None to Accompany Me

Chapter 19

Not now, not now. The day would come — no need to be a prophet, a little political nous is all that’s needed — when Didymus would be resuscitated from beyond his lifetime as one of the band of Jacobin heroes who had done terrible things to save liberation in a terrible time. But for the present his greatest service was for him to be forgotten. The chroniclers of history are not those who make it; sufficient honour is being done him in giving him the task of writing the history of struggle in exile. A university press in the United States would publish it and advertise it in literary journals among other books of specialist interest, black studies, women’s studies, homosexual studies, theses on child abuse, drug abuse, holes in the ozone layer. Friends like Vera Stark asked how the book was getting on as if showing attention to a child by enquiring about its progress at school, and when he encountered members of the multi-party Forum on which Sibongile served they absently, looking past his head at someone who interested them more, shouted ‘That’s great, that’s great’ before he could finish answering their enquiry.

He attended sessions of a Patriotic Front Conference as an observer. He certainly could observe Sibongile at her official seat while she could not always have made out where he had found a place for himself. Being there gave him the opportunity to take aside someone with whom he needed to arrange a meeting— hardly call such exchanges between old comrades an interview — to gather or verify information for his writing task. He listened to the speakers with a supplementary decoder of his own running behind the words. He knew where the vocabulary, the turn of phrase of the Communists and nationalist radicals had been revised, by closeness of accession to power, to moderation in provisions of state control, and where the cautious thought of the moderates assumed boldness in sensing that, with power rising under their feet, advocation of half-measures would topple them. Sincere words? If sincerity calls all compromise into question, what (Sibongile had been right) had he been doing, when first he came home and was still on the National Executive, wining and dining, that’s the phrase, with the Boers? What then was the whole philosophy, the business—yes — that’s what it is — of negotiation about?

Sitting there, the observer experienced drastic shifts of response, his body suddenly warmed or drew into itself coldly with the proceedings. After tea break, when men who had blown up power installations joked among themselves, hailing each other as terrorists, and Anglican churchmen ate cake with an imam, the Chair was taken by a man who, during the period when the umfundisi called on a white friend for coffee, had apologized to the Government for sitting down in a train on a seat reserved for white people. From behind his disguises in the person of the umfundisi and others, the observer had followed in the newspapers of the time cartoons depicting the man’s craven apology: Ag sorry my baas Mr Prime Minister Mr President. And followed the scorn of the liberation movements towards this man who had grovelled so that his white masters, poking at him with the toe of a shoe, could let him get up and continue to serve as Government-appointed representative of the people in his particular region of the country. Now he smiled the blind smile of church ministers, before the assembly of men who had survived guerrilla war, men and women who had endured prison and exile, and he spoke of ‘our struggle’. He spoke of ‘the significance of this great assembly’, of ‘my comrades in the struggle of the past, now sharing the heavy responsibility of the future, and bringing to it the same courage and dedication we roused in ourselves when we were fighting the evil of the regime. My Brothers, so we go forward …’

Didymus gazed from the man to those grouped around him. Men with whom Didymus had been in detention, known the clandestine contacts of living as moles; with whom he had barely escaped being blown up in Safe Houses; at his wife, with whom he had moved from exile to exile on different continents. A disbelief twitched dully in his hands and legs. Distress; he looked about him for someone to blurt out at: the shit, that shit. What was that man doing up there among people he had shamed by grovelling before the white man?

Didymus knew: what he could not accept. A constituency. That’s what the man was. A community of people we can’t do without, in this conglomerate we call unity. But every time he looked at him disgust rose and had to be suppressed.

If I could clear my head as you clear your throat.

Others were speaking and he had not heard.

His attention drifted back to them. A white man held the microphone curiously, as if this were a gesture of allegiance, a raised fist or the hand that rests on a bible to testify. Didymus knew him, of course, although he was a strangely fat and hairless version of himself, now. The result of some drug. He had been ill — some said an incurable illness — and often absent from his place on the National Executive.

He was saying — what? He was answering the unheard Didymus. — We’ve made many compromises with the past. We’ve swallowed the stone of many indignities. We have formed relationships we never would have thought possible or necessary. (There was a fidget of alarm along the row of delegates.) But if we really want to serve our people, if we want to convince them, in every hut and shack and hostel, if we want to convince them that when they make their cross on a bit of paper in our first one-man-one-vote elections they really may have the chance to be led by and represented by honesty, by men and women who are not seeking power to sleep in silken sheets, to grant themselves huge salaries, to take and give bribes, to embezzle and to cover up for others who steal, to disperse secret funds of public money buying contracts that are never to be fulfilled — if we’re going to ask our people to put trust in a new constitution we have first to put our lives on the table to vow integrity, we have to swear publicly, here and now, and entrench this in a constitution, that we will not take up with power what the previous regime has taken.—

Of course Didymus knew him well. He was a man in whom there were depths Didymus knew in himself, dangerous depths it was difficult to believe, knowing their history, a white man in this country could occupy. And yet there had been some, and what they had gained, for whites, was something most white people would never acknowledge because they would never understand. It was through such people that whites had gained acceptance for the future in spite of their past; it was through such a man that colour and race could count for nothing and the delegates in their seats were of different skins, instead of all black. Would the whites ever realize that? Such a man sets a precedent others like Didymus’s good friends the Starks find spirit enough to follow, whether they’re conscious of this lead or not. Such a man wakes what has been buried by fear and the deliberate function of custom, called, as if humans were dogs at obedience class, conditioning.

— … we are not going to pay for private planes to take our ministers on holiday overseas. We are not going to foot hotel bills for their families, their lovers and mistresses. We are not going to give our members of parliament allowances to run Mercedes-Benzes. We are not going to disguise, cover up, label ‘top secret’ spending of public money the public won’t know about. They had their Broeders, let us not use our Brothers the same way. Let us tell our people, and mean it — we shall not lie, and cheat, and steal from them. Without this, I tell you, all the provisions of a constitution we are debating so carefully are meaningless!—

He ended with a sudden simple gesture, as if remembering himself, passing his free hand over the dome of his skull, where the pale spores of chemically blasted hair were a fuzz of light.

Such a man has been dangerous because in the depths of self — his and what Didymus knows as his own — is the idea of necessary danger. And this implies wiliness; the man has lied, prevaricated, denied the facts when there was something to be gained in struggle: but never for personal profit, never that!

This morality will remain a mystery for ever. It is the morality, beyond the old justification of ends and means, he and Didymus knew rather in the sense the bible uses of ‘knowing’ a woman: they knew it from entering it completely. But what the man was saying now seemed to have nothing to do with all that. What he was saying now was — terminal, yes. He spoke from beyond his politics; but it was not his terminal illness that spoke, it was the final conclusion beyond politics. It came up from a depth dredged by a whole life, beyond the one he and Didymus both knew. Pragmatic, clever, he would never have spoken like this before. This was not his rhetoric, it was his message.

Whether the assembly of his peers, whether the observers round Didymus knew that — there was applause because his status as one of the heroes always drew applause, and the new heroism, of his resistance to illness, merited it anew. But no one picked up the microphone — the public amplification of his voice from the Mount by which he had sworn testimony — to take up what he had said. The assembly passed on to other matters.

Didymus wanted to go up after the session and say to his old comrade-in-arms — what? But the man was apart from the general throng, apparently drafting something in a corner with two others. An approach looked like curiosity. Or envy. Once there has been rejection, nothing is certain, even between old intimates.

The giant sky cracked its knuckles far off in an approaching assault. Under the bedroom lamp Sibongile was sewing back the loose metal catch on the neckband of his black tie. Her eyebrows were lifted stoically at the last-minute task; he was to accompany her to a reception given at the close of the Patriotic Front Conference by one of the new embassies opened in Pretoria. He looked at his feet, shiny in black shoes acquired along with homecoming. — What a loud silence when Dave spoke this morning. What did it mean?—

Sibongile had a way of breaking off whatever she happened to be doing and staring into a statement she found suspect.

— What should it mean?—

— I expect someone to stand up and support a speech like that, I’d expect enthusiasm for it, coming from everyone there.—

She went on sewing. — There was plenty of applause.—

— For him. It’s always done — applaud Chris, applaud Joe, applaud Dave. They’re hailed for what they are—whatever they might say.—

— Of course the applause was support for what he said! You’re getting morbid.—

— But not a word of comment, not a word, not a single reference, as if he’d never spoken at all. As if no one wanted to hear.—

— Because everyone’s committed against corruption, no need to jump up and shout ‘I agree’, everyone believes it, everyone takes it for granted. Except you.—

— Except Dave. He thought you ought to hear.—

At the open window the sky thickened as if with inky murk expelled by an octopus. The drawn breath of the coming storm stilled birds, crickets, everything; the breath was cold against summer’s surfaces — leaf, cloth, metal, skin. It seemed, in the small room, to be created by Sibongile, it was her chill of annoyance, the presage of the storm came to him as the realization that she took ‘you’ to be directed at her instead of, as he had spoken it, the entire assembly. In place of hastening to reassure her he was overcome — with the sweep of a sudden gust that ran before the storm, slamming the window — by resentment. A lit fuse-wire of lightning racing across the sky struck and the house lights failed, providing a domestic diversion; Mpho stumbled in from her room with a shriek. She giggled and nuzzled her father. They hugged. He reassured her teasingly in Xhosa; Mpho had learnt something of an African language by now but she would never get accustomed to African storms like an African-born girl.

On the slow drive tunnelled through rain where their headlights poked a direction, tapes of old Dizzy Gillespie recordings, the kind of music that had accompanied their life together wherever they were, repaired fragility between husband and wife; an old remedy — if only this had been a lovers’ quarrel. Sibongile allowed herself a gesture from some television serial repertoire, straightening his black bow-tie with an appreciative expression as they entered the residence of the ambassador recently arrived from the Far East. How confidently and attractively Sibongile, in African robes and turban she wore for such occasions, picked up whatever conventions of ceremony and protocol came from different cultures! The kind of contacts they had had in exile around the world as obligation and privilege of various positions he held there might have been more important but were less social; a liberation movement in exile may be received secretly by foreign ministers, commissars, army and Secret Service generals whose self-interest (shared ideology, future access to raw materials, trade privileges, military co-operation, expansion of spheres of influence) in the defeat of a particular regime offers support to the liberation movement, but neither supplicant nor donor, for reasons of security or their other alliances, had ever wanted these deals displayed in the disguise of full dinner dress Didymus wore now.

Sibongile was the one more suited to present roles. Moving from group to group about the room, she paused with equal amiability among members of the white Government, comrades from the Movement, and a loud huddle that included the sometime apologist for having sat in a white’s seat in a train. Now Didymus heard her familiar singing rise of voice as she joked with the man, drawing attention to his resemblance to the huge ink-and-wash panel of a Chinese sage on the wall behind him, his wispy beard and straggle of hair over his collar therefore referred to without offence, flatteringly. Delighted, taking the reference as to his wisdom, he was making some remark Didymus could not catch, and put his arm in avuncular flirtatiousness round her bare shoulders, half-complimenting, half-patronizing femininity.

While Didymus stood talking to others, in his mind he walked across the room and pulled her away, punched the face with the smile that had forfeited self-respect in apology for what should have been taken as right, and slapped the woman who tolerated his touch. Slapped Sibongile. As if Sibongile were a woman craven as the man, and would accept restriction on her actions; as if he, Didymus, belonged to the tradition of men who took it as their right to hit their women. Sibongile had been, was his comrade-in-arms, something along with and beyond his woman. The fantasy enacting within him had no sense or usefulness in real time. Sibongile was on a mission, in action suited to particular circumstances, as often he had been. He said nothing to her of the incident. He was tender to her when they got home that night. Sibongile had the feeling he thought he had to atone to her for something — something that had been said to her or about her? That she had been wounded — had a wound of public life (by now she knew well enough about those) she herself was not yet aware of, but that would evidence itself, throb in harm, in time, sometime? — What did you think of it?—

— Of what?—

— Well, the ambassador, the evening, the whole do—

He answered in her language, that they used in intimacy. — Just like all the others now. Exchange compliments with foreigners for trade deals, alliances, maybe arms if we should need such things again. Eat and drink with friends and enemies even if once they drank your blood. Our fathers did it under a tree but they had their impis ready. (In English:) Public Relations. —

She unwound the turban, feeling through her freed hair as if for some inkling of what he saw had happened to her. Nothing; one of his mysteries. — I knew you were bored.—

But the fantasy sprang from convictions, however unreasonable and inappropriate, outdated, they might be, that could not leave him. He had lived a whole life by them; whole lives, different personae. Traitors come large and small, and those who commit petty treachery, apologizing to the enemy, abasing, licking backsides, are no more fit company than the informers who infiltrate a liberation army and are confined in camps where no one may admit to being an interrogator, no one may admit to knowledge of what that meant. What has to be done in war is terrible and if this is to be forgotten then so has that committed by traitors — that’s it? Yes, that is it.

