None to Accompany Me

Chapter 1

And who was that?

There’s always someone nobody remembers. In the group photograph only those who have become prominent or infamous or whose faces may be traced back through experiences lived in common occupy that space and time, flattened glossily.

Who could it have been? The dangling hands and the pair of feet neatly aligned for the camera, the half-smile of profile turned to the personage who was to become the centre of the preserved moment, the single image developed to a higher intensity; on the edge of this focus there’s an appendage, might as well trim it off because, in the recognition and specific memory the photograph arouses, the peripheral figure was never present.

But if someone were to come along — wait! — and recognize the one whom nobody remembers, immediately another reading of the photograph would be developed. Something else, some other meaning would be there, the presence of what was taken on, along the way, then. Something secret, perhaps. Caught so insignificantly.

Vera Stark, lawyer-trained and with the impulse to order that brings tidiness with ageing, came upon a photograph she had long thought thrown out with all she had discarded in fresh starts over the years. But it wasn’t any print she had overlooked. It was the photograph she had sent to her first husband in his officers’ quarters in Egypt during the war — their war, the definitive war, not those following it which spawn without the resolution of victory parades. He must have kept the photograph. Must have brought it back in his kit. It was a postcard — the postcard — she had sent when on a trip to the mountains; a photograph of the little group of friends who made up the holiday party. What she had written on the back (turning it over now, the lifting of a stone) was the usual telegraphic few lines scribbled while buying stamps — the weather perfect, she was climbing, walking miles a day, swimming in clear pools, the hotel was as he would remember it but rather run-down. Best wishes from this one and that — for those linking arms were their mutual friends, there was only one new face: a man on her left, a circle round his head. He was identified by name in a line squeezed vertically alongside her account of the weather.

What was written on the back of the photograph was not her message. Her message was the inked ring round the face of the stranger: this is the image of the man who is my lover. I am in love with him, I’m sleeping with this man standing beside me; there, I’ve been open with you.

Her husband had read only the text on the back. When he came home he did not understand it was not to be to her. She defended herself, amazed, again and again: —I showed you, I ringed his photograph next to me. I thought at least we knew each other well enough … How could you not understand! You just refused to understand.—

But yes, he must have brought it back in all innocence with his other souvenir knick-knacks, the evidence of his war, brought it back and here it was, somehow hadn’t been torn up or thrown away when they divided their possessions in the practical processes of parting in divorce. After forty-five years she was looking at the photograph again and seeing there in its existence, come back to her and lying on a shelf under some old record sleeves, that it was true: the existence of his innocence, for ever.

Vera and Bennet Stark gave a party on one of their wedding anniversaries, the year the prisons opened. It was a season for celebration; sports club delegations, mothers’ unions and herded schoolchildren stood around Nelson Mandela’s old Soweto cottage queueing to embrace him, while foreign diplomats presented themselves to be filmed clasping his hand. The Starks have been married so long they don’t usually make an occasion of the recurrent day, but sometimes it suggested an opportunity to repay invitations, discharge all we owe in one go, as Vera says, and on this year of all years it seemed a good excuse to go further than that: to let themselves and their friends indulge a little in the euphoria they knew couldn’t last, but that they were entitled to enjoy now when, after decades when they had worked towards it without success, change suddenly emerged, alive, from entombment. There were her Legal Foundation colleagues, of course; and white men and women who had been active in campaigns against detention without trial, forced removals of communities, franchise that excluded blacks; student leaders, ganged up under a tree in the garden drinking beer from cans, who had supported striking workers; a couple of black militant clergymen and an Afrikaner dominee excommunicated for his heresy in condemning segregation; a black doctor who hid and treated young militants injured in street battles with the police and army; black community leaders who had led boycotts; one or two of the white eternals from the street meetings of the old Communist Party, from the passive resistance campaigns of the Fifties and rallies of the Congress Alliance, the committees of any and every front organization during the period of bannings, who had survived many guises. And there were some missing. Those who were Underground were not convinced it was safe to come up, yet. Negotiations with the Government on indemnity for political activists were not decisive. One of their number made a surprise appearance — a late-night cabaret turn bursting into the company in a purple-and-yellow flowered shirt, gleeful under the peak of a black leather cap. There were wrestling embraces and shoulder-punching bonhomie from his brothers-in-arms Above Ground, and the hostess reacted as she used to when she didn’t know how to show her son how moved she was by the pleasure of having him home from boarding school — she brought her best offerings of food and drink.

The occasion was already marked by the presence of that son — Ivan, on a visit from London, where he had made his way to become a successful banker. With his aura — he wore what Jermyn Street called leisure clothes, silky suede lumber jacket, Liberty cravat and tasselled loafers — he seemed an unacknowledged yet defensive embarrassment to his mother (his father never showed his feelings, anyway) in the illusion that he was one of the colleagues and comrades; that coming home meant the matter of taking a plane. If the party was supposed to be for him as well as to celebrate an enduring marriage (and who would remember, of that extraordinary era, what occasioned what) it became a clandestine welcome for one of his mother’s mysterious friends. Music began to shake the walls and billow out into the garden; political argument, drinking and dancing went on until three in the morning. Ivan danced wildly, laughing, with his mother; it was as if their resemblance to one another were a shared source between them. When the man who had come up from Underground was found to have gone as he had come, from where and to where, no one would ask, it was as if the music stopped abruptly. He left a strange hollow silence behind; the echo chamber of all those years, now closing, silence of prisons, of disappearance, of exile, and for some, death. Over? The guests driving away to sleep, the hosts collecting dirty glasses, could not answer themselves.

