. She appeared with a pair of his soccer socks on over her jeans, threw a second pair for him to catch. — Don’t worry, I haven’t been rummaging into any of your things. They weren’t put in your room yet, they were among stuff Rebecca’s washed.—

The house to themselves. Even the children had slipped away for ever in the adult silences of a night walk. He offered: —D’you want a fire?—

— Too much fag to go out for wood.—

— I feel like a drink.—

— Okay, I’ll make tea. Coffee?—

— I mean a drink. What about you?—

But without waiting for her to say, he went to take a bottle of wine and forgot the glasses. She brought the first thing she saw in the kitchen, two cocoa mugs. — Hillela!—

— It’ll taste the same.—

He went for glasses. Smiling, she watched him open the bottle. — You’re supposed to wipe the rim.—

— Why, it’s not dirty.—

— I don’t know. They always do at Olga’s. And Arthur sniffs it first.—

— And what’s that in aid of.—

— To see if it’s corked.—

He filled the glasses. — The education you’re getting — what a great start in life.—

Hillela took his sharpness kindly, with enjoyment. Her cheekbones, dusky-red with cold, lifted under her strange shining eyes, whose iris, he had examined and explained to her, had no grain to differentiate it from the dark pupil. — At least I’m learning to drive.—

— But you ought to get your learner’s licence, you know. I suppose you’re driving around illegally all over the place.—

— In what?—

— Your friends let you, I’m sure.—

Hillela was always in command of the subject; changed it at will. — Teach me to play chess.—

He looked at her. — Now?—

— Yes.—

He drank, drew a note sounded from the glass with thumb and forefinger, didn’t look at her.

— What for?—

— To play, of course. Oh you think I’m too stupid.—

At once his face was sullen with anxiety. — You are not stupid, Hillela. — He moved his head as if tethered somewhere; and broke loose. — You are the most intelligent person in this house.—

She laughed, made an exaggerated movement pretending to spill her wine. — There’s no-one here except you!—

— And it’s true.—

— Then only you think so. — At once she turned away quickly from what she had said. — Come on. We’ve got all night.—

They took the bottle and went into Joe’s study, intending to fetch the beautiful chess set that was kept on a filing cabinet, but instead of returning to the livingroom settled themselves there, with the radiator turned on and the wine at hand, in that single room in the house that was never for general use, where Bettie was not even allowed to dust because of the importance and confidentiality of the papers and documents filed and piled within it. They lifted the legs of the burdened desk and pulled from beneath it the sheepskin foot-rug, to sit on; they dumped the papers from a stool to make of it a low table between them. Given in, Sasha was explaining to her. — It’s too abstract for you. You’ll learn, all right. But you’ll only want to play when there’s nothing else to do. And that’s not what chess is. How shall I say — you’ll always be wanting to do something else.—

She was setting up the men, an Africanised set made of malachite in Rhodesia (maybe even exported by her father, who at one time had dealt in curios). — I don’t want to do something else.—

In the small hours, the child abandoned in the dark and cold came back to possess a body again for a moment. Sasha woke to some awful interruption; he had the sensation of terrible discovery and disbelief he had had when, for a period when he was already around eight years old, he would find he had wet the bed. But it was a regular slamming, and not a physical sensation, that had wakened him; his bed was dry, he was not alone, there was the wonderful heavy warmth of breasts against him, and the passing time that brought him to consciousness was measured by the gentle clock of another’s breathing. Hillela was there. There was nobody else. He got up and went, knowing his way in the dark in this empty house, to that bedroom where the window had been left open and was banging to and fro in the wind.

Her charges had cooked breakfast for themselves when Bettie pushed the kitchen door open with the armful of pots and dishes brought back from her man’s dinner the night before. She was satisfied rather than pleased. — You old enough now not to make such a mess! — She washed up for them, her reproaches affectionate, a routine assertion of her field of efficiency. Although Hillela was like a daughter in the house, she did not have quite the proxy authority to give Bettie the day off. Sasha told her she needn’t bother, he and Hillela would find their own food. — And tonight? For dinner? — It’s Saturday. We’ll be out. Saturday night, Bettie. — She swept eggshells into the bin, laughing. — Him? When do you ever go out dancing? Hillela, she’ll be having a good time, but you … Sasha … You afraid of the girls, I’m sure. — Not a man, to her, yet the white man in the house, for that weekend: —Please, Sasha, go and see what’s wrong in Alpheus’s place. There’s no light, the water’s not hot, nothing. She can’t warm the food for the baby.—

— Probably a fuse blown, that’s all. I think there’s a box of wires in the broom cupboard. You know, on that small shelf. Alpheus can replace it himself.—

— No, no, you must go. If he messes something up, who is it going to be in trouble? Me, that’s the one.—

— You’re a terrible nag. Why can’t you trust Alpheus?—

— Because Alpheus he’ll sit there with candles and he won’t ask! Won’t say nothing! I’m the one, for everybody. Must speak for everybody.—

Sasha was throwing corks and broken kitchen utensils out of a drawer, looking for the fuse wire.