This was Didymus’s mystery. His moods, the contradiction he could not speak of, turning inside himself without the acceptance that is resolution. The old silences that were necessary between him and his wife when he came back to their exile home from a mission, the weeks and months he could not speak of, had returned between them although now they were really at home, together.

And then something happened. Human affairs move in natural uncertainty always, deaths and lives and eras end in illness, old age — and accident. And accident is exactly that: something unplanned, unforeseen by anyone.

Assassination is planned. Assassination is determined. There is no uncertainty; pure intention. Assassination axes jaggedly through the fabric of life, the bearable and borne, tears the assuaging progression of past into present and future. Murder strikes the lives corollary to an individual; assassination rips the life of a country, laying bare ganglia that civil institutions have been in the process of covering with flesh. Assassination is a gash.

The death of an old leader can be understood and taken into continuity in the sense that his work was done. The assassination of the young leader, outside his gate, that day like any other — there’s no sense to be made of it except in the mind of the one who held the gun, no sense although the priests and ministers may speak of commending him to God’s keeping, the prayers speak of laying him to rest, and the funeral orators assure that his spirit lives on. His place and work was on earth, here, now, not in God’s keeping, wherever that might be situated; he was for action, not rest, and the survival of his spirit is claimed in many distortions to the purpose of the crazy pleasure of looting, burning, and killing, licence taken in the name of revenge for his death.

But the irreplaceable, no matter how obviously so, must not be so, even in the confusion of loss must be replaced. With his assassination the meaning of the position of the young leader in negotiations becomes clearer than it has ever been; his presence carried the peculiar authority of the guerrilla past in working for peace. If men like him wanted it, who could doubt that it was attainable? If a man like him was there to convince his young followers, could they fail to listen to him?

Didymus was one of those who put on again the battle dress he had worn in the camps and the bush, a persona that was no disguise but his ultimate self, and bore the weight of the coffin on his shoulder. He had read in the paper that morning a letter signed with a white man’s name that rejoiced in revenge that the man being carried to his grave had lived by the sword and deserved to die by the sword. He had been angered by the letter, but now, with sorrow palpable on his shoulder, he felt peace in himself and for the man he carried, at having had to accept the necessities of living by the sword prepared to die, as he had been, by the sword.

In the days following the assassination of the young leader, when the gap left by it had to be closed and a successor chosen, he and his kind were sought out and consulted.

Didymus had worn the battle dress again, emerged out of his past. The day had come — aborted from the logic of history by the intentions of tragedy — too soon.

Chapter 20

Empty houses. FOR SALE. Estate agents’ portable signs propped at corners, arrows pointing: ON SHOW. Clues in the paper-chase of flight. On Sunday afternoons the cars clustered at an address are not the sign of a party but another form of diversion, curiosity to see what other people are abandoning— not all who follow the estate agents’ signs are prospective buyers.

It has happened a number of times in the neighbourhood where Vera Stark has continued to live in the house that is one of the only two evidences of an early alliance. The Sharpeville massacre in the Sixties, the black student uprising in the Seventies, now the assassination; although all these dire events did not lay a hand upon the occupants of the white suburbs (only the violent robberies against which they try to protect themselves with walls, alarms, dogs and revolvers do so), these events literally send them packing. In commercial indices in a time of recession, the international movers’ firms report unprecedented growth, their competitive advertising campaigns include jingles on television and radio.

FOR SALE. ON SHOW. Are these suburban museums, exhibiting a way of life that is ended? Is that why the once houseproud occupants are leaving? Or as they flee do they really have to fear for their lives — in the constitution, Bill of Rights, decrees that are going to change life?

Vera and Ben Stark drive past the signs on their way to the airport, not to see someone go, but someone arrive.

Several months before, there was another letter from Ivan in London. One unlike the short notes and postcards which supplemented phone calls and kept awareness of one another’s existence, the slack familial liens, hooked up. After the first page the letter broke off and had been continued under a new date: a letter the writer did not know quite how to write, whose reception he was unsure of. It was addressed to them both, this time. Vera handed it to Ben. A gesture to how much Ivan meant to him.

— I’ll read it out.—

— No don’t — I can wait. — She was opening other mail, tearing up pamphlets, putting aside bills, but as he read he put a hand out to her. In response, she moved to read over his shoulder as he sat.

— Oh my god.—

— Ben wait, let’s get the whole picture.—

But he was drawing breath through pinched nostrils, he held his hand, stayed, at the page.

The boy, the son Adam, had been arrested for drunken driving, suspended sentence, but only after Ivan had made representations to the magistrate, and then the boy had been arrested again, his third offence for speeding, and lost his driver’s licence.

Vera did not find it such a tragedy … she spent every day with people in great anxiety whose youngsters threw stones, couldn’t be got back to school, defied the police in marches and sit-ins, and risked being shot dead. Thinking of what sort of hazards were likely in London streets, she offered — At least it isn’t drugs.—

They read on. Ivan put the blame ‘mostly — I’m aware I’m a weekend father, and sometimes not even that’ on the boy’s mother. To put it bluntly, Adam is too intelligent for her. She can’t meet him on his own ground and so he does what he likes with her — and for himself. She makes scenes. She phones me around the world, always these urgent messages to get in touch with her at once. I think god knows what’s happened to Adam, and then it’s the same tears on the phone, he won’t listen to her, he came home five in the morning, he won’t bring his friends in for a meal, he wears jeans torn over the backside, what must she do. And it’s finally not a matter of what she must do, it’s what I must, I see that more clearly every day, if Adam isn’t to become at best a drop-out and at worst land in jail.

Here the letter had been put aside, like Vera’s bills. Three days later, Ivan began again. I said I must do something. Of course it’s obvious — you’ll be thinking. I should try and get custody for myself. (She has it until he’s eighteen.) There’s the strong evidence that the mother is not a fit guardian — the arrests testify to that, eh, Vera, you’re the lawyer in the family, but of course this kind of case, divorce wrangles, are not quite your thing. And these days the preference of the youngster himself for one parent counts, in the courts; I’m pretty sure he’d want to come to me, though not for the best reasons, I’m afraid. He’s bored with her nagging, with being expected to bring his friends home to chat with her over tea (that’s what she really wants, she has never got over her girlishness, sees herself as one of them, and you know how the young hate that — you never did, never, Vera, a great advantage of the little time you had for us when we were adolescent). He knows I’m away a lot, and he’d be on the loose. And he’s old enough, worldly enough to see that as I live with a woman I’m not married to I couldn’t very well make some big moral stand over his relations with girls — and he seems to have many.

Which brings me to a tremendous worry. The usual. AIDS. He’s had all the information and warnings (they educate even small children as well as adolescents at schools here) and I’ve added mine, told him that as he never goes out without his credit card he must never go out without his condom — but … What I’m getting at I’d better come right out with. If his mother is not fit to look after him at this stage in his life, neither — and it’s hard for me to admit it — am I. I think he needs time to mature, away from both of us, before he goes to university or trains for whatever else it is he wants to do (as yet undecided, of course; that’s part of the trouble). Once he’s in training for a career and living independently — I’ll set him up in a flat or something — I’m sure he and I will get on and become closer. (It’s not that we don’t get on well now, it’s that I know I can’t give him what he doesn’t know he needs.) So I’m going to ask you if he couldn’t come to you, to the house at home, our old place that doesn’t refuse anyone or anything, not that I know of, Ma. I have a feeling his mother will consent, though she’d raise all hell if I wanted to move him in with the Hungarian and me. If Vera and you, Dad, would let him live with you for, say, a year, I think he’d gain a new perspective on his life. If Ben could find him something to do, some work — no offence, Vera, but quite honestly I don’t want him getting out of one kind of mess here and getting into another kind because of becoming involved in politics. Anything you’d offer him wouldn’t be without that risk. One bullet in a leg’s enough. So no good works, please, no brave works. He doesn’t belong in that country, he doesn’t owe it anything. He did fairly well in his A levels and, at my insistence, is taking another at a crammers to be sure he’ll be well qualified to get into a university eventually. This course will be over soon. Ideally, he should go to you then. The handwriting became larger and wide across the page. No immediate hurry. Think about it. Do it for me. I can ask you because I love you, Ben, Vera.

We can talk now.

This is something they can talk about. Now; any time. What concerns Ivan occupies Ben’s attention and energy openly. He remembered Vera’s dismayed silence when — some time ago, he’d been thinking about this solution for the boy even then — there was the divorce and he suggested they might take the boy for a while. Ben rose, turned her to him and with his index fingers lifted her short hair where it lay behind each ear as if it were the long tresses he used to loop back to study her face when it was new to him. He kissed her, one of his long embraces, sensuous as they always became at any contact with her, the letter hidden in one hand of the arms that held her. — It’ll be like having Ivan back again. It’ll be all right.—

They talked many times, many nights. Ben’s practical propositions of how they tactfully could take care of the boy for Ivan—

— He’s not a boy—

— how they could make arrangements for his needs and anticipate his preferences—

— Arrange our lives.—

Vera’s sense of resentment. Half-defiant, half-ashamed, she had never realized how much her (what was it?) sense of privacy had grown. How could someone like herself whose preoccupations of work were so public, so intertwined with other lives, have at the same time this sense? She did not know, could not decide whether it was protective, necessary (she saw how those who, unlike herself, really were public figures, were surrounded by piranhas of public adulation), or whether it was the early sign of some morbid onset, like the first unnoticed symptom of a loss of physical function. It was linked in an obscure way — she chased it in random dissociation down labyrinths of the subconscious — with the voice that had come up in her several times, the impulse she had had to ask: What am I to do with this love?

Ivan, Ivan. Her double (how Ben loves them both, her in him and him in her); her invader. He had germinated in her body, interloper from an episode into her definitive life. And now he sent his representative, his replacement, for her to ‘make arrangements’ for in that life, over again.

Her daily life. This became the irritable obsessive expression of her emotions; daily life, she challenged and argued with Ben over details that astonished him, housewifely niggles of anticipated disruptions of petty routines she had no more thought worth discussing than she would have needed deliberation about brushing her teeth. Young men always dumped bundles of dirty clothes about; Esther Dhlomo, who came to wash and iron once a week, would have to be engaged to come twice. The kind of simple meals Ben was satisfied to eat and Vera quickly cooked when she came home from the Foundation; a young man would want red meat. And the telephone? He would be on the phone for hours, no one would be able to reach her. It would be necessary to apply well in advance for another line, have a phone installed in the room he occupied.

Ben countered all these problems and was only occasionally impatient. He smiled, offering Vera the bonus, in the life of parents of adults, of what was surely an empty space in that life about to be filled. — He’ll have Ivan’s old room.—

What pleased Ben as a destined occupancy, a heritage binding son to father, Vera recoiled from. With a sudden switch of her emotions in an insight: she had been seeing the son as the father, but Ivan was what Adam was being rescued from.

Ivan’s room; yes, because it had become the room of Annick and her woman lover. A room that imposed no succession upon a male. So there he could be himself, whatever that might turn out to be.

Past the signs.