Vera opened the door to a ring at ten o’clock at night — no fear of muggings back in those days of the Forties. He stood, still in his uniform, come to see if he could find some keys missing in the possessions he had packed up and taken away to the hotel where he was living. — Can’t lock my suitcases, damn nuisance as everything’s still lying about stored here and there. — He didn’t have to apologize for turning up unannounced at that hour because, of course, he knew her habits, she stayed up late, sometimes even after he had gone to bed he used to wake from first sleep and feel her sole sliding down his naked leg.

She kept him standing a few moments in the doorway as if he were a travelling salesman, and then stalked before him into their old living-room, now hers. He rummaged through the desk; she stood looking on. He might have been a plumber mending a pipe. She made a few offhand, low-voiced suggestions of where the keys might be. He had come prepared to meet, in the civilized way already established between the three of them, her lover with the thick smooth black hair like the coat of some animal, a panther, maybe, and the clear ridged outline of turned-down lips — how was it he hadn’t taken notice of these striking features in a photograph? Poor stupid trusting bastard that he was! But the lover wasn’t there, or he hadn’t come ‘home’ yet.

— They just might be in the (he didn’t say ‘my’) old tallboy in the bedroom — I left some stuff I thought you might still want. D’you mind if I go in?—

He turned to her politely.

Suddenly she peaked the stiff fingers of her hands in a V over her mouth and couldn’t suppress snorts of laughter.

He smiled, the smile broadening, sending ease between them like circles from the broken surface of water.

They entered together. She behaved as if their bed weren’t there, walking past it as something she didn’t recognize, and pulling out drawers for him. — I haven’t got round to going through this—

He held up papers. — Your old school reports, believe it or not. I thought you might want to keep them.—

— Good god, what for? I’m sure I would have thrown them in the bin, it must have been you who stuck them away.—

She made a gesture of refusal, not interested.

— Maybe I did rescue them from you some time. You still want to become a lawyer?—

Her chin jerked vigorously towards her sternum, with the vehemence of a child whose determination is beyond words. And at once she casually deflected this intrusion of past confidences. — Why are you still in that outfit?—

— Not yet demobilized.—

Perhaps the remark was not so casual; a subconscious rebuttal of unease she had never admitted to herself—‘that outfit’, referred to as if it were some form of affected fancy dress, had never been taken on by her civilian lover.

There grew between them the silence of nothing left to say. Nothing of their boy-girl love affair, their clumsy assumption of adulthood together, when she was seventeen, in a marriage interrupted by war. Absently he took off to toss to a chair the jacket with its epaulettes and insignia, its strip of campaign ribbons, and got down on his hunkers, searching through the lowest drawers of the piece of furniture. She opened a window to establish that the closeness in the room was lack of air.

Arms crossed, she stood there, watching as he set aside papers in sorted piles, and his back with its muscles moving under the stretched cloth of the shirt, the unawareness of her expressed in the nape grained with sunburn and clipped pale hair bared before her, the warmth of the flesh releasing the smell of a clean, creased shirt — she could not believe the sensation this was bringing her. She fled from it to the kitchen and poured two glasses of fruit juice, but as she was lifting the tray went to the living-room, took a bottle of whisky, came back to the kitchen and in two fresh glasses poured the liquor slowly over ice. She returned to the bedroom with harmless words ready: I think you need a drink. But she approached that warm and redolent back, forgotten, familiar, discovered anew, and touched the shoulder with the hand that held a glass. He turned at the nudge and lifted eyebrows in acknowledgement of the welcome drink, getting to his feet with weight supported on one palm.

They drank.

Nothing to say.

She tried to let the distraction of alcohol in her blood overcome the insistence that, clear of circumstance, unwanted, unreasonable, her body urged to her. She could not stop it from reaching him from her, as the flesh and soap smell of his shirt came from him to her. It took him by surprise; his face changed, resistance or pain passed across it, but swiftly. He took the glass out of her hand and put it down behind him. They stood, arms helpless at their sides, looking at each other in restless contradiction. He took her against his chest, her face pressed into the odour of the shirt. They made love for the first time in two years, on the floor among the papers, not on the bed where she belonged with the lover, now.

And what if the lover had walked in on them, he must have the key of the door, what change in direction would have happened then?

Vera was awarded the house in her divorce settlement and her lover Bennet Stark became her husband the day after her divorce was final. She gave up the wartime job she had had as secretary to someone in the set she had mixed with in her previous life, got herself articled to a legal firm and registered as a part-time law student at the university. There were no children of her previous marriage and, having lived with her lover in confident anticipation that they would be able to marry soon, she entered the second marriage already pregnant. The child — it was Ivan — grew inside her, her lover was secured as her rightful possession, she was working and studying to fulfil the ambition she had been deflected from in the rosy feminine submissions of a first marriage, but that had been hers since she was a schoolgirl. She sang as she lumbered heavily about the house. At night between the arms of her chosen man, with all the possibilities of her life envisioned in the dark, refrains of precise legal formulations she was learning ribboned pleasingly through her mind on the way to sleep. She saw her happiness as conscious and definitive. Once, in the first months when she was appearing in public with her lover as husband, a woman she did not know turned to her girlishly: ‘Who’s that terribly handsome guy talking to the woman in the red dress?’