— Oh you are good to me. Thanks, eh. Thanks, Mouser. — To be called by that name was to meet with blankness someone who makes the claim in the street: Don’t you know me? It was himself, Mouser, one of the many pet names of childhood that evolve far from their origin, in the manner of Cockney rhyming slang. It might have had something to do with big ears, with a liking for getting into small closed places, with pinching cheese, or the cat-like patience and curiosity of a solemn small boy. Even his mother, who had so many such names to express her delight in him then, would have forgotten, in her loss of so much that had been between them. That Bettie was still allowed to bring it out incongruously was more a mark of condescension to her than a privilege accorded. Despite her house-training in awareness of her own dignity, she had her lapses into the manner of Jethro, which perhaps needed less of an effort against the grain of their identical definition as servants.

The absent Carole went in and out of what was now the home of Alpheus and his family, and often brought the baby over to the main house. She and Alpheus’s girl made clothes for it on Pauline’s sewing machine that Carole had taken to the garage. Sometimes she shared a meal there. But Hillela showed no interest in the inhabitants across the yard, and Alpheus was some sort of issue between Sasha and his mother that nobody but the two of them was aware of; when he came home for holidays there was expectation that he would go to talk to Alpheus as he liked to renew acquaintance each time with all that was familiar.

— What about? — He knew she naturally assumed that the kind of school community he was privileged to live in must provide an ease of communication with the young man she herself could not have. She wouldn’t say it, but he wouldn’t let her off. — I live with black boys all the time, I’ve got nothing particular in common with Alpheus.—

Neither he nor Hillela had been in the garage since it had become a family home. Frilly curtains on a sagging wire, smell of burned cooking and the sweetish cloy of confined human occupation, a hi-fi installation hanging the festoons of luxury over napkins, bed and cooker — its existence became real around their presence as strangers; bringing a sense of this not only here, but in the house across the yard where they had moved in from night streets.

Alpheus was a soft-voiced helper as he and Sasha dismantled a single electrical outlet whose plastic had melted and melded with the overload of plugs connected through an adaptor. — You need a separate outlet now that you have a hi-fi as well. They’ll have to get an electrician to install another lead from the main. — Alpheus took the advice as if it were something he could follow in the practical course of things. But both knew he had bought what he did not want his benefactors to know about, because he had no business spending money on such things as hi-fi equipment, any more than he should have burdened himself with a family. Alpheus’s girl hanging about in the background acknowledged Hillela with the same gazing politeness — gone completely still, as if in the children’s game where the leader turns suddenly to confront those moving up secretly behind him — that she had had when the white girl, carrying torn-up letters, had come upon her carrying her pregnant belly in the yard. The girl was wearing one of Carole’s favourite dresses Hillela now realized she had not seen for some time; she had worn it herself, she and Carole often exchanged clothes. There was something else whose disappearance she had not noticed. In the little home where the functions of all rooms were reduced to fit into one, there were no ornaments except a few plastic toys and, on a straw mat on the hi-fi player, the undamaged Imari cat.

In many ways it was more than the distance of a back yard from the house to Alpheus’s garage. It was the only outing they took, that Saturday. Hillela did not use the telephone. This was a day before them, all around them, untouched either at beginning or end by the week that preceded it or the week that would follow when on Sunday night, familiarity, a family would return. The luxury of its wholeness extended the ordinary course of a day, measured time differently, as Hillela’s breath had measured it in the night. The cat followed and stayed with them everywhere, perhaps only because they did not know it was accustomed to getting trimmings from Bettie. It kneaded Sasha’s thighs and Hillela kissed one by one the four sneakers of white fur for which it had got its name, Tackie. What they took for affection, weaving them into its caresses, was only greed. They themselves did not touch. There were several chess lessons that ended in laughter, they even quarrelled a little; it was impossible to have Hillela to oneself, at one’s mercy, without frustration at her lack of adolescent apprehension, envy of her — what? Adults begin to predicate from the time children are very small. What do you want to be when you grow up? What are you going to do when you leave school? What career are you interested in? This predication was not an answer to anything about life it was needed to know. These questions, formulae put absently by men and women preoccupied by financial takeovers, property speculation, divorces, political manoeuvres, Sasha knew were lies. From the beginning: —They knew you were never going to be an engine driver … not if they could help it. They despise engine drivers. They know it’s not what you want to be, it’s what they’ve already decided you’ll settle for, so they can say they’ve done all they could for you.—

— You should do whatever you want to do.—

— Can’t you understand?—

— You wrangle away at it too much. You’ll get hungry, you’ll have to eat; you’ll have to work.—

— I don’t understand you. You’re the one who’s had a lousy time, you’ve been pushed around as it suited them, and you — I don’t know … you seem to feel free. No-one’s less free than you! What’s going to happen when you leave school next year? Are they going to pass the hat round to send you to university?—

— Now don’t be unfair, you know they would.—

— Or are they thinking that for you it’s a secretarial course and a useful job through influence at the Institute of Race Relations, and someone will pay for a degree by correspondence, on the cheap, like for Alpheus.—

— Well, maybe I’ll go to Rhodesia.—

— You’ve just thought of that for something to say, this minute.—

She laughed; they were eating apples and the juice trickled down her chin.

