None to Accompany Me

Chapter 3

You don’t know who this is?

On her way in the city, coming up to the street from the underground garage where her car had its regular booth, a creature within its range of burrows walking the block to the Foundation from the bank, a coffee bar where she might have joined a friend or the Italian restaurant where occasionally she and Ben, in the observance of a forgotten retreat for clandestine lovers, met for lunch, Vera sometimes found herself stopped by someone who was searching for recognition to come from her.

You don’t know who this is?

The chestnut satin skin of a young black woman now darkened and puckered beneath the eyes, the saucy jut of dancing buttocks now built into a monument of solid, middle-aged flesh; a figure of a man with one tired shoulder lower than the other, shining pink dome where Vera would have recognized only the lost blond curls, another whose belly-fat, straining gaps between shirt buttons, had swallowed the slender black Jonah (that really happened to be his name) she and Ben had hidden from the police in Ben’s office before he fled the country — who would suspect a market research consultancy of harbouring one of the leaders of the uprising in ‘76. Some had come from their years in prison, some were the first of those returning from exile. As they talked, hands grasped, sometimes embracing, the double embrace first clasped round this side of the neck then that, which everyone in the liberation movement forgot was derived from the embrace of dictators, Vera and these old acquaintances and friends were giddy with discovery, the past set down on the streets of the present.

You don’t remember me?

The past is known to be irretrievable. But here that proposition is overturned.

In the euphoria of being back, of presenting themselves alive, resurrected from the anonymity of exile, of these who have returned, and the eager desire of those who have stayed at home to make up, in welcome, for the deprivation of exile they have not suffered, people who had had reason to distrust or simply dislike one another and people who once had been close as brothers and sisters are all greeted in the same way as cherished returning heroes. It is something of the same phenomenon as young Oupa’s lively accounts that do not discriminate between terrors he has experienced and the everyday gossip of the Foundation’s personnel. A convention came instantly into being, as conventions often do, to serve where it seems established patterns of behaviour don’t. Yet beneath it, under the disguise of flesh, behind the sunken eyes, within the clothes of a foreign cut, the black leather caps of East Germany, the dashikis of Tanzania, the Arab keffiyeh worn as a scarf, the old events and circumstances exist; standing there in the street, the old dependencies, the old friendships, the old factional rivalries, the old betrayals and loyalties, political scandals and sexual jealousies were not gone for ever but persisted in evidence of traceable, ineffaceable features, visible cell structure, still living. The past was there.

Perhaps because of the break in continuity this was so. If the satin skin had been seen slowly bruising dark with age and heavy drinking, if the blond curls had been observed, in the course of ordinary encounters, thinning, if Jonah had been heavier, maturing each time he dropped in for talk and a beer with Ben, the changes would have wound away naturally in the reel of years. But there was no tape running between the state of being they had been in when they left for exile or prison and their sudden reappearance back here where they had left: the weight their lives had was the weight of the past, out of storage and delivered to those who had stayed behind.

The man whom experiences had bowed to one side and shorn of his hair turned up at Vera’s office to see if there might be something for him — a research job, anything; he had been back three months and could not find work. He had been a journalist on an often-banned small paper when they knew one another long ago. While she tried to make some suggestions, where he might find employment and — she had to offer — she would be able to put in a word for him, there lay between them the knowledge that he was — had been — suspected of being a police agent at one time, and when he fled the country, although apparently cleared of this suspicion, he was mixed up in some schismatic defection. This was what he was, to her; she did not know whether he had been reinstated among the exiles abroad and whether or not he had returned with the status of one fully accepted within the Movement — knowing him only in the persona of the past, she saw that that persona might have inveigled by some subterfuge the status to return under indemnity, supposedly vouched for by the Movement.

But if there were ambiguous feelings subsuming the enthusiasm of welcome and the obligations it carried, there was also the overwhelming sense of good times impossibly restored. Among the people who were returning were some the sight and sound of whom, their very mannerisms and turn of phrase, were proof that such times are carried along within the self.

When a railway line is abandoned, the tracks aren’t taken up. Under weeds and grass, they remain, marking a route. For the Starks, with Sibongile and Didymus Maqoma suddenly sitting in the Starks’ living-room again after more than twenty years, there was the unexpected warmth and understanding, across the conditioned inhibitions of colour, between couples sharing youth and the ties of children. Now again, in the presence of Sally and Didy, the Starks were the lovers in an affair continuing in the protection of domesticity, expansive towards others in the bounty of sexual happiness. Vera had not seen Ben as the woman at a party once had, his male allure, for a long time, had not even been aware, in her familiarity with him and her preoccupations, of not seeing him. He, Bennet Stark, was still there, with only the deep lines from the corners of those lips to that fine jaw to mark him, as if in the conduct of his life he had sculpted his own face.

She exchanged again with him the side-glance smile of complicity, displayed the coquetry of joking reproaches that claimed him as hers, the recognition of his judgment in quoting him on this matter or that, which was the atmosphere the young couples used to generate between them. The class difference set by white privilege had been rather less than was usual between whites and blacks. Didymus was an articled clerk then, in a law firm, as Vera had been a few years before, Sally ran a black cooperative and ambitiously attended the extramural classes Bennet taught at the university, moonlighting for the money. That was how they met — through Bennet, and made the discovery that there was a link in that both their partners had chosen law. Of course, Vera had the house that had come to her with divorce, and the Maqomas lived in Chiawelo, Deep Soweto; Didymus carried a pass. But the Maqomas, both politically active, even then had open confidence that they would be among those who would destroy white privilege sooner or later, and pragmatically made use, as of right — and this was recognized unembarrassedly by the Starks — of the advantages the white couple had. It was more pleasant to pool the children in the Starks’ run-wild garden on a Sunday than to have the Starks over in the two-roomed Chiawelo place, although the Stark couple enjoyed breaking the law of segregation, from the comfort of their side, by coming at night into Chiawelo to listen to jazz recordings — Didymus was a collector and himself played the trumpet in those days! — and drink and perhaps dance, bumping into Sally’s well-polished furniture.

Sally and Didy now back in the same living-room in the same house where the four of them had been together so many times, talking across one another in the same animation. The Maqoma boys might have been there, in Vera’s house, as they often used to be, come to spend the weekend, Ivan might have been there, sharing his schoolboy room with them, and, down the passage, the disdainful small girl, Annie, against whom they ganged up.

It was not nostalgia Vera was experiencing on such occasions, but something different: a sense of confrontation with uninterpreted life kept about her, saddled on her person along with the bulging shoulder bag always on her arm, her briefcase documenting inquiry into other people’s lives.

Didymus Maqoina, whose whitening curls sat like the peruke of a seventeenth-century courtier worn stately on his black head, and Vera Stark with the haircut of a woman who has set aside her femininity, in this joyful reunion of friends gave no sign, even to one another, that it had not been twenty years since these two had seen each other. One Saturday morning five years ago Vera, alone in the house, had answered a ring at the door. A black man with a scanty peppercorn beard round lips and chin, wearing thick glasses and the collar of a clergyman, stood there. He did not speak, or before he could, she gave her usual response to anyone in the racket of purporting to collect church funds. — Sorry, I’ve nothing for you.—

The man smiled. — How mean of you Vera.—

It was long before the encounters in the street where people waited to be reassured by recognition, to have confirmed the claim that they were back. There were no indemnities, there was no lifting of bans on political movements. The last thing the man looked for was to be recognizable. To be recognized was to be hunted. Didymus, he said.

As if she had dropped up to the neck in a pit alarm for him engulfed her. She took his arm and pulled him inside, kicking the door shut. She did not need to be told that he somehow had been smuggled into the country, and that he had a purpose about which she must not ask. Her nervous amazement broke hysterically. — Umfundisi! You look so funny! No — no, you look dead right, that kind of Sunday suit, and the collar frayed, where did you get kitted out so perfectly—

They were both grinning with emotion. — We have our network in the shops down Diagonal Street. One week I’m a labourer with cement on my shoes, torn overalls and a woollen cap down to my eyes, next week I’m in a three-piece blue with a white cap, a soccer promoter from Jabulani.—

They were walking through the house, weaving about each other, she was out of breath.

— Are you all right? Do you think they know—

— No, so far it’s okay. But I can’t stay in the same place too long. I can’t stay with anyone who has any connection … As soon as neighbours want to be nice to me, I have to disappear. Move on.—

— I’d heard you were ill, you had something awful— leukemia? — you were being treated in Moscow.—

— Yes, that’s right, I’m out of action sick in Moscow. I’ve been here six months.—

She was looking at him, head on one side, thrilled by the audacity. — Six months!—

They were in the kitchen, she was distractedly picking up cups and putting them down, turning on her heels to rummage in a drawer for spoons, forgetting whether she had or had not switched on the kettle.

She talked fast at him, as if the house were surrounded and at any moment there would be a hammering on the doors — and what would she say? Where would she hide him? She tugged the kitchen curtains across the window. — D’you need money— how do you manage, I mean. I haven’t much in the house, but I could go quickly to the bank — oh god, no, they close early on Saturdays — but how stupid, I can use my card at the machines—

— Money is one thing I don’t need. That’s taken care of, thanks, don’t worry.—

— Does Sally know?—

— That I’m not dying in Moscow, yes. But not where I go. And other comrades in London believe I’m sick.—

She was shaking the coffee jug to make the liquid drip more quickly through the filter, she didn’t know whether she wanted to get rid of him or take him and hide him away. — Ben’ll be home soon. Wonderful for him to see you. Can’t believe it! But I’m so afraid for you, what they’ll do to you if they catch you — you could just disappear, you know that, they keep infiltrators in solitary for months under interrogation, months and months before they piece together enough to bring them to trial. If they ever do.—

He looked as if he really were an old preacher, tranquilly breathing in the aroma of coffee steam, adding another spoon of sugar like a poor man making the best of luxury. But coaxing irony surfaced from his own identity: —You’ll defend me, if I come to trial, Vera, I count on you.—

— Lot of use I’d be. — What would she do if the police did come, what if they were waiting somewhere hidden in the street, sitting in a car, ready to take him as he walked out of her gate? — I hope Ben won’t be long.—

— I must go before Ben comes. Vera, there is something I do need. I’ve got things here I want you to send overseas for me. But not by post. If you have someone, if you know someone who’s flying out and won’t ask questions — they can post them somewhere in Europe, doesn’t matter, anywhere.—

She took the letters and a package, claiming trust, not necessary to add any assurances. As she saw him to the door, a rush of rejection of fears swept her, she walked out with him into the street, they were ambling together in full view of neighbours, police, anybody who might be witnessing them from watching houses, the eyes of windows, crossing and rounding the corner in the middle of the street where they could not fail to be seen, arm in arm to where, for discretion so that it would not mark her house, he had left a car. And there they embraced goodbye: the open stare of the street fixed on them.

If no one finds out, it’s as if it never took place.

It was not the first time Vera had experienced something she never revealed. Only five years of silence had passed this time; but Ivan was more than forty years old. So it comes about that the precedent of lying by omission becomes a facility that serves a political purpose just as well.

Sibongile and Didymus Maqoma regained their names when they came back. In exile they had had code names; there would always be many people in the outside world who would know them by no other. Addressed by these names, they would react — answer — to them as they would to the names given them, attached as an umbilical cord to the location outside a coalmining town (Sibongile, daughter of a Zulu mother and Sotho father) and the steep hut village folded in maritime hills (Didymus, in the Transkei) where they were born and first answered to a name at all.

They did not go back to the little house where they were young — probably a slum by now, with the crush of people doubling-and tripling-up for somewhere to live — unthinkable to live in Chiawelo, anyway. They spent the first few weeks in a Hillbrow hotel that had been taken over as a reception centre for returning exiles. It had been a drinking-place for working-class white toughs and their women, and the cheap orange carpeting was stained with beer and pitted with cigarette burns. Stretched tapes on the music diffusion system repeated themselves through twenty-four hours, day and night. Sibongile stripped the beds to look for vermin. She felt them on her skin, sleepless, although they were not there.

The plane-loads of returning exiles who were arriving every few days were awaited at the airport by chanting and dancing crowds; when they came through the automatic doors that closed behind them on the old longing for home, when they emerged pushing squeaking chariots charged with the evidence of far places, carrying airport store giant teddy-bears, blind with excitement in the glare of recognition — not, at once, of who they were individually but of what they stood for, the victory of return — a swell of women’s ululating voices buffeted them into the wrestle of joyous arms. Children seen for the first time were tossed from hands to shoulders, welcome banners were trampled, flowers waved, bull-horns sounded, the hugging, capering procession of transit to repossession, life regained, there outside the airport terminal, was a carnival beyond belief it would ever be possible to celebrate. Home: that quiet word: a spectacle, a theatre, a pyrotechnic display of emotion for those who come from wars, banishment, exile, who have forgotten what home was, or suffered not being able to forget.

The Maqomas of course had not come on one of the crowded charter flights and their reception was less flamboyant though no less emotional. Didymus was a veteran of the inner circle in exile, one who for all those years had been involved in international missions and certain other important activities, and they were met by comrades equal to him in rank within the internal organization. A car was waiting for them, driven by one of the young returned Freedom Fighters now deployed as Security men. Home. They slept, that first night, in what used to be a forbidden white suburb at the house that had been acquired for one of the most important leaders. But it was understood they could not stay; the room would be needed for other transients in the to-and-fro now established between representatives from the Movement’s missions in other countries. A comfortable room with the niceties of bedside reading lamps, a supply of Kleenex, a television set, a room where bags were never unpacked. Until a house or flat could be found they would have to live in a hotel — there was, in fact, a hotel provided for just such an unavoidable interim.

Sibongile came to Didymus with a blanket held draped over her raised palms. He had no idea what for, but was always patient with her sense of drama.

— I can’t live like this.—

— What is it?—

A crust of something whitish-yellow dried in a smear on the hairy surface.

— What is it! — Her rising laugh, a cry. She thrust the evidence at him.

— Oh. That. Yes. — Semen, someone’s seed.

— I can’t live like this, I can tell you.—

— Sibo, you’ve lived much worse. It didn’t kill us.—

— At the beginning, years ago, yes. It was necessary. In Dar, in Botswana. But now! My God! I’m not running for my life. I’m not running from anybody any more, I’m not grateful for a bit of shelter, political asylum (the blanket dropped at her feet, her hands lifted, palms together in parody of the black child’s gesture of thanks she had been taught as a little girl). This’s not for you and me.—

— What can they do about it? They can’t find accommodation for everyone overnight. Give it another week or so … —

— Accommodation. How long can we be expected to carry on in this filthy dump, this whore-house for Hillbrow drunks, this wonderful concession to desegregation, what an honour to sleep under the white man’s spunk.—

— What about all the others living here … it’s no better for them. — He was confronting her with herself, as she was every time she entered the foyer of the hotel or walked through the room smelling of cockroach repellent that was the restaurant, embracing unknown women, men and children in the intimacy of shared exile and return.

She had a way of screwing up her eyes and opening her mouth, lips drawn back, mimicking the expression of someone straining to hear aright. — If you’re happy to come back to this from your meetings of the NEC, your big decisions, no complaints … —

— How can I have complaints when so many have come back to nowhere at all. At least we have dirty blankets.—

She ignored the smile. — And how does that help them?—

It was Vera Stark to whom she suddenly felt she could unburden herself; the farce of self-sacrifice when it was not necessary might have to be kept up with the wife of the leader in whose house she and Didymus had spent the first night, but Vera, while counted upon to understand perfectly the necessity for such tactics within that circle, was outside it. There were whites who had been in exile, but Vera had not; there were whites who shared the wariness of return, Vera was not one of them. Unburden to her and, by implication of a grant of intimacy, place responsibility on her.

When Vera answered the telephone with the usual cheerful how-are-you, there was a pause.

— Lousy. — And then that cry of a laugh.

Vera, good old Vera, didn’t make the usual facilely sympathetic noises. — Let’s have lunch today. Have you time?—

— I just have to get out of this place.—

On the site of the small restaurant where young Vera and her wartime lover had sat longing to embrace, the place now transformed into a takeaway outlet with additional vegetarian menu and tables open to all races, Sibongile was first to arrive. Her crossed legs were elegant in black suede boots draped to the knee.

— I love those boots. London boots.—

Vera had the generosity, towards women who still make their appearance seductive, of a woman confident that she was once successfully seductive herself and now knows she may only occasionally, and in an abstracted way, herself be merely pleasing.

The two women kissed and each gave a squeeze to the other’s arm as men greet one another with a mock punch.

— Do you? Yes, London. I suppose they give me away.—

They ordered a meal. Vera, whatever was the special for the day; her guest reading up and down the menu and asking for what was not on it — fish, was there no fish? The waiter smilingly patient, addressing her respectfully as mama, persuasive in what he somehow correctly divined was their shared mother tongue that this dish or that was (back to English) very, very nice, tasty.

Vera read the message of the fish. Lousy; everything lousy, not even possible to get what you wanted to eat.

With the waiter gone the required time had passed for her companion to be able to speak. She described the hotel — the ‘accommodation’ she kept calling it, by turns derisive, angry, disgusted, despairing, and — being Sibongile, Sally — giggling sharply. — But Didy! I don’t know, he seems ready to accept anything, he’s meek! Like a rabbit, quiet, nibbling at whatever’s given to him.—

That veteran of prisons and interrogation. That fox at infiltration, raiding under the eyes of the police and army. They laughed at the notion.

— I’m telling you! He seems to be living in the past, a time warp, we’re still some sort of refugee, we must suffer in noble silence — for what the cause doesn’t need any more. While he’s meeting members of the Government, for God’s sake! The Boers fawning all over us, inviting us to official dinners, getting themselves photographed with us for the papers! But he won’t tell anyone on the NEC, straight out, we must have something decent to live in if we’re to function properly at that level. They’re never going to find anything, that I know. We’ll have to do it ourselves … I’ll have to do it … but in the meantime! That flea-pit, I wouldn’t put a dog in it, and you know I don’t like dogs. I never dreamt I’d think back on our basement London flat and the one we had in Stockholm, those grey days — my God, I do.—

So Sibongile and Didymus Maqoma regained the personae of Sally and Didy, the code names of their old concourse with whites. They came to stay with the Starks. — Ben, you should just see the Hillbrow dump! Not just the dirt Sally goes on about … people sit around in the bar lounge watching television all day long, sprawled there sucking Coca-Cola, nothing to do and nowhere to go. She’s years from that kind of slum atmosphere, even though they’re her own people … she and Didy have moved away from that cheek-by-jowl existence they were at home in, the old days, Chiawelo.—

Ben defined the element exile had, at least, brought into the Maqomas’ life. — Privacy; they’ve had it in London for years, now.—

There was no reflection between the Starks that their privacy was invaded for the five weeks Sally and Didy lived with them. Their own relationship was at the stage when the temporary presence of others was revivifying. They had an extra bathroom; that was the only condition of middle-class existence that had any importance for them.

Sally and Didy’s late-born daughter, Mpho, arrived from her school in England. She stayed indiscriminately, a weekend here, a week there, between her grandmother’s house in Alexandra township and the Starks’ house, sleeping in the bed and among the curling pop-star posters and odd trinkets that had survived their daughter Annick’s adolescence and absence. The Maqoma daughter was a sixteen-year-old beauty of the kind created by the cross-pollination of history. Boundaries are changed, ideologies merge, sects, religious and philosophical, create new idols out of combinations of belief, scientific discoveries link cause and effect between the disparate, ethnically jumbled territorial names make a nationality out of many-tongued peoples of different religions, a style of beauty comes out of the clash between domination and resistance. Mpho was a resolution — in a time when this had not yet been achieved by governments, conferences, negotiations, mass action and international monitoring or intervention — of the struggle for power in the country which was hers, and yet where, because of that power struggle, she had not been born. This schoolgirl combined the style of Vogue with the assertion of Africa. She was a mutation achieving happy appropriation of the aesthetics of opposing species. She exposed the exaggeratedly long legs that seem to have been created not by natural endowment but to the specification of Western standards of luxury, along with the elongated chassis of custom-built cars. The oyster-shell-pink palms of her slender hands completed the striking colour contrast of matt black skin with purple-red painted fingernails. Her hair, drawn back straightened and oiled to the gloss of European hair, was gathered on the crown and twisted into stiff dreadlocks, Congolese style, that fringed her shoulders. Despite all this, Mpho did not have the aspirant beauty queen’s skull grin but a child’s smile of great sweetness, glittering in her eyes. Out of her mouth came a perky London English. She could not speak an African language, neither the Zulu of her mother nor the Xhosa of her father. — Oh but I understand, mother dear, I can follow— And she would open her eyes wide and roll her head, appealing to high heaven in exactly the gesture of the mother with whom she was arguing.

— Yes, but who knows you understand when you never answer, people will think you’re an idiot, my retarded child. You’re going to have lessons.—

— Well, that’s pretty humiliating for you, ma, isn’t it — have your daughter taught our language as if it’s French or German or something.—

Sally appealed to their hosts, Vera and Ben — Listen to that. My girl, that is exactly what has been done to our people, you, your father, me. We’ve been alienated from what is ours, and it’s not only in exile. Your father’s descended from a great chief who resisted the British more than a hundred years ago — you have a name to live up to! You were robbed of your birth — that should have been right here. Take back your language.—

The schoolgirl gave a smile of complicity with the witnesses to her mother’s emotionalism, dealing with it in harmless insolence. — I’ll learn from my gogo. — She giggled at her use of at least one word in a mother tongue, but was too shy or perhaps defiant to admit that she was serious about the intention. It was of her own volition that she left the guest room so well suited to her age and comfort and often went off to stay with her grandmother in Alexandra. After the first duty visit of respect required of a son’s child, Sally had not expected the girl to go back again soon, let alone pack her luminescent duffle bag and spend days and nights there in the house with its broken-pillared stoep and dust-dried pot-plants, battered relic of real bricks and mortar with two diamond-paned rotting windows from the time when Alex was the reflection of out-of-bounds white respectability, yearned for, imitated, now standing alone on ash-coloured earth surrounded by shacks, and what had once been an aspiration to a patch of fenced suburban garden now a pile of rubbish where the street dumped its beer cans and pissed, and the ribcages of scavenging dogs moved like bellows. How could a child brought up with her own bedroom, fresh milk delivered at the front door in Notting Hill Gate every morning, tidy people who sorted their newspapers for recycling, be expected to stand more than one night in such a place, gogo or no gogo? Going out across a yard to a toilet used by everyone round about! Heaven knows what she might pick up there! A return to a level of life to which Sibongile, Didymus, had been condemned when they were their child’s age — what did a sixteen-year-old born in exile know of what it was like when there was no choice?

The distress is something that can be conveyed to someone other — Vera — but a kind of pride or self-protection would prevent Sibongile from acknowledging to the child herself the dismayed humbling of the mother by the worldly child’s innocent level of acceptance: the sense that she knows what home is.

Mpho moved between Alexandra and the house that came from Vera’s divorce settlement with an ease that charmed the Starks. At the Starks’, along with her parents, she met and mingled with the Starks’ friends, Vera’s colleagues from the Foundation, the protégé Oupa and the lawyers. The young people got on well together, Mpho was carried off to parties with these youngsters her relieved parents knew were decent, no drugs or drunkenness; through a contaet of one of the lawyers, the Maqomas found exactly what was needed, a small house in a white suburb near the school where, again with the help of someone met in the Stark circle, the girl was accepted to complete her A-levels. The day after they moved in with nothing but borrowed beds, Sally, taking the car the Movement provided for Didy, drove along the street of local shops to look for secondhand furniture, and reversing into a parking place was held up by a municipal cleaner, a woman sweeping the gutter-muck into a drain. She didn’t know that women did this work, now. Well, any job was better than nothing, these times. It could be that some of those she had known in exile, the fighters in the training camps, might end up sweeping streets; the probability gave her an internal cringe, the drawing in of her stomach muscles that was involuntary when she confronted herself with the responsibility in which she was engaged: she had just been appointed deputy director of the Movement’s regional redeployment programme, at present a collection of research papers emerging at the pace of stuttering faxes. As she locked the car (forewarned since the day of arrival of those for whom theft was better than nothing) she saw that the cleaner had not moved on, was leaning on her broom and looking at her, a woman dressed ridiculously in the handout of bright protective overalls, football stockings rolled round her calves, flat-footed in men’s shoes, a fisherman’s hat complete with slots for flies crammed on her head. Begging? She would give her a greeting, anyway: Sawubona, sisi.

The woman did not approach but spoke excitedly. — Sibongile, when did you come? I’m Sela’s child, your mother’s cousin, you remember? From Sela’s house, you used to see us there, in Witbank.—

Wakened suddenly, shaken alive into another light, another existence. Sally is drawn over to her other self, standing there, the one she started out with, this apparition with a plastic bag tied over the hand with which, deftly, it picks up dirt the broom misses. Home.

In the streets of Johannesburg, on your way around the city, You don’t know who this is?

Even Oupa managed to move into a white suburb.

Why did his white colleagues at the Foundation use, to themselves, the prefix ‘even’? Because once the legal restrictions they campaigned against were lifted there remained an older, even (yes, again) greater restriction to be addressed: poverty. The clerk was decently paid by the decent standards of a Foundation that was non-profit-making not only in the money sense but also the human one, providing the same benefits of medical care and pension fund for all who worked there, from the director to the cleaner. But the rent of apartments in the area where he wanted to live was beyond his means. In one way, he was like any other young man in training for a professional career; a stage when it is assumed the youngster has as yet no responsibilities, has emerged from school, free, to a few years of chasing girls and enjoying himself with his male peers. Starting out in life, the saying goes. But of course this one’s start had been delayed so long, he had queued up unable to get into schools, dropped out into political action, spent four years on Robben Island, that before he could start on the lowest rank of a career he had acquired the responsibilities of maturity. Oupa was a man, not a boy. A burdened man, at the same time as he was the Foundation’s bright protégé. For him the business of growing up had not been, could not be, followed in recognized chronology. Of course Oupa had a wife, somewhere, of course he had children. His decent salary was diminished by the rent, the food, the clothing to be provided out of sight, for the anachronism of his life. The wife and children lived in another part of the country, with relatives who were dumped by the Government in some resettlement area. The eager apprentice was in fact an adult already trapped by adult desires, conflicts and responsibilities.

The Foundation was more than tolerant of the time he took off from work to find a place, a bachelor home among them in what had been the streets where only whites could live. They feared for him on his daily journeys to and from Soweto by train; he could be knifed by gangsters or thrown out of the window to his death by political thugs. Mrs Stark was remiss in being too busy, at the time, to telephone around among friends who might know of vacancies or have influence with estate agents who were wary about letting to blacks; it was someone else in the office who found a lead that resulted in the young colleague getting what he wanted. He was elated, although the rent was too high for him to afford; untroubled, although he had signed a lease restricting occupancy to two people, and he was going to split the rent by sharing the place with a couple and their two children.

Oupa planned a house-warming for everyone from the Foundation. Mrs Stark, to compensate for not having been any help to him in finding somewhere to live, offered to contribute homemade snacks and left with him a little early on a Friday afternoon to help with preparations.

— Where do we go? — Oupa had mentioned enthusiastically to everyone an area where there were numerous apartment buildings but had given no further details. He named a street and chattered on. — It’s an old building, man, but that’s why it’s so nice, big rooms and everything. Here we are — here it is. ‘Delville Wood.’ (Look at that real marble entrance!) Something to do with a war, isn’t it?—

The car came to a standstill neatly against the kerb. — Delville Wood. — Walking up the steps under packages loaded between them, Mrs Stark turned to him, an odd smile accompanying the banal scrap of information she was giving. — Yes, it’s a battle. Where it happened.—

He thought there was some unhappy connection with the name he’d ignorantly blundered on. — Someone you knew died there?—

But she laughed. — That war took place before I was born.—

He led her along red-polished corridors. Her eyes counted off the numbered doors as they passed.

— That’s it!—

In his proud moment, she pronounced before his doorway: —One-Twenty-One.—

He rapped zestfully on the number and echoed her. — One-Twenty-One Delville Wood.—

In the living-room two junk-shop chairs covered with nylon velvet shaved by wear, a one-legged stand topped with a fancy copper ashtray, and an old box trunk covered with a piece of African cloth. Everything faced the glaucous giant eye of the television set.

— Of course it’s not fixed up yet. Pictures and so on. I need a desk and something for my books. I’m going to do a lot of work here, man! But nice, aih?—

— A desk over there at the window … Ben might have one you could use. Yes, this is a lovely room.—

He had switched on the television, it was a children’s programme with the squeaky voices of anthropomorphic animals but he did not notice, it didn’t matter, the gesture was that of possession, he was at home in these walls where only whites had lived before.

— Come and see the rest.—

Talking expansively, he led her to a room with a double bed made up under a fringed bedspread with three cushions propped diamond-shaped against the wall. — I might put the desk in here, because the others use the sitting-room as well. Better for work. — He was assuring her of his seriousness about studying; after all, although she was a motherly friend, she was also one of the seniors in the Foundation that employed him. The second room: a chaos of clothing, toys, pots and pans, hot plate standing on a triple-mirror dressing table, cot filled with jumbled shoes. — They’re moving in.—

Oupa went to fetch from the car the folding chairs borrowed from the Foundation and when he returned Mrs Stark was in the kitchen unpacking what she called the goodies. He stood about: —I haven’t got the hang of the stove yet— But she had opened the oven door and taken out fat-encrusted shelves, she tried the plates one by one, knowing exactly how everything worked, I’ll show you, she said, just as she calmly and quietly would explain to him some legal question he would bring to her from his correspondence course. He was flattered that she concentrated on the preparations for his little party as if it were of great importance to get everything right, to think of nothing else until this was so. He felt Mrs Stark knew what this occasion meant to him, even if to others it was just another office party.

The extended family of the Foundation arrived. Husbands and wives, permanent lovers of this sex or that, the other half of unexplained attachments. There was the bonhomie of the special set of relationships between people who work together and find themselves at play, their joking in-house references that others might not follow but which raised the general level of celebration. Somebody’s boy-friend had brought a guitar and he sang his compositions in a mixture of Zulu, English and Afrikaans to a group that stood about or sat with their drinks on the fringed bedcover in the bedroom, while in the living-room nobody was listening, the talk and laughter at a higher volume than the music. Mrs Stark’s hot cheese puffs ran out. She and several others from the Foundation were back in the kitchen opening cans of Viennas that seemed to be Oupa’s sole food supply, when her husband arrived late and had brought along a carrier of wine and beer. With a knife in one hand and the greasy other hand held away from contact with his jacket, she dropped what she was doing and went over to kiss him for the thought. He almost backed in surprise, then held her shoulders a moment; it was so unlike her to make a show of affection public. His contribution to the party hardly called for any special mark of gratitude; perhaps she’d had a few drinks — well, why not?

The promised desk was picked up from the Starks’ house and delivered to One-Twenty-One Delville Wood by a friend of Oupa who borrowed a bakkie from another friend. Oupa bought a computer, on credit, to complete the equipment; the only problem, he remarked to Mrs Stark some weeks later, was that the friend who transported the desk had moved into the flat with him, the couple, and the two children. — He’s got no place to stay. His place is in Sebokeng and now he’s working here in town. — Soon this friend, who had agreed to contribute to the rent, was joined by another, workless and penniless. This came out when Oupa, bringing his lunch as usual into Mrs Stark’s office, relieved by talking to her his anxiety about not having fulfilled that month’s correspondence-course assignments. — He also slept in the living-room, with my other friend. On the floor, but better than nothing, aih? But now the other people are fed up, they say they’re paying for sharing the sitting-room and he’s always there, lying around. And doesn’t pay. So now he stays with me in my room and when I want to study at night he’s talking to me all the time. Man! Till midnight, one o’clock.—

What could she be expected to say? ‘Tell him to find somewhere else.’ Where else? Weren’t she and the young clerk surrounded by the papers, right there under crumbs from their lunch, of people who had been sent somewhere else, over years, and still had nowhere. She offered what she knew was useless, indignant at exploitation of him by his peers; he could have been her son. — Oupa, you have to be firm. You’re too soft. If he could move in with you, there must be someone else he can go to in the same way. You can’t be expected to live like that. Now you’ve at last got a place—

The young man swallowed a mouthful and sagged in his chair, blowing out his cheeks. He shook his head, again and again, in denial of the pressure of her attention. — He was with me on the Island.—

He bit again into his chicken leg and chewed.