He — hers. Sometimes when she woke before he did she would raise herself carefully on one elbow to gaze at his profile, the red bevelled scroll of his closed lips, the delicate hollow scooped beside the high bridge of his beautiful curved nose, the clear black shape his hairline cut against his white brow and temples, and, as if reflected, its blue shadow, the dark beard that was growing under the skin of the finely-turned shelf of jaw. If he stirred and the eye opened, black diamond mined from the depth of the subconscious, unfocussed, she suddenly was able to see him as the woman stranger had, existing in the eyes of others, her adoration — her luck — compounded by this. And there were times when, in the release of love-making, after the marvels he had first introduced her to in the mountains, caresses that had singled him out for her with an inked circle, Vera sobbed and huddled as if ecstasy were remorse or fear. Despite the extreme sensuality of his looks and the fascination it had for women, Bennet had not had much to do with them, inhibited by fastidiousness until he met this woman who, although so young, already had had the experience of marriage, abandoned a life, another man, chosen him. He understood that the passion she roused and they shared might find unexplained outlets of emotion through her; he would soothe her gently, unquestioningly. But she would take and roughly thrust his hands here and there on her distended breasts and swollen belly and between her legs so that he lost his head and they coupled wonderfully again, while he feared for the child tossed so wildly inside her.

The baby was born strong and healthy. His mother’s gaze during his gestation had been so concentrated on his father that he might have been expected to be imprinted with his father’s Celtic or Semitic beauty; but he came out favouring his mother, exactly, from his infant days; in Vera’s image, alone.

Mrs Stark is a fixture at the Legal Foundation. Although she has refused to take the executive directorship which has been offered to her, preferring — selfishly, she says — not to spend time on administration, no one can imagine the Foundation running without her. Her quiet acerbity at meetings, when she disagrees with aspects of policy (and the fact that she’s so often proved right), her ability, sitting back with her head in its close-cut cap of white-streaked dark blond hair held immobile in attention, the left corner of her mouth sometimes tucked in (the cleft could be expressing impatience or understanding) to recognize and separate the truth, or as she would qualify, the facts from the fantasies born of poverty and powerlessness in applicants for the Foundation’s intervention — these combine to make her the colleague to whom everyone from the director to the telephonist turns for the last word.

Nobody can con Vera, her colleagues agree with satisfaction. The Foundation is not a legal aid organization in the usual sense, it does not provide legal representation in the courts for individuals who cannot afford to hire lawyers. It came into existence in response to the plight of black communities who had become so much baggage, to be taken up and put down according to a logic of separation of black people from the proximity of white people. A logic can be made out of anything; it lies not in the truth or falsity of an idea, but in the means of its practical application. As part of their schedule of work for this week or that, Government officials commandeered the appropriate personnel from the appropriate department and went off to bulldoze the homes of a community, pack the inhabitants and their belongings onto trucks drawn, like any other government equipment, from the State’s stores, and transport them to an area designated by the appropriate department. There they were supplied with tin toilets, communal taps, and sometimes, if these could be drawn from the stores department, tents. Sheets of corrugated tin might be supplied for them to begin building shacks. They might be allowed to bring along bits and ends left intact by the demolition of their houses — a window-frame or some boards — but cows and goats had to be left behind; what would the beasts feed on, in a stretch of veld cleared and levelled for the barest human occupation?

All this process was perfectly logical, Mrs Stark would remind her colleagues; we have to come to terms with the fact that in the Foundation we are not dealing with the only real means to defend these people, which is to defeat the power that creates and puts the idea into practice — we are not tackling that at all, at all, let’s not kid ourselves — we are only grappling with its logical consequences, looking for the legal loopholes that will delay or frustrate or — occasionally — win out over that logic. They would smile in appreciation of her hard-headed sense of proportion, quite difficult to keep when confronted with the sort of trusting wretchedness facing them in supplicants every day.

Now that the Act that put the Idea into practice has been abolished by the beginning of political defeat of that power, the Foundation has not, as might be expected, become redundant. Mrs Stark was not entirely right — or rather she and her colleagues, absorbed in pragmatic strategies while the Act was in force, had no time to think how far beyond its old promulgation and logical enactment, beyond its abolition, its consequences would become yet new consequences. Now communities whose removal the Foundation had been unsuccessful in stalling are coming to present the case for having restored to them the village, the land, their place, which was taken from them and allotted to whites. The same old men in stained worn suits, taking off hats in hands that seem to be uprooted from earth, sit on the other side of the interviewer’s desk. There is the same patient alertness needed to listen to the tale and, while it is being told, assess where, out of desperation and guile, it is omitting something the emissary thinks might prejudice his case, where it is being exaggerated for sympathy, and where the facts and their truthful interpretation are the strength of the case, something to work on.