— Maybe I’ll get a job.—

— What job?—

— Oh journalism, or maybe nursing.—

— For pete’s sake! The difference is … tremendous, total. You’d think it was choosing between chocolate or vanilla. When do you suppose you’ll decide?—

— Then. I’ll say, then. Nursing; newspaper.—

— Hilly, Rhodesia’s a horrible place, there’s going to be a war there.—

— Len never says anything.—

— When he writes you a birthday card, no.—

With regular bites, she was shaping a spool out of the apple core.

— Sasha … Why d’you let everything make you so angry. Sasha …—

He felt a fresh surge of what she called anger. — Because you forgive them.—

The castaway raft that was carrying the day dropped out of rapids into quiet water. She played the guitar to herself, bent over cradling it to save him from disturbance. Out of his week’s pay at the liquor store he had bought himself some books, and had begun one this weekend. The Brothers Karamazov was in the house in the old red hardback uniform edition of Dostoevsky along with all the other books under whose influence he had been reared without knowing it or having read them, but he had bought the paperback as if the other had not been there all his life, on one of the shelves that narrowed every passage as well as stretched up the walls in every room, and made the odours he associated with home compound with the smell of paper and the livingroom fruit bowl. He wanted to read the book because he had heard one of the masters at school mention, in a debate on capital punishment (the school tried hard to introduce issues that schoolboys could not be expected to think about), that the writer Dostoevsky had stood before a firing squad and found himself suddenly reprieved instead of dead. The extremity of this experience attracted Sasha, who sometimes was secretly drawn to the possibility of committing suicide. One of the reasons for the anger which Hillela had gently mocked was that he felt his mother had wormed this secret out of him — not in words, but in the concentration of signs only she and he could read: the way he left a room, the shift in his attention when someone was speaking — he could not stop her adding these things up. But he was safe from that secret now. Hillela was there. It was not possible to think of nonexistence while she was close by, her bare foot with the one funny toe stretched towards the afternoon fire they had made for themselves.

He was disappointed with the visit to the holy Zossima (rationalism was one of the influences he was unaware of; religious mysticism bored him) until Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov embarrassed his sons by making a ridiculous scene, but after that the new reader entered the novel as millions had done before him, although to him it seemed its knowledge of all he needed to know, that nobody would ever tell him — even though everything was discussed, talk never stopped — was part of the possession of the house boarded this silent weekend when it was lit-up and empty. As he read his absorption deepened like the stages of sleep; and he was aware of his companion only the way the cat, actually asleep, showed awareness of the comfort of human presence and the fire’s warmth by now and then flexing thorns through the white fur of a paw. Then he fell into a passage that seemed to surround and isolate him. ‘I am that insect, brother, and it is said of me specially. All we Karamazovs are such insects, and, angel as you are, that insect lives in you, too, and will stir up a tempest in your blood. Tempests, because sensual lust is a tempest! Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side. I am not a cultivated man, brother, but I’ve thought a lot about this. It’s terrible what mysteries there are!’

He did not know Hillela had stopped playing her guitar; he had not been listening. She wandered out of the room, and that she was not there any longer he felt immediately. He thought he heard her calling. Some other sound, the susurrus of the shower; perhaps he imagined the voice, like the voices heard under a waterfall. He went to the bathroom door and rapped a mock drum-roll. She did call something. He rapped again. Hillela opened the door, pink paths showing all over her drenched head, streams of water licking her breasts, the springy stamens of her pubic hair brilliant with shaking drops. A hollow of pale mauve shadow went from each lean hip-bone down to the groin. — I boiled myself by the fire. — He looked at her. Not at her face; and she was watching him, both encouraging and anxious, a kind of happiness. He kissed the breasts, letting them wet his face. He knelt down and pressed closed eyes and mouth against that wet moss that poor boys at school had tried to represent in ugly drawings in the lavatories. She reached for a sponge and squeezed it over his head. The water ran down his hair and plastered it. She teased: —Just like an old mango pip. — They played, through the open door the house was filled with shouts and laughter. The shower was still plashing. They fought and slithered in the steam. She pulled him under the fall of water and he struggled out of his wet clothes and imprisoned her, cool and ungraspable. The water found the meeting of their bellies and poured down their thighs. She la-la-la-ed, he pushed her head under the full force of the jet.

They dried their hair by the fire. He towelled hers vigorously, but her resistance was weak and laughing, the game was running down; the smell of Hillela’s hair was identifiable as the source of the intimations of her he had found, over several years now, in her jacket that hung in the jumble behind a door, or on a cushion on the old sofa, in a jersey left inside-out, as it had been pulled off, sleeves holding the shape of her impatient push up to elbows.