She held her cup in both hands and gulped tea.

— Oh god. Wha’d’we do. What’s his line of work, can’t we find something for him.—

— Worked in a dry cleaner’s, a box factory, I don’t know … he hasn’t got skills.—

She threw up her hands, then rattled a pen against her cup. — Why do I have to open my big mouth! Why do I have to open my big mouth!—

Chapter 4

Passing.

Passing down the street. Driven by countless times so that the destination it once meant has been obliterated, layer upon layer, by errands taking that route. At first, for months, halted at a traffic light, staring up at the closed windows of the flat as if into the eyes of someone who gives no sign. Then there was someone else’s washing on a laundry stand on the baleony. A dartboard hung on the wall below where the bathroom fanlight looked out. That was when the letters stopped; or only now did the image seem as signalling that other dispossession; the end of sueh experiences in reality comes much more slowly, the drama of parting, repeated in variation — the end of touching, the end of talking on the telephone, the lengthening gap between letters — it’s over-rehearsed and so the final performance is not recognized.

An old actress in many positively last appearances.

Here we are.

To stop outside the entrance, to hear the name spoken by a stranger to the site, is simply the quiet ripple of a smile: Delville Wood. This is it. Walking along the corridors, same concrete slippery-polished ochre red, a mixture of fascination and a sort of dread. After all, the mail-boxes in the foyer are numbered through six floors, the new kind of tenant could have been leading along another corridor to another number. Even on this floor it surely must be another number. But no, more and more impossible, a coincidence against odds of six floors of flats, One-Twenty-One. The door opening on locked feelings; the coming to life as fascination and dread is the old sexual anticipation of walking along the red-polished corridor to enter One-Twenty-One. Amazing: the sensations are pleasurable, as if the one who had been there at the desk before the window will get up to press himself against her or in the sleepy surprise of an early-morning visit lift back his bedclothes for her to slide in, shivery-naked beside him — as if he were going to be there, was there, in the return of the desire he had created in this living-room where the great eye of the television set sees nothing, in this bedroom where a new, poor young tenant makes his bed. The motherly friend is helpfully surveying the needs of the new kind of tenant. She is briskly preparing the dirty stove to warm up her provision of snacks. The evidence that she knows her way about this kitchen as if she lived there is attributed to the general familiarity of women with the domestic domain: I haven’t got the hang of the stove yet, the new kind of tenant says, apologetically male.

What you have done once you will do again. Sometimes Vera had reminded herself, sneered at herself, jeered in reproach; but this did not stop her. She felt resentment at self-confrontation with this evidence of what, when she was a child, her mother termed ‘behaviour’—which implied only transgression. Bennet was her lover, he was the one with whom she had slept while her young husband was fighting a war, expecting to come home to her. Bennet therefore would be for ever in the category of lover, the one chosen above the sexual bond and moral ties of marriage, even when he became husband. That was how it was for how long? Again, the reality comes at an unnoticed pace, in the brief human time-span of one life the equivalent of the smoothing of the thumb on a holy effigy by centuries’ homage of those who kiss the hand. Bennet became Ben. The skill of his love-making became satisfaction to be counted on. She could not believe she was being strongly attracted to another man; Ben, Bennet was the other man. Yet in a way it was he who made another man possible, wanted, because he it was who had shown her, up in the mountains with those friends of a group photograph, what love-making could be, how many revelations of excitement and wild sensation it could mean beyond what she had thought was its limit, with the husband who was out of the way at war. If Ben had taught her that the possibilities of eroticism were beyond experience with one man, then this meant that the total experience of love-making did not end with him. The understanding of this, in her body, must have been there for years — logically, ever since she first was made love to by him? But it remained unaccepted or dormant until, somewhere in her forties, oh when her hair was still abundantly glossy, not a single broken vein showing a red spiderweb on her legs, a man came to the Foundation to film an interview on its work for a documentary he was making about forms of resistance in the country. He left his card to join those of other visitors to the Foundation who imagined they might be contacted again, though what for, politeness forbade asking. Otto Abarbanel. The surname was one she had never heard of; he worked for an Austrian television network and spoke with a slight — to her — German accent. He was solemn going about his filming and formal in manner, like Germans she had met. He telephoned her several times and came back to the office, apologizing for disturbing her, wanting to verify this information or that, and when she realized these were pretexts she was at first amused to find she did not find him a nuisance. Then, that afternoon, without any transition from formality, he grasped her fist where it was resting slackly on her desk, covered it tightly in his own. She placed her other hand over this grip. And so suddenly, there was a covenant of desire.

Will you come and see me, he had said, to make it possible to seem that some professional appointment were being discussed, there in the office where anyone might come in upon the atmosphere the gesture had created. — For coffee on Saturday afternoon.—

Vera and Ben were busy people who did not need to account to one another for every movement. He had invited for lunch an old schoolmate who had become a successful painter. She was tranquil, serving at table, unbelieving of what she was going to do, and in the same state of mind went to the bathroom after lunch and fitted into her body the rubber device that had prevented her from conceiving since the birth of Annie. She left Ben and his visitor with an apology — she had to put in some duty appearance at a political gathering. She had many obligations of this nature and her husband looked up from his preoccupation, giving the goodbye-go-well salute that was their customary private signal before other people.

And when she came home later in the afternoon it was as she could never have imagined it could be, what had happened in the three hours’ interim was something that concerned her alone, her sexuality, a private constant in her being, a characteristic like the colour of eyes, the shape of a nose, the nature of a personal spirit that never could belong to anyone other than the self. Bennet Stark stood in a doorway once, admired by some woman who did not know he existed in a relationship with the woman to whom she remarked on his male beauty; that unknown woman was demonstrating a truth Vera now euphorically believed she had only just discovered; sexuality, in his case displayed guilelessly by nature in the sensuous allure of his face, was a wholly owned attribute, could not be claimed by the naïve bid: He’s my husband. Now Vera saw herself in that doorway. She lay beside Ben that night with a sense of pride and freedom rather than betrayal.

During those two years there was no yoghurt and apple lunch eaten over papers at the office. She fled, whenever there was an interstice in activity there or at home, whenever her absence would not be noticed or when there would be some reason for it plausible to her colleagues, her husband, her adolescent daughter (Ivan was already living in England); fled to number One-Twenty-One. The duplicate key she was equipped with hung with her car and house keys on the ring with the bluebird medallion, a birthday gift bought for her with pocket money saved by the daughter. She let herself in. He was there or was to be anticipated. Sometimes he arrived with the kind of food he liked — herrings or smoked sausage or cold Kasseler ribs — and they ate together in that kitchen before or after making love. They bathed together before going back to other people, soaping each other — why was it no one, least of all women, would admit the tender pleasure of handling like this a man’s slippery soft tube, pressing it a little, playfully, to make it grow, palpating, rounding out the shape of the two eggs, often uneven in size, in the pouch that keeps warm and alive the seed of the young, akin to the physical attribute that belongs, in the animal species, to the female kangaroo with her pouch of unborn young, quaintly reversed in the human species to the other sex, the male; the pouch that is anciently wrinkled, as if about to atrophy, even in a young man.

Otto was fifteen or more years younger than Vera. Vague about his age perhaps because he wanted to forget the age of his lover. But when, in talk, she made references he was too young to remember, the attempt to catch up, the momentary blankness in his expression, was obvious. He had a high forehead tight, anxious, shiny-skinned, like that of a rosy apple, was not good-looking; in fact, Vera did not know what he really looked like, if the face is what one is; she knew the body, the cruciform male body with its line of light brown curly hair branching up from the navel into a crossbeam at the nipples, following the dominant shape from the narrow hips and widening with a splendid thorax to the shoulders. His face was the disguise that bearded men all wear; dark shaggy-blond growth curled round his mouth and gave its own shape to whatever his chin and jaw might be. Thick-rimmed glasses protected the expression in commonplace blue eyes as if they were seen through the distancing of binoculars. His mouth was the soft one, upper and lower lip the same fullness, she associated with dissatisfaction with self, and generally found unattractive in other people. In him, surrounded by that seaweed beard, it was to her one of those fleshy creature-flowers in rock pools, sensitive to the temptation of the slightest touch. Not only had she thought she never could be attracted to another man; she had been sure she would never be attracted to another blond man. So it was this foreigner who exorcised for her some residual resentment — and resentment remains always damaging — that must be surviving against the first blond, the wartime husband. She wanted to tell Otto this odd fact, a confession surely endearing if not flattering to him, but didn’t because she sensed that references to that war, at the end of which he was a child, made him uneasy — for herself, she had no embarrassment at being so much older than he; verifying critically in a mirror, she knew there was no mark of ageing to be found on her!

But she had said after the first few times she had visited One-Twenty-One, This won’t last long, you know.

He misunderstood what she was telling him: that he couldn’t count against Ben, although she was free to choose both of them. He thought she was referring to the limit of his working assignment in the country. — I’ve got a surprise for you — I’ve applied to be stationed here, the channel’s correspondent for the region.—

They were getting dressed. He did not know what to make of the way she dropped her hands at her sides. He came over and bound her arms with his, bending his head to bury it in her neck.

Alongside the success of managing clandestinity there was in her a wish to take her foreigner home, to introduce him to her life, so that he might know her elsewhere than behind a desk or in his bed. She rationalized: if he were invited to the house occasionally, as both she and Ben would naturally bring home a new acquaintance whom they liked, this would reduce the risk of someone drawing other conclusions should she and Otto happen to be seen together somewhere.

Otto was reluctant to come to Vera’s home, to enter her life in which he had no part. But he acknowledged she must be a better judge than he in the situation. There were other guests, some of them blacks he had met in the course of his filming of trade union officials and minor political figures, and there was the husband, an impressive man, very skilful in pleasing the guests in unison with his wife, the two of them managing the gathering. The wife: that’s what she was, in this house. He was introduced, also, to her daughter, who quickly disappeared from the parents’ gathering that no doubt bored her; beautiful, but exactly like the father. So there was nothing to trouble him as evidence, in a younger version of herself, that his lover had faded in the years she had lived ahead of him.

With the chat that accompanies clearing away in the wake of guests Ben mentioned he hadn’t had much chance to talk to the young German, what was his name again? A strange name; giving it, she asked in innocent-sounding interest what its origin might be? Ben was so well-read, had a memory for all kinds of esoteric knowledge that never came her way.

— Abarbanel? But that’s an old Sephardic name, must be a Jew, not a German.—

— I think he’s Austrian. — She was enquiring.

— Could have been born there, I suppose. Jews’ve been dispersed all over, so long. Who knows.—

Who knows.

And so it was her husband who roused her curiosity. An erotic curiosity. In the dreamy confidentiality after love-making, she spoke to her lover. — So you’re a Jew. Someone told me your name’s Jewish. Sephardic. That’s Spanish, isn’t it.—

— It has a Spanish origin but the Jews were expelled from Spain in the fifteenth century.—

— I wouldn’t have known you were a Jew. — Murmured laugh. — They’re supposed to be circumcised.—

— I didn’t have the usual sort of beginning and I was sent away quite young with other orphans and adopted, I grew up in Vienna with those people who took me. People of Sephardic origin, somewhere far back.—

— What about your own mother and father?—

He turned so that their profiles faced one another on the pillow. — Dead.—

She would ask no more: the Gestapo round-up, the closed cattle-train, the concentration camp, the gas chamber; a provenance she could be familiar with only from books and films, documentation.

Vera was a gentile atheist gratified by the idea that her lover was a Jew, orphaned by racism, without a name that was his own — this linked him with the open, daily purpose of her life, the files of displaced communities on her desk and, before her on the other side of it, day after day, the faces of those who had been made wanderers because they were decreed the wrong race. She found herself paused, before the windows of expensive shops selling men’s clothing; she bought French shirts and Italian ties, and because he was fond of a few Ghanaian gold weights he picked up on assignments in West Africa, searched the art and craft galleries to bring him additions to his collection. She was making up to him for the deprivation of childhood, deprivation like that of so many she knew in the veld settlements she investigated. She was giving him toys and sweets. Naked in bed with her, he was also an infant deported, naked in the world.

Vera continued to make love with her husband, even if she felt she had the delicacy not to initiate it. She thought of it as part of a strategy, both to have her lover and not to hurt him, Ben; for the credo she had adopted for the situation was the well-worn one that anything was permitted her, was her right, so long as no one was hurt. Otto had no woman she knew of; there might be one he would go back to in Europe. And the fact was that the love-making with Ben was strangely successful. Ben must have been moved by her; instead of hurt. It was rather like it had been long ago on the mountain holiday, and again after the birth of Annick; she could not help being convulsed by wave after wave of orgasm.

Bitch.

Bitch, greeted her face in the mirror.

And next day she went back to One-Twenty-One. There she felt it was her lover she was hurting. What lover would accept that a woman like her could enjoy making love with another man? With her husband?

She was not free at all, after all. There was a clause in their love affair — she had formulated the small print of it, through her work she was familiar with the importance of clauses that allow breach of contract. This won’t last long, you know. But the clause was forgotten, buried in bedclothes and that other fabric, of the intimacy of a certain complementary pattern in their working lives. He witnessed: he was becoming filled with horror at what he recorded on film, the savagery of those who called their victims savages, the shooting of children, beatings, torture, and the savagery that this was beginning to bring forth in retaliation, the knifings and burnings in the revenge of the night. He was telling her of what he managed to film the previous day, before the police had threatened him with arrest unless he left the site of a school where they had thrown tear-gas into classrooms to drive out children who had stoned their vehicles. Dogs rounded up the terrified children, white policemen caught them at random and beat some as they were dragged to police vans, there were shots — the two children he saw fall screaming: he did not know whether they were dead or not, nor would anyone know, because at that point he and everyone there to record was ordered out of the area. Black kids, he said. As if expecting some explanation. — Black kids. A girl tried to hide behind me.—

— You haven’t lived here long enough to know. The Nazis didn’t end in the war where your parents died, they were reborn here.—

He stirred as if to ask a question and did not. He stared at the food before them. A plate of delicatessen smoked ham and potato salad she had provided to indulge his native tastes. — There’s something I haven’t told you. I don’t like to tell even myself. But it’s true. You know what a Hitler Baby is? — His German accent became unusually pronounced.

He knew she did.

— I’m one. My mother was mated like a cow to produce a good German child for Hitler. I don’t know who the Aryan stud was. She didn’t know. Was never told his name when he was put on her. Artificial insemination for a cow is better, hei’m, it’s a syringe, hei’m?—

If there is some form of love between people there surely must be something to say, always, whatever has happened. There was nothing. Vera listened to what was there but could not be seen, the transformation foretold in legend of a being into another, a woman into a tree, a god into an eagle; a creature of the unspeakable mythology of genetic engineering, the chimera of modern history.

— You want to know why she did it. I don’t know. I don’t know and you don’t know what we call living was like then. But you want to know who she was? — she was an attendant in a— what d’you call it — a public wash-place, a lavatory, she came from Bavaria. She had nothing, the only boast she could have — she would tell me my father must have been a good Nazi, chosen to give me a better brain, a better body, a chance — I don’t know — than any ordinary man.—

To remain in silence much longer would be interpreted as revulsion against him.

— The genes. I’m no Jewish victim. No Jew. I’m a German. That’s where I get the only name that belongs to me, the good German Otto my mother gave me. The genes are like the ones they have — the men who were beating up kids and shooting them.—

Vera said what came to her to be said. — Shave off the beard.—

And so there in the kitchen of One-Twenty-One the past was interpreted and shed, he clasped her fist as he had done that first time in her office, they returned to the beginning newly, over again, something based on a recognition so alien that it transformed the feel of his body, for her, and hers for him. There was no appropriate place for that curious passion to be enacted, and so it happened in the kitchen, she took him in through the aperture of clothes pulled out of the way, standing up where they had risen from the kitchen table, they were clutched like a pillar shaking in an earth tremor, and never before or after in her life was she, in her turn, transformed, and fused with a man in such blazing sensation.

That was the day and place of betrayal of Ben, Bennet, the chosen man.

Bitch.

Many years later, Otto Abarbanel has long left, and occasional meetings abroad, telephone calls from remote places, letters, have ended, and all sense of touch and feel associated with him seem to have returned to other responses as nerves regenerate after damage — that kitchen, One-Twenty-One Delville Wood, is still the day and place of betrayal, as a battlefield never loses its association. And that is why when Ben comes in with his offering of wine, Vera, spreading apart hands innocently soiled, a knife in one, suddenly drops her housewifely task, comes towards him, and embraces him.

Does the past return because one can rid oneself of it only slowly, or is the freedom actually the slow process of loss?

What she remembered while Ben uncorked the wine and joked with Oupa — come into the kitchen fondly steering a giggling young woman who protested in Tswana — was driving with Otto Abarbanel into the city one summer day and passing a restaurant where through the open doorway she saw Ben. In that moment before the traffic bore her on she could not possibly have recognized anyone but him, matching one whose unique features and bodily outline she carried within her.

He was bent over his plate, his dark head down and shoulders curved. He was alone. By the sight of him she was overcome with desolation, premonition like the nausea of one about to faint. How could he look so solitary? Did all the years together mean nothing? A childish fear of abandon drained her. His lowered head and bowed shoulders knew without knowing that he was no longer her lover. His aloneness was hers; not here, not now, but somewhere waiting.

Chapter 5

Under banners on posters in the offices of Movement Headquarters, just opened in the city, on photographs in progressive journals and newspapers, Didymus appeared among others released from prison or returned from exile. Our leaders, our heroes. Who would occupy which office and in what capacity could not be decided quickly after so long a period when there had been leadership dispersed between a number of representatives in different countries of exile, leadership confined in prison, and leaders in the front organizations which had grown up and survived within the country. He did whatever was needed, as everyone must. Sometimes he found himself arranging protocol and press conferences; then he was off to fulfil the request of some provincial branch for a speaker, he was in one of the first delegations to talk with white businessmen, he gave a graduation address at a college where the rector had hoped for some better-known face too busy to attend. But this was while it was taken as understood that his legal training rather than the avocation of clandestine missions he had carried out so successfully in the days of exile and underground activity would decide what position he would hold on the national executive in a time, now, when that formation was legal and the political ethos was negotiation, the grinning face at receptions in place of the disguised one moving in the streets.

— Jack of all trades! — Sally with her affectionately exaggerated shrug as a softener to her rising voice answered Vera when her friend asked what position Didy held now. A rap performer yammered into a microphone with the speed of a tobacco auctioneer; the Starks were come upon at the opening of an exhibition of painting and wood carving by black artists whose work had become fashionable since city corporations and white collectors had seen such acquisitions as the painless way to prove absence of racial prejudice. — And what a mob this is … all these cultural workers who’re ashamed to call themselves painters and writers. And the insurance bosses and bank PROs showing how they appreciate our black souls. Now for Christ’s sake don’t quote me, Ben! — I use that jargon around the office corridors, oh yes I hear myself … but thank God to find a businessman, dear Ben, among my friends in this crowd who don’t want to say what they are.—

Of course. The torsos are only part of the furnishings Sally knows well in the Stark house. No one singles out the identity —sculptor—of the one who shaped them, only he remembers the identity of the missing head, the complex nerve-centre of the woman he lives with and that he had given up (once, long ago) attempting to capture in its material form.

So Ben laughs with her. Of course.

— You don’t have any work going in your firm, do you?—

— Only the kind of thing you read in the Smalls. Some of my clients are in the mail order business. Money in your spare time selling from your own home — you know.—

— Most that we’re dealing with don’t have homes to sell from. But seriously … I’ve been meaning to get in touch with you, your advice about how we might set up some sort of liaison with business people, operating outside the usual employment-agency style, something more personal, tapping bad conscience … why not. I’ve been meaning to come round.—

The Starks and the Maqomas had not seen much of each other lately. Although Sibongile spoke of her job as if it were quite humble — it was the democratic vocabulary, hangover from exile with its brave denial of hierarchy — she was one who could not be reached except through a secretary these days. She had her offices and battery of command — computers, fax, assistants whose poor education and lack of skills she was attempting to tolerate while disciplining and training them. When there were complaints about her she said to her comrades in high positions what they themselves thought it better not to express. — I don’t want to be told I behave like an exploiter just so someone can go on sitting around filing her nails or someone who was once detained thinks he’s for ever entitled to disappear two hours for lunch. Comrades employed here are expected to have the will to work harder, not less than they would for some white boss. This’s not sheltered employment.—

The furnishing of the house was completed, if too sparsely for her taste; she liked beautiful objects, and some of those she had collected with little money saved while moving around in exile had had to be left behind. The daughter had been fitted out with all her mother needed to supply for the new school. There was a microwave oven installed in the kitchen so that she could leave a meal to be heated when she had an official obligation that meant she would be home only in time to find Didymus and her daughter in darkness lit up by a television film, or to take off her shoes and move about without disturbing the husband who, asleep, left space for her at his side. Home was set up; but she did not have time to do the daily tasks that would maintain it; it was Didymus who took the shopping lists she scribbled in bed at night, who drove Mpho to and from her modern dance class, to the dentist, to the urgent obligations that schoolgirls have to be here or there, it was he who called the plumber and reported the telephone out of order. His working day was less crowded than hers. She would be snatching up files, briefcase, keys in the morning while he was dipping bread in coffee, changing back and forth from local news broadcasts to the BBC. Their working life was housed in the same building; sometimes he came to look in on her office: she was talking fast on the telephone, held up a hand not to be interrupted, she was in the middle of briefing the fieldworkers through whom she had initiated research into the reintegration of returned exiles.

She began to appear at many of the meetings he attended. Glided in, late, graceful with her well-dressed big hips, eyebrows arched when anyone was long-winded. She had a complaint about her director, who didn’t want to attend and made a habit of asking her to do so in his stead. Let’s have a post-mortem, she would say, at home. She and Didymus were the best of comrades, best for one another, of all others, at such times. The months she had gone about her work in London and taken care of their child without knowing or asking where he was, the letters — suddenly, sometimes, a love letter — that came to her unsigned through some country other than the one he was in, the strangely pure emotion of his returns — what other relationship between a man and a woman could prove such trust? The abstentions from adultery that ‘trust’ means to most couples are petty in comparison; this was a grand compact beyond the capacity of those who live only for themselves. They argued, they met in complicity over this issue or that, together in the line each would follow, she in her department, he at his higher level. They defended to each other a partiality for or lack of confidence in certain leaders. — We need someone tough and quick-thinking in that sort of negotiation. Sebedi’s too much like— (she closed her eyes and thrust her head forward, pinching the bridge of her nose) — he’s an old rhino, only one horn, only one tactic—

— But when he charges, aih! There’s force, he knocks the hell out of government spokesmen.—

— Ah … how often? By the time he’s got his bulk together to charge, they’ve slipped the issue to something else, out of the way.—

— Not always. Not always. I’ve seen him make a hit. And what you must remember is that he’s impressive, these early days, he sits with his hands folded and his big head held back that way, and the government boys see he’s really listening to them, he doesn’t scratch himself and drink water and stub out cigarettes like some of the other comrades, the young ones who’re only thinking what they’re going to say next. He commands respect. —

She drew back in staring reproach. — Who wants respect from those people? Those bastards who’ve been mixed up in hit squads, who’ve sent their men in to murder our people at the funerals of people those same police have killed? It’s the other way round — they have to be shown there’s no respect due to them!—

— Then you don’t understand negotiation. There has to be an appearance of respect, it’s got to be there, it’s like the bottles of water and the mike you switch on before you speak. It’s a convention. It reassures those ministers and aides. And it traps them. They think if they hear themselves nicely addressed as minister this and doctor that, if they’re listened to attentively, the whole smoothing-over process is in progress, the blacks have been flattered into talking like white gentlemen, they’re nicely tamed. Why do you think we turn up in suits and ties instead of the Mao shirts and dashikis the leaders in countries up North wear? So that the Boers on the other side of the table will think there’s a code between us and them, we’ve discarded our Afrieanness, our blackness is hidden under the suit-and-tie outfit, it’s not going to jump out at them and demand! Not yet.—

Sibongile was twirling her hands in impatience to interrupt. — And out lumbers the old rhino! Where are the young lions?—

— Queueing up at your office, that’s where — the only place they can be. They’re the ones you’re trying to find jobs for!—

Mpho watched her parents as if at a tennis match, sometimes laughing at them, sometimes chipping in with an opinion of her own. Sibongile and Didymus encouraged her, proud of a bright girl whose intelligence had been stimulated in exile by a superior education which perhaps also disadvantaged her by setting her apart among black youngsters. They were uneasy about the school they had been relieved to find for her; although ‘mixed’ most of the pupils were white, it retained the ethos and rituals of a white segregated school. They were grateful that in the early weeks when they were staying with their friends the Starks, Vera had introduced the girl to some decent young black people with whom she enjoyed herself. Her surprising attachment to her grandmother unfortunately did not mean that there were any suitable contacts for her in the dirt and violence of a place like Alexandra.

Didymus kept in himself a slight tautness, the tug of a string in the gut ready to tighten in defence of Sibongile — he was troubled that her frankness would be interpreted as aggression; her manner, sceptical, questioning, iconoclastic, would be taken as disrespectful of the traditional style of political intercourse that had been established in the higher ranks of the Movement through many years of exile, and would count against her advancement at the level to which she had, for the first time, gained access. Even the way she used her body: coming into conference, where she was by proxy rather than right, on high heels that clipped across the floor, no attempt to move discreetly. He was anxious; not looking at her, as if that would prevent others from being annoyingly distracted, then not being able to prevent himself from being aware of the stir of legs and seats as perfume marked the progress of her breasts and hips to her place. He felt that even her obvious undocile femininity would count against her; the physical disturbance she made no attempt to minimize prefigured the disturbance in the male appropriation of power she might seem presumptuous enough to ignore. He was sensitive to any response to her comments, sometimes hearing, as offensive proof of what he feared for her, undertones that merely made her laugh (the volume of her laugh was not moderated to the atmosphere of conference, either) or provided her with the opportunity of expounding a new point. He was familiar with the way things were done, always had been done, must be done, he was part of them; he could sense how others would feel towards a personality like Sibongile’s; and a woman’s. What he knew was remarkable in her could be misunderstood. He did not know how to give her the benefit of his own experience, teach her how to conduct herself if she wanted to realize the ambitions he saw were awakened in her. Home for her was the politics of home. That’s how things had worked out. But she wasn’t going about it in the right way. He feared the effect of failure on a person with such high confidence in and expectations of herself. God help me, and Mpho, and everyone else she knows, when that happens.

Didymus was against nepotism, but what is nepotism? — nothing more than putting in a word when this seems appro priate. He was one of the old guard, there were private moments when he could remark to a comrade with whom he had experienced much in so many situations and crises, that he scarcely saw Sibongile these days, she was working so hard, she was so dedicated to her returnees. And the permissible observation was always received with some such formula: Oh yes, she’s doing a remarkable job of it. But whether this was a cautious assurance that her value was not unrecognized, and went no further, or whether it was to remind the old comrade that he should not think he could promote his wife, the response was dismissive. A brush-off.

Chapter 6

Driving through an area where her work took her Mrs Stark’s attention to the voice beside her and what she was seeing about her kept being diverted, as if by a seized muscle which will not be discernible to any companion. There was, among the documents in that loaded sling bag that was always with her, a letter found in her office mail that morning. Ivan’s handwriting on the envelope, not addressed as usual by one of his typists and sent to his childhood home. She had opened it in the awkward privacy granted to the recipient of a letter in the company of others. Hardly taken in any details, any explanation; just the central fact her skimming arrested: Ivan was getting divorced. She folded the letter without reading the last page and thrust it somewhere in the bag.

The undertone of a shy young woman was speaking of brutality. — So you see, Mrs Stark, I mean they’s upgraded Phambili Park, sewerage and that, and we all building, but now the men from the hostels is just coming to run all over, the women from the squatters’ place is sitting in the veld right there by our houses — what can a person say to them? They frightened. Like we. We frightened, too. Last week two nights there was shooting, the men from the hostel was chasing someone—

How was it—‘I’ve got Alice to agree to a divorce.’ The sight of his handwriting on the envelope is already a signal of something unusual to be conveyed; a banker so successful that he is going back and forth from London to Poland, Hungary and Russia to negotiate new banking alliances doesn’t have time to lick stamps personally. As if she were saying it to Ben now, she heard herself, when Ivan came back to South Africa and married his schooldays girl: He’ll stay with her as long as he’s not successful.

— so I was scared, I can tell you, I was so scared, and my mom, we just hid there without the lights while there was running and screaming, terrible, and then that noise, that noise! something falling hard, just like that, heavy at the door, so I thought what if it’s Colin, he wasn’t home yet—

Billboards on bare ground proclaimed the right to shelter elevated to middle-class status. Easy Loans Available, Protea Grove, Blue Horizon, Hill Park, you too can say you live in a place with a beautiful name like a white suburb, you too can feel you are making a claim for yourself when your address is Phambili Park — forward, let us go forward! Now on the horizon, a vast unloading of scrap without any recognizable profile of human habitations, now at the roadside, the jagged tin and tattered plastic sheets that are the architecture of the late twentieth century as marble was the material of the Renaissance, glass and steel that of Mies van der Rohe; the squatter camps, the real Post-Modernism: of the homeless.

— Oh sorry — turn here, no, left, sorry— Such an apologetic young woman, with her oval face, varnished olive by the mixture of races, in its corolla of springy black hair. Is she apologizing for existing at all, neither white and living far from the wrath that overflows from the black hostels into a fake suburbia nor black and fleeing into the veld from a burning shack? — and I heard someone groaning there outside and what can I do, my mom was trying to stop me, I thought what if it’s Colin so even I get killed I must—

Ben was shocked. That’s not the kind of attitude you’d expect to have towards young married people. Hurt. Ben, who had been Bennet, the young man who took someone else’s wife while the man was away at war, had fear disguised as disapproval in his face, the withdrawal in his eyes in their dark caves. He did not want his son to suffer any complications in the search for sexual fulfilment and companionship that beckons from that other billboard: Happiness.

On a straggle of wire clothes were dripping, a woman flung a basin of water to the ground and looked up, a white flag on a dead-branch pole announced something to the initiated — a healer or some other form of counsel for sale, or maybe mealies to be bought — above a shack leaning like a house of cards. Business going on; straggling letters on board or wavering across the corrugations of tin, New York Gents Tailor, Dry Cleaning Depot, Latest Hairstyle Braiding Afro Relaxing, Mosala Funerals, Beauty Salon, a shutter propping up an eyelid of tin where a handful of cigarettes, a few bottles of bright drinks, twists of snuff and dice of chewing gum were ranged. Store. Coal Wood. Turn here. Turn there. Oh Mrs Stark. Combis have widened and channelled the dirt road to the passage of a river in flood, the Legal Foundation station-wagon is carried along, keeping track as the combis draw level so close the elbow of the driver out of his window almost touches the arm of the station-wagon’s outside mirror; held back when the combis stop at speed, without warning, to take on or discharge a passenger.

— Oh Mrs Stark, I tell you a person can’t go through that, he can’t. When I saw it wasn’t Colin, when I opened the door just a bit and I saw the head, the black man, blood, and the brains—

Crying, and all she has to deal with the shock and horror come back to her in the telling is a fancy handkerchief patterned with a pierrot’s head, his two crystal tears printed tinsel: Mrs Stark sees as she turns in the gesture of acknowledgement that is all Mrs Stark has to deal with it. For the moment; the Foundation must not flounder in effects, it tackles causes.