Although Mrs Stark is the one who prepares the yearly report for publication — it has to be both comprehensive and persuasive, because it goes out to existing and prospective donors — and she sometimes travels abroad as a fund-raiser, she does her share of interviewing and investigation. Nobody can con Mrs Stark, no. To some she seems forbidding — and what white person, who among all those whites who still have to be approached and convinced before you, a black, can come into what you are now told is your own, is not forbidding, still there, on the other side of the desk, just as before? But although with her discouraging coldness she doesn’t patronize these applicants struggling to express themselves in English — the language of the other side of the desks — and although she doesn’t try to ingratiate herself chummily, as many whites feel obliged to do, with the blacks among her colleagues, she has — how to categorize this? — connections with some of these colleagues that have come about rather than been sought and even, over the years, with individuals who to others would be scarcely distinguishable from any in the endless trudge of dispossessed in and out of the Foundation’s premises. The young clerk named Oupa will saunter into her office eating from his lunch packet of chips or takeaway of curried chicken, and sit there, sometimes in easy silence while she reads through notes she’s taken in an interview just concluded, a silence sometimes broken by talk between her bites at an apple and sips of yoghurt. He’s studying at night for a law degree by correspondence and started off by coming to ask her for an explanation of something he didn’t grasp; it was her very reserve itself that in his naivety made him think she would be better qualified to give him the right answers than any of the other lawyers on the premises. She was the figure of the schoolmistress missing in his lonely self-education, she was the abstract image of authority that, resented all your life or not, you had to turn to in your powerlessness. Then he began to talk to her about his four years on Robben Island, seventeen to twenty-one. It was everyone’s prison story, of his kind and generation, but he found himself telling it differently to this white woman, not censored or touched up as he was drawn out to tell it to other whites eager for vicarious experience. He broke off and returned to it on other days, remembering things he had forgotten or not wanted to remember; not only the brutality and heedless insult of walls and warders, but also the distortions in his own behaviour he now looked back on. Sometimes with disbelief, talking to her, sometimes with puzzlement, even shame. There was the comradeship, the real meaning of brother (as he put it). — But you suddenly hate someone, you can hardly keep your hands off his throat — and it’s over nothing, a piece of string to tie your shoe, one time a fight in the shower about whose turn it was! And the same two people, when we were on hunger strike, we’d do anything for each other … I can’t think it was me.—

What did she say? He was a gentle person forced, too young, to see another version of himself that it needed only violence against him, degradation in suffering the lack of humanity in others, to bring to life. She didn’t console, didn’t assure him that that individual, that self, no longer existed. — It was you.—

He reached for a tissue from the box on her desk with a gloomy tilt of the head and the answering tilt of her head said it was not necessary to ask. He was wiping chicken-wing-greasy fingers. She passed him the waste-paper bin, dropping her apple core into it on the way.

Oupa doubled as driver of the Foundation’s station-wagon battered by the lawyers’ trips into the backveld to consult with communities under threat of removal. One day when Mrs Stark’s car had been stolen he gave her a lift home, and the theft revived something else. Before he went to the Island, he was awaiting trial on the mainland in a cell with criminals. — Murderers, man! Gangsters. I can tell you, they were brilliant. Nothing to touch them for brains. The things they’d brought off — robberies, bank hold-ups. And they’d play the whole show through for us. Exactly how they did it. Prison means nothing to them, they had the warders bribed and scared of them. Even whites. They had all their stuff waiting for them outside, for when they’d done their time. I tell you, those guys would make top-class lawyers and big businessmen. — He grinned, chin lifted as he drove.

Again Mrs Stark was comfortably silent, if she noted, she made no remark on what he had just innocently confirmed: something of the unacknowledged self that came into being in prison still existed within him, a pride in and defiant community with anyone, everyone, who had the daring to defy the power of white men, to take from them what was not theirs, whether by political rebellion or by the gangster’s gun; silent because this was a self that, by nature of what she was, could not exist among her selves.

— You ever come across any of them again, outside?—

Oupa pressed his elbows to his ribs and brought his shoulders up to his ears. — Those people! Man! Je-ss-uss! I’d be terrified.—

Chapter 2

Vera left her promising position in a prosperous legal firm after, when she had failed to conceive for twelve years, her second child was born, Annick.

She has never known whether her first child, Ivan, is the son of her divorced husband or of Bennet Stark, her love of whom was ringed indelibly on a photograph. No one else will ever know that she herself does not. He of the sun-grained, fair-skinned nape is now living in Australia, retired from something to do with shipping, and has nothing around him to bring to the surface that last visit he made to the house they had once shared; and if, in the mood of male camaraderie on a drinking evening there is an exchange of confidences about the unpredictable sexual behaviour of women, he contributes the example of an ex-wife who gave him a better hour than she’d ever done during the brief marriage, he is unlikely to think there could have been any consequences — she was accustomed to see to that. Perhaps he might feel a momentary stab of betrayal, despite her complete betrayal of him, at mentioning her more or less in the context of the one-night stand, but it was all so long ago … As for her present husband, it’s unthinkable that ever there could be betweenthem one of those terrible, embattled stages of marriage when she might thrust her hand down into their life to seize a weapon to wound him mortally.