A powdery Transvaal day at the end of summer drought rested the eye. Pale friable grass flattened at the highwayside, fine dust pastel upon leaves and roofs pressed under the sky night had breathed on and polished. Driving in quiet to the airport together, something more than a truce in their opposing anticipations of arrival came upon Ben and Vera. He put the seal of his hand in her lap; upon not only the contention that set them one against the other in acceptance of Ivan’s proposal — Ivan’s blackmail, for Vera; his right, and proof of love, for Ben. Also upon all that had broken between them over their years, and hairline cracks where the impossibility of knowing another being had impacted, despite confidences, the exchange of the burdens of self Vera put so much value on in entry to and acceptance of the body they had experienced together countless times since initiation in the mountains. She, who had been hostilely apprehensive, was serene; Mrs Stark of the Foundation had trained Vera that once a circumstance has no chance of avoidance it must be accepted without further capacity for conflict and loss of energy. Ben was the one whose eager anticipation of receiving Ivan’s son had become apprehension. Yet there was an atmosphere between them as if they were sharing one diastole and systole in existence that may come briefly between people who have been living together a long time, and disappears, impossible to hold on to or recapture by any intention or will. This bubble of existence was trapped within the car’s isolation — airconditioning, locked doors and closed windows — from the landscape they could see: that landscape was not innocent. There were shootings along the highways and roads every day, attacks like the one that had killed Oupa, shots in the cross-fire between rival political groups, ambushes by gangs representing themselves as revolutionaries. Vera had said to Ben, when final dates for the boy’s arrival were being discussed, that Ivan should be told of the risks his son would be subject to, the ordinary risks of every-day in this country, this time. Ben was ashamed of distrust of her motives. To him it was unthinkable that Vera, who had chosen him so openly, could ever be devious, but he had written soberly to Ivan, a constriction in his fingers at the idea that this might mean the boy would not be sent, after all. Although Ivan must have known that, unlike any risks he admonished his mother not to put his son to by finding him employment in her circles, these risks were not ones that anyone could arrange to avoid, he replied he was sure his parents would take good care of the boy. I only hope there won’t be a last minute objection from his mother because she hears something … But then she never did take much interest in what was going on in the world. Whatever Vera’s motives had been, at this reply she was concerned that Ben (his dark head bent, considering) might not become aware of how determined Ivan was to get rid of the boy. She somehow owed Bennet his illusions — thought of him as Bennet again, when seeking to honour this debt.

As they walked from the parking ground to the airport terminal he laughed jerkily with nerves and remarked it was a pity it was too early for a drink.

— Well, why not? Let’s have one anyway. D’you think the bar’ll be open? Yes! — what d’you feel like? — She laughed with him while they suggested to one another what it was appropriate to drink at eleven in the morning ‘like a couple of alkies’. —Gin and tonic? — No, that’ll make me have to go and pee just as the plane lands. — Sherry, brown sherry, when I was a young girl that was regarded as a suitably mild tipple and I don’t remember it being diuretic.—

No prancing, singing, ululating surge pressing to the barriers for the appearance of these tour groups arriving and travellers returning from sightseeing holidays and business trips instead of exile. No banners; travel agents listlessly holding cards with the names of Japanese, Germans, French and Taiwanese they had come to escort to their hotels. No children conceived in strange lands, tossed home from hands to hands; only small Indian boys dwarfed in men’s miniature suits and little white girls wearing the duplicate of their mothers’ flowered tights, chasing about families patient as cattle, chewing their cud-gum while waiting to greet grandfathers back from Mecca and fathers back from business deals on the other hemisphere. Ben and Vera’s passenger came out among the first to emerge. There he was, guiding a trolley unhurriedly while others urged past him, a tall boy with a bronze ponytail switching as he casually looked around. Ben did not move, taking in this first moment, first sight, in emotion. It was Vera who rose on the balls of her feet to wave and smile. Now the boy steered, careening the trolley, for them. They had seen him only less than a year before, in London, he couldn’t have changed much, the same — it seemed to Vera — outdated Sixties style, the ear-ring, the long hair; apparently the hippies had retreated sufficiently far in history to inspire a revival of the way they looked even if their flowered path had become strewn everywhere with guns, their potsmoking dreams had become Mafia drug cartels, and their sexual freedom had been ended, more horribly than any conventional taboos ever could have decreed, by a fatal disease. Only his jaw had changed. Facing them now, he had the squared angle from the joint beneath the ear of a handsome adult male, it was only with his back turned that, ponytail curling on his shoulders, he could have been mistaken for a girl. When they embraced there was the snag of a night’s beard on his skin.

He leaned forward from the back seat of the car chattering in a London accent, well-educated but slightly Cockney, telling them of the enormously fat man who had overflowed the armrest in the plane, and how in the middle of the night he’d chatted up the cabin attendant, not the steward who’d said he couldn’t do anything about it but the girl, to find him another place— and bumped up to business class it was, too! With his air of zest and confidence it seemed he was arriving on holiday. He had never been in his father’s home country before; the woman beside him in business class was going all over the show, Kruger Park, Okavango, the Cape — he was certainly looking forward to getting around a bit. The mood prevailed among the three of them while he was shown his room and Ben opened a bottle of champagne before the special dinner Vera had prepared.

After dinner there was the first of the awkward hours that were to follow each night in the next weeks. Vera customarily went to her private place, the enclosed stoep which was her study, in the evening, and Ben read in the living-room. Although the young man had just spent thirteen hours in a plane he was not tired, he would never be tired at night, he wandered about the living-room looking at books and pictures, picking up newspapers and the art journals Ben subscribed to, the Foundation’s pamphlets and offprints of articles about land laws and removals that overflowed from Vera’s study; he walked out into the night and rounded the limits of the garden. Vera at the living-room window saw him standing at the gate before the streetlights webbed in trees, the blur of an all-night neon sunset burning, away over the city, with the stillness of one listening to the turbines of life sounding distantly: a captured animal pacing its new enclosure, seeing and hearing an unknown freedom, out there.

Kruger, the Okavango, the Cape. — Of course we’ll do some travelling together — naturally — but first I have to find you some sort of work. Have to be a responsible grandfather … What would you like to do? I can’t promise to come up with it exactly, but I’m prepared to try.—

— D’you notice how the people we meet think I’m your son — you don’t look much like my grandfather, Ben!—

Vera broke in with a cry. — And me? I suppose I certainly look like a grandmother!—

— Well, do you dye his hair for him? How come it’s still black?—

This kind of light sparring was the initial communication between Vera and the boy, Adam. — It’s always been black, black, never changed. Just as it was when I first saw him. — The boy doesn’t ask where that was, the youth of someone who is a grandmother is something unimaginable. But her remark succeeds in bringing a smile to Ben. — There are white ones if you look closely enough.—

— What’d I like to do? Now what would I like to do? Vera? Ben? People are always telling me what I ought to do, I’m not used to these big decisions. — The three were sitting in the garden; he was at the age when he could sprawl in the sun for hours, perhaps just growing, completing the physical transition to adulthood, his penis secretly stirring under the warmth.

— That’s why I’m asking.—

— But I really don’t know. — Useless to tell them, hitch the road to Kruger, the Okavango, the Cape; even she, who was holding him in a look as if she knew, smiling with a quirk to the side of her mouth, would not let him go. She might have: but she wanted to please her husband. He had been quick to see that his own presence in this house was some sort of gift to his grandfather, she didn’t really want this grandson there. Yet he’d taken a liking to her; their sparring was an admission that she liked him, too, while both were aware he was not welcome. — Maybe I could do something at Vera’s offices, what she tells about the place sounds quite interesting. I’d meet people.—

— That’s out.—

He looked from Ben to Vera. She stirred in don’t-ask-me amusement.

— Ivan specifically didn’t want that.—

— Ben, surely Ivan’s told him.—

— No I swear to you! He told me nothing.—

— Because I got shot in the leg. He thinks anything connected with the Foundation’s likely to put you in danger.—

— What crap! I could be blown up by an IRA bomb in London, couldn’t I?—

— The incidence isn’t quite the same. Vera escaped with her life. Living here is dangerous, even this garden, this house, if people come to rob they shoot or knife as well, if you walk up the wrong street and there’s a demonstration on, you can get tear-gassed or shot; you’ll learn all about this, why it is like that—

— I’m streetwise.—

— No, much more than streetwise — you have to be. You have to accept there are risks you can’t do anything much about. Certain aspects of Vera’s work simply add a few more. Ivan wants to avoid them.—

— Well, anything. Anything. It’s not meant to be a career for life, is it? — He hid in sulks his irritation with his father, with both of them.

— All the same— Ben paused, to reject the too emotional ‘unhappy’. —I don’t want you to be bored.—

He didn’t answer, sat there sucking at the hollow inside his lower lip. He knew they wanted him to get up and go into the house so that they could discuss him. He didn’t move. Vera rose with a leisureliness that challenged him, touching a plant, wiping greenfly off its buds as she left.

— See you later. — Ben followed.

In the bedroom she stood by while he changed into jeans and running shoes. Ben had always liked to run when something was troubling him; a good household remedy. Each has his or her own. Standing in underpants taking the jeans from the generous wall-cupboards the parents of her first husband had fitted, he still had beautiful, strong legs, the ankles and knees perfectly articulated, the thighs — so important if a man is to be a good lover — frontally curved with muscle under smooth black hair. She regarded him as if he were a statue; one of the works of limbs and torsos he used to sculpt.

— He doesn’t really mean it, about working at the Foundation. He’s not disappointed at all, I assure you.—

— Well, it’s the one positive answer he gave me.—

— He wants to show he doesn’t take this whole mock exile seriously, whatever we do. It’s a kind of flirtation with us.—

Adam went to work at Promotional Luggage. Profits were steeply down, with the recession and labour disputes, travel costs rising with the devalued currency, it wasn’t the time to take on unnecessary staff. But Ben knew he couldn’t hope to find anything else for the young man; his A-level achievements didn’t qualify him for something above the rank of junior clerk anywhere else, and where that kind of opening did happen to exist businesses were finding it expedient to Africanize. No one wanted to be seen to employ a white foreigner on some sort of sabbatical, even as a favour to a friend.

Adam was too young to be a salesman — who would give orders for expensive briefcases to a boy with Pre-Raphaelite locks, Ben was amused to think.

— Let him start at the bottom. Messenger and tea-boy. Like any black boy.—

That’s Vera, of course.

— Fax and automatic coffee dispensers now. You know that.—

A place was made for him that hadn’t existed, in design and production, he could learn something there. Ben had an arrangement with his partner, to which Vera was not privy, to pay the salary himself. Apparently Ivan had not provided for Adam to receive any allowance in his banishment; he couldn’t go about penniless and it would have been humiliating for him to have to accept what would have looked like a schoolboy’s pocket-money from Vera and Ben. He spent most of the first month’s salary on compact discs for the player that was in his luggage. Vera’s house was filled with the one intrusion she hadn’t thought of complaining of in anticipation, to Ben. Many desperate voices, accompanied by a heavy beat that she heard without distinction as Michael Jackson, resounded from what had been Ivan’s room.

Chapter 21

Zeph Rapulana dines on board the Drommedaris now.

He has moved more or less permanently from Odensville, where he built a home for his family in the temporary settlement area secured, and, leaving the backyard cottage, has taken a house in a modestly affluent suburb vacated by a white couple who have left in the latest count of emigration to America or Australia. What has been abolished along with the laws of segregation is the law and custom, more deeply entrenched than any law, that only white people could live in these pleasant areas. Anyone who can afford to pay the rent or buy property may do so now. Many whites who want to see racial prejudice abolished and have applauded its passing nevertheless comment high-mindedly whenever a black man or woman is successful enough in their — the whites’—world of professions, finance and business to move into one of the formerly white compounds. There are so many blacks living in degrading poverty, how can a black man live it up with a tree-filled garden, lock-up garage for his car, and neighbourhood security watch? For one to want justice for black people, they must all qualify by being poor. He ought to be living a dozen to a shack without light amid shit running from broken drains. He ought to be standing before a farmer’s door shut in his face, saying without menace, non-violently, we won’t harm you. Not you or your wife and children. Never. Whatever you do to us. Never. And we’ll never penetrate your boardrooms, we’ll never enter and take the place behind the desk in the chairman’s office, don the robes of the judge, fit the uniform of the commander-in-chief.