Hunger was also a happiness. He cooked up a rich red-and-yellow mess of tinned tomatoes and mushrooms, tuna fish and cheese, an expert in clandestine boarding-school cuisine. They carried it to the fire and camped on the floor. The cat filched bits of fish with the club of a curved paw and spat out each morsel several times to get rid of the tomato coating. Sasha put her through the window, Hillela let her in again. Sasha suggested he would take another bottle of wine but neither wanted it. The telephone rang; Hillela was sopping up sauce with a piece of bread, he put down his plate, she waved the crust, and he did not know whether it was a signal that he should answer. She cleaned her plate with conscientious gusto, making figures of eight while he counted the rings, nine, ten, eleven, and the last cut off in the middle. Within such content so many things seem possible, even easy. — All you need is enough for a cheap one-way ticket. If you can get that together, then you can work your way round Europe. There must be people we know we could stay with … connections.—

— Billie — she’s got family in London. You know — my step-mother.—

— I want to keep away from youth hostels. I’ve had enough of living in dormitories. They say in France, if you go to the South where so many rich people are, you can get taken on as crew for a yacht. Girls too. There’s someone at school, his brother went all the way to the Bahamas — fantastic. The trouble is, we’ll finish school in the December of next year—

— November.—

— Same thing; it’s winter in Europe. But we could work in ski resorts for a bit.—

Hillela mimed a shiver.

— No, you’ll love it. The way you can dance, I’ll bet you’ll ski well. Good co-ordination.—

— Cold places. — A fearful intake of breath.

— That’s because it’s something you can’t even imagine. The sun is hot, the snow is cold — it’s like eating sorbet and drinking hot black coffee.—

She smiled praisingly. — How do you know.—

He caught her hand, patted himself on the head with it. — I know, I just know.—

— And Carole could join up with us somewhere.—

— Carole?—

He stared at her. She looked back with the face of someone practical, considering ways and means.

— But she’ll still be at school.—

— In the holidays. It’ll be fun. The three of us. Like here.—

Orange and blue liquid pulsed in the coals; measured perhaps a minute. He picked up his book again, and, as the cat would look about fastidiously for a place to lie, slowly settled his head in her lap, where the plate had been. She grabbed a cushion, lifted his head, and put the cushion beneath it. He had been reading, on and off, all day. She looked to see how far along he was by now: more than two hundred pages.

— What about the bathroom.—

Only the pilot light of his conscious attention burned. — There’s all day tomorrow.—

She began to read over his head; when he got to the end of a page before her, her hand went down to hold him back. As she caught up with the sense of the narrative their pace drew even, so that they were reading at the same instant the same passage; ‘I want you to know me. And then to say goodbye. I believe it’s always best to get to know people just before leaving them.’

Sasha closed the book and put it aside without marking his place with the torn bus ticket he used, but the spine of the paperback, bent as far as he had read, lifted the pages apart from the rest at that point. After a while her hand stirred as if about to touch his hair, but did not. She bent over, smiling, but his eyes were closed.

— Sasha?—

— Sasha?—

He waited, once again, to hear her call softly, again.

— Sasha?—

He opened his eyes and suddenly began to yawn, yawned till his eyes watered, full of tears.

They got up. She stood a moment, waiting for him.

— I would never go to Rhodesia.—

She was moving her head very slowly. Feeling him looking at her, a smile turned the edges of her mouth; she might have been being photographed. He approached her very shyly, and kissed her. They wandered through the house, arms about each other’s waist, following the trail of their inhabitation: among the papers on the study desk, a packet of chocolate broken into, from which she took a square, records among the open tins in the kitchen, his telescope that he had been tinkering with (last year’s birthday present for a boy interested in phenomena beyond his orbit) on the dining-table.

He took the telescope into his room and for a long time, until they got too cold, they drew the moon and stars near through the open window, just as their talk drew near ski resorts, the Bahamas, the anonymous freedom of foreign cities.

They were in the deep sleep of midnight when Pauline came quietly into her son’s room and saw that there were two in his bed. She turned on the light. The room was cold and stuffy; warm in the core of it was the smell of a body she had known since she gave birth to him, unmistakable to her as the scent that leads a bitch to her puppy, and it was mingled with the scents of sexuality caressed from the female nectary. The cat was a rolled fur glove in an angle made by Sasha’s bent knees. The two in the bed opened their eyes; they focussed out of sleep and saw Pauline. She was looking at them, at their naked shoulders above the covers, and she called, as if she had come upon intruders in the house—Joe. She turned and walked out.

They did not move. Something grasped Sasha’s innards and was shaking him; he trembled against Hillela. Her body was calm as sun-warmed stone. He spoke. — It’s not Sunday. — Hillela said nothing. Her soft, clean, curly hair lay against his neck, the last sensation he had been conscious of as he fell asleep. Hillela was there. Now that terrified him.

Pauline came back with Joe, she was clutching his upper arm, taking protection. She stopped him in the doorway, against some danger. Sensing attention, the cat began to purr. Pauline’s splendid head rose like an archaic representation of the sun, aureoled with wild filaments, blinding them and holding them in her gaze. — Joe. Joe. — Sasha’s mother was imploring his father to tell the intruders not to be there. The cat stretched, jutted rump and tail and jumped off the bed.