— like at the butcher’s shop, I never knew our brains was like that—

There is no stain on the doorstep. Neither blood nor the red-veined jelled grey displayed in shallow pans. All has been scrubbed away in the desperate upkeep of housewifely standards. A tall woman is waiting, bony in the way that often comes to African fleshiness from the mixture with European blood, and prematurely aged (she could probably give Mrs Stark a year or two) by the determination to defeat poverty by the virtues of fastidious cleanliness and decency believed to belong without effort to people with money, the rewards of being white. The door is not that of a house but the side-door of a garage; a stove, refrigerator, TV, beds, the family is living there. — Colin’s doing the house on weekends, oh it’s over a year now, a slow business! — The older woman insists on making tea, there’s a granadilla cake with yellow icing, she breaks in for emphasis: —His brother-in-law, my other daughter’s husband, he’s in the trade, and there’s others in the family comes to plaster and so on.—

— Sundays it’s quite a party! — Distracted from her tears by the comfort of pride, the young one shows Mrs Stark over what will be her house one day, Sunday by Sunday, the breakfast nook, Colin’s clever with his hands he’s doing the table himself, the master bedroom (she calls it), the kids here, with an entrance to the yard for them, the living-dining’s going to have a hatch counter to the kitchen, ma’s room with a separate bathroom and that, this’s the foundation for a patio and braai. The visitor is led outside again to admire the façade. There is no roof yet but on the unplastered wall where the window frames are paneless the replica of a brass carriage lamp is in place just as if it were standing to light the pillared entrance to a white man’s driveway.

The assertion of this half-built house is so undeniable that both women feel an unreality in returning to the object of Mrs Stark’s presence, which was supposed to be an inquiry into what happened in Phambili Park the night a man was murdered on the young woman’s doorstep. This sort of investigation was not normally within the purview of the Foundation, but on this occasion, as increasingly lately, the connection between the people who had been removed from a site and squatted near Phambili Park because they had nowhere else to go, and the violence from hostel dwellers they were subject to, pursuing them, the disruption this in turn caused residents in a legally proclaimed, upgraded etc. township, was relevant to the Foundation’s case against the removal. The young woman leads Mrs Stark up and down roads in the veld drawn by the rough fingernail of an earth-mover. Woodpecker tapping — building going on wherever you look — the veld an endless offering to the infinity of light that is a clear Transvaal sky, scaffolding standing out in the exaggerated perspective of bareness, de Chirico, Dali, thought they imagined it, Munch saw open-mouthed women fleeing in space from dingy, smoke-smouldering encrustation of shanties, there, over there. But where is Europe, what place has the divorce of a banker in the mind of anyone picking a way over rubble and weeds to the neat hallucination of small houses with their fancy burglar grilles, and flowered bedsheets hung out to dry, someone speaking to families living in garages while the habitation that has existed over years, in their minds, is slowly materialized in walls rising at the rate at which money is saved and free Sundays are available. The normality in these homes — camping out in the garage is home, because it is the first occupation of what has existed in mind — is also hallucinatory. So what is normality? Isn’t it just the way people manage to live under any particular circumstance; the children who are teetering a stolen supermarket trolley under the weight of two drums of water back to the squatter camp (one of the Phambili Park residents’ complaints is that the squatters come over to use their taps) — the children are performing a normal task in terms of where and how they live. They yell and pummel one another, tumbling about as they go. A carriage lamp is the blazon of aspiration, fixed to the wall where a mob smashes a man’s head in.

Mrs Stark put her notes into the sling bag, assuring that she would find her way back to the city. Without the face of a resident in black areas as escort beside her, she took the precaution of locking the car doors and closing the windows. Moving in a capsule; neither what usefulness her notes will be to the case nor the letter lying beneath the notebook dispelled the unreality of the place just left behind. She was accustomed to squatter camps, slum townships, levels of existence of which white people were not aware; the sudden illusion of suburbia, dropped here and there, standing up stranded on the veld between the vast undergrowth of tin and sacking and plastic and cardboard that was the natural terrain, was something still to be placed.

She had an urge to pull over to the roadside and read the letter.

But it was a resort to distraction; just as having to go about her business to somewhere named Phambili Park had served as a reason to thrust the letter half-read into her catch-all bag. And you don’t stop for any reason or anyone on roads these days. With one hand on the wheel, she delved into the bag to feel for the envelope. Ivan a frowning child her own frown of attention always looking back at her from him his habit of fingering his nose while he talked (don’t do it, it’s ugly) at the butcher’s I never knew our brains was like that a carriage lamp to shine out over the grey spill—

She found she was at the turn-off to the hospital where the soft-voiced witness had said people from the squatter camp had taken refuge. So she drove into the hospital grounds, waved on by security guards, and brought the car to a standstill. But not to read a letter.

She trudged over raked gravel between beds of regimented marigolds towards the wings of the hospital, dodging the hiss of the sprinkler system. Pigeons waddled to drink from the spray; a two-metre-high security fence under the hooded eyes of stadium lights surrounded this provincial administration’s hallucination of undisturbed ordinance. All along the standard red-brick and green-painted walls of the hospital people were collected as if blown there as plastic bags and paper were blown against the fence. Women sat on the ground with their legs folded under skirts and aprons, small children clinging and climbing about them. Men hunched with heads down on their knees, in a dangling hand a cigarette stub, or stood against the walls; looked up from staring at feet in broken track shoes advertised for the pleasures of sport. She greeted some groups; they blinked listlessly past her. She made a pretext for her approach, Were there people living in the hospital? An old woman took a pinch of snuff and pointed while she drew it up her nostrils. Are you sleeping there? A woman tugged at the blanket tied cutting into the shape of her sturdy breasts, needing to accuse anyone who would listen. — They tell us no more place. Here! We sleeping here!—

Out of the stasis others were attracted. They didn’t seem to understand questions in English or Afrikaans — Mrs Stark knew from experience how people in shock and bewilderment lose their responses in confusion, anyway — but the woman in the blanket spoke for them. — Five days I been here. What can I do? That night those shit take eveything, they kill — look at this old man, no blanket, nothing, the hospital give him blanket, when he’s run those men catch his brother, TV, bicycle, everything is gone from his place — shit!—

The man was coughing, his knees pressed together and shoulders narrowed over his chest, folding himself out of the danger of existence; the babies sucked at breasts, greedily taking it on.

— And this woman, she try to go to her home yesterday, in the night she come back again. No good, terrible—

The woman had the serene broad face that at the end of the twentieth century is seen only on young peasants and nuns, she will have followed her man from some Bantustan to the city that had no place for her, but neither the squatter camp nor the flight from it had had time to redraw the anachronism of her face in conformation with her place and time. She didn’t yet have the tough grimace pleated round the eyes and the stiff distended nostrils of the woman, a creature of prey, who was displaying her.

She prepared herself obediently to speak. A hump under cloth on her back was a baby. A small girl hid against her thick calves. — Friday there by Phambili where we living they come to get my husband. We run away but there’s plenty people running, night-time, and I don’t see where is my two children, the boys children, I was running with the small ones like this— (raised hands towards her back, carrying the weight) — now I don’t see my two children when I’m come to this hospital. Now yesterday I think I must go back to my house and see where is my children, my boys children, but when I come in the veld I see those men again they by my place—

She looked to others, someone, to find words for this sight, an explanation, what to do.

Were they hostel men, did they carry knobkerries, knives, how were they dressed?

The woman pulled the baby’s legs more securely round her waist and took again the long breath of her panic as she fled dragging her children into the veld, how could she be sure what she saw, how could she know anything but the urgency of her flesh and the flesh of her children to get away.

What about you — you get a chance to see who they were, the men who came that night?

The woman with the blanket stood before Mrs Stark on bare planted feet. — Me? You say what you see, your house is burn down or they kill you. Better I see nothing. — A fly was creeping round her cheek under the eye. Too much had happened for her to notice so small a predator treating her as if she were already a corpse.

And the letter. Lying at the bottom of the sling bag under the notes, under the sign of spilt brains and carriage lamp and the people staring for salvation, becoming dark clusters and clumps along a wall as she walked away from them.

When she got home — it was too late to go back to the Foundation — she came upon the letter. She was alone in the house that was hers as the bounty of divorce, in an order of life that could take for granted rights and their material assurances — her normality. It’s always been her house; Ben moved in with her, first as lover, then husband. It contains tables, lamps, posters and framed photographs, worn path on a carpet, bed — silent witness to that normality.

She leant against the windowsill, where there was still sunset light. The handwritten address directed to the Foundation was itself part of the text waiting to be read. Why does he tell me and not his father?

Why did he know — think — she would understand better? The envelope written in the well-rounded upright script she had seen form from his kindergarten alphabet, sent to a clandestine address like a love letter; a claim to share a secret that should not have turned up again at the bottom of a bag of notes. He cannot possibly know what she does not know herself: whether he is the son of love-making on the floor (in this very room where the letter is in her hand) one last time with the returned soldier, or whether he is the son of his mother’s lover, Bennet.

He does know. Somehow he does know. She has an irrational certainty. It was always there, can’t be denied; he doesn’t only look like her, in the genes that formed him is the knowledge of his conception. If she has never known who fathered him, he does. The first cells of his existence encoded the information: he is the child of the childless first marriage, conceived after it was over on this bedroom floor in an hour that should be forgotten. The information was always there: when she and Ben took him into their bed for a cuddle, as a tiny child, and in the inner-focussed emergence from sleep his gaze would be fixed on her eyes; when, a grown man, a banker, he danced with her, each holding the other in their secrecy.

You might have been aware, I think you were aware the last time you were in London that things were not going too well. Alice made me promise we’d keep up the appearance and I gave in — mistakenly, I believe, but when you’re what’s known as the guilty party (that’s my designation with the lawyers …) you try to make small concessions in order not to seem too much of a bastard. I should have known better, not so? Alice was plotting, poor thing, I suppose, every kind of delaying tactic she could think of. I sometimes wish you could be here now to tell her what people like you and I accept, that if you didn’t exactly tell Annie and me, we somehow learned from you about emotions — you can’t fake love. If it’s gone it’s gone. She wants me to stay with her, she says she doesn’t ask me to love her. She’s grown to be the kind of woman who’s content to be used like a prostitute, I should go on sleeping with her for god knows what — hygienic reasons, what she thinks of as the sexual needs of men that have nothing to do with love. She doesn’t understand for a moment that the idea fills me with disgust. I don’t want a vessel for my sex. Vera, I’ve outgrown her, she’s the little girl I took to school dances. For a long time I’ve had nothing I could discuss with her, not my work, not what’s in the newspapers, not my ideas about life. If it’s not concerning Adam, his earache, his school marks, whether he needs a new tennis racket, there’s nothing. I can’t live like that and I’m not going to be party to her weak choice to do so.

I have another woman. Have had, of course, for a long time. She hasn’t pressed me into divorcing Alice, I can tell you that. She’s not the type to go in for emotional blackmail. She’s a Hungarian redhead, if you want to know what she looks like (!), half-Jewish, and she’s very bright, an investment banker. There’s no messy tangle on her side, her husband died at thirty-nine five years ago, a brain tumour. No children. I don’t know whether to contest Alice over Adam. He’s almost grown up. She’s got a strong case for custody, but doesn’t an adolescent boy need a father, more? Difficult for me to judge, because I had both. All the old clichés of what’s best for him etc. Sometimes I just want to get out, I’d agree to anything. Other times, I feel bad about the boy. This is beginning to sound like one of the soap operas Alice watches on tele and quickly switches off when I come in, to pretend she doesn’t. No doubt every divorce is a soap opera. And you get addicted to your own soap opera, never mind the important things that are happening in the world. I’ve just come back from Moscow, the refinancing of part of the arms industry to make vehicle components, the swords into ploughshares operation. But it’s so much more profitable to sell arms, and they need money, no financial aid consortium can give them what can be earned by selling to the Middle East. I’m enclosing a photograph. We’re at some dinner in Budapest a few months ago. She’s the redhead next to the fat man standing up making a speech.

But there was no photograph. He must have thought better of it; had the instinct that a photograph, a face ringed, is no way to announce a betrayal.

When she heard Ben come in, his relaxed home-coming sigh as he paused in the passage at the bookshelf where the day’s mail was always left, her concourse alone with Ivan’s letter sank away; the reason why Ivan didn’t write to Ben was because Ben is his father, of course, must be; he knows how deeply Ben loves him, and doesn’t want to upset him with the sudden evidence of any unhappiness or instability in his son’s life.

Vera threw away the envelope.

Chapter 7

Who are the faces arranged in a collage round the great man himself? The posters are curling at the corners and some have faded strips where sunlight from a window has barred them day after day, month after month. Crowds who dance their manifesto in the streets are too young to recognize anyone who dates from the era before exile unless he is one of the two or three about whom songs were sung and whose images were kept alive on T-shirts. Didymus went about mostly unrecognized; disguised, now, as himself.

In the ranks of the entourage at mass rallies the cheers and chants fell pleasingly on him among other veterans as a category to whom this sort of valediction was due; it didn’t matter who they were individually. The press mixed up the attribution of names and that didn’t matter either. In a democratic movement the personality cult must be kept to a minimum, except in the case of dead heroes, who are an example to the people without any possibility of leading a tendency or faction that might be divisive. The time of welcoming posters was over; there were many new faces, or the unexpected appearance of known ones in positions they had not held previously. But these positions were interim ones — more or less on the level of his own adaptation to a variety of impermanent roles.

When the date was announced of the congress at which the Movement’s elections for office would take place, lobbying began, of course. Among the strong group to which he belonged, those returned from prison and from experience as a government in exile, the concern — not to be admitted outside their own ranks — was how to concede positions to those who had earned them by keeping the Movement alive within the country, while retaining key positions for those who had surely earned them by conducting the Movement from exile or prison. Women’s groups, youth groups, trade union groups were busy gathering support for this or that candidate; the old guard welcomed the influx as affirming a new kind of mass base after so many years of clandestinity. They had no need to fear they would not be returned to office — loyalty to the most militant is a dominant emotion in the masses; deserved; to be counted on. Meanwhile Didymus made it quietly but firmly known that on the new National Executive he would not expect to continue doing whatever came up. He would get the legal department, or at least something on that level; it was tacitly assured by his comrades on the outgoing Executive that this went without saying.

Among the possible newcomers Sibongile was nominated by a combination of returnees and a women’s organization, neither very prominent as yet. He didn’t think she had much chance but was proud of the recognition nomination, at least, brought her.

— They’ve put me up only because I’m a woman — I’m wise to that and I don’t think it’s a good enough reason. The women just want to see one of us there among you men.—

— Of course the women have. But not your returnees. They know what you’re capable of, they know what you can do.—

— For them? Well, then they know more than I do. — Her theatrical, comic stare. — All I know is how we allowed the government to get away with giving us amnesties and passports and nothing else. All I know is we didn’t hold out for training centres, housing — your executive didn’t insist, it was up to you. In my office, with three raw youngsters and a pittance, I’m trying to deal with the results — and believe me, I’m not making miracles.—

Didymus had always appreciated her vehemence. He acknowledged the reproach, smiling. — I promise you I’ll take it up in the new executive.—

What has been forbidden for so long — a gathering, any gathering — becomes a kind of fairground of released emotion, with its buskers, its symbolic taking, together, of food and drink, its garrulous decibels rising after long silence, its own insigniabanded marshals mingling as if already the unattainable evolution of humankind has arrived, where men and women discipline themselves. No more police, no more dogs, no more tear-gas, no more beatings on the way to the Black Maria. Even if it never comes, it is enacted here and now. And as always in the mix of human affairs the tension in the sense that the future of the country is being decided is combined with dissatisfaction with the catering and discomfort occasioned by a hopeless provision of too few toilets.

Didymus moved among old acquaintances, old comrades who had to introduce themselves with reminiscence of campaigns they had shared with him. He had the politician’s flattering tactic of the hand on the shoulder, the grin of recognition even without knowing whom he was greeting. Every now and then he would excuse himself from his progression, called to confer with an other of the outgoing Executive members — questions of protocol coming up, complaints from the press, requests from the groups that should have been settled in advance; in a country where it had been a criminal offence for people like those gathered in the hall to meet for any kind of political purpose, what are routine procedures anywhere else here were arcane secrets of power and privilege. While his conclave drew aside, their eyes glancing into and away from the throng as they sheltered within their half-turned backs, in the air thick with voices and the friction of movement, the sussuration of clothing, the echo of coughs, laughter, a slithering stamping of feet, the tremolo of ululating cries broke again and again into song. People sing on marches, they sing at funerals, they sing on the way to jail; it was their secret, all that time of the forbidden.

You can’t toyi-toyi your way to freedom, Sibongile often tartly remarked in exile. He saw her, caught up in a sway and shuffle of women and young men. Her shoulders shrugged rhythmically and her head was thrown back; Sibongile was enjoying herself, or learning how to be a politician. He was amused.

The old guard sat on the podium through the announcement of nominations and process of voting, facing the people they had gone to prison for, gone into exile for — and died for: in their faces were those who were absent, who would never come back. Didymus, looking out at his people, had a strange realization, in his body, in his hands resting on his thighs, of his survival. He had moved among them as if dead; had he died under treatment in Moscow, the fiction, and walked among them those months as a phantom? Disguised, unrecognized, do you exist? And now they see him; back to life. It was a conviction of pure existence. He sat there; he was.

In this state he heard the results of the election announced. His name was not among those voted to the new Executive. The applause continued, the shouts flung about like streamers, the songs lifted, the list of names was somewhere beneath. Sibongile Maqoma. She was hidden in a scrum of triumphant supporters. He was congratulating his successful comrades, the clasp round the shoulders, the dip of the cheek to each cheek, ridiculous, as if he were a prize-fighter coming forward in defeat to embrace the victor. Nobody said anything, with the single exception of a comrade who had always felt enmity towards him: —It’s crazy. That they dump you, man.—

He made his way to the chanting, dancing press around Sibongile, pushing to get to her until someone saw who he was and nudged to have him let through. His embrace was again a public one, the hug and hard kiss on the mouth from the comrade-husband; his presence before her bounced off the excited glare of her face like the flash of a piece of glass in the sun. But what could she say right then — he was eddied about with some sort of respect among those celebrating her, the husband congratulated by eager hands.

When the surface of the crowd began to be broken up like foam in a current she appeared drifting to him with Vera Stark linked by the arm. He was back at the podium gathering briefcase and papers to leave his seat vacant for a successor. Vera was one of the team of independent observers — lawyers were regarded as having the most credibility for the task — brought in to monitor the votes. Clasped chummily by Sibongile as if they were schoolgirls after a victorious match, Vera stood waiting for him to speak; knowing he wouldn’t. — You’ll be co-opted. So it doesn’t mean anything.—

He patted her on the arm, smiling at the lie between them. — Let’s go and look for a drink — we must toast Sally, man!—

— Oh there’s a party! We’re all going to a party! Vera’ll come in our car — who’s got the keys, did I keep them or have you— Sibongile used this abstracted jollying tone when Mpho was little and had to be hustled off for an inoculation or an exam. After Vera had entered the back of the car Sibongile stood with her hand on her door, turned her head, close to him. — You’re all right …?—

— Of course I’m all right! What do you think! Now come on.—

At the party he took part in the noisy discussions that assessed the composition of the new Executive which (’on balance’ was the phrase) had kept the key positions intact while pushing a few of the leadership upstairs under honorary titles, and bringing in new people with better contacts within the country. One would have thought him quite detached from the event; he succeeded in this: no one dared commiserate with him. Towards the end of the evening, when he and everyone else who took alcohol heightened the atmosphere of achievement (the younger comrades tended to find this a weakness of the old guard and drank fruit juice), he himself was in a mood to believe he felt that all that mattered was that the congress had established conventional political legitimacy for the long-outlawed Movement. You had your role, your missions, you took the risks of your life, you disappeared and reappeared, went into prison or exile, and there was no presenting of the bill for those years to anyone, the benefit did not belong to you and your achievement was that you wanted it that way.

The marital tradition of the post-mortem between husband and wife who were also comrades: one o’clock in the morning in the bedroom, the silence of weariness, stripping off shoes that have become constraints, opening waistbands that leave the weal of a long day — Sibongile burst into anger.

— Those sly bastards! They planned it! They wanted you out, I know that cabal, I’ve seen their slimy smiles. They’ve never forgiven you the time when you opposed them over the business of landings on the coast—

— Oh nonsense. It was a crazy idea, I wasn’t the only one.—

— How can you say that? You were the one. You were the one who had gone inside and reconnoitred, you were the one who knew whether it was possible to carry it out or not. What you said had to be what High Command would listen to. And those others couldn’t stomach to see themselves made fools of.—

He sat down on the bed. This seemed to make her angrier.

He did not look into her anger. — All so long ago.—

— They slapped you on the back, they whispered with you in corners, I saw them, even tonight, right there! And all the time they had it all set up to get you out. It isn’t long ago, for them. They don’t forget they didn’t come out of that business too well.—

She was pulling clothes over her head and flinging them across the room. Her straightened hair broke loose from its combs and stood up blowsily, her mouth was squared open, anger made her ugly.

— For God’s sake, Sibo— He changed from English to their language, or rather hers, which was the tongue of their intimacy. — It’s done. It’s happened. I don’t want to deal with it now. It’s political life, we held everything together in exile better than any other movement did, now’s not the time to start stirring up trouble. There may be a purpose, I don’t know, something else planned for me.—

— Hai you! What purpose! You going to grow a beard and all that stuff and infiltrate — where? What for? Where can’t we just get off a plane at an airport and walk in, now? We’re not living in the past!—

— That’s exactly what you’re saying — we are — there was a plot against me because of something that happened outside, done with. For God’s sake, let’s sleep.—

She lay beside him stiffly, breathing fast. — I don’t sleep. I can’t turn over and forget about it.—

— Listen, woman. — He sat up with effort. — You are going to be there, now. In there. Here at home in the country. Keep your mind on what you have to do, you have to work with everyone on the Executive, don’t make enemies for private reasons.—

She came back to English. — On principle. Ever heard of it, Didymus. On principle. —

— You’ve got a lot to learn. Let me look after my own affairs.—

— Your affairs are my affairs. Have I lived like any other woman, hubby coming home regularly from work every day? Have I known, months on end, whether you were dead or alive? Tell me. And could I ask anybody? Did I ever expect an answer? Could I tell our child why her father left her? Our affairs. —

— Not now. Not in politics, where you are now.—

Deep breaths snagged on a few sobs. She had always wept when she was angry. But was she also giving vent to the emotions of excitement and pride she had repressed out of consideration for him, when in the hall filled with delegates she heard that she was one of their chosen?

Chapter 8

We don’t seem to have much success with them. All he said.

— What d’you mean? Banking may not be exactly what you or I would have chosen for him, but he’s good at it, and Annie always wanted to be a doctor, she’s doing good work isn’t she, her heart’s in it— But she knew what he meant. Annick, inheritor of his beautiful face, had brought many boys home when she was a teenager but since she had qualified and taken a post in community medicine in the Cape she appeared to have no man and in her thirties gave no sign of marrying; Ivan was getting divorced without showing enthusiasm for a new woman who evidently was as much business associate as lover. Arid lives, by Ben’s hidden standards of high emotion.

— Well I don’t suppose we were such a good example — at least to Ivan.—

— I’ve never been divorced.—

The forgotten heat of blush, called up by Ben in her cheeks: Bennet, who thought he had seduced someone’s wife but had been seduced by her, and never since made love to another woman. That she was sure of, the certainty was there in the image bent alone over a meal in a restaurant that came back to her with blood in her face. I love you. That was in the blood, too, but she could not say it, what reason would he find for such a — declaration, at this moment? What reason was there? — Anyway, it’s not whether or not we make a success of their lives. Nothing to do with us.—

His palms smoothed along his jaw-line, a familiar gesture in the language of their marriage, not, as it might seem, a physical response to the shadow of his dark beard that by evening always had appeared again, but a sign of disagreement. — Maybe we should take the boy if they’re squabbling over him. Give him a stable home for a year or two.—

He went away to write a letter to Ivan, turning from what he knew was her alarmed silence.

Ben didn’t show her the letter and she did not ask to read it. Perhaps he had not made the offer to Ivan. It was not mentioned when Ivan telephoned, as he did now and then, or they called him because there had not been time or thought to write to him. The idea that there could be space in their life for something more was mislaid like a document lost in the bottom of the files where the struggle for another kind of space grew up every day around her. On the western border people from a tribe that had been moved with the concession that they could come back to their land to tend the graves of their ancestors for one day a year did not leave at nightfall but began to build huts. The sullen silence of reclaim met the arrival of authorities to evict them; they were left there — temporarily, the Foundation was warned, when it took up the issue on the appeal of the tribe. Vera and Lazar Feldman, a young colleague, found themselves proceeding from instructions of two kinds: one, from their own training in secular law, that the owners of the land had been displaced illegally in the first instance; the other, from the people who were thatching huts and surrounding them with fences of thorned branches and hacked-off prickly pear plants, that the instruction to return and take possession came from the ancestors.

It was easy to see this use of ancestor worship as a political tactic shrewd peasants had thought of beyond the rational ingenuity of lawyers; but there were moments when, listening to the people’s spokesmen, she felt confusion and uncertainty— not about them, but in herself; whether the only validity of their claim lay outside the political struggle, outside the challenging of laws made by governments that rise and fall, in the continuation of life itself from below and above the very ground that sustained it. What other claim is there that holds? The wars fought over land, the boundary proclamations, the paper deeds of sale — each cancels the other. What was she — the Foundation — working for, if not for that claim? But it didn’t look good enough in legal plea — peasant mysticism can’t be codified as a legal right — it was too good, for that. With a shift in a chair or a half-smile she and Lazar passed over the instruction from the ancestors and took that which came from their own strategical experience in opposing the law through its interstices, which consisted mainly in delaying tactics. The action of re-evicting the people would be held off — maybe so long that the present policies of land ownership would be torn up. Who knows? Such things are not discussed with Lazar; he is young, and would not understand that doubts do not mean that belief in the necessity of the work she does is abandoned. And even while this case was occupying her, Oupa came with a favoured opening: they’ve got a problem, we’ve got a problem, he’s got a problem. The owner of that apartment building where he was living was seeking the eviction of some tenants.

— The problem is, rooms on the roof. There are many people living up there.—

— But who pays rent for the rooms?—

— Well, that’s it. The tenants of the flats let them out to, say, one person or two. Then those people take in more. People who work in the day let the bed to people who work at night and sleep in the day. It’s like that.—

Yes, it was like that; when the apartments were built for white people, for their occupancy, their way of life, for the white millennium, when they lived in the apartments, each had the right to one of the rooms to accommodate a servant.

— I didn’t know about it. So I haven’t got anyone up there.—

They laughed together at the missed opportunity.

But the ‘problem’ remained, between them on Mrs Stark’s desk. Oupa had received an eviction order along with the other black tenants. The Foundation would have to look into it, take it up on behalf of them all. Oupa had been so proud, so happy to move in. Yet he was cheerful; she noticed he was wearing a new lumber-jacket, brown suede, and he asked his old adviser and friend something he’d never done before — she didn’t know he went to the theatre — whether a current play was to be recommended? He had about him the confidence of a young man elated to find himself attractive to a chosen girl; well, circumstance kept his wife away in another part of the country, absence makes room for other attachments, and perhaps they were parted, emotionally, by reasons only absence makes clear. She filed at court an intention to defend against the eviction order; she had to find time to interview the other tenants. Along the corridors of Delville Wood the old, faint signals from One-Twenty-One were jammed by the static of complaint, voluble indignation that buzzed about her in flats she had never before entered, and by the sight of the cubicles on the windswept roof, water dribbling from the communal washrooms, spirit stoves beside makeshift beds that in her clandestine occupancy of the white millennium had existed above her head while she was making love.

Ben — Ben was negotiating finance for the new enterprise in which he had involved himself. Promotional Luggage. She made staggering, clownish movements of hands and head when, that evening, she heard the name, the term. What did it mean?

The gestures offended. He read scorn or ridicule into them, and she felt exasperation at having to deny these. He had to be coaxed to explain coldly. Suitcases and briefcases designed exclusively for executives, to their requirements and incorporating their logos in materials superior to some embossed stamp. Custom-made. Business has its jargon just as the test-cases of the Foundation have. After a bath to wash away the ancestral instruction from beneath the earth and the sense of lying, herself, buried in One-Twenty-One with reality windswept and forlorn ignored above her head (for if you deny any time, any part of your life, you have no continuity of existence), she dressed and perfumed herself to go with Ben to a business dinner. They agreed it was inexplicable that people in business seem to have no feeling for the privacy of leisure; apparently they are lonely after the occupation of the day and want to fill this vacuum with a continuation of the same company and the same talk over an extended taking of food and drink.

He looked at her in detail, a sculptor’s eye for line and volume, her legs patterned in a filigree of lacey black stockings, her waist marked with a wide belt, her face made up sufficiently to conform with what would be expected of her. For her it was a calculation; for him it put something of the fascinating distance between them that had existed when he first saw her, unapproachable, somebody else’s wife.

— You look lovely.—

— My old glad rags.—

In the car he took up what her banal show of modesty provided the opportunity to say. — Unless I do something about making some money now we’re going to be without resources when we’re really old. (My god, I’m beginning to use their vocabulary.) Hard up. That’s what I’m saying. That’s what Promotional Luggage is about.—

They had never talked about provision for some long survival. A country where there was so much death — why should you need to choose your own solution. — If you can believe we’re going to live so long.—

— It’s easy to think there’s the option of dying before you run out of cash.—

— We’ll always have somewhere, Ben. We’ve always got the house.—

She had taken him in there, into the booty from her relationship with another man; he had given up the idea of becoming a sculptor to provide for her through Promotional Luggage. She put out a hand and squeezed his thigh, a compact, one of the bargains constantly negotiated by marriage.

The restaurant is called the Drommedaris, after the ship that carried the first European to the country; it’s fashionable for cartels that own hotels and restaurants to feel they honour history and claim patriotism with such names. History and patriotism implying settler history and patriotism. They are the clubs whose entry requirements are that the applicant shall be expensively dressed and willing to pay one hundred per cent profit on a bottle of wine. The password comes from the client’s own cabalistic vocabulary — promotion — and is evidenced without being pronounced: up-market. Everyone’s main course is served at the same moment by waiters who, taking the cue from the senior among them like members of an orchestra with one eye on the conductor, simultaneously flourish silver-plated covers from the plates. Revealed are not four-and-twenty blackbirds (she catches Ben’s eye across the table) but attempts at culinary distinction and originality that combine incompatible ingredients in — fortunately — an unidentifiable mixture. Eat. It’s expensive, therefore it’s a privilege, she admonishes herself. It you don’t like it, you’re a prig. Between courses a fake silver egg-cup of watery ice cream is served that coats the palate it is supposed to clear for more eating; a ritual someone in the cartel has picked up in eagerness to claim elegance as well as history, patriotism etc.

The galleon decor is not inappropriate to the conversation, for the men frequently speak of this or that absent colleague being ‘taken on board’ some enterprise. And there are others referred to as small fry; the fingerlings in the sea of business. Women are expected to talk to other women, she knows that, and does not attempt presumptuously to engage the host, on whose right hand she has been placed (the position to be interpreted as recognizing a woman’s husband having been taken on board). He assiduously signals a waiter to fill her wineglass and passes with surface attention friendly remarks suitable to feminine interests (Just like my wife, she’s always removing those chunks of ice they put in the water. Where do you have your holiday house — Plettenberg? — do try some of this, looks exciting doesn’t it oh I agree the Cape is too windy but I’m out in my ski-boat, that’s my passion, Yvonne’s a girl for winter holidays, game parks, you know, all that).