Ben was almost embarrassedly dismissive of the fact that his daughter had inherited his beauty; part of the quality of that beauty was that he was not aware of it, he was brought to see it only by remarks upon the beauty of the baby girl as the image of her father. Ivan — because he reproduced the face of his mother? — remained Ben’s favoured child.

When the girl was born, with the marvellous markings of her father’s black hair and double fringe of lashes, even the bevel-edged lips, Vera could have been looking in a mirror where her lover from the mountains was preserved as he was as a child. A tremendous gratitude gushed from her along with the expulsion of the afterbirth. For a year she stayed at home taking care of the baby with the tender emotional fervour of one making amends — for what, to whom, was diffused in maternal energy; from which she looked up, only now and then, at the newspaper headlines announcing arrests, trials, bans, finally the outlawing of political movements. Physical fulfilment is a temporary withdrawal from the world, a sealing-off from threat and demand, whether directed to oneself or others. At the time, it seems the other world, all extraneous, is jabber and distraction, a crowded station passed through, train blinds drawn and compartment door locked. The self-absorption was pierced only by the fact of the baby shot dead on its mother’s back at Sharpeville — an infant like her own, like Bennet’s. Her life was all touch: during the day the smooth plumpness of her small daughter damply warm against her hip, the hands of her leggy son, roughened and scratched in tussles at play; the caresses of love-making. There could have been a biological explanation for the strong resurgence of eroticism between Bennet and her. Some theory that after giving birth women experience fresh sexual initiatives and responses. They had been married for twelve years; whatever the reason, the feast of sex begun as a picnic in the mountains again preoccupied her and her lover-husband as it had done. Intelligent people as they were, while they discussed what was happening around them he could be distracted by the bare cup of her armpit showing in a sleeveless dress, and she could be conscious of the curve of his genitals enticing under his jeans.

Bennet Stark carved wood and modelled clay but while recognition for his work in this vocation seemed long in coming had had to make use of a conventional degree he had earned when too young to know what he wanted to do. Bennet Stark was known, behind his back at the Department of English in the university where he worked, as Our Male Lead; as if he were responsible for his looks and the mixture of resentment and admiration these aroused. From the point of view of advancement in an academic community it’s a bad sign to have some advantage that is simply a gift of nature, not earned and not attainable for others by any amount of hard work, lobbying or toadying. He remained in a junior position and the ambitions the lovers had for him as an artist when first they exchanged confidences beside a mountain stream were in abeyance while they concentrated on each other and the extension of themselves in their children. He still modelled in clay occasionally over a weekend — the heads of the children, which were growing, changing, even as the clay hardened the image of one stage or another, and the naked torso of Vera, anonymous female body to anyone other than himself, who supplied the beloved head in his mind. But married to the woman he had captivated and captured and the father of a family, he had given up the idea of becoming a sculptor. Vera, at least, had attained her easier ambition of qualifying in law. Lovingly, he felt no jealousy; hers was a practical goal, not dependent on the imponderable mystery of talent, of which, protected by sensual happiness, he came to accept he perhaps did not have enough.

When Annick began to wriggle out of her arms and Ivan distanced himself from the need of her touch on childish wounds, Vera appeared restlessly displaced. She told Bennet she was going back to work.

They could certainly do with the money.

— I’m not going back to the firm.—

He did not know what to make of a sudden announcement that overturned all assumptions.

— I don’t want to fight their insurance claims when they lose their jewellery and Mercedes. Or dig the dirt in their divorces. — He looked at her tenderly, patiently. — Set up on your own?—

— I don’t know.—

Vera read newspapers and reports, White Papers, was drawn to people who were spread-eagled between their private attachments and those other tentacles, the tug of others’ predicaments, the tangle of frustration and misery; women, as she was a woman, lifted out of the humble ramshackle of their lives and dropped, destitute, in the veld, men, as hers was a man, endorsed out of a town where they might find work, driven off farms where their fathers had given their labour; children unlike hers because there was no childhood for them, begging and sniffing glue for comfort in the street. She did come to know. She went to work at the Foundation, not out of the white guilt people talked about, but out of a need to take up, to balance on her own two feet the time and place to which, by birth, she understood she had no choice but to belong. This need must have been growing unheeded — seed shat by a bird and germinating, sprouting, beside a cultivated tree — climbing the branches of passionate domesticity.

Population removals were being fought everywhere to the limit of the Foundation’s resources; she was working until midnight at home as well as all day at the offices; Bennet had left the university and, with a partner, opened a market consultancy in the city. Alone in the house in bed at night, they talked over for hours the disappointments, worries, resentments and compensations each had gathered during the day, giving one another advice, putting together the context, from his experience of one level of society and her experience of another, their life.