The greatest shock was the confusion. It was days before Sasha (and Hillela, for all he knew) understood why his parents had come home on Saturday night. And Pauline and Joe had to grasp a total displacement of apprehension. They returned because of a crisis they knew how to deal with, in an anxiety not unexpected in the context of their lives. Someone had brought that curse upon peace, a radio, to the camping ground in the Drakensberg. He took the thing, the size of a cigarette pack, along with him when the party of friends went on a climb, and under another kind of waterfall (of static) its cackle told of the arrest of Joe’s partner in the early hours of Saturday morning. Joe and Pauline left Carole with the party and tramped back in the silence of shared preoccupation along the hikers’ trail where, a few hours before, they had noticed the minute beauties of every fern and flower, and the grand surveillance of eagles. What both feared most, on the long drive back, was that their house had been raided while the other two members of the family were left alone there. — Well … they’re not children … they’ll know how to behave sensibly. — Pauline accepted the reassurance, but a mile or two farther on, while she was taking her turn to drive, allowed herself: —How d’you behave with those bastards raking through a house? It’s all very well … but it hasn’t happened to us. I’m not sure what my reactions would be. If I could shut up. And Sasha …—

— Sasha knows the drill. — They were travelling in the car in which Pauline had taken the Masuku family to escape over the border. Police investigations into such things often took a long time when they were preparing a case pertaining to state security and involving many people. Both were thinking about this, but said nothing. When Pauline was not driving there was no other claim to distract her attention, and foreboding built within her a whole construct of consequences from a single act, made by her, it now seemed on impulse, that would trap the considered, continuing usefulness of Joe and his kind. She experienced a new guilt; through her, hands that should never touch, eyes that should never see the papers in Joe’s modest study might have been going through them.

That was the first room in the house she went to, and there was some evidence of disorder — Joe’s rug was not under the desk, files were on the floor, the chess set was not in its usual place. She could not wait to verify if anything had been taken but ran at once to be reassured that the children were all right, that Sasha was in his room.

Joe was already on the telephone, waking up his partner’s wife.

Coming back from that room, Pauline waited a full minute, standing there looking at Joe, not hearing what he was saying, unable to understand anything, neither what she had just seen nor the purport of his expression as he asked questions and received answers.

And in the days that followed, which was one to think about, how could one grapple with the one, the always-to-be-expected crisis, while the other … how was one to think of anything but the other? Joe had no choice. He was preparing applications, making representations, following procedures and looking (always looking) for the loopholes in Acts through which he could reach the detained man, while at the office doing the work of both of them. He phoned Pauline at odd moments of day, as a busy man will find time to do usually only to keep contact with a mistress. A few murmured, elliptical words, to which the response was equally laconic. Everything all right? Anything happened?

Yes. Nothing.

After Pauline had pushed past Joe that night, gone over to the bed and hit Sasha across the face, hit him for the first time in her life, hit him twice, jolting his head first this way then that, what could be all right. But outside that room where he lay naked, smelling of sex, with his sister — outside that house, all over the country, there were parents whose sons were in prison, whose sons had had to flee, like Donsi Masuku, and whom they would never see again.

For the first time, what there was could not be talked over ‘frankly and openly’ between the parents and children. There was no formula of confidence that would do. Pauline and Joe searched for one, as he searched for loopholes in the law. The attraction that had overcome taboo was something no-one could be asked to explain. Could one ask the fifteen-year-old Carole if she had noticed anything about — what? Could a father collude with his daughter in the old adult euphemism for sexual relations, ‘something between’ her siblings? The incident — how would one phrase it to Sasha, to the girl — was it an incident, a piece of sexual bravado (there was the empty wine bottle as a clue) in the defining family’s absence, or was it something—

— Oh worse, worse. — Pauline stopped Joe. — Love, then, incest, going on who knows how long.—

Joe told her again and again, she shouldn’t call Hillela Sasha’s ‘sister’.

— Not in actual terms of kinship, no, but in fact, how they’ve been brought up, how we live, they are brother and sister, they are, they know they are. And she is his first cousin. My sister shares my blood, doesn’t she! Their mothers are one!—

— In some countries even marriages between cousins were not illegal. Until very recently. Where your grandfather was born, lots of Jews married cousins. Not only secular, but religious law allowed it. — Joe offered the information not to comfort his wife and himself, but to defuse emotion that they might apply reason to the unspeakable.

In the end, Joe closed the door in his study as was customary when he and Sasha wanted to be left in peace to play chess, and said to him as Len once said to Hillela: —I don’t understand, either. — He was concurring, perhaps, with the state of mind of Pauline, who never before had excluded herself from any discussion concerning her son. — We’re prepared to accept that you yourself do not understand. So let us put it behind us. Forget it.—

Such abject desolation burned over the boy that Joe sensed this like a fever emanating from him.

— Come. Set up the men. I’ve had a hellish day in court. Let’s play.—

Sasha would go back to school, but Hillela would remain there, in the house.