There’s one exception to the contented dinner table purdah in which women chat to one another under the vociferous competitive exchanges of the men. An Afrikaner, dressed, coiffured and made up in the television-star style of an indeterminate age that will never go beyond forty while at the same time adopting every change of fashion, flashing her mascara-spiked eyes from this speaker to that, clinking gold and ivory bracelets and neon-coloured jumbo watch as she laughs in the right places, calls out a tag punch-line now and then that reinforces attention to the male speaker rather than draws it to herself. Some group’s public relations director, a prototype of how, in the choice of a female for the job, the display of possible sexual availability may be exploited to combine with suitably acquired male aggression. Poor thing; she comes clip-clopping into the ladies’ room on high-heeled hooves and behind the door there is the noisy stream of her urine falling, she’s even taught herself to piss boldly as a man. Or perhaps that’s wronging her — she comes out and smiles, My God I was bursting, hey, sorry.

At the table the host stands courteously to see his right-hand partner seated again, they know how to treat a lady. There are cigars and small fruits encased in glassy hardened sugar, as Coca-Cola and buns are distributed at treats in the townships whose workers are being discussed. A recent strike in the cardboard container trade is being compared with that in the tanning industry. Opposite Vera a man keeps pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose and breathing heavily in readiness for an opening to speak. At last: —We told them — called them all together with their shop steward, I don’t talk to those fellows on their own, eh, you only get told afterwards he didn’t have a mandate — we said, look, you can bring your wives (hands chopped edge-on to the table, then lifted) you can bring your children (hands again) you can bring the whole bang shoot, we’ll give you blankets, we’ll supply food, so you won’t have to risk anything coming to work. Most of them said fair enough, you know? I feel sorry for them, we genuinely wanted to help, they can’t afford to lose two days’ pay and they can’t risk being beaten up if they come to work — so it’s a solution. But there was one guy who said no, he has to stay away. Not for political reasons, no, no. So he said. But because he can’t leave his house for two days, in the township. He hasn’t got locks on the doors … So I said … (waiting for the laugh) so I said, all right. Don’t come to work Monday and Tuesday. All right. But then don’t come back on Wednesday.—

Through muffled background music inescapable as a ringing in the ears a cry comes from farther down the table: —Hands in the till! Everywhere you look. I could tell you many more instances … this Government’s become as corrupt as the blacks’ states. If they’re going to lose power, they’re going to make sure they give over a ruined economy. Positively last sale. Everything up for grabs. D’you know what’s happening in the pension funds—

There’s another who sits back with the care of one who has drunk too much, but a rush of words upsets the balance: —I think I’m a damn fool to be negotiating labour deals with the black unions. I ought to be learning how to get my hand in the till and get out. First thing they’re going to do when they get into power, you can own only one property. So bang goes my trout farm, no more invitations for you boys to come down and fish …—

How she sees them laugh it off, their confidence in themselves makes a joke of their fears, they will always find a way to dine on board the Drommedaris no matter what government comes, the power of being white has been extrasensory so long, they feel it within them like a secret ability to bend metal by looking at it. If they ‘get out’ they will come back; we shall ask them to. She is the only woman who has accepted a cognac (the public relations director made the approved female choice of a sweet liqueur) and she’s joined the party on the ship of fools but (too much wine, as well) for her it’s a listing oil tanker she’s on that will spill its cargo to slick territorial waters round the new state.

Why do I drink on these occasions? Why does duty make me drink? She sat in the car beside Ben, going home. What have I done, to put him in such company, what have I done to him.

But why me? What has he done to himself?

In the morning, they were in the mood to laugh over the evening. ‘Hand in the till’ became itself a password between them for ironic judgments in their private language.

The pulsations of perception throb, and die down. Throb again. How, in the end, between the swirling newspaper and slimy drains of the roof-top hidden from the streets and One-Twenty-One, evidenced as testimony bared to the sky; the probabilities in London of fulfilment or unhappiness in attachment to a redhead whose photograph was not sent; the claim of the ancestors and its codification in a land policy paper that may deprive business associates of river frontage for weekend trout-fishing, Better I see nothing, Don’t come back on Wednesday— how, between all these, will you know, will you recognize the beat: this is my self.

Chapter 9

What happens, happens early in the morning, when the hand with the blue vein raised from outer wrist-bone to the base between first and second finger feels for the switch on the radio. Sometimes as he draws the hand back she takes it for the return to life, and closes her eyes again, waiting for the news; his hand and hers, the warm pulse palm-to-palm of a single creature who exists only while bodies are still numb in half-consciousness. The news is brought to you by this bank or that with its computer services and thirty-two-day deposit convenience at maximum interest. There are wars and famines too far away to stir response: there are coups and drought drawing nearer, there are the killings of the night, still closer. Some mornings, attacks on farms; a white farmer shot, the wife raped or killed, money and car missing. Taken. ‘Taken’ to mean the motive is robbery; as if robbery has a single meaning in every country at every period. Take cars, take money, take life. These mornings robbery means taking everything you haven’t got from those who appear to have everything: money, a car to sell for money, a way of life with house and land and cattle. Otherwise, why kill as well as rob? Why rape some farmer’s ugly old wife? No violence is more frightening than the violence of revenge, because it is something that what the victim stands for brings upon him. It is seldom retribution for a personal deed, of which innocence can be claimed. The rape has nothing to do with desire; the penis is a gun like the gun held to a head, its discharge is a discharge of bullets.

She lies in a body-warmed bed, the first refuge after birth and the last, for those fortunate enough to die a natural death.

What happened one morning was the sudden startle of the word ‘Odensville’ in the newsreader’s bland recital. ‘Nine people were killed and fourteen injured in violence at the Odensville squatter camp last night. The clash occurred when a local farmer, leading a group of armed supporters, tried to evict the squatters. Police report that it is unclear whether the bullet wounds sustained were the result of the group’s action or of cross-fire from the squatters. An AK—47 and three Makarov pistols were recovered at the scene. The farmer, Mr Tertius Odendaal, said that he had called by radio the local farmers’ defence commando when the squatters were spotted approaching his house under cover of darkness, carrying stones and weapons.’

The Foundation had been unsuccessful in keeping any contact with the farmer Odendaal. The day he shut his door in the face of its lawyer, her driver, and the squatters’ spokesman, Zeph Rapulana, was the end of negotiation with him. Communication was with his lawyer. Rapulana came to the city a number of times to confer with Vera on the squatters’ options in a course of action. It had become clear to her that it was best for the Foundation to be guided by this man, rather than the other way about. He read, enquired, informed himself of all the intricacies of legislation, so that her task was simply to formulate procedure; there was a zest in working together with a plaintiff rather than taking over decisions for the helpless, which was her function most of the time. He sat quietly watching her, in her office, while she walked about going over exasperatedly her attempts to talk to Odendaal. His alert patience had the effect of taking the place of her own customary manner in that office; he was the one listening to her without showing reaction, as she listened to others. It was a curious kind of release, almost a pleasure, that created ease between them. He had ready what he was going to say, but a natural respect for the views of others made him hear out what might modify his own. There were homely colloquialisms in his command of English, a little out-of-date, with its careful grammatical construction, in comparison with the spliced improvisations — TV jargon, Afrikaans and tsotsi slang, mother-tongue syntax, mixed with English — of city people like Oupa or the Foundation’s black lawyers. — Odendaal won’t budge. We can abandon any idea of that nature. Our only possibility is to sup with the devil. Take a long spoon. Yes … The agents of the Government who put us in our position are the ones we must shame into getting us out of it.—

— Count on the Provincial Administration? Well … —

— Odendaal has threatened to bring the AWB ¹ with their guns to evict us. It doesn’t look very nice, does it? In the present political climate, the Government surely doesn’t want too many press reports of blacks being forced out of their homes. That still going on.—

— Their hands would look clean. It would be the work of the right-wing rebels.—

— Even so. They’d be asked why they didn’t do something about it. That’s where we step in. Take the bull by the horns. He applied to the TPA² to build a black township on his land, we apply now to the TPA to appropriate the farm and declare it a transit settlement, for a start.—

— Worth a try. Our case would be that it’s an initiative to avoid violence in an area of dangerous contention. I suppose we could lead with this.—

Making light of their ‘conspiracy’, they grasped hands that day; sat down together over the formulation.

That other clasp, two hands joined to make one creature, broke apart. Out of bed she stumbled to find the sling bag with the address and telephone book she kept handy when away from the office. She summoned the well-trained orderliness of her working mode in order not to think — anything— not to ask of herself the name of one of the nine dead until she reached the telephone and heard it answered. Zeph Rapulana was a squatter but he had given her the number of a relative in a nearby township who had a store and lived behind it; there was a telephone, whether in the house or the store she didn’t know. It must have been in the store, and so early in the morning the store was not yet open. The telephone rang and rang. It seemed to her an answer: Rapulana would never reply again, anywhere. She called through the bathroom door to Ben in the shower, something terrible has happened, she has to go at once — he came to the doorway streaming. — What? What is it all about? What happened? — He naked, she dressed, it was an encounter between strangers. He called out after her, Don’t go there alone! Vera, do you hear me!

But she was alone. He didn’t know the man, Zeph Rapulana. He hadn’t stood before Odendaal’s anger, Odendaal’s barred door, with him, made decisions affecting families with him, hadn’t come to read the dignity, the shrewdness of confidence and intelligence in that calm black face of the man. She drove first to the empty Foundation — no one at work yet — to pick up documents relating to the Odensville affair. Well along the highway, she remembered she had not left a note, and turned off at a petrol station to telephone her office. The young switchboard operator could hear the voices of the petrol attendants, laughing and arguing over a game of cards set out on the ground, and the jabber from their radio. — Where you partying already, in the day, Mrs Stark!—

She drove; a mind caged back and forth between the witness of the empty office where Zeph Rapulana had talked reason and strategy, the desk from which she had sent the letter to the TPA, and the collage, made up of so many press photographs, so many leaping and falling, running figures on TV, so many burning shacks, so many dead slumped on the earth as so many bundles of blood-stained washing. There was no connection. Before a reply to the letter, hers and Rapulana’s, could be received through the authorities, before bureaucracy had ‘taken steps’, the solution to everything had taken steps — deaths, again deaths.

The car door slammed behind her outside the district police station with the blow of sun striking her with dizziness of the long solitary drive. Dust, sparkle of the wire security fence; she passed under a drowsy-lidded gaze of a black policeman with his sub-machine-gun hitched on his stout thigh. Inside, a white policeman, elbows on the counter and forearms shielding his flirtatious face over the telephone, was engaged in one of those calls made up of sniggering silences and intimately curt remarks between young men and girls. Another policeman was standing before a filing cabinet, smoking and hesitating over papers. While she questioned him he continued to glance sideways at this sheet and that; shrugged without answering and called towards an open doorway through which someone of more senior rank appeared. He was a handsome Afrikaner with a glossy moustache and a Napoleon haircut, a well-groomed stallion of the kind with a special manner when dealing with women, since he felt himself to be pleasing to them somewhere under their complaint or distress, like it or not, in their female innards. Even to this tannie³ he extended the patronage, listening to her rap of questions with the air, yes, yes, he knew how to deal with over-anxious ladies concerned about their black servants. That business with the squatters last night; nine deaths confirmed but no names available, the bodies still to be identified — if the relatives can be found, you never know with them, they’re spread around in these camps. He scribbled the name of the Foundation without reaction to her revealed connection with that trouble-making organization; yes yes they could phone and ask for him personally, yes yes ready to be of any assistance. He cuffed the head of the young man at the telephone as he passed to his office.

She drove to a complex of garage, chain restaurant and restrooms in a loop off the highway and found a bank of telephones. At the store, someone who sounded like a child listened, breathing gustily, and then put aside the receiver. Vera called loudly, hullo! hullo! possessed by a useless impatience with everyone, the police, the unknown storekeeper, the wild-goose chase of calling culpability to account, finding interstices in official obduracy and solutions to ignorance of the uneducated that was, had been so long, her working life. The gaping receiver at the other end of the line, the background noises lazily conveyed, ignoring her — this was nothing but another customary irritation, but it brought her to despair and destroyed the control within which she held the fact of nine unnamed dead. If that child had been within reach she would have struck it. Violence boiled up in her from somewhere. If Odendaals kill, kill back. If they killed that good man, why not deal back death to them — she understood with all her impatient angry flesh the violence that, like others, she called mindless. When the receiver was picked up she gave her name and business testily. A man’s soft hoarse voice said no, it’s all right, my cousin is well, everything it’s all right, nothing is happen, if you want see him I can send someone—

She was given instructions to find her way to the shop. Lost, turned back by police road-blocks, she found another route— there it was, so that was it, she remembered dropping him off at that store the first day when they had left Odendaal’s house.

He was there, standing, waiting for her, wearing a tie, right arm in a sling and, oozing through gauze, the pursed red lips of a deep cut drawn together by surgical clips on the black flesh of his cheek. Smiling.

She was overcome by a kind of shyness, because the man was alive. She began to shiver — not tremble — it was the quivering wave that comes when you give way to fear or are going to be sick. Certainty that he had been killed by Odendaal, that she had not allowed to rise in her, now struck at the sight of him.

— I’m so sorry. You were worried. My cousin told me. — A gentle and calm voice.

She stood there, someone dropped from another planet, the outer space of safety, in the dim little store’s light moted by the dust of grain and spilt sugar, thick with the closed-in smells of the night, snuff, soap, sweat-dried secondhand shoes and army surplus coats, mouse-droppings and paraffin. He saw, came over at once and with his left hand strangely clasped her forearm above the wrist, held it there, between them. Tentatively, her other hand came to rest over his.

He tramped before her to a shed behind the shop. There were plastic chairs and a bed in disarray where someone had slept. He turned off a radio and gave some instruction to a child who brought cups of sweet milky tea.

She didn’t ask whether the squatters had approached Odendaal’s house armed with stones and weapons. She didn’t ask if he led them. He told drily, now and then touching with a middle finger along the gash on his cheek, how Odendaal and his commando had gone through the squatters’ shacks, firing, dragging people out. A pause, tracing the gash. A considering, rumbling murmur, expressive in his own language, that she understood from experience with blacks who have status in their communities as always some sort of warning or preparation for what was about to be said. — Now Administration will act. Now they’ll have to buy his land. No more trouble for him. Lucky Odendaal. He’ll get money, plenty of money, he’ll be happy. And the land—

Their eyes held, and shifted.

— Nine dead, so we’ll get it. — Now it was possible to say this to this man. — We’ll have to make sure it’s for occupation by your people there, no one else.—

— Quickly. When shall I come to the office? I’d better bring the Chief with me, it’s always better for Pretoria if anything is backed by a chief. First I have to make the funeral arrangements.—

She had no preparatory murmur such as he could use. — Perhaps near escapes from death are always a resurrection. Perhaps that’s how the whole legend of Christ rising from the tomb came about — I was thinking, they took him down from the cross and couldn’t believe he wasn’t dead, couldn’t believe he was there, alive, in front of them … that was the resurrection, really. The whole tomb story, the miracle came from that. — Then she remembered he was probably religious. When they first met, that day they went to see Odendaal, the man had about him the kind of modest self-righteousness, prim bearing, an overlay on the African spirit that regular church-going seems to bring about in rural people; at the roadside he sat circumspectly as if he were in a pew. This surface had burned off like morning fog in the heat of the events in which he was involved, as she had come to know him — or rather as he had come to reveal himself released by that involvement. Yet beliefs inculcated in childhood often remain uncontradicted by mature reasoning and experience. He might be offended by a Christian heretic’s doubts of Christ’s divine powers.

He understood she was talking about — himself.

— I managed to drive. I took two of them to the hospital in my car. There’s blood all over. The woman died before we arrived around midnight. Yes … The youngster may be all right. That’s how I got this stitched up. — He moved his lower jaw against the stiffness of the flesh drawn together on his cheek.

In Vera’s car they went to what had been Odensville.

A stunned aftermath of disaster slowed the pace of existence to its minimum; people were breathing, just breathing. Children with lolling-headed babies on their backs sat about, there was no way of knowing whether outside where they had lived — every element that could identify shelter and possessions cast in turmoil. Dried tears were the salty tracks on the grey-black cheeks of women who must not be gazed at. Men wandered, turning over splintered wood, torn board, plastic burned black-edged into fantastic whorls and peaks like the frozen waves in Japanese prints. A sewing machine under kicked-aside crazy mounds of pots and clothing was an artifact uncovered from a destroyed culture. To Vera’s eyes it had never seemed that the squatter camps she had been in could represent what anyone would be able to regard as home. Now in the destruction of the wretched erections of rubbish-dump materials she saw that these were home, this place had been home.

He talked quietly to people; he and she did not speak to one another, everyone ignored her, as if she could not be seen, the events of the night imprinted on their eyes, blinded to the day.

What happened.

There are always explanations expected.

— I can’t … You can read in the papers what happened, you’ll see on TV what the place looks like now. That’s all. Who has ever explained what a war is like — everyone witnesses something different.—

Ben had a fingernail in his ear, something worrying him in the aperture; the private moment like an offended inattention.

She tried again. — When you’re there yourself, it’s not anything you’ve thought. And everyone who went there would know something else … it wouldn’t be the same for you as for me, or for others as for you.—

— Isn’t it that you didn’t live through the night there. — The tone of one who assumes he knows the other better than she could know herself.

— No no. No no. That’s obvious. It’s not what I’m trying to talk about.—

— After the event: isn’t that what your work is. Always the same thing, not something different: consequences. It’s not the first time you’ve seen such things.—

In her office she dictated to a tape recorder an account of on-site investigation of the Odensville attack. It came back to her desk with neat margins and headings in the flat print-out of a computer. As she read it over for secretarial errors it seemed what Ben had annoyed, almost hurt her, by describing as having been a routine part of case work. The pain of catatonic inertia, yet another aspect of despair in addition to the many she already understood, was a terrible knowledge she would carry, because she never could be, never could wish to be inured to feeling by professionalism. That was what happened at Odensville; that she understood. The other happening was something she came to realize slowly, returned to as a distraction from work and all the preoccupations of her life, interrupting, like a power failure of all the main lines of consciousness and memory, seeking a new connection with responses untapped, as there are known to be connections in the brain that may go unused through a lifetime. At first, with a beat that was half-distaste, half-fear, it came to her suddenly that the gesture of the man, grasping her arm, and her automatic placing of her hand, for a moment, over his knuckles, was a repetition of the compact to begin a love affair with her Hitler Baby, Otto, years ago. Yes — that had been a sexual question-and-answer by sudden contact, but the advance of this other man towards her and his assumption of the right to touch her strangely, her hand placed over his, was something quite other. And yet again quite different from shaking hands, which also has as little to do with any kind of intimacy as greeting by the shoulder-bobbing accolade has to do with kissing.

Any kind of intimacy? She turned away from the problem of interpretation again and again. Certainly not sexual. She knew without doubt from the impulse in the hand that had gone out to cover his that she was not making or responding to a sexual invitation. She knew, even in the tight warm grasp of his big hand, that the gesture from him was not sexual; the nerves of skin and flesh instantly recognize the touch of sensuality. Good god, was she not too old? Wasn’t it even ridiculous, a vanity, that she should imagine this gesture could have been any repetition of the other? She had sometimes feared, in the want, the involuntary yearning of her body for the man Otto, for One-Twenty-One, after he had gone, that when she began to grow old she would become one of those women who have a fancy for young men, that she would dye her hair and undress in the dark to hide drooping buttocks and sad belly from a lover paid with — what? Gold weights and silk shirts are only the beginning. Thank god, no sign of any taste for young men was occurring; but the passing mistrust of self projected upon the commanding outer reality of a community only just breathing under its own rubble, nine dead, a man with a slashed cheek driving while a woman was dying on the back seat — what meaning could the mistrust of self have, what reality, standing against that! To whom could she pose the very inappropriateness of any personal preoccupation arising from a situation where all individuality was in dissolution in terror and despair. Not the lover-husband to whom she used to tell — or thought she had — everything. Only to herself. First the schoolgirl confessional falls away, then the kind of friendships with men and women where, the awareness comes, confidences are regretted as weapons handed to others; finally, the bliss of placing the burden of self on the beloved turns out to be undeliverable. The beloved is unknown at any address, a self, unlike a bed, cannot be shared, and cannot be shed.

In the weeks that followed when Zeph Rapulana was back and forth at the Foundation on the matter of Odensville she slowly came to understand — not so much thinking about it as accepting, unknowingly as a physical change or change of mood come about — that what had disturbed her as a mimesis of the past was the beginning of some new capability in her, something in the chemistry of human contact that she was only now ready for. This country black man about whose life apart from his place in the Odensville case she knew nothing (wife, children, web of relatives and friends) already had this capability. That was why he was able to claim her with what was neither a sexual caress nor an impersonal handshake such as they customarily exchanged. He understood her fear that he was dead was an indication that for reasons not to be explained, nor necessary to try to explain, he was not one more individual at risk in the course of her work. There was between them a level of knowledge of one another, tranquil, not very deep, but quite apart from those relationships complicated and profound, tangled in their beings, from which each came to it, a level that was neither sexually intuitive nor that of friendship.

The circumstances of the lives backed up behind them each had lived so far were an obstacle to the shared references of ordinary friendship. She a middle-class city woman — that was as much decisive as whiteness, ordering the services of her life by telephone or fax, taking for granted a secretary and a bay for her car at the office; his status in his rural community marked — it was not difficult to picture from experience of these places — by neat clothes hanging on a wire and the small pile of books and papers in a shack — what did they share of the familiar, outside the Odensville affair?

His sexuality in late middle-age was no doubt satisfied elsewhere; although it was clear, from the sense even of her reserved persona behind her office desk, that her whiteness would not be taboo for him, or his blackness for her, sex had no part in their perception of each other except that it recognized that each came from a base of sexual and familial relations to a meeting that had nothing to do with any of these. Vera had never before felt — it was more than drawn to — involved in the being of a man to whom she knew no sexual pull. And it was not that she did not find him physically attractive; from the first time he sat across from her desk, his face wide-modelled and firm as polished basalt, his heavy but graceful back as he walked out of a room, his hands resting calmly palm-down on his thighs as he spoke, brought her reassurance she had not known she no longer found elsewhere with anyone. It was as if, in the commonplace nature of their continuing contact through the Foundation, they belonged together as a single sex, a reconciliation of all each had experienced, he as a man, she as a woman.

Chapter 10

Didymus’s left eye flickered open while the other stayed gummed with sleep. In the artificial night when curtains kept out the early morning — she stood, a burglar caught in the act. The eye held her. But this was no intruder: Sibongile off an early plane, the swirl on tarmac coming up in the silence as the taxi that brought her home turned in the empty street.

She released herself. Put down the suitcase. He closed the bleary greeting ashamedly, better pretend to be asleep, drop back into sleep. She drew the suitcase on its wheels across the carpet, fluttered papers and clicked objects against surfaces. Then the waterfall of the shower in the bathroom. The bed dipped to the side as she entered. He knew she wanted him to know she was trying not to wake him: as if she were not there; or had never been away.

He spoke. How was it?

He couldn’t dredge up in his mind where she had been sent, where was it this time, Japan, Libya, not the UN, no. Better not risk how was Qaddafi.

— Ex-tr-a ordinary.—

She lay willing sleep, all she had heard and done alight inside her, could not be extinguished, as he himself had felt when he returned from his missions about which she could not have asked, How was it.

The thick atmosphere of the world of discussion and negotiation came from her hair and skin as smoke clings to the clothing of one who has been in a crowded room. He scented it as a dog sniffs the shoes of its master to trace where he’s been.

She was a stranger and she was as familiar as his own body; that must have been how he was for her, those years when he came and went; if he thought of it at all, he had thought that was how it was; something for women. She slept, suddenly, with a snorting indrawn breath. This body beside him invaded the whole bed, lolled against him. His own felt no stir of desire for it.

He must have slept. Both woke at the sound of the door slamming as Mpho left for school, and Sibongile was out of bed instantly, padding over in her slippery nightgown to the half-disgorged suitcase and packages on the floor. — Look what I found for you. — People are happy bringing the consolation of presents to those left behind.

It was a handsome staff (he saw at first), no, a walking-stick, ebony, carved with a handle in the form of a closed fist over a ring, and chased all down the shaft to a copper ferrule. — Isn’t it great? Look at the work that’s gone into it. I knew you’d love it. I’d looked everywhere in the market but I had so little time — and then there was this damned hawker pestering outside the hotel, one day the moment he held it up I knew, that’s for you. See — all carved in one piece—

She loved it, she sat back on the bed as he received the stick from her and followed its features under her eyes, her feet with magenta-painted toenails waving, her thighs shaping shifting curves of shine on the satin that covered them (he always had been proud of her clothes, her ingenuity in devising the appearance of flamboyant luxury, even to go to bed in, even when they were poor in exile and this had to be contrived out of odds and ends). — And look at the grain, here, these lighter stripes going down the fingers — isn’t that amazing — and feel how solid—

He duly held the object horizontally, raised from the pillows, weighing it on his palms. — Where shall I hang it? Above the desk, or here over the door perhaps.—

She slapped her thighs, sending the satin shivering. — It’s not an ornament! It’s to walk with! Keep your weight down! Don’t think I bring you presents without a double motive, dear— Her voice climbed its scale of laughter. She swung herself off the bed and he could hear her going from room to room, inspecting the traces of her absence, closing cupboard doors in Mpho’s little room, clanging the kitchen bin shut on something he or Mpho had neglected to throw away. The walking-stick rested across his chest. He opened his eyes. She appeared in the bedroom doorway, as she had from a distant country at dawn, but in her dressing-gown, her arms crossed under her breasts. — Aren’t you getting up?—

— What’s the hurry.—

— Oh come on. I’m hungry.—

So she wanted him there in the kitchen to deliver to him a lecture on the results of her trip while they prepared breakfast together. She was trying it out on him — he was a comrade, experienced in such presentations, after all — before she prepared a report. It has been an assignment in Africa — where else could that stick have come from — she’d been sent to negotiate the takeover by that country’s Government of a school for exiles’ children and various other buildings the Movement had had there. The National Executive left it to her diplomacy to see whether these assets, no longer needed, should be handed as a gift to a country that had given asylum, or whether it might be possible to expect some sort of compensation — the Swedes had funded the school and added living quarters for the teachers, so there was some improvement to the property since the host government donated the land. — Dinner with the President, flowers sent to my hotel room and all (I like it better when they send fruit, but only Europeans do that, aih, on our continent people don’t think fruit’s a treat). A lo-ong explanation from him on how we should run things here, my God, if you wrote out all the advice we get it would circle the world — not a word about any compensation deal for the property. The next day there was the great ceremony of the handing-over, President’s guard, military band, more speeches, mine as well, but the best I could do when I got the Minister in his office was to get out of him the promise of an agricultural training project, quite small, they’d arrange for a few students we could send up there, tuition free but living expenses our responsibility. I don’t think I can recommend that as worth taking up? Better that I come back with empty pockets than something we don’t want.—

— And the camp?—

She signalled two slices of bread to be put in the toaster. She went into one of her repertoire of elaborate gestures, throwing hands wide, bringing them together with a slight clap that mocked the attitude of prayer, leaning elbows on the kitchen table with a slumping sigh.

— Did you see Matthew or Tatamkulu?—

— Who … —

— You know.—

— Not there any more.—

— So you did go.—

— I had instructions. Just delivering I didn’t ask what— some documents. — It was said as if this were to be the last word on the subject. But he, not she, had once operated in that camp, it was one of the periods when he disappeared from the exiled homes they occupied in Europe and Africa. His was a right to ask about that camp where spies who infiltrated the Movement were imprisoned, although it was not a subject for general discussion. Recently there had been released by the Movement a public report of things done there; unspeakable things. When the report was about to come out he had thought he’d better tell her what he had never told her: that for a time, a desperate time when the Freedom Fighters and the Movement itself were in great danger by infiltration, he had been an interrogator— yes — a jailer, there. He’d told her the code names of others who were running the place and how two of them had joined him, eventually, in protest against the methods being used to extract information. She knew, all right, about whom he was enquiring when he mentioned those names.

— It’s not closed down, then.—

She lifted her chin and blinked wearily. — In the process of. I didn’t see much sign of life.—

— Did anyone say what arrangements are made when inmates are released, who is it that brings them back here? Is it the government agencies who sent them to infiltrate — or are they just being abandoned, that sort of outfit wants to pretend it never existed, these days. They seem to get here anyway, ready to be used against us in other ways. Recycled … Well, we couldn’t think that far ahead; there were a lot of things we couldn’t think about in that place.—

— No one talked to me, I handed over what I had to. That was that.—

— It’s not like you to be satisfied to be a messenger. — He put plates in the sink, his back to her; turned his head.

She was yawning and yawning as if her jaw would dislocate with the force and she wandered out of the kitchen. Gone back to bed to sleep off the journey: but no, she appeared, dressed, eyes made-up, briefcase and keys in her hand, on her way to her office. He sat in his pyjamas over the mug of coffee he had reheated for himself. Ashamed, was that it? She was ashamed that he had ever been involved in that camp where the methods of extracting information by inflicting pain and humiliation learnt from white Security Police were adopted by those who had been its victims. Ashamed, even though he’d finally got himself out of the place, refused to carry on there. Refused, yet understood why others could do the terrible things they did; she was a woman, after all, she could understand revolution but she didn’t understand war.

He sat on in the kitchen aware of the irritating drizzle of the tap he had not fully closed but unable to distract himself by getting up to turn it off.

No. Not ashamed; wary of her political position, calculating that since his code name had not been listed in the public report, she was not tainted, through her connection with him, under the necessity of leadership to discipline and perhaps in some cases expel from the Movement anyone who was involved. Unspeakable: even the subject, for Sibongile. She does not want, even in private, any reminders, any familiarity with names, from him. She has her position to think of. He had the curious remembered image, alone in the kitchen, of her frantically and distastefully scraping from the sole of her shoe all traces of a dog’s mess she had stepped into.

She had made the bed and placed the walking-stick on the cover. Mpho had ear-rings and trinkets from her mother’s part in delegations to a number of countries; he had this. It’s to walk with. A present for a retired man, who should be content to pass time pleasantly taking exercise.