When Vera comes to have coffee with him they sit and compare notes. Vera is sharp-tongued about the patrons of the Drommedaris, teases him a little, in his position as an infiltrator of a new kind. He’s calm as the old kind. — Of course, underneath that smoked salmon stuff and the wine they keep pouring I understand they’re having problems in taking a black man seriously. Of course I understand that. — He is neither sarcastic nor facetious.

Vera smiled. — ‘I know the white man’.— And they laughed.

— Well, I’ve been learning about him a long time.—

— But you get on with them — not just amiability; I mean you get them to take you: seriously. Have your say in decisions.—

— Slowly, slowly — yes. — He is a director on the boards of several finance companies, a development foundation, two banks. — I think I’m not decorative enough to be put in the window.—

— Oh I don’t think so! My bet is they certainly counted on you being decorative enough, with your credentials from the housing commission, they thought that looks good, you don’t need to say anything round the boardroom table, you’ll lend them enough credibility for progress just by being there, and then they find they haven’t got a dummy, they’ve got you. I could have warned them.—

— I’m just a schoolmaster who’s trying to educate them to diversify their excess profits into enterprises that will benefit our people whose labour made those profits. That’s all. Cheap bonds for housing, technical training instead of casinos, backing for blacks to get into setting up our own financial institutions — and the right kind of co-operation to make sure we don’t fail while we’re gaining experience. It’s like everything else with us blacks, Vera; fail, and it’s proof you can’t succeed because black can’t succeed. It’s a trap; give us funds and no access to expertise along with them. ‘See what happened? They can’t do it’.—

— Probably we’re going to nationalize banks — and then?—

He bent towards her with a gentle smile. — I think your politics are a bit different from mine, Vera.—

She was sitting back in her chair with the coffee cup on the arm, legs stretched and crossed at the ankle. With him there was no haste in communication; in every encounter between human beings there is a pace set that belongs to them, and that will be taken up in its own rhythm whenever they are together. — Private enterprise … I think you’re getting me to see it your way, sometimes.—

— The banks we’ve created will have belonged to our people already. Only the private aspect will change — there’ll be government men on the boards, some of the directors will go.—

He? He’ll move on, as he did from the way he found to emerge from the Odensville affair, doing what was to be done when it had to be done.

— I wonder what you really think of them. When you’re with them.—

— People. Human beings, men like any other.—

— Oh come on. That’s the ‘politically correct’ reply. And women? The few women I’ve met in that circle are not what I’d call like any other.—

— Can’t think of any women … yes, there’s one.—

— Poor thing.—

— Well, yes, I suppose so. But I have to admit I didn’t notice it, how she was treated. Among us black men, too, it’s been usual. I suppose I’ve been conditioned from boyhood. Although I like to think I’ve resisted all that!—

— You’re the least conditioned person I’ve met. I was quite wrong about you when I first saw you, hat in hand. I mistook dignity for servility. I can tell you that now.—

He avoided personal references by withdrawing to himself. He filled his cup. — And you? — She put her palm over hers. — I mean would you say you are conditioned?—

She knew he was saying he didn’t believe it was so, while he didn’t think they needed to be personal in this way; such a level already existed differently between them.

— I find at the moment I need to be, more than I am. I have my son’s young son living with us.—

Correcting the awkward definition: —Your grandson.—

— Grandson. I’m unsure — of our position — you know? I don’t know what he expects, the right thing.—

This was how he listened in boardrooms, waiting to unravel speakers’ motives, giving them time.

— What I should be to him.—

— You’re Vera. — His, the last word, no qualifications.

She laughed and pulled a face.

— What about the other children?—

They had been thinking aloud over the news that pupils at black schools were out in the streets again, this time in refusal to pay examination fees. He took up in doubt: —I wonder why we call them children. Eighteen, nineteen, sometimes more than twenty years old, and that’s part of what’s gone so terribly wrong in our times. If the parents weren’t too poor to keep them in school when they’re small, if there had been enough schools to take them all in at the right age, as white children start their schooling, if they hadn’t been chased here and there, everywhere, all over the country in removals — if they’d really had the chance to be children like other children — they wouldn’t be young men and women treated like children now. They wouldn’t be doing the things that scare people so much, the things that young men and women do when they’re angry. This country got it all wrong.—

— And we have to believe we’re going to get it right.—

— A piece here, a piece there. It’s all broken up. You do what you can, I do what I can. That’s it.—

Vera was looking at the palm of her right hand as if (to him) seeking to divine something there; but she was turning to the distraction of some blemish while dealing with uncertainty; she picked at the tiny grains of a couple of warts that came and went, from time to time, in that palm. — So it’s some sort of historical process in reverse we’re in. The future becomes undoing the past.—

— You still believe history will do it through us. I believe we act through God’s will.—

— I know. I know you do. — It was an atheist’s declaration of faith: in a man.

They sat in unnoticed silence for a while, closer in their difference than they might have been in agreement, with others.

Chapter 22

When politics turns to gangster methods the vocabulary that goes along with these is adopted. The slang of the TV crime series people amuse themselves with night after night becomes the language by which planned killing of leaders and those close to them is termed. There is a hit-list, there are hit-men. Just like the movies — but these tough guys are not actors behind the get-up of balaclava helmets they wear, they are individuals convinced by others that they have a mission: to save this or that political ideology, racial or national formation, religious belief.

It is only after an assassination of a leader has successfully taken place that the hit-list is released to those whose names it comprises. No one gives a ministerial or official police explanation for this, so that an explanation offers itself out of the very circumstance: those in officialdom who kept the list to themselves had among them some who were involved in compiling the list and providing the hit-men. But there are so many formations, so many intrigues, so many messianic claims for exclusive destinies not provided for by any Bill of Rights, that there could be any one of these responsible. If there is an arrest — and most times there has not been — the unlikely individual seems a strange being (produced in an unlikely period in the sense that nothing is like it was for so long) who could have served any of them. For although they squabble solemnly among themselves their yearning is the same, they yearn for the impossible (escape from history, Vera Stark would call it), the reinstatement of life as it was before. They are prepared to kill for that, although nothing will bring it back; assassination is an offering for which there are no gods left.

Sibongile Maqoma is on a hit-list. A telephone call came while she was turning over some chops under the grill. Mpho, who always rushes to answer a ring in the evening in the certainty calls are for her, yelled through the sizzling to her mother, and Sibongile picked up the mobile phone she has resorted to, like her beeper, to make her life manageable. When she heard the slowly emphasized voice of an Afrikaner speaking English she quickly, with the free hand, signalled to Didymus, who was opening a bottle of beer, to go and listen in on the receiver in the living-room.

There had been one or two abusive calls since she had become a member of a multi-party commission in negotiation talks. Pushed under the front door, a note written in straggly capitals called her a black bitch who should keep her cunt out of politics — but to be told over the telephone in that steady monotone (the man might have been reading a grocery order) you were listed to be murdered! If the Colonel had sent someone to talk to her, to tell her; but a telephone call!

She rushed to the living-room giggling on a high note, shaking. Didymus and Mpho stared as if the threat must somehow show on her. — It was so casual, I felt like just saying thanks but my chops are burning—

Mpho flung herself on her mother and started to cry. Sibongile struggled to lift her face and chide her lovingly, don’t be silly, nothing’s happened, I’m all right. — But he said they’re going to kill you— Didymus took over, his arm round her. — You’ve got it all wrong, he said her name is on a list, a whole list of other people, some names jotted down, that’s all. Your mother’s not a real target, she’s not one of the top leaders, is she.—

— But she’s up there, isn’t she, she’s sitting there, she’s part of the discussions those awful people want to stop. They hate us! They hate her!—

Mpho had not been told about the note under the door; but they could not fob her off again by telling her, don’t be silly, it’s nothing. She sat with her head on her father’s shoulder; Sibongile repeated exactly what the police officer had told her. She had at least resisted her disbelief sufficiently to ask where the list had come from: it was not in the interest of certain investigations to reveal. That’s all. They calmed the girl, Sibongile taking her hands, turning the silver and elephant-hair rings on her fingers, Didymus stroking her hair, while they talked, as of commonplaces in their lives, of the possibilities: which group might be responsible for the list and how the police found it. In someone’s house, office — where? But Didymus was experienced in these matters. — It’s come from the cells. They’ve got someone to sing.—

Under her fear, Mpha was taking the opportunity for regression, becoming a little girl again. — Daddy, you must get the police to guard us, you must.—

— My darling, you couldn’t be sure that’d be the best thing … But we’ll be careful.—

— But how can you be careful! You can’t stay inside all the time. Look what’s happened, if you go to the corner shop just to buy a newspaper, just down the road, they can drive past and shoot you as you come home, right at the gate. I’ll be like the other girl at her father’s funeral — I saw her on TV — seeing my mother put in the grave—

The phone rang again and she jumped up in reflex to answer it while Didymus called after her. — Don’t tell anything to your friend, whoever it is.—

There were no gods for them to turn to, either. No new state, not yet; no Security that was not at the same time part of the threat. The feel of the house, that was home at last, changed. The dimension of rooms stood back, fragile. The painted burglar bars that had come along with the house were toys to keep out petty thieves. The locks on the doors — nothing, to a force that had the keys to everything in everyone’s life, that had sent them into exile and let them in again. They carried on with routine lives during the day and at night sat on the furniture Sibongile had bought, as in a waiting-room.

Chapter 23

Adam’s and Vera’s approach to one another came about through faulty objects. She did not know how to make real contact with him, nor he with her (if he bothered to think about it at all); and it happened of itself. Fixing things. As if some side of him he wouldn’t have wished to admit to, hidden under the boldness of getting drunk and losing a licence, there was the guilty pleasure of tinkering, of making objects other than souped-up motorbikes work. It started with the washing machine, from which water wouldn’t drain after the rinsing cycle, and now it was the computer in Vera’s stoep-study. They were before it together, she on her swivel chair and he crouched beside her. She showed him how the machine either did not respond to or disagreed with her instructions, he watched and tried it for himself. It seemed as if the two of them, beginning to laugh at their own frustration, ganged up in argument with a third person of stubborn obduracy. — Let it cool off a bit. I think I’m getting the idea.—

— But what makes you think you can put it right!—

— Well I’m coming to something … we’ll start over again in a minute. — He went to the kitchen and fetched two cartons of the guava juice he had become addicted to in his father’s country. They sucked at it through straws.

If machines were the train of thought in which they best met it was easy for her to maintain it. — Wha’d’you think makes my car suddenly begin to stall instead of idling? It’s really annoying, yesterday every time I came to a traffic light: engine dead. I suppose I’ll have to go to the garage and they’ll expect me to leave it there for half a day, a whole palaver, I’ll have to arrange to borrow someone else’s at the Foundation … what a bore.—

— Sounds like something to do with the feed. — She saw how he liked to be consulted. — If you give me the keys I’ll take it out this afternoon and see what’s what. Could be just a small adjustment, you don’t need the garage charging you through the neck.—

Give him the keys; he was devious, this boy, taking advantage of the ease between them at this moment to suggest he should be allowed to drive again. She smiled on closed lips, in doubt: we understand each other — And if you bump into someone? Insurance won’t pay and you’ll be charged with a criminal offence. —

— Oh how could anyone know about the licence business, back in Britain!—

— Because you’d have to produce it. Wasn’t it confiscated? Or if you have it, isn’t there an endorsement?—

— I’ve got an international one they didn’t ask about. I’ve got that right here with me!—

Vera did not want to lose touch, be punitive, the lawyer too correct to be amused in recognition of shady initiative. — Compounding your culpability, man!—

— I wouldn’t fail the Breathalyzer, would I? You and Ben never offer me a drink, do you? I’m going to turn into a guava.—

Vera was still laughing. — No, Adam, no, whatever contingency plans you have … it’s not a good idea.—

He was looking at her openly, so young, beguiling, set aside as a nuisance by those other adults — his parents, her son; knowing how to make himself irresistible. — Vera, I want to take somebody you know and like very much to a jazz festival out of town, what’s the place called, Brotherstroom—

— Broederstroom?—

— Well whatever. I need a car to take Mpho there on Saturday, you don’t go to your office that day, Ben’s home and you could use his car?—

He was amazed at the change in her face and the disposition of her body in the chair.