Carole, younger and impressionable, shared a room with her. Already the parents could sense a protective hostility in Carole: ganging up for, rather than with, the old triumvirate, because Sasha was withdrawn, he spoke to the two girls only when others were present, in the conventional exchanges at table, and Hillela — no-one had confronted Hillela with anything. One of the things Hillela had done — Sasha and Hillela had done — was to take away from Pauline the single area where Pauline was certain always to know what to do, the area where she had been sure nothing could shock her, nothing elude understanding or alienate love. Joe had to shut himself up, alone, with Sasha; she could not bring herself to take on Hillela. When Hillela came over quietly — astonishingly — to kiss her goodnight as usual (this was a house where affection was displayed, normal emotions had never been suppressed) every evening of the very week that followed what had happened, Pauline touched that young cheek with lips like charred paper. Hillela went to her holiday job, Carole to hers, and in the evenings, if Hillela did not go out with those friends of hers (and god knows who they were, what ideas she had picked up from them and brought home) she was shut up with Carole in their shared room in schoolgirl intimacy — creaming faces, squeezing blackheads, pushing back cuticles; whatever they were doing or saying concealed by the music they played. Some of the nights of that week Pauline wept in the dark beside Joe, after they had talked in bed about the things that really mattered in the world, the clandestine investigations Joe was making, through contacts in the police, to find out whether his partner was going to be charged with subversion, and the progress of the trial of others, already in session. He patted her back, stroked her hip; uncertain whether it would be a good thing to go on to make love to her. Once, when his caress of comfort began to change, she spoke. — I have the feeling Carole knew all along …—

— Oh surely not. Hillela will have told her? Not possible. I can’t believe that — He did not say it: even of Hillela.

— Not told, nobody will have said anything, but you know how she adores the girl. More than any sister. Sensed it. Whatever Hillela does is always right, for her. You remember the Durban business. How she lied for her?—

It was because of Carole that a decision had to be made. Hillela had caused Pauline to strike her son, Hillela had used him as a man while he was still his mother’s son, Hillela, made a sister out of Pauline’s love for a sister, had misused the status granted her, but it was because of Carole that the petty domestic normality of the house, the goodnight kisses and cosy chess games that persisted binder danger and political upheaval, could not be allowed to return under this kind of threat. Carole was exposed; even supposing what happened were to have been an isolated incident, and when Sasha came back from school for other holidays it would not be necessary to wonder, every time one went out for a few hours, whether one should have locked grown children in their rooms … Carole was exposed.

No decision could be made by Pauline and Joe alone. She did not know whether to write to the father, to Len. It was not proposed to pack the girl off to Rhodesia, to end up a glorified waitress, like the new wife. — She’s still Ruthie’s child. — For Pauline, if love failed, became incomprehensible, there was still justice. It was necessary to speak to Olga. It had to be done; hadn’t Olga always said she had as much right to Hillela as Pauline? Olga, too, bore the charge of Ruthie’s child. Olga must face facts, like anyone else, once or twice in her life.

Everything Pauline found it impossible to be, at home, now, she was restored to the moment she found herself in Olga’s presence, in Olga’s room with the Carpeaux Reclining Nude and (an acquisition she noted with the subliminal attention that stores such things) a gilt-turbanned Blackamoor holding up a lamp. — Sasha and Hillela have been sleeping together. Don’t ask me the details. They don’t help at all. It happened; we know; that’s all there is to it.—

Olga didn’t want to believe what she was told so bluntly; Olga wanted to get out of believing. They almost quarrelled. How could Pauline say such a thing, and about her own child, too — as if it were nothing! Matter-of-fact! That’s all there is to it. Pauline was so hard. Pauline grinned shockingly at her sister. — What do you want me to say? Weep and wail? I’ve come to discuss what we ought to do next, as Ruthie’s sisters. These things happen, they happen within closed walls, like these, you can’t shut them out as you do so much else. They are in the family, Olga.—

— To think she grew up with Clive! And they’re still together quite often! He’s teaching her to drive — but Clive’s a very steady, sensible boy—

— Of course, all parents are quite positive that the way they’ve brought up their children has produced models of virtue. I don’t excuse Sasha, I don’t exonerate him, it’s all beside the point. And he’s no concern of yours. We’re talking about Hillela.—

Olga had a loose cashmere jacket over her shoulders, there was underfloor heating in her house and no need for the bulky winter clothing Pauline wore. Olga stood up giddily, taking courage in one certainty. — I can’t take her, Pauline. — Pauline watched her pressing her oval red nails into the flesh of her slim arms.

— Even though Clive is so sensible. But Olga, no-one expects it, you handed her over to me the moment adolescence arrived, don’t you remember? But now I’m asking you: what about her future? What do you suggest?—

Olga dug her nails testingly into her flesh because she was afraid of telling Arthur. All the time she was talking to her sister, she was anticipating the dread of telling Arthur. She feared something from him, and did not know what it was until it came: —A little tart, like her mother. I could always see it. Bad blood.—

Olga, who had tears of excitement in her eyes when she bid successfully at an art auction, who cried at school prize-givings, did not burst into tears but took on the force that appalled her in Pauline. — Like me. My bad blood. My sister, you bastard. You talk about breeding. I had to teach you how to hold a knife and fork properly. This house is full of beautiful things I work so hard to find and you never even look at. You bring people here you don’t know how to talk to. D’you know how many times I’m ashamed of you?—

Pauline and Olga met again, with Joe as adviser; Arthur had business engagements and did not appear. Olga clung to the idea of getting Len to come down from Salisbury; this was not something to be discussed over the telephone, and a letter would be such a shock to him, poor devil, because he wouldn’t be able to respond immediately, ask questions. Pauline and Joe were sceptical — Olga was stalling, as to be expected. Len would come, perhaps the solution already existing would be found; maybe boarding-school, once again, was the answer that would serve. Ah, and in the holidays? Where would she go in the holidays?