Sally Maqoma chose the restaurant and is known to the waiters. She orders sole. — You know how I like it, grilled, not swimming in butter or oil, and plenty of lemon, bring a whole lemon. — She and her old friend Vera Stark have tried many times to get together (as they term it) and for once Sally has a free hour to squeeze between morning appointments and a meeting in Pretoria at two-thirty for which a driver will pick her up. They talk politics on a level of shared references — Vera through her work and connections is privy to most of the negotiations which go on while the political rhetoric suggests that there can be no contact — but Sally rarely lets slip any political confidences. Vera is aware of this and knows how to respect evasions while yet interpreting them. As they eat, and drink mineral water Sally has been advised by her doctor to take copiously, Vera is both listening to her friend and piecing together rumours to fill lacunae in the spontaneity of the discourse. What Sally doesn’t say suggests or is meant to suggest that the delegation to Pretoria (Sally has spoken of ‘the three of us’ having hastily to go there) is to meet some Government minister on the education crisis, but it might well be that the meeting was one of those of the Movement rumoured to be taking place with right-wing groups at those groups’ request. Vera tried to superimpose the bearded and side-whiskered outline of a figure in commando outfit over the lively, sceptical black face so voluble opposite her. She could try a general question. — Is there anything in the newspaper speculation that the AWB and their kind want to talk?—

Sally raised eyebrows and poked her head forward comically. — Sounds unlikely. — She took a long draught and, as she put the glass down close to Vera Stark’s hand, let her touch nudge it. — Everything unlikely has become likely. That’s our politics these days.—

In their laughter the side-current of family lives surfaced, the intimacy of the times in one another’s four walls when they had pooled their children, danced to Didy’s records; the weeks when, on return from exile, the Maqomas had moved in with the Starks. — Did I tell you, some changes. Ivan’s divorced, and Ben’s father’s living with us now.—

— Oh naughty Ivan. Young people are not like us, no staying power. But I remember, she wasn’t much of a personality, you said …? It mustn’t be too good for you, having the old man in the house.—

— I’ve always got on all right with him but he needs time, from others. Us.—

— Get someone in to look after him, Vera, you can’t do it, you mustn’t. You’ve got more important things … I’m sure I can find someone for you, there’re always people coming round my office, out-of-work nurses, nice elderly mamas, long-lost cousins, God knows what — I’ll find someone who can live in, that’s what you need.—

— I don’t know. D’you know it’s going to be awful to be really old, no one wants to touch you any more, no one likes the smell of your skin, no one ever kisses you … And Ben’s never loved his father, it seems. Some sort of resentment from childhood, you know those mysteries no one but the one who was himself the child can understand.—

— Ben? Really? Ben’s such a darling, such an affectionate man.—

The limits of confidences between two people constantly shift, opening here, there closing off one from the other. Vera Stark could not speak what she was saying to herself, Bennet loved, Ben loves, only me; loves in Ivan only me, and what shall I do with that love— The thought rising like a wave of anxiety trapped in voices at a restaurant full of people; no place to deal with it. — I hear Didy’s commissioned to do a book. A history of the exile period, is it?—

— He’s supposed to be researching. Don’t ask me … Let’s order coffee— Sally had the alert shifting glance of a bird on a tree-top, surveying the comings and goings of waiters. When the coffee came she arranged the cups and poured, measuring out words with the flow. — Half the time he doesn’t even get up in the mornings. I go to work, I don’t know what time he gets round to shaving and so on. Always some pain or ache. When I say in the evening, how did it go today — I mean, Vera, I’m showing interest, I’m talking about whether he’s written letters to people who can give him material, whether he’s organizing his notes— then he’ll say something like, How did what go? To put me down. To imply I’m humouring him … Because of where I’ve been all day, at headquarters. Is what happened my fault? Can I help it? He’s got to stop this wallowing in self-pity. I can tell you (her eyes shifted focus, round the neighbouring tables, where other people’s talk and self-absorption made a wall of protection) I’m beginning to find it disgusting. He doesn’t realize that; it disgusts me.—

This confidence almost alarms; to meet it means it should be matched, and Vera does not know, does not yet understand, what it is exactly that she needs to confide, or if that impulse is any longer something to be heeded. Who can give answers? A bearded man in a preacher’s dog-collar stood in the doorway, How mean of you Vera. — He’s become history rather than a living man. How can anyone be expected to accept that about himself.—

Sally made a fist above her cup, she was shaking her head vehemently. — That’s just the problem. He does think he’s history. He’s copping out because he’s not centre stage any more, he sees himself as history and history stops with him. He won’t accept that it goes on being made and we all have to make it, my part has changed, his part has changed. He’s still a living man who has work to do even though it can’t be what he’d choose.—

— Writing a history? That’s the past.—

Sally leant on the table in silence but did not let it widen between them. — I came back from a trip — a mission — you’d think I’d never been away. He doesn’t bring me home.—

They are not two young women, after all, exchanging bedroom secrets. Vera may take the odd phrase as some locution for welcome slipped in from an African language. And she’s white, she has never known what exiles have, the return of your man from god knows where doing god knows what he had to do (Didymus’s name as someone connected with one of those camps luckily hasn’t become public). She may or may not have understood what Sally is saying. Didymus doesn’t bring her home by making love to her, as she used to, for him.

When Didymus did make the approaches of love-making Sibongile felt no response. Mpho had appeared from her room one evening charmed — in the sense of talented, gifted — with youth. The clarity of the lines of her body in a scrap of a dress, of her lips and long shining eyes with their fold of laughter at the outer corners, the cheap, wooden-toy ear-rings in the shape of parrots hanging from the delicate hieroglyph of her ears— she was the embodiment of happiness. Waiting to be called for; where was she going? A party, there were so many parties parents couldn’t keep up with the names of all the friends with whom she was apparently so popular. A girl-friend bustled in to fetch her, they chattered their way out. A thin chain looped through a pendant lay curled on the table where she had dropped it after lifting it from her neck over her carefully arranged hair when the friend pulled a face: the pendant clashed with the ear-rings. Didymus poured the chain from hand to hand, smiling. He came into the kitchen where Sibongile stood stirring a stew and, with the pretext of looking to see what was in the pot, leant his chin on her shoulder. His hand came round over her belly that was swelled forward as she moved the meat about with a fork, circled the navel in a half-humorous caress in anticipation of a meal, and then moved down over her pelvis a moment.

After they had eaten she seated herself at the computer they had bought for his work on the history of exiles. Staring at the luminous waver of the screen a moment, arrested, as if for some indication whether he had used it that day at all; she turned to him.

— Go ahead. — He chose to understand that she was asking whether he needed the machine now. She spilled out and sorted her papers exasperatedly. He switched on the TV, volume low in order not to disturb concentration on whatever it was she was writing. Swells of music and the exaggerated pitch of broadcast emotions emanated from where he sat, as she removed from and inserted words and phrases in a speech she was due to deliver in a few days. His back faced her every time she lifted her eyes from the juggled text swimming in phosphorescence; something about the droop of the head showed that he wasn’t seeing, he wasn’t hearing. Didymus was asleep, carried along, unconscious, like a drunk at a carnival, in the meaningless impersonal familiarity of the medium that invades everywhere and recognizes no one.

In their bed he took up the caress begun in the kitchen. His hand slid from her hips pressing firmer and firmer, smaller and smaller circles over the mound of her pubis, working fingers through the hair and slipping the index one, as if by chance, to touch through the lips. She flung back the covers and swerved out of bed, the mooring of his hand torn away. She stalked about the room with the air of looking for something and when aware of him watching her went out into the other rooms.

She came back and offered: —Verandah light wasn’t left on for Mpho.—

— I turned it on.—

— You didn’t.—

— My memory, these days …—

She lay beside him, not saying goodnight in case this provided an opening for him to try to rouse her again.

That night, or another night, she woke in a tension of sadness in which she and he were lost together, bound, sunk. The sound of their breathing strung tight between them but the divide of darkness could not be crossed, the weight of fathoms could not be lifted. He had not forgotten the light for Mpho. The pain of repentance, so useless, for this stupid little spite was actual between her ribs, something conjured up from the religious pictures pasted to the kitchen walls in her grandmother’s house in Witbank location, where she grew up. She seemed to be living simultaneously in the hum of the night all the images, the moments when she had been most aware of him, scattered through the years. Parted so often; what happens in these partings, his, now hers, in the one who goes away? Is the one who left ever the one who comes back? There are changes in understanding and awareness that can occur only when one is alone, away from containment in the shape of self outlined by another. Such changes can never be shared. Alone with them for ever. The images are postcards sent from countries that exist only in the personality of the subject; you will never visit them. She had to make sure that he was there, some version of himself, even as a shrouded bulk under the bedclothes. She hesitated where to touch him: on the forehead, the hand pressed against a cheek, the neck below the ear, where a pulse answers. She rested her spinal column back to back along the length of his and felt him break wind as he slept.

Chapter 11

The old man occupied Annick’s room, so she would have to take what had been Ivan’s and the friend she was bringing would have to share it with her. Ivan’s luxury had been a double bed across which he liked to stretch diagonally his adolescent sprawl. Vera bought a divan to move into the room to accommodate the friend. The old man’s presence already had changed the balance of the house. Sally forgot or had been too busy to fulfil her offer but connections at the Foundation supplied a relative in need of work; the path of the old man’s movements, on the arm of the woman who came to help him every day, intersected and deflected those of Vera and Ben. Vera’s house had the transparent grids of various presences laid upon it — the brief comings and goings of the soldier whose military kit propped against her dressing-table left in the varnish a dent whose cause was forgotten, the clandestine movements Bennet brought in as a lover and established in usage as husband and father, the route the children used to take, out of the window in Annick’s room and in through the back stoep door to get at potato chips in the kitchen cupboard without alerting parents, and the invisible trails of Vera herself, changing the function of a space by bringing Blue Books and White Papers to occupy what had held model plane kits and threadbare stuffed animals, closing windows room by room in a storm, carrying, as if following back in footsteps that have worn grooves in the wood floor of her house, an old photograph to the light. On her barefoot morning scamper to the bathroom the old man might cross her path, wavering ahead with his paralysed hand dangling curled at his side and the other held before him as a blind man senses for obstacles. He was not blind but formed the precautionary habit of keeping the hand in the position of one ready to receive a handshake greeting, because even that side of his body had not survived the stroke unimpaired and it took time and effort to muster the appropriate muscles when the occasion came. She had to remember to wear a gown, as she had done when there were still children at home and a live-in maid coming early from the kitchen to house-clean.

He wandered with a smile of strange sweetness from encounter to encounter, not that he had become simple-minded but because he was reliving the sense of achievement a child has when first it masters how to walk, and the house represented to him territory daily conquered. He did not seem to mind the wheedling patter of Thandeka, who winked and gesticulated behind his back in comment on his infirmity and pride in his progress. How is he today, Ben would enquire of her in the presence of his father; and the hand that he might have touched sank uncertainly out of the way. He bought his father specialist journals and newspapers that should be of interest — he had been a chemical engineer — and left them on the table beside the old man’s chair in lieu of a visit. The woman attendant decided, as part of her responsibility for the old man’s care, what he felt. — Mama, he’s so happy for his granddaughter coming, I tell you, mama! That time she is arrive he’s going to be there, there, mama! So happy! Mama, I’m going to put a nice suit he’ll wear—

Brought forward on her arm with abstract joy expressed on his behalf as smiling nuns set themselves to beam radiance of the holy spirit and politicians display their amorphous love of humankind, he looked uncertain, for a moment, which of the two young women who arrived was his granddaughter. He had not seen her since she was a high-school girl; but the face, the face of his son, there in hers, was surely unmistakable. Vera and Ben had somehow omitted to mention to her that the grandfather was living with them — as often, with them, each thought the other had done something neither had. But Annick kissed him, took the old hand — cold scaly skin like that of a tortoise she’d kept as a pet as a child — placed it in that of the friend with her, using the childhood form of address. — Grandpops, this is Lou, she’s in biology and she’s just come from a month on your old stamping ground, wasn’t it — Zaire — the Congo.—

His voice snagged on the effort to speak, but he turned the pause into a mock appeal to Vera. — Of course this young lady’s in biology, we all are biological — what does that mean she does, though? — He enjoyed his little quip and the polite laughter it brought; Ben only smiled, his black eyes unreadable. The granddaughter cuffed her friend lightly so that the girl shook her drape of hair like a mare stung by a fly; both had long hair, but the straight black tresses Annick had from her father had been frizzed since her parents saw her last. — Grandpops she’s a professor, she’s been doing important research up there, fascinating, we’ll tell you about it.—

— Don’t you believe her, Mr Stark. When we’re at home and I start to talk microbiology to her, her eyes glaze over, all she wants to know about Zaire is what tapes I’ve brought for her, what kind of drums and strings you can still hear there.—

Annick with their two carry-alls followed Vera to Ivan’s room while the friend took her tea over to the old man and settled for a talk about Zaire. The timidity with which the relation with adult children — actuality defies the oxymoron — is taken up when they return from their lives, surrounded Vera. Each time Annick appeared after absence she was the sudden live manifestation of someone fixed in a painting. The static features in the mind were moving, the details of the texture of the skin, the glance — what is she apprehending, at once, about her mother, about us in this house where she was once one of us? Her scent — not perfume but the smell of her that vaguely reaches back to the odour of her hair when she was observed, sleeping, as a child, by one leaning to hear her breathe. Something missing in that beautiful face? Mustn’t be seen to be gazing for it. Not a change in the line of eyebrows; these are never plucked, they are definitive, seal-smooth and glossy, each tapering at the temple’s hollow. Ben’s sperm made her like that, in his image. Not the frizzing, though that hair-style’s a pity; it’s nothing that’s been altered: something that’s gone. But the last opening with which to take up the relationship with daughter or son is to pass some remark about physical appearance.

Perhaps one should tell, not ask.

Offer, not request. Put oneself in their hands, the ex-children. Place there the mystery of the totally unexpected: what am I to do with that love. If a doctor and a professor between them could explain it. Or to place, putting down carefully, a container of secret calm come out of an exaggerated fear of the death of someone not lover, husband, child: what would this young woman who was surely closer than any other woman make of that?

And all the time Vera was talking in the usual flitting, lightly anxious and excited way of someone wanting to make sure guests would be comfortable. The cupboard was cleared for clothes, the old man would share the main bathroom so the second one was all theirs, the daughter’s and her friend’s. — Sorry the room’s crowded. But with full house now, no other bedroom, it’s all I could do, I bought the divan.—

Annick thumped the carry-alls on it. She gave a sigh of pleasure as she recognized some poster of her brother’s era that was still on the wall. — Oh you shouldn’t have bothered. We always sleep in a double bed.—

The androgynous harmony present in Bennet’s male beauty, transformed in this girl’s femininity, her breasts under a loose sweater shrugged together by crossed arms, her pelvis and hips shaped in tight jeans, distracted Vera, she was conscious of something impossible trying to come to her. Instead, a sudden distraction: she realized what was missing in that seductive face. The black punctuation of that beauty, placed exactly as Bennet’s was, below the spread of eyelashes shading the left cheekbone. — What happened to your beauty spot?—

Annie laughed instructively. — The mole. I had it off. No beauty; moles should be removed, they can turn cancerous, Ma.—

The usual party to celebrate a son’s or daughter’s visit. The usual people, Legal Foundation familiars — Ben’s new associates in the luggage business remained business acquaintances he didn’t particularly want to bring home — the old friends, once-banned political activists now turned politicians at negotiating tables, and the addition, among the returned exiles, of those whom definitive indemnity at last allowed to disembark without fear of arrest or to emerge from the subterrain beneath home, half-home. A few diplomats of middle rank, useful conduits to overseas funding, now appeared, a member of one of the UN commissions sent to monitor violence in the country; and there was a presence perhaps no one except young Oupa could place, a man introduced by Vera as Zeph Rapulana. He sat all evening in the same chair, while groups formed and broke up in and out of the garden and living-room; coming and going with drinks and food she was aware of the shine of the planes of his features sinking into the gathering darkness like the natural outline of a landscape, part of a view she could always expect to see from her house. But people came to that dark unknown figure, drawn in some way; she noticed them, Didymus, a consul-general, the UN woman whose professional qualification surely was to be enquiring. Annie and her friend Lou, shoes kicked off and feet on the grass, sat on the steps in rising and falling chatter and laughter with Oupa, Didy and Sally’s daughter Mpho, and Lazar Feldman, the young lawyer from the Foundation.

Ben and Vera cast glances over the gatherings in and outdoors as an airline attendant walks down the aisle of a plane discreetly checking whether seat-belts are fastened. They were with every group and no group, and encountered one another apart from others. He put his hand on her shoulder. The night opened a soaring space above them, dwindling the voices and shapes of the human company they had gathered to a low humming horizon, a thin and distant huddle of life stirring under a vast gaze. Was this all they could muster to set against the trajectory of people thrown off trains that morning; in the house an old man with limbs atrophying; a ship full of nuclear filth prowling round the shores that night with death at a twelve-kiloinetre limit? How far is a twelve-kilometre limit, for death, when this great engulfment of sky cannot be held off? They didn’t speak but drifted together down the steps, past the backs and legs of those sitting there with their daughter, to the garden. The neglected grass licked dew on their ankles; she knelt a moment to bury her hands in it, ants crept up her wrists, crickets filled their ears ringingly, restoring the earth’s scale. They strolled on away from their party. — Lazar seems pretty taken with Annie. I can foresee us being left to entertain the girl-friend from now on.—

Vera became conscious of the hand on her shoulder as if it had just descended there. — I don’t think so.—

— He’s the kind of man who’d be right. Appeal to her, surely. He isn’t living with some woman, is he? You usually know what’s happening outside the Foundation.—

— No one permanent, far as I know. Girl-friends, passing affairs.—

— I’ve got a hunch they’d get on. She hasn’t some big affair going all this time in Cape Town, has she? What about that doctor she once introduced us to, Van der Linde? Would she have told you? This schoolgirl-sharing-a-house, going about girls-together — it’s all right for teenagers but she’s over thirty. I can’t believe it isn’t a smoke screen for something — some love affair with someone who’s married, probably.—

— She’s living with this girl. She seems happy.—

— That’s why I think there’s some complication with a man.—

They walked on. There was a stutter of music from the house, a cassette starting and stopped. Vera halted, and he turned, thinking they were about to return to the house.

— Ben, they sleep together. In one bed. The other girl doesn’t use the divan. Annie said when I took her to the room the day they arrived, they always sleep together.—

— My god, what an idea. Childish. She’s a doctor and thirty-something years old. Why not a teddy-bear, as well.—

They were approaching the steps, the young people there, the house full of others drinking and eating.

— Would you ever share a bed with another woman.—

— No. But you know that. We can’t talk now.—

The party goes on. In the kitchen plates pile on left-over food, Vera washes glasses because Ben’s supply has run out. One or the other, they join this group and that. In a corner of the living-room the stab of interrupting voices vies with the music. A heavy young Englishman in a catfish-patterned dashiki is using the height from which he projects his voice to dominate a discussion on conditions in the liberation movement’s prison camps, which have been the subject of a newspaper exposé. —You can’t make such sweeping generalizations. Things differed from camp to camp. I myself can say—

A head was dipped disparagingly. — As a journalist, from outside.—

— Yes, a journalist, poking my nose where it wasn’t welcome. But I wasn’t doing so in the capacity of my work. My brother-in-law happens to have been held in two of those camps so I have the picture from outside and inside.—

— Your brother-in-law?—

— Yes, my brother-in-law, my wife’s brother Jerry Gwangwa.—

A small black woman wearing the Western antithesis of her white husband’s outfit, satin trousers and a string of pearls in the neck of her tailored shirt, stood by looking up now and then to others in the manner of one watching the impression he was making. — But at first they wouldn’t tell you anything, you had to—

— Why do you talk of things you know nothing about—

His soft thick throat throbbed like a frog’s. He did not look at his wife as he spoke. — My own brother-in-law was beaten on the soles of the feet, he was strung up, in another camp these methods were not used, it was no five-star hotel but … all depends on who was in command. I had some contact with him … what I know is not secondhand. Jerry’s not bitter although how he happened to be subject to all this — that’s another story, he should never have been there, while there were plenty who certainly deserved to be.—

Didymus was in the group, a good listener who, Vera saw, contributed nothing. He turned away with her as she moved on, and Tola Richards, the journalist’s wife, joined them.

— I didn’t know about your brother.—

She stood, stranded, before Didymus; before Vera. She gestured with her glass as if about to tip its contents in someone’s face. — Oh haven’t you heard it from Alec before? It’s his party piece. Whenever there’s someone who doesn’t know us, he produces his punchline about the brother-in-law so they can be impressed he’s married a black. Don’t you know I’m his passport? I’m his credentials as a white foreigner. Because he can produce me, it means he’s on the right side. That gets him in everywhere.—

Best thing was to assume she’d had too much to drink; Didymus put his arm round her in a hug and said something to her in their own language. The three of them laughed it off. We can’t talk now. Someone was waving and beckoning to the young woman and she broke away. Didymus and Vera had nothing to say to one another but were comfortable together at a distance each understood the other could not cross. It was, at least, their distance; like a place they had once been to, together. He had lied by means of an ambiguous sentence. What he had hidden by it was: I didn’t know Jerry Gwangwa was your brother. But I do know he was a plant, a South African police agent, nineteen years old, he was sent with a false record of being detained and escaping to make his way to Tanzania to present himself for military training with Umkhonto. He was to encourage dissatisfaction among the trainees, homesickness and drug-taking, and to inform other agents of the movements of military commanders, so that assassinations could be carried out. He was bloodied before he left home; he had killed two youth leaders in their beds and planted a car bomb that killed three others and took the legs of a fourth. He was interrogated by Maxi, code name for Didymus Maqoma. He survived, confessed, and having convinced the Americans he was a Freedom Fighter, was studying for a Ph.D. on a scholarship at one of their universities. Vera could not know what Didy’s preoccupation was, in the eye of silence he and she occupied briefly in the late-night animation around them, but she acknowledged it instinctively. In a long life there are many different pockets of collusion that form with different people out of different circumstances and, although generally forgotten, occasionally jingle there a kind of coinage, a handful of tokens good for re-entry to a shared mood.

Ben was approaching with an arm round either girl, his daughter and her friend, forced by him into a dancing trot. — I’m telling these two, either we get everyone going with some hot music or it’s time to send them all home. — But he looked deeply tired, the skin around his eyes so dark it seemed each had been struck by a fist, the lines from nose to mouth chiselled heavily, thickening what had been his beautiful lips into drooping coarseness. Once again at a party — as she had seen him as if with the gaze of another, at a party when first he had become lover turned husband — she saw him without the lens of her image of him. Annie, smiling under his arm, was the bearer of that face, now; on him, it was no longer there. Weariness revealed him in spite of or because of the youthful energy he was summoning. — Come, let’s show them. — In the mountains, with muscles lightly trembling from the day’s climb, the love-making, fresh from the shower, they stood together at the invitation of music. There was the same readying slight movement of his shoulders before he took Vera to dance. The others laughed and applauded his expertise, egging him on. The warmth of his body, private in his clothes, was the warmth of the bed they shared. People were looking around for the hosts to say goodbye; she broke away to go to them, trailing his hand for the first few steps. Behind the straggle of Oupa, the Maqomas, Lazar, the Richards and the United Nations envoy, Zeph Rapulana was leaving. She had not had a chance to talk to him the whole night. Sally was embracing her with her usual formula, enthusing — You know just how to do things, what a good time, we must get together— and she saw Zeph Rapulana over Sally’s shoulder. His was a calm she could not reach. He was shaking hands with everyone in his countryman’s courtesy.

What is a party? For Vera tonight it is a mass of distraction hiding everyone from themselves, a dose of drink and noise that blocks what you don’t want to think about.

We can’t talk now.

That night there was another party. When Ben in pyjama shorts (still had the figure for them) went down through the garden to fetch the Sunday paper from its slot in the gate there was the headline. A wine-tasting in a golf clubhouse had been attacked with hand grenades and automatic rifle fire. Four revellers were killed, others injured. He went slowly back to the house, reading the story, aware in peripheral vision of avoiding a couple of plates and a beer glass with its dregs filled with drowned insects, left on the grass by his guests. He sat on the bed, where Vera still lay, staring unseeing at his fine dark-haired legs as he listened to the radio report of reactions to the attack. Horrible, horrible, said a black bishop; cowardly murder of innocent people, commented a Government spokesman; savagery due to the Government losing control of blacks, according to the white right-wing. And the whole outcry merely because the victims were white, stated the Movement’s rival organization, neither confirming nor denying responsibility for the attack.

— Dorp connoisseurs. — Ben ran fingers up and down through hair on his thigh.

— And they don’t know how it came to happen, do they. Wine-tasting and a terrorist attack! Ben — it’s as if something contrived exactly what would show how out of the incongruity in our lives comes the horror? That’s just it! Innocence, they say. I don’t know what that means, any more, if it means we don’t know what’s happening outside a golf course. If people can sit sipping and spitting some Cape vintage ‘innocent’ of the existence for others of guns and bombs. How far away from one another they were, for the clash of incongruity to be so awful.—

— Further than we were.—

If it was a question she didn’t seem to hear. Across mown greens and raked bunkers, across veld farmland, the man’s reassuring broad back is leading them, the farmhouse door slams shut. — If you were to put that clubhouse in some film, some agitprop film, everyone would say it was too contrived, too obvious, too symbolic. Wine and blood. But with us, it happens.—

Sometimes picking up a garment as if not recognizing it, they dressed. The radio recounted the attack. — Thank god that crowd has taken responsibility — if you don’t deny you’re con firming, aih? That won’t give anybody the chance to dump blame on the Movement. — Ben worked his feet into worn moccasins. — Not a noble satisfaction, I know.—

— How would the Movement be thought to go in for that kind of tactic? With what purpose? It’s not exactly an act to reassure whites and win their votes when the time comes. — Vera was making the bed.

— Exactly. That’s why it would be useful to the government, if suspicion could be planted. But once responsibility’s boasted elsewhere — with a nice racist ring to it — you heard what the APLA⁴ man said: there’s outrage only because the victims are white.—

— But that’s true, you know it, Ben. Last week a whole family was gunned down in their sleep. But in a black township not a golf club. Four or five lines on an inside page. Even I only now remember reading it … And no statement from the ones who’re outraged now.—

— You know what my partner would say if you told him that? ‘What if you’d been in that clubhouse? Your wife?’—

— So we keep the pretence that’s forced upon us by this killing among so many. That everyone deplores, condemns unequivocally etc.—

— Yes, yes! You can’t support any part of the views of that man, can you—

At breakfast the young women appeared languidly tousled, their yawns rapidly silenced by the news. — Imagine, could you possibly imagine how terrified they must have been, for a moment thinking someone was playing a sick joke, and then the person beside you blown to bits … better to be killed at once than to know you might be next. — Annie drew in her lips and hunched her arms. — Think of us all last night. — The two women held hands resting on the table, Annie’s the spatulate-fingered, much-scrubbed hands of a doctor, the friend’s large and dirtied with nicotine on skin and nails. In a skimpy T-shirt and shorts Lou was seen to be very thin and muscular, the nipples of breasts like a preadolescent’s nobby beneath the clinging shirt, a concave chest between round posts of shoulders. The linked hands were laid out before Ben and Vera; their eyes drawn to them as the talk went back and forth.

Annie was persistent. — D’you think it could have been us?—

— The bishop said it could have happened in the middle of his service. — Vera directed herself to the girl Lou; it was as if she had something to ask her other than what was being said. — I don’t suppose the fact that we were blacks and whites would make much difference if the object is to create terror. Stop negotiations. But think of the international hullabaloo if the UN representative were to have been killed. Now that would have been something to wake up the outside world to this Government’s failure to deal with violence.—

Lou gave an aghast laugh. Annie assumed responsibility, perhaps admiringly, for her mother. — You do take things coolly! — She cocked her head to touch Lou’s, it was the foal’s butting gesture with which as a child she would claim affection and comfort from Ben or Vera. — Well … will you excuse us? That rather nice Lazar’s asked us to come for a walk on a farm, he’s due to pick us up.—

Ben was wheeling through stations on the radio for one that might be giving further details of the attack. — Where’d they say they’re off to?—

— Lazar’s invited them somewhere.—

— Lazar? Oh.—

We can’t talk now.

He’s sitting in her office against the light; the still solidity of him. She gets up from her desk to lower a blind and his features emerge, watching, listening. What is it about that face? The eyes — the eyes in repose always have that line of fellow-feeling, a slight lifting crease of the lower lid; that’s the only way she can define it to herself. Where does it come from, that expression that is not a smile, that self-assurance that is not concealed arrogance? There is nothing in her experience of other people to explain this man. Whatever she tries does not fit. Yet she does not need to enter his life with personal enquiries that would become a burden to both, each having to take into account circumstances with which, unlike the Odensville affair, she has nothing to do.

— You once said something. ‘We won’t harm you or your wife, your family.’—

— Yes. Yes.—

— And then he came with his commando and people in the squatter camp were killed.—

— Yes. He did.—

— Now what about this attack, the night we were all together at my house. When we talked on the phone you said you were shocked, it was a cruel and terrible thing — you said. Just as everybody else, we all did. I know you mean what you say. I said the same. But I don’t trust myself.—

Patient for understanding, he never was waiting to jump in with his own opinions.

— What reason have you not to trust yourself, Vera.—

— The same reason I have not to trust any of us.—

They smiled.

— We all pass deftly from hand to hand the assumption that it’s human life that’s sacred, it’s an unblinking pact, we look each other in the eye and say, it’s the killing of human beings we deplore, we don’t have any other considerations, no matter who does it or why.—

— Isn’t that so?—

— Isn’t it the conventional wisdom of whites? And what’s that to us? Blacks don’t believe it. When I heard that APIA man on the radio saying there’s outrage only because this time whites were killed, I agreed with him. He shocked people because they see him as racist, but what he said is more than fact, Zeph, it’s true, it’s right inside, deep in whites who own newspapers and the TV and radio stations. But we can’t say it because we’re not racist, we can’t say it because we have to demonstrate we don’t stereotype, we don’t use racial categories in the worth of human life. Killings are killings. Death is death. Blood and wine mix. All we can produce is this cover-up.—

— People don’t believe what they’re saying. — Her proposition put before her.

— The people I know. And the people you know, blacks?—

— There are some who believe.—

— How can they! They know Odendaal wanted to kill them. What were their lives, to him.—

— This thing — what you call it, conventional wisdom, it’s a kind of law, isn’t it — what’s right, what’s wrong, that everyone really knows. If we find the people who speak it don’t mean what they’re saying, the law’s empty, there’s only one thing left. — He stopped, claiming his time. — We have to take the law into our own hands.—

Her mouth changed in bewilderment.

— Because we mean it: killing is killing, every life is one of ours. So we have to become a law unto ourselves.—

She was moved, and blurted with awkward flippancy — Well why not, there are many who have done so for other reasons.—

He had come to the city because there was to be a further meeting with a provincial official over application to have the land purchased from Odendaal declared a site-and-service settlement for the people known as the Odensville squatters. The Chief was expected to accompany Vera and Zeph Rapulana to Pretoria; apparently he had stayed over the weekend with friends not known to Rapulana, since their arrival in the city together. As Vera and Zeph walked into the Foundation’s lobby, he entered with an attendant a few steps behind him. He was the son of the first of his father’s wives, a young man who held his head tilted back so that he looked down with half-closed eyes at those who greeted him. The hand, when Vera shook it, was the coldly damp one of someone who has had a drinking night. Zeph Rapulana in all his mature dignity placed his palms together, bowed with knees stiff, and pronounced a formal greeting in the terms of traditional obeisance. Yet both knew the Chief would be saying to the official only what Rapulana had coached him to say, only what Rapulana and Mrs Stark of the Legal Foundation had decided upon. Rapulana had said as if to himself — His interests are elsewhere. He wanted to come to Johannesburg and learn to play in a band, but his late father wouldn’t allow it … Perhaps he was wrong.—

Vera stood by, as an unbeliever before any ritual. Zeph was his own man with masters and slaves, yet he knew how to dissemble; but whether it was to the Chief or whether to show that he himself, his own man, was definitively a black man, her observation of him did not easily reveal. At the same time, she was beginning to have an inkling that her sense of connection with this man was that she had something to learn from him, as all unbelievers secretly hope to appropriate a value without adopting a faith.

Their daughter is back sleeping, breathing in the house as she did when she was a child.

Ben turns off the light above the bed where he and her mother lie.

— I still hope she’ll fall in love one day.—

— She is in love.—

We can’t talk now.

He didn’t have a name any more. They spoke of him as the old man; he had had a second stroke and lost the power of speech. He was incontinent and Vera had the impression that the whole house smelled like the primates’ cage at a zoo, although Thandeka’s care was supplemented by a trained nurse brought in on night duty. Ben saw Vera’s nostrils pinching and felt anxious for her — this was his father, after all. It was as if he himself were in danger of becoming repulsive to her. He suggested it would be best to put the old man in a private hospital where he’d be well cared for. It was Annick who objected. — He’s quite adequately cared for here, there’s nothing more to be done: it’s a massive stroke.—

— So it doesn’t make any difference where he is, Annie. And this house really isn’t geared to hold nurses and all the paraphernalia — it’s just distressing for everyone to no purpose.—

But Annick was a doctor, she did not need to remind her father. She had taken over from him the necessary contact with the old man’s doctor, since colleagues can be more open with one another, even if they may be mistaken in their perceptions, as the doctor was when he told Annie he did not want to cause pain to her father by telling him that this stroke was terminal and the sooner life ended the better. — It does make every difference. He may not be able to move or speak to you, but he’s not unconscious. He knows where he is. He knows he’s at home.—

— Hardly that. He had to give up his own place, as you know. He’s been with us only a few months.—

Annick opened her clear-lipped mouth and touched the tip of her tongue to her teeth, his mannerism inherited along with his beauty; so often, in her presence, it seemed that nature was mocking him in his own image, a reluctant Narcissus. She spoke gently. — Home where you are, Dad.—

She came out to the stoep-study and hitched her hip onto the table where Vera was doing some weekend work for the Foundation. — Would it be better for you if Lou and I cut short our stay. Don’t be worried about saying so.—

— My god Annie, no. It’s better for us that you’re here.—

— But we’re occupying the second bathroom … —

— It doesn’t matter. You know how to see that the nurse and Thandeka are doing what they ought to.—

— Lou would like to take over the cooking, you know. She’s damn good, at our place she does it all, I don’t have to boil an egg.—

— Is that a fair division of labour — you both work. — Vera did not lift her head from her papers.