Mr Tertius Odendaal had three farms, one inherited from his grandfather through his father, one that came as his wife’s dowry, and one that he had bought in the agricultural boom times of the early Eighties. With America and the British — even the Germans who had once been supporters of the war in which his grandfather was a Boer general — interfering in the affairs of the country, embargoing oil supplies, boycotting sports tours, encouraging the blacks to make trouble so that even his ignorant farm boys were no longer reliable, he began to think about looking to the present, if not the future. With the old stern President pushed out by one of his cabinet who smiled like a film star and was said to be having talks with blacks, no one could be sure what that would be. Not twenty kilometres across the veld from his homestead there was a black homeland. He had had to put an electrified fence round his kraal to protect his Holsteins from thieves, after one of his watch-boys had been slashed in a panga attack. Even the old President had dumped blacks too near white farms. On one of his other farms — the one bought when there were good rains for his maize crop and beef prices were high — that he used only for seasonal grazing, he found squatters, although the herd-boy who had his women and umpteen children with him in his outpost of mud and thatch huts lied that these were just his family, visiting. He told the herd-boy to clear out, get off the farm and take his hangers-on with him. But next time he drove to inspect the place with one of his other boys there were fluttering sheets of plastic and leantos of cardboard, tin roofs held down by stones and old tyres, thrown up on his veld like worm-casts. Only women and children to be seen; the men would have been away at work or loafing somewhere, even as far as town. He got his boy to warn these people with an harangue in their own language: what were they doing there, they must pack up their rubbish and get off his land immediately, if they were not gone by tomorrow he’d bring the police. A tiny child clutched his penis in fear and drew up his cheeks to whimper. The women stood unblinking or turned away. As the farmer’s bakkie lurched and swayed off, one screamed something the herd-boy didn’t translate to the farmer. The cry trailed in the wake of the vehicle.

Mr Odendaal decided to move with the times; whatever they might be. What the Government had done, was doing, could not be undone by one Afrikaner alone. Fighting its betrayal of the white farmer was something for which political action would be found. In the meantime, farmers would have to — in the businessmen’s way of speaking—’diversify resources’, yes, that’s it, get up to the tricks that make those people rich. He applied to the Provincial Administration for permission to establish a black township on one of his holdings. He would convert the farm into cash as a landlord; he would divide it into plots for rent to blacks. He was going to turn their invasion to profit.

During the year pending the Administration’s decision — the application appeared in the Government Gazette and there were ponderous objections from farmers in the vicinity—1,500 squatter families representing approximately 26,000 people took possession of Portion 19. These figures for the Odensville squatter camp (it must have got out among the squatters that Odendaal had thought to commemorate the family name in his township) were ascertained by a field-worker of the Legal Foundation, to which a man who presented himself as the spokesperson of the squatters had appealed for investigation. A station-wagon with a tide-mark of dust and a windscreen dashed with splattered insects drew up at the Odendaal farmstead. Odendaal sensed at once it had been through the squatter camp that had been meant to be his township. A woman with white-streaked hair cut like a man’s, speaking the usual badly accented Afrikaans of English-speaking townspeople, introduced herself there on the stoep as a Mrs Stack or Stock from the Legal Foundation.

At the pronouncement of that title his body shifted in reflex to bar the front door; that body would not let her past into his house. She actually had with her the man he had refused to meet, whose existence was a matter for the police to deal with — the black bastard who put up that crowd of criminals, drunkards, and won’t-works on his land to talk about ‘rights’ they never would have had the nerve to think of. She introduced the man and even the driver, also a black, as if she expected that the two blacks would be received as part of her delegation and greeted as visitors.

She ignored that the farmer did not respond. Mr Odendaal this, Mr Odendaal that. Polite and talked so you couldn’t get a word in to stop her. — We’ve come to discuss the situation down at Odensville, which must be distressing for you, don’t think the people there don’t realize this. I’m one of the Foundation’s lawyers and — we know from experience — the worst aspect of this sort of situation is when the farmer feels he’s accepting it if he should agree to talk to the other parties concerned. The Odensville people have a spokesperson, Mr Rapulana, and I can assure you that neither of us is here to deny your position (changed to English, not knowing how to put that sort of sly lawyer’s phrase in Afrikaans). We’ve come because it’s in the best interests of everyone … believe me, I’ve seen it, solutions can sometimes be reached where there has seemed no possible way out while the only communication is the threat of police action … Mr Odendaal, I hope you’re going to talk to us, Mr Rapulana and me — oh this morning or whenever it suits you — we’re going to hear each other out without prejudice to either side.—

This was the kind of woman who produced a revulsion in him. To him, in fact was not a woman at all, as he knew women, even if she had been young he could never have believed a man would want to touch a woman like that, would never have thought there were breasts you could fondle in the marital bedroom dark, the mouth asking questions and addressing him without the respect and natural deference due to a male, yet offensively quietly, could bring the sensation of a woman’s tongue in your mouth.

He made her wait. He was looking over her head as if she were not there. He spoke in Afrikaans, since she thought she would make herself acceptable by trying to speak his language.

— Daar’s geen Odensville se mense nie! Odensville is my township that’s not yet declared, nobody is living in Odensville, nobody! All those people are trespassers and the only thing I’m going to tell you, lady (the term of address emphasized, and in English), I’m going to get them run off my land, I’m going to burn down their rubbish, and you can go back yourself and tell them I’m not just talking, I’m not talking at all to you, I’ve got the men to do it with me, we know how to get it done, all right, and if they want to get in the way, that’s going to be their funeral. Running to you won’t help them. There are no Odensville ‘people’, so you can forget about calling them that. They’re nothing, vuilgoed. —

This meddling woman — lawyers, they call themselves! — stood calmly, even the twitch of something like a smile at the side of her mouth, as if waiting for a tantrum to spend itself. He began to breathe heavily at the insult.