But Hillela herself provided the solution. She was leaving school. Yes. She had a job, ‘somewhere to stay’; she was going to move in with other young people who had rented a house.

It was Joe she told. Joe who had bought her a guitar during the court lunch-break in Pretoria. She knocked and came into his study, as she had done so many times, with a cup of tea, and when he murmured thanks, she told him.

— Not before matric! What can you do without matric? Your whole life, Hillela. You’ll prejudice your whole life! You can’t do that! For god’s sake, what do you want to become of you! It’s only just over another year—

She gave him a schoolgirl’s answer that made it easy for them both: —I’m sick of school.—

The pen he held between second and third fingers seesawed, tapping at the desk. There was a strange sad echo between them. — You’re in a hurry to live, Hillela. You don’t stop to think.—

She chewed at the inside of her cheek, and looked at him boldly, openly, appealingly — he never decided which it had been. He was ashamed to see she understood that although he used the present tense, he was referring to what he and she could not talk of, in the immediate past.

What could they be expected to have done about Hillela at that time? Her father had been reached after some difficulty; he no longer lived at the flat, his second wife had left him and he was working as a mine storeman up in Ndola. Len was clearly in no position or state of mind to take any responsibility. So there was nothing for it but to let a seventeen-year-old girl think she was the one who knew what to do.

Pauline believed it her duty, for Ruthie’s sake, whatever might have happened, to see the place where the girl was going to live. Hillela took her obediently to an old house with peeling wallpaper, sash windows propped open with rolled newspapers, and in the bathroom (Pauline asked to see the bathroom) a lavatory bowl stained the colour of iodine. Olga, through Pauline, offered a small monthly allowance, to be sure the girl would have a roof over her head. The girl did not refuse; it was arranged that Olga would open a bank account in her name. It is unlikely that she ever saw Olga again; Olga could not very well invite her to Friday evening dinners at Arthur’s house. Pauline telephoned, for Ruthie’s sake, every week or two, while she could reach Hillela where she worked in some mail-order business, but she did not last long in that job and there was no information about where she was to be found next. She had been told that if ever she had any problems, she should come to Joe — problems were Joe’s profession, he could deal with them disinterestedly; that was the one advantage she had left them to offer her. It would have been against Pauline’s principles to forbid any child of hers anything, but Carole was kept so busy between school and the communal activities she shared with her mother that there couldn’t have been much time or opportunity for her to seek out her cousin. And Sasha — Sasha was out of the way at school. When he came home for the Christmas holidays, Hillela had left her first job, moved from the old house, and — unless she had written to him? Hillela had never been known to write — it was unlikely he could seek her out, even if he had ‘had the heart to’.

That was Joe’s phrase, when they worried about the probability, and Pauline was somehow offended by it. What harm had been done Hillela? In that house, Pauline and Joe’s, she had been treated like one of their own, as long as this was possible. Pauline could not resorb into mental balance the confusion of that Saturday night’s return from the mountains — the eagles’ air, so easily invaded by cackle of a cheap little radio, the fear of the State and police that roused a whole resource of heightened alertness, craft and strategy working above daily life, and then the unbelievable sight that stared from within the safety and familiarity of that daily life — a child’s bed with the cheerful blanket crocheted by a black women’s self-help group, on the floor the shirt she chose for him only last week, the telescope bought and kept concealed as a loving surprise for a birthday; the house cat purring in the aghast vacuum. Pauline did not allow herself to think about the last time in her life she had felt a like confusion. That was the sort of trite matching for Olga to go in for — Pauline had a lifetime of clear-headedness, passionate desire to face facts, in between, separating her from the ancient history when she was a young woman and their sister Ruth forsook them all, everything they knew, for a dockside nightclub in Lourengo Marques. Let Olga and Arthur compare the mother and daughter, if it would make them feel any better. Pauline loathed sanctimonious self-justification. She never abrogated her responsibility for that stage in Hillela’s life. Never. It was not because of Ruthie they had failed with Ruthie’s daughter.

The girl brought no problem to Joe, so she must have been all right. Whatever that meant in the way she must be living.

It is not easily understood why Pauline did not think about what the problem might be, if there were to be one. Perhaps she assumed that a girl who could do what Hillela had done would know how to look after herself. And that practical conclusion, in itself, referred to all that was unthinkable, must be forgotten.