— Where have you seen her?—

He laughed in deliberate misunderstanding, as if at her lapse of memory. — In your house. When she came with her parents.—

— I mean since then.—

— She came into the shop a couple of weeks ago. Turns out she’s keen on the same groups I like. — Adam had found a job for himself and left Promotional Luggage. The knowledge of all the variations of pop music he showed as a customer led to his being offered a place at the CeeDee Den. He believed, quite correctly, that Vera privately approved the move towards some sort of independence, a freeing from the authoritative chain father-grandfather, while Ben’s acceptance was an unexpressed sense of desertion.

Vera appeared to be struggling with some formulation, whatever it was she wanted to say. He watched with impatience. Who could understand people as they leave youth further and further out of sight. He and she were getting on so well, and now she had disappeared before his eyes into some domain he might reach in fifty years or so.

— You should keep away from her — Mpho. — After all that preparation what came out was blunt.

— But why? She’s a damn nice kid. We have a good time together, what’s wrong with that? Why keep away, all of a sudden?—

— Because I ask you.—

The lame reason lay between them.

There must be something more to it: his look interrogated her, without response. Suddenly, he was again amazed: —Because she’s black. Because she’s black!—

She lowered her head and looked up at him from under her brows.

Then what was it, what was it, Vera knew as well as he that she would not and he would not accept ‘Because I ask’.

— Because she’s trouble. Yes I’m very fond of her and she’s a particularly attractive girl, a charmer, but it’s better not to get mixed up — not to be involved there.—

— Better for her, for me? Who?—

— I don’t know how well you know her, how much she may have told you about herself—

— We’ve been out a few times, a disco and club, we don’t have any heavy sessions explaining things. — He had had enough of his own family problems; couldn’t older people understand there were other interests in life if you were young.

— Her parents have been my friends for a long time and I was drawn into some trouble they had with her. Over a man. — No point in treating him like a child; he’s also a man. — It was a painful business for everyone. The young man was a close friend of mine, too. He’s dead.—

Dead.

A death, the idea, so distant from any sense of it at seventeen, drew him level with Vera’s interpretation of the significance of his going about with Mpho, even if he did not understand this. — She hasn’t said anything. I mean she’s such a great girl, happy and all that.—

— It’s just that her parents had a bad time as much as she did, and they’re people with all sorts of special responsibilities, any more personal trouble is something they shouldn’t have on top of everything else. You know that her mother’s on the hitlist. There are people who want to kill her.—

— Is that really true? My God, I can’t imagine knowing anyone at home in London who was being shadowed by hit-men. It’s something out of a movie.—

— It’s not a movie, here.—

— I see. — A confusion of dissatisfaction came over his face; perhaps he was wondering what he was doing there. Why he was sent by the collusion of adults.

— If you were to start something with her, Adam. If you were to sleep with her. I have to tell you, Sibongile and Didymus would hold me responsible — for having put her at risk again, emotionally — and in every way. I know you’re grown up, you have to live … but this would be a drama you shouldn’t get into. And if you have — if you’re sleeping with her—

The frankness drew some sort of clandestine confidence between them. To him she was not so old, after all; to her, he was not so young.

— Not yet, but I can see she’ll go along with it, I mean she’s ready for anything. She rather likes me … of course I’m keen on her. Who wouldn’t be.—

He began touching the keys of the computer again as one might run a hand over a piano.

His apparent submission affected her, she began further explanations. — You know I’d never have done this if it had been any other girl you want to sleep with. It’s not that I’d be blamed, it’s not that which matters. It’s the Maqomas.—

— What complicated lives you people lead. — The curiosity and superiority of distance, youth.

Vera was watching the screen with him. — And in London?—

— Oh in London there’s only my mother and the Hungarian to worry about — for Dad.—

— Look, it’s doing that same thing again …!—

Their eyes moved in duet across acid-green signals glowing and disappearing on the screen. Meanwhile he began to chat. — D’you know, I’ve been meaning to ask and I always forget, did Dad ever remember to tell you? He bumped into the man you were married to before. He was in Sydney at one of those business conferences where everyone wears dog-tags with their name, a man came up in the bar and said, you’re Vera’s son, aren’t you. It was crazy — he said like he was introducing himself, I’m her husband.—

Vera’s eyes did not leave the screen but he felt her attention there cut out, a current suddenly switched off.

— Well he was.—

And then the boy began to see with fascination something he didn’t think could still oecur in — ever be needed by — older people, real adults, who had no need to fear the power of authority: an instant alert wariness quickly dissembled into indifference. Without that recognition of a route of escape he knew too well, he never would have had the nerve to press her. — Must be ancient history.—

Her shoulders lifted and fell.

— How old were you when you married him?—

— Your age.—

— God, how awful.—

— Well, it was the war. It’s a hothouse for that sort of thing. Falling in love or rather thinking that’s what it is. People are getting killed so nature advances the mating age to replace the dead with children — something like that. Same sort of thing among young blacks in the violence of the townships now; life’s cheap, sex tricks you into breeding.—

— When you were young sex meant getting married.—

— Generally, yes. Certainly for girls. If you wanted the sex you thought you wanted the marriage.—

They contemplated, a comfortable pause between them.

— I can’t imagine it. We’ve got the sex, now. And we’ve got AIDS … so?—

— Looks like there’s no such thing as sexual freedom. Well, perhaps one generation, at least, had it — Ivan and Annie. Between the end of the necessity to marry and the arrival of the disease.—

— Doesn’t seem to have helped much. Dad got divorced, same as you. When I’m with him, and when I’m with my mother, I wonder why on earth either of them married the other. And what about Annie?—

— How d’you mean? — So Ivan must have related as a disaster Annie’s choice of alliance.

— You know what I mean.—

— That Annie’s a lesbian.—

There was a slight waver of embarrassment on his face before he pursued. — So that’s part of freedom.—

— I suppose so, Adam. Yes.—

— But when d’you think it happened? When she was my age? What about boys?—

— Of course — she’s beautiful. Like Ben; people fall for that kind of beauty. There were boys, men, but they somehow couldn’t strike the right response in her.—

— But another woman could. Why d’you think it was — that she went that way?—

Their attention met and turned aside like the flick of a page, several times. For his part, he was giving her space to reflect, to offer him something he could learn from. She almost said it, shed on this unlikely confidant, Fear of men because her mother was ‘taken away’, the nest of home broken into by a man. But she answered with an assumption of careless self-deprecation. — Sometimes I think I know, but of course it’s nonsense. Maybe the ‘cause’—can you call it that, gays themselves are furious if you suggest it’s an abnormality — maybe it’s physical. Maybe psychological. There are many theories. But Annie would say: choice. Free choice.—

Then he said what Ben had once said, perhaps the question all heterosexual men ask of a woman when considering the rejection of their gender. — Could you sleep with a woman? I don’t mean now (she smiled as he respectfully absolved her of any survival of sexuality, as if it would have been a disgrace), when you were young.—

And she turned Annie’s accusation to advantage. — I’ve loved only men.—

— Some people say to try it … I don’t know. Doing it— or something like it — with my own sex, the idea turns me off. I mean, once you’ve done it with a girl, how can you think of any better way. I love girls.—

— You don’t have to apologize for that!—

— The idea of the war, your getting married to that chap. But you didn’t have any children, did you?—

— No.—

— Before Ivan.—

— Before Ivan, no.—

— Did Dad really not mention that he’s met him?—

— You know how his letters have been preoccupied with you.—

The gentle reproach had him deflected, smiling in a different direction. But he fingered along his jaw a small lump where a shaven hair had burrowed into the skin. — Not just the meeting at the conference. The man took him snorkeling with him, he flew him to the Barrier Reef.—

There was the waiting silence that comes between two people when one is confronting thoughts the other does not know of, but an instinctive inkling, a kind of prickling of the nerves, is being conveyed.

— They seem to have had a great time together. — His curiosity grew; it secluded Vera and him closely.

— I’ve heard the Barrier Reef’s wonderful.—

— Oh he says it was the time of his life. Dad as a pick-up! It’s sure out of character.—

— What do you think of as Ivan’s character?—

— Well he’s not — spontaneous (pleased at finding the right word), like you must have been. He weighs things up. Look how long it took him to make up his mind between my mother and the Hungarian. But maybe it was because of the man knowing you. Not just any stranger in a bar.—

— Maybe. We never know what a son or daughter understands about us; what we think of as ourselves.—

— Well old people are so cagey! … d’you ever tell Ivan what you’ve just said, about the war and sex and everything? — He slowly moved his head in certainty of her joining him in the denial, and she did, the two of them smiling at her compliance.

They returned to the computer. — It’s really bombed out. I’ll see if I can recover the data, try the back-ups.—

She said she’d leave him to it. He sensed that he had gained some advantage over her: she was at once Vera, to him, and his grandmother. He turned. — I’ll take some other girl — you’ll lend me your car for Saturday?—

Consequences.

Father and son.

Vera sees them. They swim towards each other through ruined palaces of coral, flippered feet undulating, ribbons of current and light passing, and, magnified by water: recognize. Ivan’s face is the face of the young woman on the bedroom floor, the wriggling sperm magnified by time out of sight and mind into the man picked up, tagged, in a bar. Without the tag, he might have been taken for one of those coincidental likenesses that share no blood: at one side of the ocean and another two beings happen to have been born with the same conformation of features. Vera, that wilful sexy bitch Vera, had to transform fertilization into parthenogenesis, the proof of her deceit being that she reproduced herself, only herself, in male form, for her new lover. And Ivan is drawn to the man never seen, never talked of, who once was married to a girl who became his mother; such attraction is a kind of recognition. The time of his life, together.

Father and son. No end to consequences. This consequence is that the seventeen-year-old boy has become one of Vera’s confidants. He knows there is something about herself she conceals, making other confessions round about it. He does that kind of thing himself, to protect himself from adults. In recognition — another kind of recognition — of this, she lets him drive without a valid licence, and both of them, as friends, are concealing this from Ben.

She has a need to redefine. Friends. Friends are differing individuals who are the repositories of confidences and confessions. The act of these friendships, in which the various aspects of self cannot be placed all upon one person, is the equivalent of placing the burden of self within the other by which she used to define the sexual act.

Chapter 24

Ms Vera Stark, Deputy Director of the Legal Foundation (in the end she has not been able to avoid a title), is among the faces in the newspapers captioned as nominated to serve on the Technical Committee on Constitutional Issues. Vera had heard that her name was being considered, but had not taken the possibility seriously; there were so many commissions and committees sitting, more set up every day either to pass the heat of change from hand to hand or keep an ethos of democracy evolving while the set of the old hegemony theatre was being struck, its now incongruous flats still lumbering people’s lives. Some groups wanted to keep them in the way, hoping that an ivy of acceptability might be able to be painted over them; others wanted to cart the junk off to live by in some enclave of a single skin colour or language, and pranced the streets with guns in mounted commando to make their Nazi neo-Arcadian cause a threat. Some enterprising adapters to a coming order where it might be possible still to make money while losing political control, wanted to lease the ultimate relic of the dead regime’s power, Robben Island, to a resort developer. A former political prisoner whose people the Foundation was representing in a land dispute made to Vera the counterclaim: We spent our lives there. We earned it. The Island is ours.

Vera was cautious not to decide at once on what the nomination meant. Not in terms of how she was favoured publicly: with committees on all questions — and what was not in question now? — there was surely a desperate search for people even marginally qualified to deliberate them.