The black man he would never speak to — never! — looked at him unavoidably as the dark aperture of a camera aimed. This was a country black, brought up where his parents and grandparents, share-croppers and labourers, spoke the language of the farmer they worked for, and the school for blacks where he learnt to read and write taught in Afrikaans, not his black language. The man’s Afrikaans was Odendaal’s, not Mrs Stark’s pidgin.

— Meneer Odendaal, don’t be afraid. We won’t harm you. Not you or your wife and children.—

The woman lawyer touched the man’s shirt-sleeve (dressed up like a gentleman, jacket over his arm). Before she led the way back to the station-wagon she paused persistently. — Mr Odendaal, I apologize for turning up without telephoning. I’ll be writing to you and probably will be able to explain the Foundation’s assessment of the situation more acceptably than I’ve been able to do now.—

The farmer turned his back. He opened his front door and slammed it on them behind him. In the optical illusion of blotchy explosions that comes with leaving the glare of sun for a dim hallway, he, too, paused a moment. He listened to hear the station-wagon leave his property. As if he had just stopped running, his leaping, bursting heart slowly decelerated to its normal pace.

For a long time — how many years? — Vera still told her husband everything. Or thought she did.

Meneer Odendaal, don’t be afraid. We won’t harm you.

This reaction, response, whatever you like to call it, lay between her husband and her like a gift. Of what, to whom, their faces showed neither could decide. Back in the blueish domes where his black eyes always stirred in her the strange attention they had attracted against the thudding of a waterfall she and he had climbed to at the beginning, she looked for his answer. Once he had been the answer to everything; that was falling in love: the end of questions. But she was finding an answer within herself. The gift of the squatter leader’s tolerance, forgiveness — whichever it was — was something the farmer didn’t deserve.

And it was unclaimed! Rejected. — Don’t you see, he isn’t able to be aware of it. — A further explanation, coming from one whose familiar symmetry of features juxtaposed the harmony of life with the discord she had not only witnessed, but been part of in this experience and was part of routinely in many others. How could these contradictions exist in one species, the human one? How could such beauty be achieved in the composition of this man’s, her chosen one’s, face, and such ugliness distort the ability of human response in that man’s, the farmer’s, spirit?

— Who’s the fellow, anyway — from Odensville — d’you know anything about him?—

She opened and shut a hand in the gesture of her limitations. — About as much as I do about all the others who come to us. Only difference, he’s apparently the one all the squatters trust to represent them. In many of these places there’s so much rivalry, different factions saying theirs is the man. Often we find the person we’re working with isn’t accepted by this group or that. Little power struggles going on even among people you’d think too desperately busy trying to survive, to have the energy … He seems well-educated, not like most rural schoolmasters. But I don’t know if we’re going to get anywhere with this case. If the Administration does give the farmer permission to declare a township there, he’ll be in a position to say to the people, pay up or get off. He’ll zone such and such a number of plots, and that won’t be enough for even those who possibly could pay. There’s no minimum living space in a squatter camp, you know!—

— He could charge what he likes for his plots?—

— I’ve seen farmers rent a piece of ground half the size of this room for a hundred rands a month. Rural rack-rent, and we’ve no legal recourse. Exploitation is the other name for the law of supply and demand, my darling.—

— Maybe. Maybe. In the situation of people with nothing. When it comes to land. Pocket calculators, deodorants, vodka brands … the stuff I’m consulted about — the greater demand you create the greater the competition and the less chance of getting away with exploitation.—

He spoke in irony but without resentment. A contradiction between the purpose of Bennet Stark’s occupation and the purpose of Vera’s was something that, as with other couples of their kind, of their place and time, was unremarked in their intimacy, part of an accepted ambiguity. For so long this had been a place and time when integrity in many matters could be maintained only by dishonesty, when truth had to survive by lies. If Security (itself a euphemism for threat) came to ask where so-and-so was living, you said you did not know, and, out of necessity to protect yourself as well, might even put Security off on a plausible false trail. If you were going to be a conduit for letters addressed to certain destinations that risked being intercepted by agents at the post office, you hired a mail-box under a fictitious name in a suburb far from where you lived. If there was a rumour that this one or that among acquaintances was suspect as a police plant, you smilingly dissimulated before the person but no longer talked in that company about anything you believed in. You lied by omission, and warned others against association with someone who perhaps was innocent, a name smeared by yet others to cause dissension in your ranks. These were the only ways to defend at least something of the truth against the ultimate lie, the only way to defend the principle of life struggling against death, which is the ultimate, forgotten etymology, not to be found in any dictionary or political speech, of that embarrassing word, freedom. So while Vera’s Foundation upheld the right of land and shelter, the object of Bennet’s market research consultancy was to discover for his clients the enticements that distract people from what they really lack.