Her daughter’s gaze drifted relaxedly out of the window for a moment, where the sheen of a hadeda’s back took on peacock colours as it dug its beak-probe into the grass. — What about you and Ben? I remember when we were kids, he did most of the fetching and carrying to school and so on. — She smiled, for admittance. — Hasn’t he always indulged you — quite in awe of your career, you’re his priority, and yours … well you’ve always been available to so many other people. Is there ever a really fair division of labour, as you call it, between couples?—

The sense of approaching some move that would change what they were, what they had been since Vera had wept with the joy of absolution when the girl child was born in the image of Bennet, grew between them, a supersonic hum only they could hear. Instinctively — the Foundation papers were under her hand — Vera took on the impersonal openness of her professional manner: Mrs Stark spoke.

— Ben can’t believe you are a couple. He refuses to see it.—

— You mean, accept it?—

— But also to see. He doesn’t interpret what he sees.—

Annie wriggled her way more comfortably onto the table, pushing papers aside. — What does he think he sees.—

— Well, when I told him you were sleeping in one bed, that it’s your choice, he took it as a sign of some sort of immaturity. He said why not a teddy-bear.—

Annie laughed. Clients often laughed when they were about to defend themselves from some real or imagined accusation. — But you have gay friends, you and Dad, there were gays at the party. Some of your Foundation people.—

— Men. Not his daughter. He just can’t believe it. He was matchmaking with Lazar, he saw that Lazar was attracted to you — you are beautiful you know, men could be mistaken into thinking … can’t blame them—

Vera had emerged, looking fully at her daughter, and the girl was amazed to see her eyes trembling with tears. To help her, Annie was casual. — Poor Lazar, my guess is he’s a bee that bumbles into any flower. Anyway, he didn’t object to us both going walking with him. I suppose he’d invite a girl to bring her mother along if he thought that would help his pursuit.—

— Perhaps he saw, but he thought it worth taking a chance that there could be a man who’d convert you to men. It’s surely natural, if you’re a man.—

— Their arrogance.—

— Not really. Maybe there’s a chance, always.—

— That’s Ben, not you! That’s what Ben really believes, doesn’t he? You know I’ve had men. I used to bring them home to my room occasionally.—

Somewhere in the house lies an old man who has lost the power: here, it’s time to talk. Vera overcomes the urge to touch her daughter, place a hand on her cheek, trace her features. It’s as if over thirty years she has missed the times to do so, she has always been looking elsewhere, turned away, while the girl grew and changed and moved into another self.

— That’s why I don’t understand. My darling, how can you do without a man?—

A plea, a cry.

— Oh perfectly well, Ma! I can look after myself!—

— I don’t mean that. Anyway, I don’t think you do, you have someone who looks after you, doesn’t she? Husband, wife, whatever she is. You’ve just said there’s never a fair division of labour.—

— All right. Granted. Of course you can’t know of the other dependencies, how that works between her and me, just as it does between your kind of couple.—

Vera was hearing her out with the gathering silence of a determination to speak, against reluctance to reveal oneself. — I mean the love-making.—

— The love-making! — The amused, coaxing tone; her mother might have been an adolescent timidly seeking information.

— I have to tell you, Annie, I can’t understand how you can prefer it without a man. — Vera got up and went to close the glass doors that led into the house. In privacy she turned passionately. — Without a man!—

— It’s wonderful. Let me tell you. A woman is like you, she knows what you feel, what makes you feel, and so — she does — instinctively she does what you want, she’s feeling what you’re feeling, at the same time. It’s not like that with a man, who wants his kind of stimulation while you want yours. Oh I suppose you’ve never made love with a woman, for all your independence—

— Never felt in the slightest attracted to one. Though you know, you’ve seen, I’m affectionate with a few women friends—

— But it’s men you like. Always men— There was an edge of judgment, the twinge of an old injury in the smile. — I suppose you’ve had a few more lovers I don’t know about. You’ve experienced nothing but men, men.—

— Yes. I love men. I mean exactly what I’m saying: how can there be love-making without the penis. I don’t care what subtleties of feeling you achieve with all those caresses — and when you caress the other partner you’re really caressing yourself, aren’t you, because you’re producing in her, you say, exactly what you yourself experience — after all that, you end up without that marvellous entry, that astonishing phenomenon of a man’s body that transforms itself and that you can take in. You can’t tell me there’s anything like it! There’s nothing like it, no closeness like it. The pleasure, the orgasms — yes, you may produce them just as well, you’ll say, between two women. But with the penis inside you, it’s not just the pleasure — it’s the being no longer alone. You exchange the burdens of self. You’re another creature.—

Annie was fascinated by and yet moved to retreat from her mother. — The beast with two backs.—

Vera looked at her with a flash of anguish. — Annie, what did I do to put you off men?—

— What makes you always think what I am is determined by you! It’s against all your principles vis-à-vis other people, isn’t it.—

It was not only the door that closed them off from the house and its familiars, their separate existences. They had moved into a territory that might never be re-entered, never found again. As voices that come out of the mouth of a medium, they spoke with the dreamy groping of the subconscious, silences aloud between them.

Coming into the kitchen — the woman with wet tendrils of hair fresh from the bath at One-Twenty-One taken to disguise the roused flush of love-making — startled, because she was so far out of mind, to see the schoolgirl at the table with a mug of cocoa, doing her homework: —Did I disgust you?—

— No no. I was sorry for you, I don’t know why. I wanted to comfort you. Seeing you come home, fucked out. I thought you’d come to the age when you’d need peace instead of what you were doing. What age! At seventeen anyone over forty seemed old to me. — The sense of a conspiracy unacknowledged in the past; neither brought up the name of Ben. — Tell me. We disgust you — Lou and I.—

— Of course you don’t.—

— No ‘of course’ about it. Tell me.—

— Not disgust—

—‘So long as I’m happy’, mnh? — what all the parents deprived of grandchildren swallow bravely and say.—

— No — I don’t disapprove, I don’t consider what you do is wrong. It’s just the penis. I have to say it. I regret for you — no penis.—

Annie gave the smile that acknowledged: you mean well, and they both laughed. — What about Ivan? With the penis, and the grandchild, it still didn’t work out.—

— Ah, it doesn’t solve everything, I’ll admit—

— But it’s the essential.—

— For me, yes.—

— So you see— Someone was rattling at the glass door, the eager black face of Thandeka was distorted through it. Annie thrust in quickly, their eyes already on the door: —You really have the same view as Dad, for him that thing’s also the essential, because he has it, he can’t bear to think of any woman rejecting what’s gained for him the treasure of his life, you, you— Thandeka burst out onto the stoep, her face the standard-bearer of the old man’s presence back in the house, and the lifeline between Annie and Vera fell before alarm that some crisis in his state had occurred.

But it was only that Vera was wanted on the telephone. Thandeka, so close to the drama of death, seemed to transfer a disproportionate sense of events to everything, even a telephone call.

Sally Maqoma: she stuttered interruptions through Vera’s expressions of pleasure at hearing from her again after many-weeks and cut short the exchange of circling civilities by which friends excuse neglect of one another. She had something to speak to Vera about, it could not be discussed over the phone. Vera felt the valves of her heart exposed, her blood vessels lying open from the time and place with Annie from which she had just emerged. Sally’s voice came as a disembodied assault loud in her ear. She recoiled, distrait. She explained that her father in-law had had another stroke, nurses in the house, confusion — could whatever it was possibly wait a day or two?

Without a man.

Bereft.

To imagine that state.

Why, if Renoir could say he painted with his prick, has no woman ever had the guts to say I live by my vagina? Love affairs as a neat motif, a sprig recurring woven in the textile of her life — it’s been nothing like that. She is the one who, she understands, sent her soldier husband a photograph ringed in revenge — that was it; she has never forgotten or forgiven him premature ejaculation. That’s the fact of it. The only time he didn’t end up by himself like an excited little boy was after they had parted for divorce. A lover only in name; a father who has never known he is one. Wasn’t that the real reason for abandoning him, never mind all the others more acceptable she gave to all around her: his conservatism, his love of sport that she didn’t share, the mistake, for which neither was to blame, of wartime marriages between people too young to commit themselves.

Wasn’t that the real reason for the passion for Bennet; not his remarkable beauty nor his attraction as an artist, a creator in clay, but his ability discovered on the mountain holiday to sustain what the other had failed at, to stay within her and exchange the burden of self.

Make the beast with two backs.

The emblem under which her Hitler Baby remains with her is that of the first image that drew her attention to his flesh. As he sat in her office one of his gestures brushed against a wire letter basket and loosened a scab from a scratch; he ignored it while she was aware of a trickle of blood below his rolled-up sleeve tracing a hieroglyph down his forearm — a warm message to her.

Spending on silk shirts and gold weights while the schoolgirl is kept short of clothes and once from a school camp wrote a pleading note because she hadn’t had money to buy toothpaste and was ashamed to keep using other girls’; she must understand her parents are not rich, she must not be indulged.

And then to come home fucked out.

The shower in One-Twenty-One, the dousing with perfume, the careful rearrangement of the hair (still so long, then, she could caress his breast with it) — nothing could disguise sexuality. A sign of life. Without knowing it, she had ringed herself just as she once ringed a photograph.

Mrs Stark at her desk was working on the Foundation’s yearly report and clerks and colleagues came in and out with documents she requested or advice she sought. The tension between tenant-labourers and white farmers had come into prominence alongside that of the old squatter removals and their consequences. The Foundation had had successes in overturning eviction notices farmers served on tenant-labourers for fear these might make a claim to their share-crop holdings under a future majority government, but already in one case success ended in tragedy. Philemon Maseko — in this very office he had spoken through an interpreter — was shot dead by a group of white farmers a few days after his case was won. There were no arrests, no names of the farmers published; the Foundation was to prosecute on behalf of the man’s family. Whether it was a general disturbance, with doubts about the apparent consequences of some of their work, that produced a distracted mood among Foundation people, or whether this was something she projected from herself, it was present. Even Oupa seemed inattentive and distant. There was agreement among senior colleagues that they ought to publish some sort of ‘crisis’ paper in addition to the report, urging that a drastic revision of property and land laws was necessary to forestall disaster in the growing conflict between white and black over access to land. She worked at night, at home, on a draft. Annie’s Lou shopped and did the cooking. Ben entertained his daughter become a guest, and her friend, taking them to the cinema or one of the so-called clubs where they could hear black groups play the kind of music they enjoyed. The night nurse creaked heavily up and down the passage to make herself tea.

No arsenal of repressive laws, no army, no police force can stabilize the situation—catch herself out in the jargon officialdom used to abstract and distract, draw the shroud of order over the body of Maseko with his bit of legal paper in his dead hand. No laws, no army, no police force can protect white farmers from the need and right of people desperate to find a place to live. She wrote and rewrote. Who will read what is happening on the farm Rietvlei, Mooiplaas, Soetfontein, Barendsdrif, at Odensville? The newspapers paraphrase a paragraph or two, even those who read the original will be those who do not know, have never seen Odensville or lived, neither as farmer nor tenant-labourer paid once a year when he harvests his crops, on the ‘pretty farm’, at the ‘sweet fountain’ or the river-crossing Barend claimed for himself. Who, understanding by ‘land reform’ the loss of his weekend fishing retreat, you chaps won’t be invited down any longer, will be interested to hear that without reform tenant-labourers are losing the mealies and millet they have worked the land for, every day, for generations? How far from one another. The commissions in session, the politicians promising, the Foundation challenging the law by means of its interstices and the great principles of justice beyond it: these stand somewhere between. Through the will to formulate the Foundation’s understanding of the meaning of land, her own life was gathered in. She had no thought, no space in herself for anything else. When she stood up a moment to place her hands at the small of her back and arch it, face upturned to the ceiling, to ease tension, with the slight dizzy lurch there came the presence of Annick, Annie, about the house, although the girl might be out at that particular hour: the fact of her.

You’ve always been available to so many other people.

The seventeen-year-old schoolgirl alone in the kitchen over those textbooks she used to cover with fancy paper and stickers of film stars. She looks up from the conventional wisdom of adults she’s been taught, parents love one another, that’s the goal of sex children are taught, for parents their children come before everything and all others — her mother walks in warm from the body of another man. Fucked out. How can that schoolgirl be expected to know the family never was the way she’s been told families are, to accept that her own father was ‘another man’, her mother’s sexuality something that made a claim above the love of children?

There came to Vera, as what had been a long time waiting to be admitted: it was because of her that Ben’s daughter was a lesbian.

During the night she went into the room where he was dying. The black nurse was dozing in a chair, her uniform ridden up her thick thighs. Her stockings were stretched so tight over the flesh that they shone, catching the light silvery from the shaded lamp.

She looked at her father-in-law. His hand lay palm up outside the covers. She looked a long time. She knelt at the side of the bed and said close to his poor flabby ear, with prurient curiosity: What’s it like?

He couldn’t hear; or he heard only as an echo in an empty chamber. His head stirred, she thought — imagined? — as if he were somewhere shaking it. The side of his mouth twisted. It was the way a baby’s did when it was too young to smile — could be mistaken for a smile.

The Egyptians took with them furniture, jewellery, food, wine and oil, and attendants who must finish their lives in the next world. Even his false teeth had been taken from him. His watch, his time run out, had been handed to Ben for safekeeping. His attendant, as usual for whites in this country, was a black woman, caring for the failing functions of the body without shaming him. This black face crumpled with weariness, a deep division of effort frowning between the eyes, as if in perpetual anxiety to catch the crammed minibus that brought her back and forth from Moletsane or Chiawelo or Zondi to be with him on the last threshold.

There was no one else.

When the nurse saw he had crossed she would replace her knitting in its plastic bag, pack up her cardigan and tube of lip salve, collect her pay and maybe a gift of oranges from a box bought thriftily in bulk by Lou, and leave.

Chapter 12

Vera was sorting the clothes to give to charity, taking the opportunity of one of the public holidays renamed like the streets under successive regimes to reflect shifts in the ethos of power: Dingane’s Day, his victors oddly conceding the force of the black warrior-king’s name, changed to Day of the Covenant, commemorating his defeat by the Boers’ hard bargain with God, and become for the present something presumed semantically less offensive to blacks sold out by God: Day of the Vow. It was the first time she had handled a dead person’s clothes; life shed like a skin. Different garments marked the ambivalence of the species to which the old man could be ascribed. Why two dress suits and a white dinner jacket as well, whereas the shirts were so worn they were not worth giving away, and there seemed to be only three pairs of misshapen shoes. A silk dressing-gown with satin revers was folded in tissue paper in its presentation box, apparently never worn, and of a style (she shook it out) that suggested it must have been very costly, even in the Thirties in which it must have originated. The awareness of a survivor that one knows so little about the other and there will be no opportunity to know more, is usual; an accompaniment to death. Only speculation on the evidence of relics: one of the few known personae with which the old man could be identified was as an Englishman among expatriates of various roving nationalities in corporate outposts and Belgian colonial clubs in the Congo. There (Bennet had picked up only the barest outline of his own origin, with which to fascinate her in the mountains) the liaison with the half-Spanish half-Lebanese wife of a dealer in wild animal skins had led to his marriage to his mistress’s daughter. The dressing-gown had no place in the category of charity clothing for refugees or drought victims. But Ben wouldn’t wear it, it was hardly for him, either. She was just thinking that the one person she could imagine it on, to his pleasure, was young Oupa, she would take it to the Foundation and offer the gift in such a way that it would not be a hand-me-down — when the phone rang. There was Oupa’s voice. — Telepathy! You were in my mind—

Agitation made him hoarse. — Mrs Stark, please come over. To the flat.—

A call from Oupa on a public holiday? If he had been in her mind putting a living form into the dressing-gown that, for some reason, the old man had never brought to life, his immediate self had been placed by her, far removed, in however a young man like him would be spending a day at leisure. What on earth — an accident, a mugging, police raid, eviction — all the ordinary hazards that surrounded his life — she thought instantly of what it would be necessary to bring: money and a demeanour to pull rank with the police.

— Mrs Maqoma says you should come.—

— Mrs Maqoma? But what is all this about? Why Mrs Maqoma?—

She heard he was being interrupted by voices in the background. His hand must have cupped the receiver and lifted again. — Please, Mrs Stark, come.—

— Oupa, who’s crying there, tell me what’s happening— But the call was cut off; she had the impression someone had taken the receiver from him and replaced it.

In the living-room Ben was listening to his favourite Shostakovich piano concerto while reading. She stood about a moment; under her own sense of alarm was the serenity he had regained for himself, alone with her, now that his father and daughter were no longer in the house. — There’s just been such a peculiar call from Oupa.—

He looked up over his glasses. — On a holiday? What’s he want.—

— God knows. He said Sally says I must come to the flat— (she corrected) — his flat. Sally—.

— What’s Sally doing there?—

— How would I know? — All she did know was that she had forgotten her promise to call Sally back when she telephoned just before the old man died.

— D’you want me to go with you … what’s that you’ve got— The glasses slipped, his strange deep eyes rested on the dressing-gown lying over her arm; the eyes belonging along with the garment to some unexplained aspect of the old man’s being, perhaps even belonging together? — the mistress’s gift to her lover, and the son her daughter had borne him — in the double liaison out of which Bennet emerged.

— No … no, I’d better do as they asked.—

Oupa belonged to her Foundation responsibilities, Ben had no obligation to get up from his chair, his books, his music. She lifted her arm: —Grandpops’s finery. — Annick’s childish name for the old man.

— When would he ever wear it.—

— Of course not. Someone must’ve given it to him. Long ago, it’s old-fashioned luxury.—

The son put out his sallow hand, as he could do now that her house was theirs alone again, to touch hers as she left, spoke drily. — Some woman.—

Chapter 13

Oupa must have been hanging about at the door waiting to open it to her. There he was. His curly-lashed eyes were lowered sulkily as if to ward off reproach and his tongue comforted dry lips before he spoke. — Sorry. It’s her mother made me call you here.—

— And what is this all about? — But they were already entering the room where her voice invaded a silence so charged she might have been shouting. She had the sudden impulse of distaste — premonition — to turn and leave: what am I doing here? What were they all doing here? Sally sat upright, thrust forward on the single armchair; Didy stood with his back to the television set against images without sound; and on the floor, shockingly, face hidden on her knees and arms shielding her head, was the girl, Mpho. Now Vera, with Oupa a step behind her: all might have been thrust by a stage director — you here, you there. Each waited for someone to speak. Only Didy flicked a blink of greeting at Vera’s presence.

Sally’s face was that of a stranger confronting Vera, broad with hostility and accusation. — Ask your favourite, ask the man you introduced her to, the one she met in your house, the one you liked so much that we let her go around with him and his friends. Ask him.—

Didy dropped back his head and expelled a breath of distressed embarrassment. He made some sort of appeal to her in her own language.

— No, let Vera ask him!—

— I don’t know why you have to drag Vera into it.—

— Well if there’s trouble … among friends … we’re all in it. — Vera lied against the impulse to back out.

— You knew he was married, you know she’s a child, why did you let us believe he and his crowd would be nice company for her, safe? Why didn’t you warn us—

Vera turned from Sally’s assault to Oupa, uncertain whether to defend or accuse. — What’s happened with you and the girl?—

— He’s been sleeping with my child, my daughter. I take her to a doctor and I find she’s pregnant. That’s what’s happened. That’s the result of the nice people you introduced her to! Not a word from you, Vera, not a word of warning, you must have known she was running around with him—

— I? I knew nothing, I had no idea. I don’t have anything to do with the private lives of the people at the Foundation—

— Oh yes you do. You had him in your house. You said nothing to me when she went to parties and they were not parties, he was bringing her back to this place to sleep with her! You had him and the other nice friends in your house, you and Ben.—

The girl began to wail, twisting her feet one upon the other. Everybody looked at her, nobody touched her.

Vera did not turn to Oupa, who slunk out to fetch a kitchen chair for her, a gesture Sally read with a despising glance as a call upon his employer-friend’s support.

And did the companionable lunches in her office count for nothing? The years of deprivation on Robben Island, did they not make understandable a weakness for the pleasures of affection and love-making, the temptation of an enticing girl? But a schoolgirl. Sally and Didy’s daughter.

He placed the chair. — Oupa, you idiot. — The moment the aside came from her she realized it would be taken by Sally as a dismissing insult to her. And to say to him, is this true, would be worse: doubting Sally. She looked at the bowed head of Mpho, the dreadlocks falling either side of her pretty ears dangling ear-rings large as they were. Likely that this girl had made love with others, as well, and Oupa was the one named as culpable, unable to prove he wasn’t. This lovely child — she saw now what should have been evident while the girl lived in her house — had all the instincts of her sex Annick never had had. She wanted to put out a hand and stroke her head, but there was in Sally a forbidding authority against anyone making such a move.

Vera addressed Didy as if he stood once again in the persona she had not recognized at her door. — How was I to know? Do you think I wouldn’t have done something, I would have spoken to him …—

Sally wrested the attention away. — But you should have told us your nice young man was married, his wife wasn’t here, he was running around like any man … and look at him, ten years older than a schoolgirl, and no respect for her or her parents. Parties! She lied to us. When a girl-friend came to call for her, it was him! That pig. He sent a girl so we wouldn’t know he was waiting in this place.—

Vera knew it was pointless to question Oupa but could not ignore that this was expected of her. Their gaze met apart from the others, he was cornered by her, counting upon her. — How did you let it begin. — He understood this signalled You knew I trusted you, there are plenty of other women for you.

— It was nothing, quite okay, we all went to Kippies together to hear the music, poetry readings, and that. And then one time she said she wanted to see a play, she used to go to plays in London and — I even asked you, you remember … what was a good one … and she said her parents mustn’t know she would go out alone, she was only allowed if there were other girls, she’d tell them she was going to a party. So after that, we saw each other.—

— And the wife? — Sally rang out. — The wife and children, and now he makes my child, under age — does he know that? — a criminal offence — he gets my child pregnant? He’ll go to jail, does he know that!—

— Your child is not under age, don’t talk like that Sibo. Sixteen is not under age. She’s an adult by law. And what’s the use of threatening? You want him to divorce his wife? You want Mpho to get married at sixteen, not yet passed her A levels? Is that how we want to see her end up before her life’s begun. Is that what you want? Of course you don’t. Then what’s the use of all this, blaming this one, blaming that.—

— We should never have brought her from London. She should have been left at school there. You wanted her home; ‘home’ here, to get pregnant at school like every girl from a location.—

— All right. You also wanted her here. Blaming again, blaming doesn’t help.—

— That’s how you can count on these people. — Sally spoke of Vera as if Vera were not summoned by her to be present. — Same as it always was, eager to help so’s to be on the right side with us. And making a mess of it. Bringing us harm.—

— Sibongile, stop it! You’re talking nonsense, you don’t know what you’re saying. It’s my fault, it’s Vera’s fault — what’s the use, what we need is to talk about what we’re going to do, have you forgotten about Mpho, she’s sitting there on the floor, she’s our daughter—

— I don’t know what we’re going to do about her. I only know she’s got herself into a mess.—

— What we’re going to do has nothing to do with this young man. We shouldn’t be in this place of his at all. He’s out of it now, the whole matter. What happened between Mpho and him is finished. That’s all he needs to know. Finished and klaar. This child will not be born. Over and done with. Vera will help us—

How could they all keep the girl grovelling before them on the floor — her mother, her father, Oupa, herself? Vera, shamed, spoke roughly. — Mpho, get up, come on, you’re not alone—

Usually so quick and graceful, the girl lumbered to her feet, her tear-bloated face had the withdrawn expressionlessness Vera was familiar with in accused brought before court without hope of being found not guilty. Still the wrong thing: making her stand there. Perhaps she was in love with Oupa; but she knew, young and inexperienced in the judgments of the world as she was, that this was no plea.

— You mean Mpho should have an abortion.—

Didymus was used to doing what had to be done. — Yes. And we’re new here, now. It must be without danger to her. You’re the one who’ll be able to make sure of that for us, we know.—

Sentence passed. The girl went over to the arm of the chair where her mother was sitting and picked up a duffle bag decorated with the iconographic names of pop groups. She ignored her mother and took out a handkerchief, blew her nose.

FUNK DOGS HIPHOP ROCK ELECTRIC PETALS INSTANT KARMA

An intense discomfiture filled the room as if the temperature were rising. The girl was disposed of like a body. She was a body, in the solution that had been found; nothing else. The other aspects of the situation that had brought them together had been withdrawn — emotions, motives and responsibilities nobody knew how to deal with. Didymus gathered his wife and daughter; the girl walked out before him without glancing at anyone except — a moment — up at Oupa; Vera saw the movement of the head, from behind, and could not tell whether the look was in compact or defiance; but she saw no responding change in Oupa’s face. Didymus gave a nod to Vera: —We’ll call. — Oupa was imploring her with his eyes and his stranded stance not to leave with the Maqomas. In sudden distress Vera wanted to waylay them — Don’t treat her as if she’s a criminal, put your arms round her, hug her, she’s your daughter— but the girl, walking alone before her parents, was gone down the corridor. Vera slowed to keep to the hesitant pace of Oupa accompanying her, urgent to speak. — I wasn’t the first one she’d been with.—

— Oh what does that matter. Why tell me. It’s not the point. — Vera was impatient with him for burdening her with the confusion of excuses, if they could be accepted as such, she had thought of already.

— Not to you. But it would matter to her parents. I didn’t want to make more trouble for Mpho, if I’d told them.—

They walked a few steps. — So you love her. You think you were in love with her.—

— I don’t know. How can I be in love, I’ve got a wife. — He closed away from the intrusion.

— You mean you don’t think you have the right to. — She smiled. — That doesn’t prevent it coming about, you know.—

— When I say I don’t know … she’s such a kid, the time when I might have a girl-friend like that, I was inside, those young years. But also she’s seen, she knows, so many things I never have — London and Europe and so on … sometimes she even laughs at me, the things I don’t know about. In one way she’s too young, and in another way she’s ahead of me. So I don’t suppose we could ever get it right.—

As she drove home she realized she had not once, while there in the flat, been aware that this was One-Twenty-One. Otto’s One-Twenty-One. With that unawareness, everything that place had been to her and her lover slipped out of grasp; no retracing of walls and footsteps along a corridor would bring it back, once let go, overlaid, it was disappeared for ever. No part of her was occupied by it.

That flat was now the scene where she, whose daughter would never have a child, was appointed to arrange to abort the child of someone else’s daughter. The procuress. On the day when the Maqomas were to come and talk to her about arrangements, Didymus, once again, stood alone at the door. — Sally doesn’t want anything to do with this. — He revised what Sibongile had said: Just get rid of it.

— She’s still angry with me?—

— She has the idea you ought to sack the man.—

— How could she possibly expect that! Even if I had the power to, which I don’t.—

— Of course. It’s just that she’s in such a state. I can tell you. It’s not easy. After all, Mpho is our only daughter, we’d given up hope of having a girl and then she came along … Sally brought her up on her own, you know I was away most of the time. And Mpho just shuts herself off, she won’t speak to her mother, she won’t even speak to me, though I don’t reproach her, I’m prepared to forget about the whole business once it’s been dealt with.—

Didymus looked so different, so — battle-weary, in comparison with the man in great danger who had smiled and said, Vera how mean of you; so isolated, in contrast to the man who lived in the solitude of disguise. She had the instinct to offer some sort of exchange of unexpected situations, as people who feel attachment for one another do; something private out of her own life. — You know Didy, Annie has become a lesbian.—

He glanced away, clucked his tongue bewilderedly. After a moment, an African exclamation: —Yoh-yoh! What makes you think that?—

— I didn’t have to think; she’s told me. That woman with her you met at the party, she’s the other half of the couple.—

— I don’t know what to say — I’m sorry? Does it worry you? D’you mind?—

— I think I do, but not morally; from my own point of view, you know, because I’m a woman.—

— I’ve never thought much about it — among our people, about men of that kind, I mean. They’re around. Of course, it’ll be part of our constitution that there’ll be no discrimination against any sex … but that doesn’t cover about your own child becoming — d’you have any idea what made her?—

— At present just … I suppose we believe we’re responsible for what we think has gone wrong with our children and in their judgment hasn’t gone wrong at all.—

— Sally and me, with Mpho.—

— Maybe. The villain of that whole business said something to me about Mpho and him. He supposed they couldn’t ‘ever get it right’ (he meant even if he wasn’t married with kids), they’ve both been displaced, their relative ages don’t tally naturally with their actual experiences, there’s a dislocation that couldn’t be corrected. He missed out her teenage stage, in jail; she has a worldly sophistication beyond her years, because of European exile.—

— And our generation created both circumstances … well, it could be. Man, I don’t know. But they wouldn’t apply to Annie?—

— No.—

He saw that this was the limit of her confidences, for the time being; his old Underground experience in being alert to moods when people reveal themselves remained sensitive to the dropping and raising of barriers.

They discussed, as if the itinerary for a journey or the agenda for a meeting, the doctor Vera had managed to persuade — playing on his left-wing sympathies and lack of open activity in liberation politics — to salve his conscience, do his bit by removing an embryo from the daughter of an eminent couple who had suffered for the cause much disruption in their lives. A date and place were set.

Vera walked with Didymus, once again, to his car, this time there openly outside the gate. She hesitated at the window after he was seated. — Ben refuses to believe it — about Annie. He pretends not to know.—

Chapter 14

The radio alarm clock Mpho had not been able to resist, duty-free, as she left London airport, woke her with its Japanese version of Greensleeves at the hour she had set. She lay with her fists at her mouth, feeling on them the soft double stream of breath from her nostrils. To awake in the very early morning when everyone else is unconscious is to be alone in the world.

She got up and went to the window, carefully pulled the curtain. All was blurred with mist and, set back on a hill, only the glass façade of a towering building glistened out of it, mirror to the still hidden sun. She took off the Mickey Mouse T-shirt she slept in, her breasts dragged up and bouncing back; threw the shirt on the bed and then picked it up again, rolled it and put it in her duffle bag. Naked, she packed some other clothes and a goggle-eyed toy cat. She went to the window to see one more time the radiant face witnessing her. As she pulled in her stomach muscles to zip up her jeans a sense of fear and wonder and disbelief at what was there, inside, held her dead still. A lump of panic was suppressed with a swallow of saliva. She put herself together as she always was: frilled elasticized band circling her dreadlocks like an open blue rose on the crown of her head, another T-shirt with some other legend or logo on it, bright socks rolled round the ankles, black sneakers, the crook’d wires of one of her collection of earrings hooked through the soft brown tips of her ear-lobes. Mpho. That’s Mpho. The mirror on her dressing-table caught her as the sun did the face of the building; there she is, nothing’s changed. In her trembling sullen unhappiness, something overturned: she felt gaily released for a moment; nothing had ever happened, she had just got off the plane from London to meet the admiring glances of this country called home.