Ben looked at her with admiration, seeing the light of others playing upon her and taking pride in it. He chided her hesitation. — You don’t refuse an honour! And you damn well deserve it. Your qualification as a lawyer is as good as any of the others— better. None of them has your experience. What do they know about rural communities and squatter camps, all those constituencies to be considered?—

They had met for lunch at his suggestion, the new development providing the occasion to take up again what once had been a means of seeing one another during the separation of the working day. She went on picking olives out of her salad. He watched her. — You’re not thinking of turning it down, are you, Vera. — She did not know what she was waiting for him to say, what it was she wanted from him. When the coffee came she sat over her cup, dragging the skin of her cheekbones under her fingers towards the temples. All she received from Ben was distress at her indecision, and her apparent lack of ability to explain it. Then she had to get back to the office; there was the awkward fact that he was in no hurry, unfortunately his business was doing poorly and there was no urgency or incentive to cut short the distraction of lunch. She touched his hand in acknowledgement and left, not looking back at him sitting there, alone.

She sat at her desk gazing at the door so familiar she no longer saw it, following the gauze of an after-image, the old entry of Oupa with his papers for her and his plastic tray of curried chicken and pap. If he was no longer there, neither was she. When did she first start suddenly seeing a familiar scene (bedroom at night, the level of a glass of water, the abandoned clothes) as if she were describing to herself something already past? It was when she had beside her in One-Twenty-One, so real, a young lover. The Hitler Baby. Long ago as that. Her sense of her existence was as if she had entered someone’s house and seen a letter she had written, addressed in her own hand, lying there, delivered and as yet unopened: the impulse to gather it up, gather it in.

One by one her colleagues finished the day’s work and left the offices. She could hear the cleaner emptying paper baskets with a slap on the base accompanied by singing in the strange soprano, almost atonal, of black women, the Greek chorus to their lives. They passed one another in the corridor on Vera’s way out, Vera prompted to come up on cue with the usual enquiry for Bella’s amour propre, how was the Dobsonville Ladies’ Choir doing in competitions lately, and Bella responding with the appreciation expected of her in return — Oh very good, very good, just won second place.

The lopsided Stop sign at a crossroad, the splendid purple bougainvillaea espaliered on a wall, the fence where the black-and-white mask of a Husky was always pressed yearningly against the lattice, the place at which the elephant’s-foot roots buttressing a belhambra tree had raised the tarmac of the pavement like the bedclothes of a restless sleeper; the turn into a side street where these signals reached a destination. She picked up the evening paper at Zeph Rapulana’s mail-box and took it with her to the front door. Rang; stood there patiently. The silence of an empty house where his electric wall clock (a stickler, he says, no African time for him!) whirrs on the edge of audibility, and documents shift under the current of air from a fanlight left open. After a while she turned and went into the garden where a neat arrangement of two plastic chairs and a table was kept under the jacaranda. There she sat reading the paper. She did not find it difficult to give it her full attention. The dimension of awareness she had inhabited at the office had closed away. Vera was not even waiting for the owner of the haven she occupied to come to his home. If he had not, she would simply have stood up and left, when she was ready, refolding the paper and placing it carefully on the doorstep. But his car was heard slurring into the garage, and in a few moments he came through a side gate into the small garden claimed with palms and tree ferns he had brought from some ancestral home in the Lowveld that was not the Odensville squatter camp which for her was his place of origin.

He smiled without sense of surprise, as if he always expected to find her there; or more likely because the African characteristic that rather exasperated her, in her house, of arriving at any time without a telephone call in respect for privacy, worked appealingly in reverse, where in African homes it was taken for granted that people walked in whenever they wished. He wore one of his Drommedaris suits, an elegant grey, but they exchanged the usual bobbing embrace of greeting appropriated by the liberation movement from the dictators. He took off the jacket and settled down in shirt-sleeves.

— It’s an honour. — She tried it out on him.

— Oh certainly.—

— But is an honour the most useful. For me.—

— Now what are you thinking of, Vera?—

— Aren’t I better off, isn’t it better for me to be doing my job at the Foundation — the work you know I do well, don’t I — than putting myself in the position of making terribly important decisions, conditions for other people — the whole country. Putting myself way up there, above them—

— Isn’t an honour as useful as you can make it? You know you always remind me I’m not against what people think of as honours. Some of our people even think of going to a board meeting as an honour, but you and I know it as something else. What did you once say? — infiltration.—

— But this’s different. It’s setting oneself up to decide power, in the end. What’s a constitution but the practice, in law, of a Bill of Rights? The practical means of achieving all our fine phrases, The People Shall Have …—

— It’s only the draft you’ll be dealing with. Something for the transitional council. It’s not final, all-out responsibility our grandchildren will blame you for.—

— Ah but it’s the draft that will have to reconcile everything, so that the final constitution will have coherence, at least, to go on. Think of regions, alone; the passions of disagreement over regions, everyone with his own home-drawn map and the powers he wants there. The Odendaals, the Buthelezis and Mangopes all shouting and stamping their feet for the right to do what they like with the people in this part of the country or that, no power of interference from a central government.—

— But that’s exactly where the last battle’s going to be fought! There where the Committee sits! That’s the last gasp of the old regime, we’ll hear it there! There’s this one breath left in it. Go for it!—

She swayed uncertainly, half-smiling; his usual manner was not vehement.

The schoolmaster in him spoke as if he were back in his rural office and had called her in. — It’s your duty.

— But she couldn’t see herself as self-righteous.

— All right. It’s power. And power scares you.—

— I don’t know. — She feels vaguely aggressive. — Yes it … I’m not like you: I’ve belonged so long to a people who used it horribly. I distrust it.—

— For yourself. But if this Committee does the job, it’ll mean real empowerment for our people.—

It was accepted tacitly that when he spoke of ‘our’ people it was as a black speaking for blacks, subtly different from when he used ‘we’ or ‘us’ and this meant an empathy between him and her. They continued to accept one another for exactly what they were, no sense of one intruding upon the private territory behind the other. It had come to her that this was the basis that ought to have existed between a man and a woman in general, where it was a question not of a difference of ancestry but of sex.

— It’s a matter of degree, whether I sit on boards or you get to be part of the Committee — that’s something more urgent. You’ve never shown any doubts about where I sit.—

— Ah no. Who could have anything to say about that. You’re making a place for blacks in the money world. Even the ex-Stalinists among us want it. There’s no millennium; only the IMF and the World Bank—

— There are plenty who do say! I’m in it for the directors’ fees. I’m living in the Northern Suburbs instead of Alex or Soweto. — He was smiling at her certainty.

She had teased him about that fancy restaurant. She released her tongue sharply against her palate and jerked her head in dismissal of herself and his detractors. To believe in him was to accept that the Left, as expressed in the living conditions of the majority rather than in ideology, can find its solutions to those conditions by using some of the means of capitalism. Looking at the neighbouring countries of the continent, what other solution was there to try, for the present?

— So I should set myself up there among the little gods who are deciding what the country will be. Proportional representation, regions … And what about the Foundation? I’d be away for months, you know. We’re always short-staffed. There’s going to be so much work, things hotting up before a new government comes. People fear the old boundaries will stick unless you can get back to your land first. Places on the borders of homelands that are resisting incorporation with the rest of the country— we need successful court action to claim them quickly, and you know what a wrangle that can be. Problems like Zevenfontein — who, black or white, wants those poor people squatting next to them in a middle-class suburb? And Matiwane’s Kop, Thembalihle, Cornfields — they want their land back. Yesterday I was in Pretoria — again — the Advisory Commission on Land Allocation—

— The old battlefield.—

— Mogopa this time. A hearing we’d prepared for the Mogopa delegation. You know what one of them said to the Commission? ‘The Government is a thief who’s been caught but returned only half he’s stolen.’ The application we’d made for the restoration of those two farms taken from them in the mid-Eighties has resulted in them getting back only one, and it’s Swartrand, the one with less arable land. So we’re contesting. The man burst through our legal jargon like a paper hoop. ‘Now that the land is supposed to be given back to us, there are a lot of talks, talks … the Government is having the power to steal people’s property and afterwards set up commissions.’ And there was one old man, Abram Mabidikama, I can’t get him out of my mind — he said that watching white farmers graze their cattle on Hartebeeslaagte was like watching an abducted child labour for someone else’s profit, ‘while I have nothing’. And then he stood there and he told them, we are going to struggle to get our land back ‘up to the end of time’.—

Zeph echoed quietly, for himself and them. — To the end of time.—

The old man hadn’t said what rally crowds were chanting, kill the Boer, kill the farmer; but like Odendaal when this man sitting opposite her in his cuff-linked shirt-sleeves had said Meneer, we won’t harm you. Not you or your wife and children, the Commission fingered their pens, hid behind their bifocals from the menace as Odendaal did behind his slammed door.

— What piece of paper that’s going to be disputed by the gang of the white Right and homeland leaders is more important than the chance to make sure, now, people have somewhere finally to arrive, for god’s sake — to end being chased from nothing to nowhere. At least I know I can do something about that. Someone else can sit on the Committee? It’s easier than to replace me at the Foundation.—

— Many things seem not to make sense because we’re rushing ahead, we have to, and this gets pushed aside for that, gets knocked over so something bigger can go forward.—

— But nothing measures up.—

— No. We have to leave the old standards of comparison, what’s important and what’s not. We’re not just weighing a bag of salt against a bag of mealies, Vera.—

— I’m supposed to sit quietly on an electoral committee while down the road someone watches Sally and Didy’s house, waiting the chance to kill her.—

— Have you seen her?—

— I took a bunch of flowers, and that was all wrong — as if she were sick, or the way we do when someone’s died. She took them from me with a peculiar expression.—

— You should go often. When something is threatening people need to have others coming round. I’ve known that in my life.—

— She and Didy won’t come to our house. It is as if it were a disease. Or a curse. They don’t want to involve anyone else in the risk. Sally’s all bravado, of course, says you never know whether the man knows how to shoot straight, he might hit someone else by mistake.—

The sun had set and the underlit sky was pearly with cloud. She stood up and stretched towards it. They walked together to his gate, sharing the end of the day without domesticity, he did not ask what she was going to do, she gave him no decision. He twisted a yellow rose absently off the bush beside the gate; and then handed it to her. She rolled the stem in her fingers.

— Mind the thorns.—

— Empowerment, Zeph. What is this new thing? What happened to what we used to call justice?—

Chapter 25

Didymus accompanies Sibongile everywhere with a gun in the inner pocket of his jacket. On his political record he never would have been granted a licence to carry a firearm had he applied for it; the Movement supplied one, asserting its own form of legality. Not only the State, but those factions within it but out of its control, rebelling at the State’s even reluctant concessions over power, had the whole arsenal of army and police force to seize upon. What were a few caches of smuggled arms— symbolized by the AK-47, mimed, chanted, mythologized— against that? When police protection is blandly offered, behind it is this reality: the bodyguard itself may include in its personnel an assassin. To have that one patrolling the street outside the house, the first home back home, where Didymus and Sibongile and their daughter are eating the evening meal, to have that one sitting behind her head as she drives into the city!

Sibongile looks at the thing, the gun, with distaste, and constantly asks Didymus if he’s sure the safety catch is on, there against his body. But he is no white suburban husband, needing to be instructed how to ‘handle’ a gun — as the professional-sounding phrase used by amateurs as a euphemism for learning how to kill, goes. And he will not, he assures, hit anyone by hazard, the wrong one.

And they both know that if the hit-man acts it will not be while presenting a target. It will be, as it has been for others, a spread of bullets from a passing car, or through a window where she and her husband and daughter sit at table. Didymus will not have time to see a target or fire. The gun is a pledge that has little chance of being honoured. Didymus has long been accustomed to heavy odds in his way of life and all he can do is lead Sibongile through them.

Suspicious-looking individuals hang around the house but they are only journalists; the assassins will not arouse suspicion, or if they do, it will be after the event, as when neighbours remembered that a red car circled the block a few days before the last assassination. Failing to get to the prospective victim or her husband, journalists manage to waylay Mpho, who is quite flattered to be asked how she feels about her mother being under threat, and appears in a charming photograph which she cuts out of the newspaper and puts up in her room. The distraction makes her feel less afraid.