But — again, wait! — isn’t there another, everyday, pop-freedom, broadcast everywhere in shops and elevators and the combis which transport everyone in cities and on country roads, an easy-to-use freedom in the choice of buying the beer that champions drink or the hair-relaxer beauty queens advise? Must people forgo the pleasure of the unnecessary, as well as everything else they don’t have? If Bennet had stayed on as Our Male Lead at the university, he would have been teaching a curriculum devised for the level of general education and Western cultural background of white students, difficult to attain for the black students who satisfied entrance standards nominally but came from township schools where boycotts were their history thesis, running battles with the police their epic poetry, and economic theory that of a home where there wasn’t enough money for bus fare, let alone books. So what was the difference, whichever way a failed sculptor might earn a living?

In some blessed peaceful country, existing far away, an obvious moral contradiction in the activities of a man and woman might destroy the respect that goes with love. But here, for these two, while the great lie prevailed, it was part of a shackle of common experience of what was wrong but aleatory, could not be escaped. They were scarcely aware of its chafing.

When Oupa had driven two or three kilometres from the Odendaal place the little party from the Foundation stopped on a side road for tea under a tree. Mrs Stark always took along on such trips a flask and a packet of biscuits, sugar in a jar, and a stack of plastic cups. Most welcome, the Odensville man said several times, sitting with his knees neatly together, on the grass. Young Oupa crunched one biscuit after another and every now and then, irresistibly, shook his head and laughed on a full mouth at the encounter they had left behind them. — I know that man. Yoh-yoh! I know him! That kind from the Island, warders just like him. There was one commandant — stood there like a bull in front of you when you came up for interrogation. Never spoke himself, let the other one question you and rough you up, but just standing there he was in charge. If he hadn’t been there, they couldn’t have done the things they did to you. And every time I thought, now it’s coming, now he’s going to start in on me, too. Yrr-ah, man. But he didn’t need to, he just had to be there.—

Mrs Stark ran her fingers through her hair, a commonplace sparrow ruffling its feathers, and yawned, the yawn turning into a smile, the pleasure she always took in the young man’s ebullience, his awesome way of dealing with his terrible experiences in the indiscriminate narrative style in which he would gossip of something pleasant or funny. The soft red road was empty except for a distant stick-figure zigzagging on a bicycle just below the horizon. The tea was hot and sweet. Beyond a barbed-wire fence where wispy beards of sheep’s wool were caught, veld grasses and weeds streaked in undulations of green woven to bronze and rust where a declivity in the ground had been swampy in summer. Black-and-white plover flung themselves up out of the grass as if they had been thrown, crying out on a single note at human presence. After the battering of responses and emotions in the exchange with the farmer, the irritation and exasperation repressed — and who knows, neither Mrs Stark nor Oupa, what else the Odensville man was experiencing? — calm and quiet fell upon the three as a common bond. After this one unremarkable manifestation of that conflict which rang and babbled about them, in them, a constant garbling of their different lives— suddenly the swallows of hot sweet tea were their only awareness. The paper-flutter of white egrets lifting the sky, the gauzy sleeves of water trailing from irrigation faucets in a vast field of something barely there, barely green; the three rested on the land: this was what it was, not a wrangle in a cross-fire of saliva on a stoep, not folders of documents citing deed, claim and proclamation in the files of a Legal Foundation. Oupa wandered off to pee behind a tree. Mrs Stark, unconcerned about the dignity of her maturity, climbed through the spiky fence with the skill of one used to improvise and found a bush for herself. As she squatted there so privately, the flit of insects in the sun above her head made her drowsy, as if they were some pleasant drug taking aural effect. In an instant measured by the flick of transparent wings, there/away, she felt she was about to lie down on the damp rough grass and dream something she had forgotten. She came back to herself and through the fence again. The Odensville man was still sitting as if at a church meeting. — What about you?—

But if he understood the brisk reference to the humble call of nature he perhaps thought it an embarrassing familiarity on the part of this woman, from whom he expected the formulations of the law. He dusted the elbows of his jacket as he rose, asking whether she would mind dropping him at a store nearby, he had to see someone. He got out of the station-wagon there, taking off his hat.

— I’ll be contacting you when I have any news, good or bad. You have my phone number? Yes, keep me posted if there are any developments. One of us’ll come out again some time next week to take statements — if you could get some people together.—

It was the same sort of professional formula she had used for the farmer, a lawyer must not identify with the anxiety of a client any more than a doctor can function effectively if he begins to feel the pain of his patient.

A day or night when Vera heard, like a phrase recurring from a piece of music once listened to and out of mind: Meneer Odendaal, don’t be afraid. We won’t harm you. Not you or your wife and children.

She separated the three statements.

Meneer Odendaal, don’t be afraid.

(Meneer Odendaal) We won’t harm you.

(Meneer Odendaal) Not you or your wife and children.

She thought that she had not heard them aright on the stoep that day. The farmer heard them and Rapulana the Odensville man heard them the way she did not, they understood what was being said. The words of tolerance and forgiveness so strangely coming from the Odensville squatter dweller, shaming her for the crude aggression of the farmer, were not tolerance and forgiveness but a threat. Remember, Meneer Odendaal, we are thousands on Portion 19, our Odensville. We are there across the veld from you, every night. You have dogs, you have a gun, but we are thousands, and we can come across the veld to this house, this house where you and your wife and your children are asleep, and, as you said about us if we don’t go from Portion 19, that’ll be your funeral.