Nobody heard, nobody saw her close the front door behind her. In this white part of the suburban city only joggers were about, hamsters working their daily treadmill. She took an empty bus to a city terminal where blacks arrive from the townships to go to work. Street children lay in doorways as drifts of cartons, paper and banana skins lay in gutters. Women were setting out rows of boiled mealies, the venders of watches, sunglasses, vaseline, baseball caps, baby clothes, were unpacking their stock. A shebeen on a packing-case displayed litre bottles of beer and half-jacks of brandy, and before this altar a man still crazed from the drinking of the night danced round her to mbaqanga music coming from the stall-holder’s cassette player. The freshness of the morning brought the smell of urine as dew intensifies the scent of grass. She passed through it all with an untouchable insolent authority beauty creates, going against the stream of workers, agile among the combis cornering, stopping and starting racing-circuit-style, smiling in response to remarks made to her in the language no one who made them would believe she didn’t understand.

There is dread at the sight of an empty bed.

Gone.

Gone, it says.

Where?

The contractions of fear; people kill themselves if they have been made to feel ashamed of their lives. From that comes the extreme of fear: what should have been done to avert the sight of the bed, there, empty. What has been done to bring it about. Sibongile knows — he doesn’t have to say it, doesn’t have to conceal — Didymus thinks she has been too harsh and judgmental towards the girl.

An appallingly reasonable conviction strikes her; of course. — She’s gone to that man.—

He bunched his mouth. — Unlikely. He’d be scared. I think he’s a weak character. Never mind his record as a comrade. I don’t think he’d take her in, now.—

Sibongile rummaged again for some clue — no note, of course, if the idea is to punish your parents you certainly don’t leave a note. Didymus followed her into the room, a place mute and accusatory. The odour of Mpho was there, the mingle of perfume and deodorants and skin-warmed clothing, sweaty sneakers, the mint-flavoured gum she liked. She could have run away to people they didn’t know she knew, people picked up at those places young people frequent, Kippies, discos. Now something really terrible could be happening to her, rape, drugs.

They stood about in her absence.

— Why do you think she’s done this?—

— Scared. She’s scared of what’s going to happen to her. The operation.—

— For heaven’s sake. It’s hardly an operation. I’ve told her, she’ll be asleep, she won’t feel anything. I even told her I’ve had it, so I know.—

A change in his face. — Why d’you do that.—

But Sibongile — Sally — belonged to the generation and the experience that saw emancipation in burdening their half-adult children with the intimate life of their parents. — Why not? So she wouldn’t be scared.—

— But if you put yourself in the same boat — why should she feel there’s anything wrong with her adventure with the man, why that whole business in the flat, her having to hide her face from us … you get pregnant, you have an abortion, doesn’t matter, it’s nothing to worry about.—

— Oh you make me mad. Isn’t what’s happened enough without you … d’you think she shouldn’t be allowed to know what our life was like sometimes in exile, how hard up we were, couldn’t even keep the boys with us, how could we have another child those days in East Germany! You always want to protect her from everything, and then look what she brings on herself … As if what I had to go through has anything to do with her playing around with someone else’s man and getting herself pregnant!—

He spread and then dropped his hands: not prepared to argue. — I’m going to his flat to see if he knows where she is.—

Sibongile was due to take part in a press conference — it would be that very morning the child chose to run away, God knows where. She was dressed for public exposure. In her distraction and anxiety she had put on as a general does his uniform her tailored skirt and jacket, her accoutrements of small gold ear-rings (nothing showy), her carved wooden bracelets — as royalty is expected to wear garments and jewellery designed and made in their own country, a walking billboard for home products, she always saw to it that she included on her person some example of African craft. It’s understood — and she exacted this from her co-workers — that personal obligations must be subordinate to the cause, always had been in exile and clandestinity and were no less now, round conference and negotiation tables. Public exposure may be an armour within which trembling flesh is hidden. Photo opportunities (that’s what the press asks for) are the victim’s obligation to wear a persona separated by duty from self.

It simply was not possible, for Sibongile; not possible, if she was what she had taken responsibility to be in the Movement, for her to telephone and leave a message that her chair would be vacant — because? Because a foolish child had got herself into a mess and punished her mother by leaving a deserted bed. When she was ill and alone, in London, with a baby to care for, could she expect to call her husband back from wherever they might have sent him, another country, another continent?

She stood there, looking at Didymus, unable to leave. All the partings and reappearances, the arrivals and departures, the climates and languages, the queueing for rubber-stamped entry and exit were present between them, as a wind gathers up a spiral of papers in dust.

He released her. — Go on. I’ll call. I’ll leave a message for someone to slip to you.—

The lift did not move; he stabbed at each button in turn. A beer can rolled into one corner had dribbled its dregs and caked dirt on the floor. He climbed stairs and walked corridors to number One-Twenty-One, passing napkins, T-shirts and underpants hung to dry over the burglar bars of kitchen windows, doors with their sections of stippled glass replaced by cardboard, bags of trash in doorways, a bicycle frame without wheels he had to step round: our people moving into the shell of middle-class life without the means or habits that give it any advantage. So they inhabit it and destroy the very thing they believe they wanted. It becomes the ghetto we think we’ve escaped. Only it costs much, much more. The white landlord cuts the water supply because ten people in a two-roomed flat, multiplied by ten storeys, strain the sewage system beyond the capacity it was installed for; the rent falls into arrears and the electricity supply is disconnected. This building with its mirrored foyer and panelled lifts hasn’t got there yet but it’s on the way, it’s on the way. Isn’t this what our ‘education for democracy’ is all about, after you’ve learnt to make your cross on a bit of paper, after you’ve learnt not to allow yourself to be bribed or intimidated to vote for someone you don’t trust to govern your life: it’s about not occupying the past, not moving into it, but remaking our habitation, our country, to let us live within the needs of space and decency our country can afford. And that’s what the whites have to learn, too. Luxury’s a debt they can’t pay. A good thing he wasn’t called upon to make speeches any more; something more easily recognizable as rousing than this would be required.

Unlikely the bell worked. He struck the stippled glass with his knuckles and waited; if the answer were to be a long time in coming, he supposed she was there; he felt a eurve of sorrow wash over him, as if he had come to fetch his little girl from some misdemeanour at that English school she had attended paid for by white fellow-travellers, and was about to meet her humiliation. Bloody fucking bastard: suddenly he joined Sibongile in anger against Vera’s nice young man. But a watery dark outline had appeared on the other side of the glass door; it opened and he was there, barefoot, in running shorts, a thick slice of bread with a bite out of it, in one hand; at once showing in his face that he felt foolish caught like that.

Didymus spoke Zulu — it was Sibongile’s, not his own language and he didn’t know what this man’s was, but every black in Johannesburg at least understands Zulu, he needed a lingua franca other than English for this occasion. Was the girl there?

No.

He was not asked to enter but saw at once that it was unnecessary.

You know her friends, your friends. Do you know where she might be.

Uncomprehending: She’s not at her home?

She’s disappeared since last night. You know some friends … where she would go?

The young man slid a glance at the piece of bread he could not drop, came back with an open face, upper lip faltering before he spoke confidently, no doubt at all: Her grandmother. There in Alex.

Mpho.

That’s Mpho.

Their girl was ironing on the kitchen table in the Alexandra house where her father had come to live as an infant when his parents left the Transkei. So many countries, cities, rooms, hideouts, personae — and now his daughter was ironing sheets on that same table in that same kitchen, a doek tied over her fancy hair-style. She said as if they were unwelcome neighbours dropped in, Hullo.

The old lady was peeling potatoes into a basin on her spread lap.

They spoke in their family language, Xhosa. — Why should I phone you? She often comes, doesn’t she? I thought you knew — every time. Why must I phone?—

— But Mama, didn’t Mpho tell you?—

— What should she tell me, my son. You say.—

Sibongile’s elegance, the hound’s-tooth tweed suit and knotted silk scarf, high-heeled patent shoes and sheen of matching navy blue stockings emphasizing her stance before all that was familiar to him and his mother within the four walls; the old grey-painted dresser with its display of enamel plates, mugs on hooks, three-legged alarm clock ticking, the refrigerator with wadded newspaper under one lame leg, the enormous scoured aluminium pots on the stove, his childhood reassurance against hunger through many lean times, the calendars illustrated with pink blondes and fluffy puppies, the framed Last Supper and blurred certificates of children’s prowess, long ago, at bible class, Didymus Maqoma’s matric certificate — these powerful inanimates stood back from Sibongile’s presence.

— I think Mama knows what her granddaughter told her. We don’t have to go over it. — Sibongile spoke a mixture of her own Zulu with what she knew of Xhosa, not to be seen wanting in respect. But English was the medium for Mpho, English was the reminder to her that there was no running away from what she was, what circumstance made of her, a girl who had to have lessons in order to claim a mother tongue. Once home, the new world had to be made of exile and home, both accepted. In the vocabulary Sibongile herself had absorbed unconsciously through the circumstance of exile in London she found this next escapade — Alexandra — what the English called tiresome—yes, plain tiresome, mixed with a concealed hysterical relief that the girl was alive and safe. — Mpho, why did you have to go off in the middle of the night or whenever it was, not leave a note or anything. Nobody would have stopped you if you’d said you wanted to spend the next few days with gogo. It was just silly, darling.—

At the end of ‘the next few days’ was the appointment with the doctor Vera had found.

Ah, so it was still silence: the girl didn’t look up, was expertly folding the sheet in four, testing the iron with the hiss of a finger first moistened by her tongue, and then running the iron over the neat oblong. But the old lady was ready to speak. — Our people don’t do this thing. Our children are a blessing. We are not white people. Didymus is my son. Mpho is my child. This child will be my child. I will look after the child here, in my house. I have told Mpho. — She stood up, put aside the basin of potatoes.

Didymus rose, too, from the plastic chair whose screws on metal tube legs he had been turning in patient forbearance. He went over to Mpho and put his hand gently on her nape, the gesture of love familiar to both his women, wife and daughter. — One day Mpho will have children she’ll care for herself. That’s the way it’s going to be for her. But it can’t be now. Thank you, Mama, Sibongile and I, we thank you for looking after her so well; we’ll come back to fetch her at the weekend.—

Careful that the movement should not be interpreted by him as a rejection of his hand on her neck, Mpho slowly looked up, untied the doek from her head, laid it on the table, and turned, ready, to her father.

Chapter 15

A lawyer and a clerical assistant, both of the Legal Foundation, were attacked this week while on an investigative tour of State-owned land the Government proposes to sell off to private ownership in advance of the installation of an interim government. The Foundation has criticized the Government’s intention to ‘offer this land to speculators and developers when a future government expects to use it to solve the enormous land and housing crisis existing in the country’.

What play of inference and preconception, this way or that, comes between the news item on an inside page and what has happened as an interruption of or, maybe, the culmination of certain directions. In the context of newspaper headlines, the nightly sheet-lightning of violence, psychedelic entertainment darkening and flaring on the television screen, this must be an attack by black hatred on a white foolish enough to think she had any reason to be in areas whites themselves had declared fit only for blacks; or it could be an attack by white hatred of white collaborators with blacks’ intention to seize land — the land! — for themselves. Either way, serve the victims right.

And the third possibility. Created as climate creates conditions, accepted like the lack of rain — the couple could have been robbed because they didn’t lock the doors, they didn’t keep the gun handy, they should have had the sense to stay at home. Stay out of it.

Mrs Vera Stark sustained a bullet wound in the leg and Mr Oupa Sejake was wounded in the chest.

What were they doing on a road far from the site of any State land on their itinerary? To know that would be to have to enter their lives, both where they touched and widely diverged, to be aware of what they knew about each other and what they did not know; where they had expectations, obligations operating covertly one upon the other. To know at least that much.

Vera could not know whether, by acting as procuress of an abortion for Oupa’s girl, she was someone to whom he felt he owed gratitude or resentment. The old woman said — Didymus had told her — We are not white people. Didymus dismissed this smiling, in passing. But maybe Oupa would have liked to have a child, somewhere, souvenir of the beautiful girl who was not for him, out of his class, speaking and moving in the manner of cities he had never seen, yet at the same time a black girl, sharing the precious familiarity, the dangerous condition of being black, for which he had dredged seaweed and broken rocks on a prison island. Oupa didn’t have his wife and children with him in One-Twenty-One; what difference if there were to have been another child, likeness of hours of love-making and virility, to be visited with gifts at the home of some grandmother?

He didn’t bring his plastic container of pap and curried chicken-leg to keep company in Mrs Stark’s office. He didn’t discuss problems of his legal studies with her. He was in and out with papers and messages and talk on Foundation matters continued between them as usual, but there were no lively asides from him, he kept his eyes on papers or unfocussed, to concentrate on what was being discussed; only occasionally, from the door, as if he had forgotten something, in what was barely a pause: his smile.

This — to her — self-punishing attitude became more and more unnecessary; she found herself increasingly impatient with the idea that he should have to feel exaggeratedly contrite, to the extent that this was carried over to his demeanour at work. If he thought it was expected of him by her, she didn’t know how to convey to him that this certainly was not so. The image of Mpho, brought to mind by his behaviour, changed outline, developed, on reflection. That charmer was fully aware of, became completely in control of her attraction; quite as much capable of seduction as a man; this young man. There was never any suggestion that she’d been raped, or even found herself innocently in a situation where submission to unwelcome desire was difficult to repulse. Sly little miss lied to her parents, made friends collude with and cover up for her when she went to make love in that flat; the love-nest of two generations.

On the three-day drive around the country the atmosphere between Mrs Stark and Oupa was easier but still was created only by exchanges of reaction to what they saw and to whom they talked in relation to their task. They spent a night in a Holiday Inn where Oupa swam in the pool and she, drinking a beer on the terrace, saw no objection, from the party of white farmers at the next table, to his presence among their splashing, shrieking children. Even at the dorp hotel they slept in the second night, a place where the proprietor and his wife slumped before the television set in the bar lounge while a receptionist-cum-barman took the guests’ particulars, their arrival was accepted with listless resignation. The dorp was dying; local farmers who used to fill the bar had abandoned their farms and moved to town during the years when they feared for their security from groups of black guerrillas infiltrating from over the border; those farmers who had formed commandos and stayed, then, were now trying to sell their farms before blacks reclaimed land under a majority government. But in the meantime without the patronage of black drinkers in the public bar the hotel would be abandoned, too. From his armchair the proprietor called out in Afrikaans — Show mevrou and meneer to their rooms, Klaus, show where the bathroom is.—

They laughed together over this as they had not laughed since Oupa summoned her to the flat. The factotum dragged back and forth serving a dinner of mutton, mealie rice and pumpkin they ate with satisfaction, as people retain a taste for the dishes of their country others would find dull and unappetizing. In his high-collared white jacket moulded in sweat-dried contours like a plaster cast containing his body, listing on shoes cut out on the uppers to ease bunions, the old black man brought Oupa’s third can of beer.

— Didn’t your baas see me when he told you to show the meneer his room, Baba?—

In the black face darker-streaked with age the mouth gaped on a thick pink tongue. He looked slyly, comically round the empty dining-room before answering in his language. Oupa, clasping the old man’s arm, laughed as he translated for her: The white man doesn’t want to see nothing. Nothing any more. Nothing nothing.

In the quiet of an early-morning start in another part of the country, an empty road, hornbills taking off from cowpats they were pecking at as the Foundation station-wagon approached, Oupa spoke as if to himself — This’s only about fifty kilometres from my uncle’s place. Where my wife stays with the kids. The turn’s just over there at the trees.—

She was watching the approach of the stand of eucalyptus; they neared; she could see long swathes of swaddling bark peeling from their white trunks.

— Let’s take it.—

He turned his head to her. — We go there?—

— Yes. — Mrs Stark authorizing transgression of one of the strictly honoured rules of the Foundation: the Foundation’s vehicles are not to be used for private purposes. And Vera added — Why not. It makes no sense for you to be so close, and drive on.—

So that day when they should have been heading for the city and the office she offered him a joy-ride; not in the usual sense, of aimless pleasure, but the joy of restoration, union, in some — tentative — compensation for the sundering that outcast him, in his sense of self, in what she knew of him in the city.

He asked no questions. That he didn’t was in itself a dissolve of constraint and a return to the old simple confidence between them. He opened his window to let the morning air gush in wide, he slotted a Ladysmith Black Mambazo cassette into the player, he drove faster; it was as if he had downed a couple of the beers he enjoyed so much. — You give me the green light, okay. I’m going to stop at a store. Get some sweets and things. — As they neared the settlement there were roadside venders selling mounds of sweet potatoes and onions and an Indian store into whose dimness he disappeared in skipping strides. He came out with chips and Jelly Babies, clear plastic guns filled with candy pills for the children, and packets of tea and sugar, the gifts poor people offer adults the way rich visitors offer flowers.

If there had been somewhere for her to wait for him while he made his visit she would have suggested that he leave her there so that she would not intrude. She hung back as two small children threw aside the cardboard box in which one sat while the other pulled it through the dust, and leapt to fling themselves at him. The younger had him by the leg, the elder hung from his neck. Hampered with joy, he staggered through the gap of a fence that had been shored up with strands of barbed wire and off-cuts of tin roofing, and approached the small, sagging mud-brick house, as much part of the features of the country as anthills in the veld. One of the children broke loose and ran inside shouting. There was some exchange; a woman came out, a plump young face screwed up, hand shielding her gaze. She greeted — her man? her husband? — respectfully, distantly, in the manner of one expecting an explanation. In their language, he introduced Vera. Shaking hands, brought close to her: the tender roundness of the neck with the gleam of sweat-necklaces in its three circling lines.

These shelters provided for by men absent in cities fill up with women; in the all-purpose room were several and a baby or two, flies, heat coming from a polished coal stove. The sweetish smell of something boiling — offal? — was swallowed with tea flurriedly made for the white visitor; the children brought her their school exercise books. Perhaps they thought she was some kind of teacher or inspector. In her familiarity, through her work, with homes like this one, scatterings of habitation outcropped along with the trash-pits of white towns, she was accustomed to being regarded as someone to whom it was an opportunity to address a demand, attention. She and the children chattered and laughed although they had no common language, while she admired their drawings and painstaking calligraphy. Time passed — some idea the visitors were to wait for the eldest child to come home from school. But he did not appear, and his father was not surprised or perturbed. — It’s far. And they play on the road, you know how kids are. Sometimes I myself, I used to be the whole afternoon, coming home, forgetting to come … — From the cajoling, laughing tone of his voice he was telling the mother not to be angry with the child, but she jerked her head in rejection. Such movements of self-assertion surfaced from the withdrawn placidity with which she kept her place. Sitting at the kitchen table, she might be any of the other women murmuring there. Her man from the city talked and she responded only to questions, now and then giggled when others did, and covered her mouth with her hand. The sun shifted its angle through the window barred with strips of tin; he decided, turning to his fellow visitor — Time to get going, hei— And while the farewells were being made to all the women, the children hung again about him. Their heads caressed under his hands storing up the shapes, he asked — undercover — whether his employer could help him out? — The loan of twenty rands or so.—

Only then did he and his wife have a few minutes alone together; he put his palm on her waist to guide her to the only other room of the house, where through the door, in a mirror, a crocheted bedspread was reflected. The door was not closed behind them but their voices were so low they could not be heard in the kitchen. Whether they embraced, whether they said to one another what could not be said in the company in which the visit had passed, no one could know. They were soon back. He hugged his children, he joked again with the women: a man, a lover, a husband, a father. His wife stood aside — displaced by an arrival without a letter, without warning in the life she held together by herself; in her stance, the way her full neck rose, she alone, of all the other women, in possession of him; lonely. That was how Vera saw her and did not know she would never forget her.

Driving away. To say he was so happy: how to explain what this was. He might have expected to be sad. Depressed, at least, at taking up with the road the split in his life. But he was talking about his children, boastful of their excitement at seeing him, he was drinking deep of being loved. — Man, I wish you could’ve seen my big boy, last time, he was nearly as tall as I am — right up here to my ear. And he’s clever, there he’s already bigger than me, I’m telling you … He can do everything. At Christmas, one of my other uncles was here at their place with his car, so this kid says, Ntatemoholo, I bet you I can drive, so his uncle gets in next to him and hands over the keys. And off! That kid manages the clutch, gears, everything. Just learnt from watching people.—

To say he was happy: it’s to say he was whole. He’d accepted himself again; husband, father, Freedom Fighter, womanizer, and clerk at the Legal Foundation. At that moment when, glancing at his profile, she found the definition, he saw someone flagging him down on the road. A black man was waving a plastic container. A good mood overflows in openness to others; the Foundation station-wagon slowed and pulled up level with a brother in trouble, run out of gas. He leaned from the window and spoke to the man in the language of the district. An arm thrust through and snatched the keys from the ignition. She heard the gurgle as the forearm struck against Oupa’s windpipe in passing and saw the mound of a ring with a red stone on a finger. Tswaya! Get out! A voice that of a man giving routine orders.

All the muscles in Oupa’s body gathered in a storm of tension that sucked into a vacuum his shock and hers, she felt it draw at her as if he had had his hand upon her. He burst out of the door knocking the man back with its force. The scuffle and animal grunting and yells of two men fighting. She saw another man run from behind the decoy car with a gun and she jumped out of the passenger seat hearing a woman’s voice screaming screaming and ran screaming, another self, screaming, to where the two men fought on the ground. The keys were thrown, the hand that had held them struggling to get something out of his pocket as he fought. She and the third man were racing towards the ring of keys shining in the dust; she was terrified of what she was converging with, thumping tread like hooves making for her, there was a loud snap of giant fingers in the air—! and then another that gave her a mighty punch in the calf. She lost herself, more from lack of breath than whatever had happened to her leg. The first thing she was restored to was the ordinary sight of a man picking up a ring of keys. He came over and not looking at her face, tore off her watch and grabbing her left hand, pulled at the ring on her finger. She put her finger in her mouth, wet it with saliva and gave the hand to him. He made a disgusted face and signalled her to take off the ring. She worked it over the knuckle and handed it to him; she didn’t know what had happened to her leg, she didn’t know if she could get up, he was there above her ready to strike her down if she did. The sling bag — her money, the Foundation’s money, all her documentation — was in the station-wagon, was his, taken possession of without any further effort necessary. As feeling came to her leg in the form of pain making pathways for itself, she saw as he left her that he was not like the other, he was a puny man and the thumping tread that had pursued her had come only from the pump-action of jogging shoes below skinny legs.

The two vehicles were driven away. He — Oupa — lay gasping over there. There was a tear in her jeans, quite small, some ooze of blood, she did not want to roll the pants leg and see more, she had the desire to sit up and wrap her arms tightly round the leg but she moved, squatting on one leg and supporting the other, to where he was. They clasped hands, dumb. Tears of effort, of the violence with which he had fought, were finger-painting the dirt on his face. He patted his ribs on the right side to show her where: blood was blotting out the face of Bob Marley printed on his T-shirt. They were castaways in the immensity of the sky. They were abandoned in the diminishing perspective of an empty dirt road, leaving them behind as a speck to be come upon as hornbills come upon a cowpat. They helped each other somehow to the side of the road.

Tears and blood. It was a country road, it was miles from anywhere. But they are everywhere, the violent. To meet up with them again: Je-ss-uss! I’d be terrified. He carefully rolled the leg of her pants and fonnd — Oh my God, there’s a hole on the other side, the bullet went right through … it should’ve been there, where you were standing, did you find it … — But neither had the strength to go back and search. She lifted his shirt and saw the hole, like the socket where an eye had been gouged; on his back there was no exit wound.

— It’s still inside?—

— I don’t know too much about anatomy. But it’s far from your heart.—

Their watches were gone. They did not know how long after but it must have been quite soon that a cattle truck loaded with beasts huddled together for the abattoir stopped and the driver, calling out in his language, came over with the face of dismay and curiosity with which a man meets a disaster that could happen to himself. The cattle jostled to the bars of the truck to stare and low, giving off the ammoniac stench of their own instinctive fear of their last journey. Under the panicked whites of the beasts’ eyes he and she were helped into the cab. She was a leg, her whole being stuffed down into a leg, a concentration of pain filled to bursting down there. Blood trickled from her; she kept her gaze on a vase with its branch of artificial carnations hooked above the windscreen. Oupa and the driver talked in their language; although short of breath he was fortunately in less pain than she, the bullet inside him perhaps was lying in some harmless space of the mysterious human body.

Oupa had his bullet on the cabinet beside the hospital bed between the bottles of orange squash and bunch of bananas his friends at the Foundation brought him. No longer any segregation of black and white sick and injured, but the elegant Indian lady who shared a ward with Vera rang for a nurse to come and draw the curtains round her bed when Oupa, in a dressinggown, came to visit Vera; on crutches, she went to visit him. Animatedly they pieced together over and over again the details rescued from the confusion of the dog-fight blur in which the attack happened. — You noticed that big ring with the red stone — Oh I can see his hand as the back of it hit your throat, I don’t think I’d recognize the face but I feel I’d know that hand anywhere — I heard you screaming, I thought my God they’re killing her— They shuddered and they laughed together: lucky to be alive.

Oupa’s bullet had been removed cleanly through an incision just below the ribs. It had missed both lungs and liver, merely chipped a rib and lodged in muscular tissue. He was proud of this form of resistance to the attackers. — I think I got so tough on the Island, you know, and I’ve done some weight-lifting, well, I used to, so I’m sure that’s helped me. — He took his bullet back to One-Twenty-One with him in a cigarette pack. Vera’s wound at the point of entry of the bullet became infected and she was kept in hospital a few days after his discharge.

Ben telephoned Annie with daily bulletins and requests for professional advice, insisting she keep in touch with the hospital surgeon. He related Annie’s reassurances with a lack of confidence in doctors’ judgment, sitting through long silences at Vera’s bedside looking at her as if piecing her together, out of destruction, from images in his mind. When she came home he returned from Promotional Luggage at odd hours of day to make sure she was following doctor’s orders for healing to be established. — We ought to take a break somewhere.—

She was reading documents from the Foundation, sent by messenger, strewn on the sofa. — I must get back to work. It’s piling up there.—

— Just three or four days together.—

She tried to give her attention to understanding the need; his need or hers. — Well, where.—

— To the sea … —

— I don’t suppose I should put this thing in water yet.—

— To the mountains.—

The mountains.

Ah, so there was no practical reality to be understood, she was obtuse in objecting to the sea because she would not be able to swim in it just as she would not be able to climb — these were not mountains for climbing, they were the site in themselves, herself and Bennet, proposed to return to. — I ought to get back to work. — No more assertive than a murmur.

The words fell from him with the clatter of a weapon concealed on his person. — I couldn’t live without you.—

A jump of fear, of refusal within her.

He began to straighten and stack the sheets of paper lying haphazard as fallen leaves over the outline of her legs under a rug. In her appalled silence his continuation of the senseless task, picking up sheets that slithered off the sofa, putting an order into documents, whose sequence he did not know, understood the rejection.

She could not see the violence at the roadside as evidence of her meaning in his life. She could not share the experience with him on those terms. She was not responsible for his existence, no, no, love does not carry that covenant; no, no, it was not entered into in the mountains, it could not be, not anywhere. What to do with that love. Now she saw what it was about, the sudden irrelevant question, a sort of distress within herself, that came to her from time to time, lately.

When he had gone back to his office she lay, holding off confusion and resentment, stiff, head pressed into cushions. She rose slowly and pushed back the rug, rolled up the leg of her track suit to the place on her calf where the punctured flesh, still an outraged blotchy purple, had been secured by metal clips.

The sacred human body is only another object that can be patched together, like a tyre. This is one meaning of what had happened on the road. Something to be traced with a forefinger. There are many. Violence has many: now, in this country, as the working out of vengeance, as the return of the repressed, for some; the rationalization for their fear, of their flight, for others. But the experience of violence is for the victims their conception of a monster-child by rape; only they share its clutch upon their backs. Only they, in the privacy of what has been done to them, can search through the experience for what they should have done differently in resistance, where there was a failure of intelligence, of courage, of wiliness, of common sense; of how much they were influenced, even in panic, by the conditioning of the rules of the game, their society’s game. Never stop for anyone on the road. Let them die there. Break the rule for a brother, Oupa, and you stop a souvenir bullet. You admired the criminals you were forced to share a cell with — but to meet them outside — Those people? I’d be terrified. The attraction of power predestines us as its victims. And if I hadn’t been wasting my breath screaming I might have reached the keys, run over the bastards. Oh easy to swagger in retrospect. While you were fighting, while I was screaming, weren’t we conscious of getting what we deserved, according to the rules? If I had stayed home as a white woman should in these times (what other times have there been in the efficacy of a country run by fear) it wouldn’t have happened, serve you right. There’s someone there at home who can’t live without you. What were you doing about that when you got yourself shot in the leg?

She leant to pick up the phone and ask him, Oupa, already back at work, to come by when the office closed, and then remembered she expected Sally that afternoon. Sally had put her hostility to Vera aside, as people do when its object encounters some sufficiently punishing misfortune, but it was unlikely that this clemency would be extended to the young man, if he were to arrive before she left. The experience of violence on one’s person also makes one self-absorbed and forgetful of other people’s preoccupations — Vera had failed, while she was in hospital, to ask if all had gone well with Mpho. — I’ve brought Didymus! — And there were flowers. Vera got up and went to fetch drinks. — Don’t let her hobble about for us, Didy! You do it— But Vera was already in the passage, he followed her. — The young man? — A clatter of ice cubes he was releasing covered the question in that same kitchen where an umfundisi had drunk coffee behind closed curtains.

— Back at work. And Mpho?—

— The whole thing’s never mentioned at home. She laughs a lot, girl-friends in and out, very busy. It’s what we wanted, I suppose.—

Vera looked round into the pause. — Well, what else?—

— It seems a bit callous, the way she is. But I don’t believe it’s forgotten, inside her. In a way, we gave up her confidence in us. I don’t think Sally realizes we’re not going to get it back.—

As they were leaving the kitchen he blocked the way. — The doctor told me, it was a boy. Apparently you could see already.—

— He shouldn’t have done that!—

— Of course she doesn’t know, neither of them does.—

Vera was careful to enquire again, of Sally. — How are things with Mpho? Were there any problems?—

A momentary coldness, in admonition, flexed the muscles in Sally’s face. — She’s working quite well. She’s been given a leading part in the school play. The school accepted she was away for a week with flu — that time.—

Everything can be patched up. Everything knits somehow, again. Souvenirs are the only evidence: a bullet in a cigarette pack, a half-formed blob of flesh dropped in an incinerator.

I couldn’t live without you.

Her visitors had gone and the threat returned. She lay listening to the inanimate counsel of the house, creaking in its joints with the cooling of afternoon. The hand of a breeze flicked a curtain. The blurt of an old rubber-bulb horn announced six o’clock; as every day at this hour the black entrepreneur on his bicycle was hawking offal from a cardboard box, her gaze on the ceiling saw him as always, lifting portions squirming like bloody spaghetti into the basins of backyard residents who were his clients. Attackers take everything. The sling bag of documents. Address book. Wedding ring. She feels the place where it was, as she investigated the other scars of the attack. The place where the ring was is a wasted circle round the base of the finger, feel it, frail, flesh worn thinner than that of the rest of the digit. Documents, address book — ring; on the contrary, to live: without all these.

Until the man on the road forced her to do so, she had never taken off the ring since Bennet placed it on her finger. She had worn it while making love to Otto. Her finger is naked; free.

They went to Durban for a week. The break fitted in with an opportunity to have a look at a trade fair where Promotional Luggage was displayed.

The ring has never been replaced.

Chapter 16

Mrs Stark returned to her office on Monday morning and was told Oupa was back in hospital. It was early, the story vague. Only the receptionist at his desk: Oupa had sat about ‘in a funny way’ last week, he was bent and couldn’t breathe properly. Then he went to the doctor and didn’t return. Someone phoned the doctor and was told he’d been sent to hospital. And then? What did the doctor say was the matter?

No further sense to be got out of a young man who didn’t pay attention to what he heard, was incapable of reporting anything accurately. No wonder messages received at the Foundation were often garbled; irritation with the Foundation’s indulgence of incompetence distracted her attention as she called the doctor’s paging number. She reached him at the hospital. Slow internal bleeding, the lung. Well, it was difficult to say why, it seemed there was an undetected injury sustained when the bullet penetrated, perhaps a cracked rib, and some strenuous effort on the part of the patient had caused a fracture to penetrate the lung. It was being drained. The condition was stable.