It had to be forgotten for Sasha’s sake, so that he could come back, always come back, without sensing the restraint of tolerance in the feel of home, come back to looking at the stars, chess games with his father and fierce political arguments with his mother. Sasha wrote letters but he never asked about Hillela, even in those addressed to Carole. Forget it. He had always, since it began, forgotten ‘it’ when he was at school; put it away, folded very small, and in code, in the centre of himself where no-one could get at it. Whether it was shameful or precious he had not needed to know until Pauline and Joe looked at it. Now he knew it had to be forgotten. It was all right at school; he feared the feel of home, the having to come back to its smell of fruit and Hillela’s hair that was home; to sensing the odour of that hair that wasn’t there anymore.

At school there was nothing to fear, until one weekend that term a girl in his class hanged herself in the gym. It was a Sunday, those who wanted to go to church had been in the town, others, including himself, had gone to help build a village school for the children of black peasants. She was a white Catholic girl and had stayed behind from church that day to hang herself; one of the juniors went into the gym to fetch cricket stumps and saw her dangling from the wall bars. She was not a particularly popular or pretty girl — people laughed behind her back at the dark hair that made her upper lip look dirty — but she had her little group, played tennis in the second team, was not left out at the Saturday night disco in the school hall. Sasha was among those brought running into the gym by the screams of the small boy, and her body hanging there was something without explanation. Another girl gave it to him: their classmate was pregnant. Her terror of her parents had been greater than her fear of death.

Sasha wrote in his weekly letter home about the brick-laying he was doing, building the village school.

Sasha had no fear of his parents. They were enlightened people. They had only looked. His mother had tried to hurt simply because she was hurt. He had not been afraid until now; he had only now remembered, discovered, there was something to be afraid of. This was the time when he would telephone home apparently for no reason; was there anything he wanted sent, anything he needed? They were always cheerful, pleased to hear from him. He tried, whenever he had a chance, to reach Carole when they were out, but never succeeded. The immense shock of curiosity with which he had seen the body of the girl turned into an obsession that blocked his co-ordination in the science laboratory and at games. He was able to bury himself in sleep the moment he went to bed at night in his senior boy’s private cubicle, but he woke very early in the morning, as if something had taken him by the shoulder and shaken him. Or slapped him this way and that across the face. He did not open his eyes but was wide awake behind this sham of sleep, and what he saw was not a dream but like a film he had never seen yet remembered, or the images accompanying the reading of a book. He saw the carcasses he had passed so many times unremarked, hanging from hooks in the country butcher shop near the school, where dagga could be bought from old women in the yard behind. The pigs and sheep dangled; the girl dangled, the laces of one of her shoes untied. Her face was the face of Hillela with head drooped to one side, like the plaster statues of Christ on the cross. How many weeks passed? How soon did girls know for sure what was going on in their bodies? With the knowledgeable girl who was his friend he brought up the subject of their dead classmate, for whom prayers had been said at school assembly. — She could have had an abortion. I’m sure we’d have found someone to do it. Poor stupid, thing. It’s not the end of the world …—

How many weeks to half-term? At last he could wander into Carole’s room. She was putting safety-pins round the torn hem of a skirt; he watched for a while. — Any news.—

She kept her head down.

— You haven’t seen her?—

The head nodded, so that no-one other than he would witness, by the spoken word, an admission.

— What’s she doing.—

— She wanted to leave the job she had, I don’t know what she’s found now.—

— You do know.—

Carole’s hair hung over her face, a little long-haired dog whose muzzle can’t be seen.

— Is she okay?—

A splotch fell on Carole’s hands, and another. — She’s okay, but I’m not going to talk about her with you.—

There came from him, riled by her tears of loss: —It’s not the end of the world.—

Yet what sort of assurance was Carole’s ‘okay’. Who would confide trouble to little Carole? He spent a great deal of that weekend searching: the old haunts he remembered, the warehouse where Hillela had played her guitar, and the kind of places he thought she might frequent now, Hillbrow discos, pizza joints, jazz clubs. He ended up, the Saturday night of his half-term break, alone in one of the cinemas where they had sat on autumn afternoons.

Sasha never saw her, not then or any other weekend or in the school holidays. It was not that she was not to be found; she was there, in the city, all right, but not for him, or surely he would have seen her somewhere, as he constantly encountered others he knew. How many months passed? Slowly, he became used to the fear. He lived with it all the time. And then too much time had gone by; if what he feared really had been, something terrible already would have come to pass, by now. And so this meant she was safe. She would not hang from a butcher’s hook with one shoelace untied. It’s not the end of the world. Forget it.

This is not a period well-documented in anyone’s memory, even, it seems, Hillela’s own. For others, one passes into a half-presence (alive somewhere in the city, or the world) because of lack of objective evidence and information; for oneself, the lack of documentation is deliberate. And if, later, no-one is sure you are really the same person, what — that is certain to be relevant — is there to document? Everyone is familiar with memories others claim to have about oneself that have nothing to do with oneself.

In the lives of the greatest, there are such lacunae — Christ and Shakespeare disappear from and then reappear in the chronicles that documentation and human memory provide. It is not difficult for a girl of seventeen (out of sight of the witness of family and friends) to be absent from the focuses of a woman’s own mnemonic attention in later life: to be abandoned, to disappear.