No one can say when again it will be safe. Safe to do what? Move about freely. Leave the gun at home. At the Negotiating Council sessions Sibongile and others on the hit-list are at least conveniently gathered in one place. Young men from the liberation army are on guard; grown plump and relaxed after the austerities of years in bush camps, they stand close among themselves, like schoolboys at lunch break, when their share of the refreshments provided for delegates is handed out to them. To be accustomed to precautions may be exactly what the hit-men are waiting to happen to their targets. Any routine, even that of watchfulness itself, becomes absent-minded: once you get used to being at risk that is when you are most at risk. That is when the opportunity arises for you to be taken in a way not foreseen. A surprise. Those singled out on the hit-list remind each other: go out to the corner shop for a newspaper on a quiet public holiday morning, there’s nobody about so early, it’s not a movement habitual to you that anyone could predict, just to the corner, that’s all, and when you come back you get a bullet through the head, not once but three times, to make sure. The last surprise of your life.

Sibongile has the compulsion to leave nothing half-done. The most trivial task; before she leaves the house in the morning she goes from room to room, putting things in place, fitting new batteries in the cassette player Mpho has left empty, sorting the disorderly files Didymus piled on the kitchen table, as if these tasks will otherwise never be completed. She is agitated at any disagreement left unresolved when Mpho closes the door behind her on the way to the computer course she now attends, even at the casualness with which such daily partings take place. She will rush to snatch a kiss on Mpho’s cheek and watch, from a gap in the blinds supposed to be kept drawn so that movements inside the house may not be followed, while the girl’s high little rump pumps under her scrap of denim skirt as she hurries. Didymus finds notes in various places. He sees they are not Sibongile’s usual reminders to herself but instructions for others that would keep continuity in life if she went out, like the one who bought a newspaper at the corner, and did not get back. He says nothing. Crumples the notes and aims them at the kitchen bin. He himself had never succumbed to the temptation of rituals of this nature; but then he had had the talisman of disguise.

They continued to sit in the house in the evenings, he reading or at the computer making notes for the book he was expected to write and she studying documentation from various committees who reported to the Negotiating Council. Would it happen when she went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of that rooibos tea which in her old fussiness about her health she thought was good for her? Or when she said, I’m off now, and, on the way to bed, in the bathroom would have time only to turn the taps on? The slam of a door or the crack of gas exploding from a car’s exhaust in the street made them both swiftly look up; then Sibongile assuming careless haughtiness, and Didymus wryly smiling to her. Mpho sat with bare feet up on the sofa arm, little mound of well-fed stomach showing in her slouch, rustling a hand into a packet of her favourite cornflakes as she watched the TV parody of their lives in simulated violence and shootings.

Sibongile and Didymus went about as a team, and with others on the list were the initiated, set apart from people who had not been singled out, even close comrades and friends. These did not seem to know how to deal with the situation, though the victims appeared to be managing the unimaginable well enough. Vera Stark came to the house fairly regularly with silent Ben. What was happening in the Starks’ lives? At least this was one way of getting friends off the subject of the List, away from the endless going-over who was behind it. Vera is battling with the Advisory Commission on Land Allocation—‘as usual’, she dismisses. They talk of the first sitting of the Technical Committee on Constitutional Issues due soon, assuming she is going to be part of it. Didymus is not resentful at himself being passed over; the threat of death, close by, drains ambition of all importance, for the time being. — You’ll be taking leave from the Foundation next week, then. — He grins and gives a tap on her hand; wonderful she’s been chosen. Vera glances at his assurance, a moment of exchange between them.

— Yes. Next week.—

It is the first Ben has heard of a decision to accept. He studies her in his silence, he is alone in the room among the others. She doesn’t look at him and he sees that her profile— thumb momentarily tested between her teeth — asserts that her life has no reality for her in the context of the situation of Sally and Didy, this stage-set on which, in a dread adaptation of Chekhov’s maxim for the theatre, a gun whose presence is unseen but everyone is aware of may go off before the end of the act, before the Technical Committee makes its measured deliberation and a new constitution is created under which — it is the only hope — assassins come to realize that the gods to which they sacrifice have abandoned them.

Ben half-believes, has to believe, Vera has spoken only to ward off further questioning about the Committee, she doesn’t want to discuss her indecision. For these old friends, Sally and Didy, he is coaxed out of his preoccupation by a sense of Didy’s need for distraction, for a show of normal interests, and he offers that his business is in trouble. Faith in the promotional value of Zairean crocodile, South American lizard and Cape ostrich skin luggage with gold-leaf initials and logo was low in these times of recession and political uncertainty. The sanctions-busters who liked to travel equipped this way had had their day, and the succeeding affluent class who would come when sanctions were lifted and unemployment dropped, were not yet in place. He joked dryly against himself, for diversion; the irony of his attempt to secure the old age of his Vera, a woman like Mrs Stark, by profiting from the vanity of the Government’s officials, expressed in contrast with the distinction of his face, his black eyes deep as the eyes of antique statues suggested by dark hollows. — The regime’s ambassadors know they’ll soon be recalled for ever, no more boarding for London and Washington with a dozen matched pieces.—

— Well if you’re selling off stock cheap, I wouldn’t mind a smart new briefcase. Doesn’t matter if it has some Pik Botha or Harry Schwarz initials and the old coat-of-arms, I don’t care even if it’s embossed with a vierkleur, ⁵ I can always stick one of Mpho’s decals over it. — Sally matched the spirit. — And maybe if you’ve got any off-cuts handy we could order a nice holster for Didy. Something cowboy-style, you know. The lining of the pockets in his jackets is getting worn from the weight of the damn gun carted around all the time.—

— Some people wear buttons on their lapels, I wear the gun, that’s all.—

— At least you’re not the only one. Everyone carries guns about these days … without your reason. — Vera turned to Sally. — Ben even wants me to keep a gun in my car …—

But Vera is small fry. A terrible privilege to which Sibongile and Didymus belong changes and charges everything about them, to the outsider; the sound of their voices in the most trivial remark, the very look of their clothes, the touch of their hands, still warm. When every old distinction of privilege is defeated and abolished, there comes an aristocracy of those in danger. All feel diminished, outclassed, in their company.

The Island is ours.

Chapter 26

Vera’s house is empty.

Promotional Luggage closed down, bankrupt but honestly so; Ben paid out creditors, owed nobody anything. He did not know what to do next and to disguise this went to fill the interim with a visit to Ivan in London. Ivan had parted from the Hungarian; a treat offered, Vera anticipated for Ben an interlude of male companionship between the generations without the intrusion of women. What would Ben do, around the house, while Vera was occupied and preoccupied, every day, every hour, between the Technical Committee and her attempts to keep in touch with work at the Foundation? Shop in the supermarket? Bennet? Regard himself as retired? Take up as a hobby, like joining a bowling club, the sculpture whose vocation he had given up in passion for Vera? Vera was his vocation; Promotional Luggage had been intended to provide for Vera.

Adam stayed on for a while in Ivan’s room. He and Vera had the curious loose accommodation of individuals who, though vastly divided by age, by the commitment to ideals in one and the lack of ideals in the other, are at some base alike in following their instincts and will. His grandmother did not give him advice (the one occasion on which she had done so was to protect her friends rather than himself), make his bed, sew on his buttons or supervise his activities, so she was no grandmother. They took telephone messages for one another, ate independently at no fixed meal times whatever was in the refrigerator or each left for the other in the oven, sometimes met up late at night and chatted like contemporaries simply sharing a convenient roof. At one of these incidental meetings he remarked that a friend had found a cottage in Bezuidenhout Valley and wanted someone to share it. A week later he moved out in a party atmosphere, borrowing Vera’s car to make several trips with the possessions he had acquired, helped and hindered by the to-and-fro of volunteers among his friends. There was fondness between Vera and him but both knew they would see one another rarely once they did not sleep under the same roof. The family roof: it was that, the house built in the Forties in the style of whites of the period, half colonial bungalow and half modernist with a split-level living-room and coloured slate stoep they called a patio, the house provided for the young bride and their soldier son by people who did not know what they themselves were, part of Europe or part of Africa; the house that was Vera’s loot by divorce, the roof under which she took her lover home, where her children were born, where the ‘patio’ meant for white teaparties had been converted to a study where strategies for restoring blacks to their land were worked out. In every room the house retained the life lived there. Scratches and stains, makeshift (bookshelves built of planks mounted on bricks) the newly married lovers, caring only for love-making, nothing for material things, had made do with. A sculptor’s chisel among counters from a children’s game and someone’s collection of labelled stones, rose quartz, crystal, geode. Clothes hanging limp, lost the shape of the body that wore them, never given away because someone (Annie?) once had had the intention to pick them up some time. Boxes that hid the remains of Promotional Luggage, ‘vanity’ cases and elephant-hide wallets nobody wanted to buy. The scent — her own particular body-smell of the house, independent of the perfume she used — of the documents and newspaper cuttings she hoarded, a calendar of her days and years, live as paper in its organic origins is, secretly wadding together in damp and buckling apart thinly in heat. Broken pottery, a Mickey Mouse watch stopped at some hour in childhood, postcards and photographs. It is impossible for anyone, tidying after the departure of a sojourner, not to stop as Vera does and look through photographs come upon. It is then that she turns up, once again, the postcard photograph sent to Egypt during a war. She had not thrown it away, torn it up; only slid it back under all this other stuff.

And who was that?

I’m the one in the photograph whom no one remembers.

It was within this calm that she worked with the Technical Committee on Constitutional Issues. What came out of the Committee would be anonymous in its effect on millions, only a small sample of whom she had known and knew, and whose lives she had affected personally, the people of the Mogopas and Odensvilles. She and Zeph Rapulana talked together under the jacaranda as perhaps they would not, elsewhere. It was necessary to believe that elections and the first government in which everyone would have a vote would stop the AK—47s and petrol bombs, defeat the swastika wearers, accommodate the kinglets clinging to the knobkerries of ethnic power, master the company at the Drommedaris; no purpose in giving satisfaction to prophets of doom by discussing with them the failure of the mechanisms of democracy, of elections ‘free and fair’, in other countries of the continent.

— At last — a year, a month, an actual day! — our people are coming to what we’ve fought for. They can’t be cheated! It can’t happen! Not to us. We can’t let it! What a catastrophe if people started thinking it’s not worthwhile voting because whatever they do the old regime will rig the thing.—

She took his determination as a reviving draught. — But if we’re going to deliver the goods there has to be a real anticipation of what could happen, Zeph. How to deal with the Homeland blacks who’ll still want to keep their petty power even if their territories have been reincorporated into the country before the elections. What if their alliance with the white right-wing holds, grows? What if the white generals become their generals? And the regular army becomes their source of weapons?—

— They have to be shown — absolutely, no other possibility — they can’t win. After all the years with their guns and their armies, after all the thousands they’ve killed, all the laws they’ve made, all the millions they’ve robbed of land and chased about the country to take it for themselves, they had to let Mandela out of jail and sit down and bargain with him. Didn’t they? They must know they can’t win! Not even if they do what UNITA did in Angola and refuse to recognize election results when we win, not even what Babangida did, and declare elections null and void. They can’t win.—

— So somehow they must be convinced to take what’s offered them. But this has to be done now, they have to be accommodated somehow, before. And that may betray everything.—

— How everything, Vera?—

— If we have to give in to that crazy idea — the white extremists — the bit of the country they want exclusively for themselves! The ultimate laager. What corner of the country doesn’t also belong to others? What about the blacks who live there, or once did? The land, Zeph, the land. You know all about the land. We promise redistribution of the land to the people and then we so much as consider giving even a metre to those who stole it in the first place? Are we going to start endorsing people out again, this time in the name of the good of unity, one South Africa, one people? And are we going to have to settle for federalism, or some sort of regionalism that’s a disguise of federalism, so the old power blocs of whites — maybe with some black satellites, or their alliance with ethnic ambitions — remain?—

— We’ll deal with that with regional powers, that’s being tackled. The regions aren’t going to be a disguise for anything. It’s a difficult game, but it’ll come off.—

— But the other! Those whites we laughed at until they drove an armoured car into the negotiations building.—

— That track goes nowhere. They’ll run out of steam. You and I can’t tackle that one, Vera. — He was kindly amused at consideration of the presumption. — We have to trust the leaders to find the right signals to send them on their way. We can only stick to what we’re doing. Each of us.—

Chill comes quickly these afternoons. The last light intensifies evergreen foliage to black, with a brush of thin gold across the fading jacaranda that will shed only when winter ends. In pure radiance far off a plane floats silently, linking their vision as their eyes follow it. The presence of shrubs rises. And then the incineration of the vanished sun blazes a forest fire behind blackened trees.