At lunchtime Mrs Stark and Lazar Feldman went to visit their colleague. What should they take him? They stopped on the way to buy fruit. At the hospital they were directed to the Intensive Care Unit. Whites habitually misspell African names. Mrs Stark repeated Oupa’s: wasn’t there some mistake? The direction was confirmed. As they walked shining corridors in a procession of stretchers pushed by masked attendants, old men bearing wheeled standards from which hung bags containing urine draining from tubes attached under their gowns, messengers skidding past with beribboned baskets of flowers, unease grew. The community of noise and surrounding activity fell away as they reached the last corridor, only the squelch of Lazar’s rubber soles accompanied a solemnity that imposes itself on even the most sceptical of unbelievers when approaching a shrine where unknown rites are practised. She shook her head and shrugged, to Lazar: what would Oupa, his bullet in a cigarette pack, recovered from what had happened to him and her on the road, be there for as she pictured him, sitting up in bed ready to tell the story to his visitors?

At double doors there was a bell under a no entry sign. They rang and nobody came, so Vera walked in with Lazar lifting his feet carefully and placing them quietly behind her. Cells were open to a wide central area with a counter, telephones, a bank of graphs and charts, a row of white gowns pegged on the wall. A young black nurse in towelling slippers went to call the sister in charge.

Was the place empty?

Is there nobody here?

The wait filled with a silence neither could recognize; the presence of unconscious people.

The sister in charge came out of one of the doorways pulling a mask away from nostrils pink as the scrubbed skin pleated on her knuckles. — Ward Three? We’re pleased with him today, gave us a smile this morning. — The nurse was signalled to take the packet of fruit from Lazar. — Nothing by mouth. — They robed themselves in the gowns.

On a high bed a man lay naked except for a cloth between the thighs, a body black against the sheets. Tubes connected this body to machines and plastic bags, one amber with urine, another dark with blood. The sister checked the flow of a saline drip as if twitching a displaced flower back into place in a vase; the man had his back to them, they moved slowly round to the other side of the bed to find him.

Oupa. A naked man is always another man, known only to a lover or the team under the shower after a match. Friendship, an office coterie, identifies only by heads and hands. The body is for after hours. Even in the intimacy of the injured, on the road, bodies retain their secrecy. Oupa. His fuzzy lashes on closed eyes, the particular settle of his scooped round nostrils against his cheek; his mouth, the dominant feature in a black face, recognized as such in this race as in no other with an aesthetic emphasis created by highly developed function, since we speak and sing through the mouth as well as kiss and ingest by it — his mouth, bold lips parted, fluttering slightly with uneven breaths.

— He’s asleep, we’ll come back later.—

The sister stood displaying him.

— No. Unconscious. It’s the high fever we’re trying to get down. Speak to him, maybe if he knows your voices they’ll rouse him. Sometimes it works. Go on. Speak to him.—

With these gentle calls you bring a child back from a nightmare or wake a lover who has overslept.

Oupa, Oupa, it’s Lazar.

Oupa, it’s Lazar and Vera, here. Oupa, it’s Vera.

She took the hand that was resting near his face. It felt to the touch like a rubber glove filled to bursting point with hot air. His eyelids showed the movement of the orbs beneath the skin. They talked at him chivvyingly, what do you think you’re doing here, who said you could take leave, man, my desk’s a mess, we need you … Oupa, it’s Lazar, it’s Vera … And his head stirred or they imagined it, under the concentration they held on his face.

— There, he hears you. You see? Now nurse’s going to give him a nice cool sponge-down.—

In the reception area Vera waylaid the woman as she strode away. — Why is he in a fever like this — what’s the reason for the high temperature?—

— Septicaemia … the blood leaked into the body’s cavity, you see. — The lowered tone of confidential gossip. — Of course, he should have had himself admitted the moment he had symptoms. Dosed himself with brandy instead … But I’m telling you, at least he hasn’t gone down, he’s fighting, we’re pleased with him.—

The nurse came to Lazar with the packet of fruit. It was become evidence of their foolish ignorance, his and Mrs Stark’s, of the nature of the ante-room in life to which they had been directed; of this retreat for those upon whom violence has been done, where their colleague had entered as one enters an order under vows of silence and submission. By contrast, the uninitiated are clumsy and intrusive and have only the useless to offer. — Oh no, keep it, won’t you.—

A giggle of pleasure. — Oh thanks, aih. Lovely grapes!—

There was an official roster of Foundation colleagues taking turns to visit the hospital every working day. At weekends others felt they had a right to disappear into their private lives; Mrs Stark was older, there were surely no urgencies of family demands, love entanglements, waiting to be taken up, for a woman like her. She joined the trooping crowds of relatives and friends who filled the hospital on Saturday and Sunday. Out-of-works, beggars and staggering meths drinkers officiously directed cars and minibuses searching for parking, sleeping children were slung round the necks of fathers, there were girls adorned and made up to remind male patients of their sexuality, Afrikaner aunts in church-going hats, bored young men gathered outside for a smoke, Indian grandmothers sitting in their wide-swathed bulk like buddhas, popcorn packets and soft-drink cartons stuck behind the pots of snake plant and philodendron intended to distract people from bleak asepsis, the smells and sights of suffering, the same plants that stand about in banks to distract queues from their anxiety, in the power of money.

The first Saturday and Sunday, and the second. Oupa, the body that was Oupa identified by the mute face, lay as he was placed, on this side or that, sometimes on his back. And that was something to stop the intruder where she stood, entering the cell that was always open. No privacy for that body. On his back, totally exposed. Once she asked if there could be a sheet to cover him and was dismissed with impatience at ignorant interference: he was kept naked because every bodily change, every function had to be monitored all the time, nurses coming in to observe him every fifteen minutes; he was kept naked to fan away the heat of infection raging in there, see the flush in his face, the purplish red mounting under the black. When she was alone — with him but alone — she carefully (he must never know, even if he were to be aware of the need for the small gesture it would humiliate him) drew the piece of cloth between his legs over the genitals that lolled out, ignored by nurses. Sometimes he seemed asleep as well as unconscious. The breathing changed; the men she had slept with breathed like that deep in the night. She wanted to tell him she — at least someone — was there yet it was a violation to touch him when he seemed so doubly, utterly removed. At other times she stood with her hand over his; it was the gesture she knew from other circumstances. She fell back on it for want of any other because nobody knew what he might need or want, they believed he had no thirst because salt water dripped into his veins, they believed he did not feel vulnerable in his nakedness because fever glowed in him like coal. Whether or not the people he shared One-Twenty-One with came to see him she did not know. And moving away from the black townships he had lost touch with neighbours and friends there, most did not know where he lived, now, in a building among whites. Very likely they would not have been allowed in to see him if they had come; the sister in charge made it clear that visits were to be restricted to his employer since it seemed he had no family.

Of course he has a family — but who knew how to get in touch with the plump young woman sitting among all the women who are left behind in veld houses put together as igloos are constructed from what the environment affords, snow or mud. No one had an address; as an employee and as a patient Oupa had given his permanent residence as One-Twenty-One Delville Wood. The Only way to reach her was to retrace the journey from the turn-off at the eucalyptus trees — could someone from the Foundation be spared to drive there? Mrs Stark knew the way but her husband, supported by her son out from London on a visit, absolutely forbade her to revive the trauma of the attack in this way.

During the week Lazar Feldman and others tiptoed in and stood a few minutes, afraid of closeness to what the familiar young-man-about-the-office had become, the grotesque miracle of his metamorphosis. One of the clerks who had meekly suffered because she was too plain to attract him, wept. They went away and some found excuses not to come again; what did visits help a man, said to be Oupa, who did not know there was anyone present, did not know that he himself was present.

Vera glanced at her watch and set herself the endurance of twenty minutes. But she forgot to look at the dial again. What was a presence? Must consciousness be receptive, cognitive, responsive, for there to be a presence? Didn’t the flesh have a consciousness of its own, the body signalling its presence through the lungs struggling to breathe with the help of some machine, the kidneys producing urine trickling into a bag, the stool forming in the bowels.

An insect settles on a leaf and slowly moves its wings.

She sat and watched.

The Fat Nurse and the Thin One, the Chinese and the Black (nurses are known by rank and the most obvious features, they seem to have no names) came and went, marking the passing of time ritually as the tongue of a church bell striking against its palate where traffic is not yet heavy enough to break the sound waves. How ignorant, how far away from this, she had been curious: what’s it like. This is what it’s like; an anatomical demonstration that spares nothing. When, in church between her mother and father, she heard about that moral division, the soul and the body, and grew up unable to believe in the invisible, what the priest really was talking about and didn’t know it, was this: what he called soul was absence, the body was presence. It was swollen now, not only the hands: one day when she walked in there was the young man’s flat belly blown up, the skin taut and shiny, a version in a fun-fair distorting mirror. To look for identity in the face was to be confronted by an oxygen mask. The Chinese gave it a touch to make it what she judged would be more comfortable, if one could feel. The Black used a little blood-sucking device to draw specimens from a huge toe pierced again and again. The Fat One cleaned the leaking anus. If one could feel? The dumb creature that is the body cannot tell. It is an effigy of life ritually, meticulously attended. Outside, in between times, the acolytes eat grapes, arrange on the counter flowers left behind by dead patients, and whisper forbidden telephone calls to children home from school and boy-friends at work.

Vera no longer imagined the plump young woman down the turn-off from the eucalyptus trees and phrased what she ought to be saying to her. Ivan, back at the house where he was conceived, disappeared from her awareness as if he were still in England. The wheeze and click of machines that now breathed for the body and eliminated its waste chattered over its silence. Remote from her, within that awe, a final contemplation was taking place — isn’t that what it is — what it’s like? — the years on the Island, night study to be a lawyer in what the politicians promise to be a new day, freedom the dimensions of a flat in a white suburb, a box-cart pulled through the dust by children— who knew what the final contemplation must be? In that silence she saw that the certainty she had had of death, Zeph Rapulana’s death among nine at Odensville, when he was, in fact, to appear before her alive, was merely a mis-sort in time, a letter first delivered to the wrong address: the certainty belonged to her where it reached her now, in this place, in this presence.

Among the casualties of violence listed in the newspaper is a clerk in the employ of the Legal Foundation, Oupa Sejake, who has died of complications resulting from an injury received when the Foundation’s vehicle was hijacked.

Chapter 17

It was only decent that the Foundation be represented at the funeral. Because the poor young man had been more or less her assistant, Mrs Stark would be the obvious choice. Lazar Feldman volunteered to accompany her and do the driving, since muscles torn by the bullet’s passage through her calf felt the strain of depressing a brake pedal. But the day before they were to leave he developed that perfect alibi for opting out of anything and everything, virus flu. While other colleagues were avoiding one another’s eyes and suggesting someone ought to take his place, she said — without having any idea of whom she might have in mind — no need to worry, she would not have to go alone. Perhaps she had been thinking Ivan might come with her; it would give them a chance to talk, reopen the secret passages between intimates that have to be unsealed each time after absence. The first week of his visit had belonged entirely to him and Ben — between meetings at the Foundation with major funders from Sweden and Holland and running to the hospital, she barely had had time for a meal with her son. Ah — but she remembered Ben mentioning, with pride that drew down the corners of his mouth, that Ivan was so well thought of internationally in the banking world that the Development Bank had invited him as a special guest to participate in talks with a representative of the IMF, to take place next day.

Another claim of life while the process of dying was moving to its close was the hearing in the Supreme Court of the farmer Tertius Odendaal’s appeal against a judgment allowing an informal housing settlement to be established on the land known as Odensville acquired from him by the Provincial Administration. Zeph Rapulana was present when the judges dismissed the appeal; one of the Foundation’s lawyers who had accompanied him while she was preoccupied with the Swedes and the Hollanders brought a note: ‘Vera, we’ve won, this time we’ve shut the door in his face.’

This other conclusion, of a process that had seemed to have little chance of success, bubbled a clear spring through her preoccupations. Zeph Rapulana had a base in the city, now, backyard cottage in a suburb — his success with the Odensville affair had brought him to the attention of a housing research project which employed him as adviser. On the telephone they both talked at once: Vera wanted to know exactly what the judge had said, how Odendaal reacted — and it became quite natural for her to go on to suggest, look, why don’t you come with me tomorrow, we could talk. He knew about the death of the young man who had been shot, as she was, on the road: —If it’ll be any help to you.—

The stand of eucalyptus. Then approaching, a face awaiting, demanding recognition: it happened, it happened, it happened here, the death began here — the place on the road where Oupa, sitting beside her as this other man, Zeph, sits beside her now, drew up and called through the window, Brother.

— This is where they were.—

Pointing out a landmark, that’s all. The only being with whom what happened there is shared has disappeared. But there is a counter-balance in the presence beside her; with him is shared something else, living, that could not be shared with anyone else. From the day Odendaal had closed the door in their faces; from the statement, the threat (never to be discussed between them) Don’t be afraid, Meneer Odendaal, you won’t be harmed, your wife, your children — to the nine dead, to the judge’s words dismissing Odendaal’s appeal, the door shut in Odendaal’s face — this single return of land to its people was their right, Rapulana’s and hers, to quiet elation. Like the feeling between lovers continuing in the presence of the pain of others, it showed no disrespect to the dead. Out of companionable silences she let her thoughts rise aloud now and then. — Why is it that more can be done for the dead than the living? I’m on my way to his home, his wife, now, but neither I nor anyone else went to fetch her while he was at least still alive, although he might not have known she was there. There was no proper address to send a message, a telegram, no telephone, no one knew how to get in touch with her short of driving there, but once he died — suddenly someone at the office knew someone else who was a friend of his, the Soweto grape-vine was followed, there was a way found to get a message to her: Oupa dead. Just that.—

— You don’t think he’d let her know about the attack. — I don’t know. And would she read the papers? Unlikely. Of course, someone might have heard from the driver of the cattle truck and passed the news on to her. Who can say? It’s hard for someone like me to imagine the feelings of a woman like her — living as she has to. You’ve known so many … I suppose it doesn’t strike you … She gets his body back. And that seems so important. The dead body? She didn’t show much enthusiasm when he walked in that day. But someone came specially — from her — to arrange the transport, the money for the funeral. All the things that distance and poverty and … I don’t know— acquiescence in the state of things? — couldn’t manage before become possible when there’s so little purpose left. But I suppose it’s your custom.—

He watched the mealie fields approach and turn away, cleaved by the road. — We have too many graves and too few houses for the living.—

Vera followed the ritual of the funeral without understanding any comfort it could bring to the wife. She was dressed in a polka-dot skirt and jacket that she endured like a tight pair of shoes (an outfit bought by her husband from a street vender in the city?), the skin of her stunned face peeled raw by tears. The children were wearing white socks and polished school shoes. The gangling boy who (that day, that day) hadn’t returned from school held the hand of a two- or three-year-old who stared down curiously into the pit of dank-smelling earth ready to receive his father. There was singing, of great beauty, from these women left behind, and when they wept one of them took Vera’s arm because with the bullet that passed through her leg she was part of the son they mourned and she wept, with them, for the horrible metamorphosis revealed by Intensive Care.

The company trooped back to the house. She felt impatient with herself, confused. — Oupa. Why was he named that? Grandfather, old man, and he’s dead before thirty. Why do you name children ‘old man’ for god’s sake? — Zeph smiled down at her. — Something to do with authority. You take the Afrikaans word for a respected man and it gives — wha’d’you say — confers power on the child. You give him the strength of a baas. —

At the Washing of the Hands in tin basins set out by women he told her she was expected to say a few words to the wife and company. But apart from their own language they understood only Afrikaans, the language of the whites they worked for in that district, and hers was court-room Afrikaans; she did not have the right words for this occasion. — You speak to them.—

A mild reproach. — How do I know what you want to say?—

— I want to say I don’t know what to say.—

— No, come on.—

— Really.—

— They want to know how he died, of what sickness, what happened at the attack, that he was a soldier in Umkhonto, that he was well-thought-of at work, that he was a good man who cared only about his family although he was far away—

— There, you know it all. Tell them you’re saying it in their language for me.—

He became again as he was when he was among his own people at Odensville; the cadence of his voice, his gestures, transformed a fragmented life into wholeness, he knew exactly how to do it, it came to him from within himself in symbiosis with the murmuring group gathered. They understood the tradition and she understood, without words, without tradition, their understanding. It was not true; the son and husband of this place left behind did not think only of his family, he yearned for a girl who had seen things and possessed knowledge he would never have, he did not die peacefully, his body, in attempts made to keep it alive, suffered tortures his interrogators in prison had not thought of. It was not true, in fact, but this stranger she had brought with her made it so beyond evidence. Who was Mrs Stark, herself to some the forbidding eminence of the Legal Foundation, to others the procuress of convenient abortion, to know what was between the young man and the clumsy-bodied young woman with her peasant stance and the classical three lines of beauty round her neck? Who was to know whether or not the sister in charge was right when she said, finally, he doesn’t feel what we’re doing to him?

Vera had cleansed her hands of death, with the others. In the car driving to the city she reflected differently, now. — At least we saw him come back. At least he’s home.—

The sonorous, lyrical, stately persona created by the company in which Zeph had found himself had retired somewhere within where it had its place and would never leave him. He spoke out of what he had perfectly reconciled with it, in his dealings with laws made to manipulate him, and the entry into relationships for which there was no pre-existing formula of hostility or friendship, suspicion or trust; combinations thrown together by compatibilities discovered, side by side, in conflict and in change. — He didn’t want to go back, did he.—

How did Rapulana know? He’d seen him only a few times, first at Odensville and then at the Foundation, and, of course, at the party in Vera’s house. — He’d had something to drink that night … yes … he told me he was going to do what he thought about when he was in prison. He was going to disappear and travel the world, he was going to Cuba — to England, China, specially Cuba — everywhere.—

The end of the joy-ride.

Chapter 18

Lucky to be alive.

Ivan paid the courtesy visit expected of a son’s interest in his mother’s work and the assumed interest of her colleagues in her family; the Foundation is not a business, where directors and staff have no connection outside the purpose of making money. The very nature of their work, concerned with the condition of personal lives in communities, influences their own sense of community. One or two of the older lawyers remembered him as a schoolboy or youth; others, such as Lazar Feldman, exchanged ready-made friendliness established by proxy through their familiarity with his mother. That he looked so like her made this oddly easy. Chatting with him, Lazar remarked how sorry he was to have had to let Vera down over the trip to Oupa’s funeral, he really would have liked to be there.

From the Foundation, Ivan took Vera out to lunch. Just the two of them, the son’s treat, she walking before him to the table he had reserved in the quietest corner of a good restaurant, the succession to clandestine lunches taken with a lover.

— Is this the time when we compare notes? — She was contentedly flippant, using the phrasing he would remember from the days when he came from boarding school and the right moment suddenly arrived for wariness to dissolve, so that they had no age, either of them, moved into knowing each other as an element common to them.

— I was thinking all the time I was there — (he read up and down the wine list, looking for something special) you’re lucky, with the Foundation. They’re such a good crowd, so absolutely dedicated but intelligently tough — you know what I mean? None of the feeling that it’s a refuge for the well-meaning who can’t face the kind of world I work in, can’t face that you have to deal with it, with the Haves, if you’re going to achieve anything for the Have-nots. And the way they value you and you’re so completely absorbed in what you do … lucky.—

— Are you thinking of yourself?—

— Myself? How, myself?—

— Oh I’m not suggesting you haven’t been successful, exceptionally so. But that doesn’t always mean you don’t sometimes think there could have been something else. Something you didn’t know about at the time; time of choice.—

He said it for her: —There’s always something you didn’t know about at the time. Are you going to have meat, then, with that wine? D’you still like calamari so much — we could have a small starter, and a half bottle of white, first. — The habit of discretion in their working lives — his in banking, hers in the confidentiality of the law — tacitly guarded their tongues while the waiter stood by.

— I was thinking about Dad — Ben. What he’s doing. It’s marginal in his life, somehow. He laughs about it. But I wonder. No … I actually see. — At once he sensed intrusion: leaning on the table his mother linked her hands in a single fist and covered her mouth against it. — I don’t know what the centre is. He says this luggage thing is to provide … for the two of you. That’s all.—

— All this concern, it’s something new, with him; age syndrome, turning in on himself. If you live here, the future — not the one you can provide for with suitcases — the future’s more like a pile of bricks. You can only opt to help sort out a few.—

— According to a plan you believe in.—

— Yes. Pretty much.—

— And you’ve got the satisfaction that whatever goes wrong with it, at least what you’re doing now realizes something of it, in advance.—

— Oh— she lifted her head, fanned out her hands — So little, such a dab of cement filling in a corner. Typical that I’m using the old image of a building, while people have nowhere to live.—

— They were telling me, Odensville, what are the others— is it Moutse? — people with the right to live in these places, now. Of course it must be a satisfaction, it’s there with you, in your busyness, your preoccupation — I don’t mean that as a reproach — I see it in your face, everything about you since I’ve been here. But him. In him. None of that, in him. And I’m in London, Annie — well he mourns for Annie, d’you know that, you’d think she’d died — that’s another story. What has he got apart from his damn suitcases?—

She looked up at him to see what he knew.

— Me.—

The waiter arrived with plates ranged along his arm. Another hovered with the censer of a giant pepper-mill. The wine was uncorked, Ivan lifted his glass and mouthed a kiss blown to his mother across the table; —Where are the Indian waiters there used to be when I was a kid? They’re all African now.—

— Moved up a rung on the ladder. They’ve taken the place of whites who used to serve in shops — men’s outfitters and so on. You’re like an old man, reminiscing! That’s what happens when you exile yourself.—

They ate and drank, in the charm each invested in the other during absence. In this variation of meals both had eaten as the opening act of a love affair, there was the same calculation going on of how presumptuous each might be, approaching the other. He judged he had cajoled her sufficiently, in the persona of her small boy become an attractive man, out from behind the line of intrusion set up by her. — You didn’t tell us Feldman didn’t go with you to that funeral. You know you shouldn’t have gone alone.—

— I didn’t go alone. — Head cocked at him.

— Oh. That was sensible. But how is it you didn’t mention Feldman was ill and you were going with someone else? Ben thought you were with someone he trusts, back on that road again.—

— I took along a friend he knows, the man who’s just won the Odendaal case, there couldn’t be anyone safer to be with.—

— But Vera. — He tapped a dance between a knife and fork. — You puzzle me.—

— My darling, how do I puzzle you? — Her face thrust towards him in a smile.

He wasn’t to be turned aside by any ploy of motherly affection. — Why didn’t you let him know it wasn’t Feldman? He thought you were safely with one person, you were with another. When you talked to us about the funeral you didn’t mention Feldman wasn’t there. It’s childish. — He has the right to be critical with her; that’s the kind of edgy relationship both are aware exists between them.

— I don’t know. It’s the usual form of evasion, to say so. Perhaps I’ll find out now you’ve mentioned it.—

Fascinated, he hesitated, sat back in his chair, and then righted himself. He spoke with an intense curiosity. — Do you often lie to him?—

— Is keeping something for yourself lying.—

— I suppose so. Even if you manage to put it that way.—

— And do you?—

— Who to?—

His mother rounded her eyes exaggeratedly, pulled a face: what are the limits of what you will tell me, what can we divine of one another. — Well, the Hungarian.—

He laughed, and then shook his head, down, down, at what had been come upon. — Well yes. As you say, the Hungarian. She wants a child. From me. For instance, there’s that. I tell her no, it’ll spoil what’s between us, I want her to myself. But that’s not what I want. There’s Adam, one hostage enough between me and a woman I couldn’t go on living with.—

— So you don’t envisage going on living with the Hungarian.—

— She’s got a name, Mother! — Eva. No, we get along well but I’m getting old enough to realize what you don’t know at twenty; life isn’t going to end with the catastrophe of hitting the forties, you’re very likely going to have to continue for a long stretch ahead with what — with whom — you take on now. Eva. It’s not like with you and Ben, something for life. I’m not like him — alas, I suppose. He took you away from that first husband of yours, at least that’s what he’s sure he did, I think it’s the basis of his feeling that he belongs to you entirely. You’ve always been and you are all that he has.—

— You can’t belong to someone else. It’s love-making gives the illusion! You may long to, but you can’t. — She stopped, as if the mouthful of wine she swallowed were some potion that would suffuse them both with clarity. — You see, Ben made a great mistake. Choice. — A flick of a glance returned her conspirator to the earlier remark: something not known about at the time. — He gave up everything he needed, in exchange for what he wanted. The sculpture. Even an academic career — all right, it didn’t look brilliant, but he might have been a professor by now, mightn’t he? What d’you think? That wouldn’t have been marginal? He put it all on me. — She was excited to continue by a sense of approaching danger, saying too much; doing exactly that, herself: putting the weight of all this on a son, a grown child. There is a fine limit beyond which a son or daughter may turn away in revulsion. Parents must be defined as such.

— What on you?—

— The whole weight of his life. That love he had. I love him but it’s hard to remember how much I was in love with him. That love affair that started on a holiday in the Drakensberg, it hasn’t moved, for him. It hasn’t been taken up into other things. Children born, friends disappearing in exile, in prison, killings around us, the death of his father in the house, the whole country changing. It hasn’t moved. Not even his confusion over Annie has shifted it, not even your divorce, because both he’s understood only in relation to his own feelings in the Drakensberg, he hasn’t any other criterion. The violence that was always there, pushing people out into the veld, beating them up at police stations, and the gangster violence that’s taking the opportunities of change, now, that’s killed Oupa Sejake — even that he understands now through me, it’s because it’s something that happened to me, it’s the bullet that went through my leg. Love. There’s been so much else, since then. Ivan, I can’t live in the past.—

— I wish I were nearer. For him. Because I always loved you best, as a kid.—

An offering of complicity she did not choose to see, held out to her.

She was examining him lingeringly. — Yes, so far away. You are his favourite. His only child, now. That’s how it turned out.—

Theirs was the last table still occupied but they sat on unnoticing, accepting coffee, more and more coffee, like lovers reluctant to part.

— You don’t need anything, Mother.—

In the clatter of waiters clearing tables he touched her cheek to soften what she might take as judgment.

— On the contrary, I’m finding the answer presents itself before the need. I know only then that it existed.—

They went out into the street roused with wine and confidences, laughing.

‘Do I lie to him often?’

How alike we are, it doesn’t end with the mask that is the face. He knows me because he himself was the first lie. One day I’ll be so old we’ll even talk about that. And he will say, I knew all along, although he couldn’t possibly know except through the code of genes and the language of blood.

Every time Vera leaves Ben out — isn’t that simply a different kind of unfaithfulness? Different from leaving him out by making love with someone else, that’s all. And just as after those times of love-making in One-Twenty-One, she ‘makes it up’ to him. Not by repairing the omission of telling him Rapulana instead of Feldman had accompanied her back along that road where she, too, could have met her death and left him to live without her — the trivial omission, as it could have been presented, of one name for another. When Ivan went off to London she asked Ben to come with her to Cape Town, where there were problems for her to solve at the Foundation’s branch office. Ivan was gone; —We can see something of Annie. — If he was lonely, he must be reminded that he had a daughter.

Annie insisted that they stay with Lou and her. Vera and Ben had never been in this common household. It was everything Annie’s parents’ was not. Vera’s house, that Ben had entered to live among the wartime makeshift provided by her first husband’s parents, donated beds and mismatched chairs, was aesthetically unified — if it could be called that — by coffee-stained newspapers and journals where fish-moth scuttled, grotesque woodcuts and figurines bought at charity sales of African art, photographs of the children who once lived there, poster souvenirs of travel, bureaux lacking handles, box files and old utensils that were meant to be thrown away but might come in useful. From this collage of hazard Annie had taken what had been consciously created within the house, the female torsos Ben had sculpted years ago. They were encountered in a Victorian house balanced on a steep street, one at the archway into the livingroom and the other at the centre of a small patio created by knocking down a wall, Lou explained. Old Cape furniture with the patina of acorns smelled of beeswax. There was a single huge abstract painting that suggested the sea. Flowers filled the fireplaces and plants trailed in the remodelled bathrooms. The kitchen was ranged like a surgery with glass-fronted and steel-topped equipment. Indolent cats slept, hetaerae on a velvet chaise-longue, in the room Ben and Vera were allotted. Whisky in a cut-crystal decanter and ice in an Italian-designed insulated bucket; bedside books, Thomas Bowler views of the nineteenth-century Cape, and a collection of poetry by black women writers. The Bowler, presumably, was a guess at what Ben would appreciate, and the other, for Vera, chosen by Lou on the principle that the lives of blacks were Vera’s particular province and that women ought to be, if they weren’t.

Ben was alarmed to notice that Vera limped slightly going to bed up the narrow staircase with its perfectly restored brass stair-rods. — You were all right at home, what’s gone wrong—

— There aren’t any stairs at home, are there!—

Annie was called to examine her mother’s leg while he stood by ignoring dismissal of his alarm, his frown turned away to ward off the example of the young man who had been with her on the road and died of injuries from which, like her, he was supposed to be recovered. — There’s probably some slight shortening in the tendons, really nothing. It’s inevitable, Daddy, the human body replaces, repairs, and in some instances it can adapt one function to substitute for another, but nothing’s ever quite the way it was.—

— I’m not even aware of it, I told you, Ben. Thank god I’m not a ballet dancer and I’m too old to enter a beautiful-legs contest, eh. I haven’t worn anything but trousers for years— nobody sees those scars.—

In the bedroom, naked, she smiled at him as he lay in the bed. — Nobody but you. — Nakedness in men and women who have lived together a long time is clothed by familiarity, a garment of self. Now she presented her body before him as nude again, consciously so. If that body was damaged by births and time, so that vanity would save her from presenting it before anyone else, for him (there’s the advantage) it took the beautiful form of its known capacities, the flesh remembered everything between them. Vera seduced Ben again, for all that she withheld from him, she flung herself into his embrace, took the force of his entry into her body as a diver plunges to emerge unharmed from under a high surf. They were making love the way a man and woman do, in this house where, on the other side of a wall, two women lay enlaced. The awareness became a kind of excitement, a defiance for her, an assertion for him.

In the early morning they stood against the wooden balustrade of the verandah outside the room. The black velvet curtain of mountain held back the day, breathing smoke from its folds. As the sun splayed over the top it rounded up in light a flock of pines huddled like sheep on its flank. — When did Annie take those torsos from the house?—

— Oh, the last time she came. After the old man died, don’t you remember? She had them packed and sent down by road transport.—

— I know nothing about it.—

— But she must have asked you?—

— She asked you?—

— Of course, and I understood you’d agreed, I thought you’d given them to her.—

— I would never have given those to her.—

— I can’t believe she’d do that.—

— Can hardly ask to have them back now.—

— No don’t. It must have been because she wanted them so badly, she thinks your work was so good.—

Do you lie to him often. Vera knew that Lou had admired them, Lou had thought they were — how did she put it — exceptionally explicit. Lou was the one who had chosen the paintings, collected the old furniture, designed and put into effect the adaptation of an old house to express a chosen way of life without disturbing the shell of its style, formed to contain a way of life the women lovers rejected. The quaint wooden valances on the verandahs and the white-painted wrought-iron fence were in place, but the nursery was some sort of private retreat the two women shared and where others were never invited; the family bedrooms, with the exception of a single guest-room, had been knocked into one grand space, the room where the heart of the house stood, a great low Oriental bed under a canopy mounted on carved posts adapted from Zanzibar lintels.

Ben had created Vera for himself as body, a torso without a head. As such it was (indeed, connoisseur Lou had observed) exceptionally explicit of the power of the body. It had no identity beyond body, and so the body that was Vera, that Ben could not live without, was transformed into the expression of desire between woman and woman. In Annie’s house the headless torsos were become household gods.