In some eras what would seem the most impersonal matters are the most intimate. Becoming part of the massed design of the dark, there was nothing either felt more intensely than these political fears and exaltations, no emotion that could draw two individuals more closely than this. A strong current of the present carries them headily: this is the year when the old life comes to an end.

Ben and Vera exchange regular telephone calls. Tacitly they were supposed to alternate but if a week passes in silence when it is Vera’s turn to call, he will call instead.

When the phone rang late at night she knew it was him.

He heard the rings and followed them through the empty rooms of the house to find her: the stoep-study under the gooseneck lamp, the piece of fruit she had beside her when she worked at night, the kitchen where she would be squeezing a lemon to make herself a hot drink, the bedroom where her body emerged from her clothes in an unconscious ritual he could have described.

Usually she was in bed, her arm went out for the phone. Each gave an account of those of their activities they thought the other would like to hear. There were pleasantries, small anecdotes. Ivan had had a party and one of the guests had brought a two-year-old boy who had been put to sleep on Ben’s bed and wet it. Vera had been driven round the block on the back of the motorbike Adam had acquired and brought to display. Ben asked, with in his disembodied voice the assumed concern of one to whom such things are a story in the foreign news pages of a daily paper, how the negotiations, committees and commissions were going, and whether the killings were as bad as it seemed on TV flashes. She asked if Ivan was away in some other capital or at home with Ben. He reminded her of routine obligations she might forget — he knew how little time Vera had to think of such things. Licences to be renewed, tax returns — although she was the sole earner now. She passed this over quickly: another kind of reminder, one she wished to avoid, for him — the failure of Promotional Luggage to provide for her as he wished. This was the progression to the moment when there was nothing left to say. In a pause before goodbye — she was lying looking at the ceiling as if she were a stray fly walking there in the silent room — his voice reached her. — Are you lonely.—

— No. — A laugh. — No.—

After she had dropped the receiver she cringed with remorse. She must pick up and call him back, call Ben, Bennet. Say what? If she could lie to him before, times before, why couldn’t she find it in herself to give him a lie to grasp at, now. She turned out the light and slept, her empty house drawn up around her.

Forgive me, for I know quite well what I do.

Ben and his other beloved, Ivan, were having a good time in London as bachelors together. Ben was in a rage of sorrow no one knew of. A rage of sorrow for all Vera has done and will never know. And if she had? Would things have been different, better? If he had told her that he had felt another man on her, in her, those years, he knew that she was enjoying two men at once, she was capable of it then, he knew there was a flat or a hotel room somewhere she came from, back to him — would she be lonely without him, need him now? Oh not as in the mountains, the delicious and wonderful seduction of him by someone else’s wife. But as the husband he became. He saw that Vera never ever really wanted a husband — only for a time, when it excited her to have her lover domesticated, a kind of dressing-up in other garments, perversely, looking after babies together, telling each other confidences, having friendships as a couple, tandem in political beliefs even if she lived them in her work, risked herself, while he built the beaver dam to shore up, provide for her … the dam that breached, wrong enterprise for the wrong era. Not that she cared about that; it was part of her not having wanted a husband, ever, not the first or the second: not needing security, which he supposed is what a husband represents to most women. She’s getting old and she understands something about security, down there he’s far away from, he can’t fathom. She’s getting old, even his Vera’s ageing; and she’s not lonely. He searched himself for the bitter comfort of her inadequacies, the things in her that irritated him. She had no plastic, tactile feeling — except for flesh, of course, fondling him, making him rise in terrifying excitement, stroking his lips and eyes, she used to, telling him how beautiful that face of his, that he still bears with, was. A mask for a performance he can’t take off. He has all the time he’s always needed for reading, now. There is exegesis in everything he reads. Going back to the books that had been the essential texts of his youth, rereading Rilke, he seems sought out, signalled to: Vera is Malte Laurids Brigge’s ‘one who didn’t want to be loved.’ ‘That inner indifference of spirit’: it was written of Vera. And he was reading an Irish poet — not Yeats this time — he wanted to let the words tell her that although he’d failed to share the credo with her in the end, he understood: What’s looked the stronger has outlived its term, I The future lies in what’s affirmed from under. (But it’s the beauty of the assonance, perhaps, that holds the meaning for him.) She had listened in his arms when he read poetry to her, Yeats and Lorca, in the mountains, she had said she was entranced. Entranced! Vera never read anything but newspapers and White Papers, Blue Papers, a house full of Reports. For her the condition of existence was what happened in the power of politics, while the very power of life itself, the all-beneficent sun, god-symbol eternally of a future rising, was turning out to be the source of death rays humans are letting in upon themselves by tearing their only shelter, the atmosphere. She nagged him to ‘keep up’ sculpture in his spare time of being a husband; she didn’t know volume, shape, the smooth skin of wood and the grainy one of stone, and the full time these needed. She favoured her daughter openly, cold Annick, and seemed, even when he was a baby, her firstborn, to have some kind of unexplained resentment against her son, perhaps because Ivan was formed in her image — did this mean Vera did not like herself? God knows. Lover, husband, you never know the one to whom you are these. He wanted to call out, call out to her — Yeats again — lines that came back to him as a blow: What do we know but that we face I One another in this place? He hated — not Vera, but his dependency on loving her. He has gone away knowing that he does not know how to carry on his life alone.

Didymus gave evidence about the camps. It became necessary, for the cause, to go further than a report. He was to speak in open inquiry of what he had had to keep to himself. A change of self-discipline; in a career of exile, infiltration, guerrilla battle, spy and spied upon, he was accustomed to such switches. The Movement itself announced to the press and conducted the investigation.

What is the difference between a criminal and a hero? He had thought about this with the particular form of revolutionary sophistication — the nearest to irony a revolution may allow itself to get, because irony is distancing, a luxury, like expecting a soft bed when waiting in ambush to kill. While standing ‘trial’ before his comrades instead of the last white government’s courts, it’s hardly a matter of justifying his actions in the name of a just cause, the end against the means. It’s a matter of fulfilling whatever is needed by the Movement to show its integrity to the truth, its capacity for self-examination and condemnation because it is strong enough to survive these, a capacity others dare not attempt. He tells as much as is needed to demonstrate that the Movement may emerge with a cleansed conscience. He tells himself it is a mission like any other, suited, as all have been, to a particular stage in liberation.

When the press badger him with questions contrived to make him express bitterness etc. so that they may have a sensational story about divisions within what they call the ‘upper echelons’ of the Movement, he disappoints them effortlessly with a well-worn formulation, one of the printer’s lugs of rhetoric. — I’m in complete agreement with the principle of accountability we have always rigorously followed.—

They scamper after him with the weapon of their microphones. — You don’t feel you’re the fall guy? You’ve been victimized?—

— How? — He appears indulgent of stupidity. — After more than three hundred and fifty years of victimization by one white power after another, I should feel ‘victimized’ by a normal process within my own liberation movement?—

And afterwards, although there’s now no possibility of concealing his involvement with the camps, there is also no need for this in order to ensure that Sibongile’s advancement will not be prejudiced. The death threat provides the highest proof of political correctness of the potential victim. Paradoxically, the reputation of Sibongile is unassailable.

Vera and Didymus suddenly caught sight of one another as each was approaching the pay booth in an underground parking garage. He walked with Vera to her car and at a gesture both made at the same time, got into the seat beside her. There was something clandestine about the vast dim cellar of a place, evilsmelling of fuel fumes, and cold; as if the context of their encounters, just as some people are likely to meet at concerts, bars or libraries, was set when the umfundisi stepped into her house and she kicked the door shut behind him. They didn’t talk of the inquiry; if Vera was curious she knew enough about him to keep her curiosity to herself. They talked of Sally. She was the one on missions all about the world, now, delegate to this country and that in search of funds for the election campaign. She was tipped for a portfolio in the cabinet when it came. There were newspaper photographs in which she could be picked out among Japanese and German dignitaries and Scandinavian politicians; Vera saw that the Portobello Market boots and African robes had been succeeded by a wardrobe of suitable international elegance for her position. The two in the car were proud of her, as if from the same perspective; when someone becomes a public personality and gains an image distinct from an intimate one, he or she regains the remove of being ‘someone else’; Didymus spoke of her as of a stranger rather than one whose being is dulled by familiarity. — At least she’s safer when she’s overseas. And she’s doing so well! She has this way of getting to people and dealing with these institutions — you can tell she does her homework, when she meets them she knows exactly what their resources are, their pet prejudices, what they like to fund. And tough! No pledges, she says: cheques, not promises. And she gets them, too. How she can charm … just watch her, sometimes …—

— She’s always been beautiful, that helps.—

— But now! — The two words are almost a boast. Vera understands something else about any kind of public distinction: the individual with such an image remains sexually tantalizing despite the passing of years. Ben beckons distantly. She catches at a disembodied wisp of telephone voice, words that are going round lost in her space. — Ben saw her in the foyer of some hotel. One day in London. He said she was splendid.—

— Ben in London? When did that happen? When’d he go?—

Neither he nor she was prepared for the strangeness into which his cheerfully ordinary remark had fallen.

— He’d already been gone a long time.—

Didymus did not want to be drawn into confidences with this woman, old friend from the days across the colour line. The private relationship of his secret visit in one of his revolutionary personae was not licence for her to speak to him of that other privacy, between husband and wife. It was something only a white woman would have expected. Yet he understood what she was telling him; understood out of the balance and imbalance of withdrawal and closeness experienced between himself and Sibongile. But in their case it was surely all due to factors outside themselves, to the struggle and what that meant in all its phases. Whites, even Vera and Ben, surely had at least some intimacy safe from these things? If he had allowed himself to say: I’m sorry — that would have acknowledged he understood, and burst discretion for her to pour out God knows what, Ben with another woman, the usual story. In and around the Movement there were many such; when political action is the only imperative, the sexual emotions rebel.

— Ivan’s still over there, isn’t it? Big boy in banking, man, that’s really nice. We must get together and hear all the news when Ben gets back. I’m expecting Sally next weekend, with luck. She’s in Los Angeles and coming via Bonn. You know that Mpho’s got a scholarship to study drama at N.Y.U.? — Here was an area of confidence to which both belonged since Vera had taken responsibility for a mishap in the girl’s life, along with her parents. — Much better, for a girl like Mpho, than computers — she’d never have stuck with that, hei. Not with her temperament. Sally fixed it.—

Vera returned to the empty house at night in complete self-forgetfulness; and met herself. The curtains she went about drawing across the windows, the angles of walls she followed, the doors she closed as she passed from room to room sheltered and contained only her. Her house, acquired dishonestly, that she never should have kept; that house was still with her, it was, in a sense, her sole and only possession, the only one she had carried with her through everything that had come and gone within and around her, Mrs Stark and Vera; men, the children she bore them, the communities she saved or failed to save from removal, the deaths of and the death-threats to companions, the terrified traipse of squatters from hostel attacks to refuge, the return of faces from prison and exile, the last white parliament that would ever sit, the swastika rising from the bunker to blazon, with a new twist, on the arms of white vigilantes; the abstract of words, power struggling with the unfamiliar ploughshares of negotiation, the committee she came home from where the needs and frustrations and ambitions of more than three centuries were meant to be reconciled and achieved on paper in some immutable syntax.

Old partners in crime (so long ago it had become respectable, a family home) she and her house were alone together. Ben had put in an alarm system. Like every other dwelling that could be called a house, whether in the city suburbs or the black townships, it was a cage outside which prowlers cruised in their cars or loped along the gutters waiting for a way to get in and take what they wanted. She was not afraid because she reasoned that a house with such a shabby exterior would tempt no one to believe there was much worth taking, inside; and that belief would be correct: her files were priceless to herself and would rouse only disgusted disappointment in anyone expecting valuables; the furniture supplied by parents-in-law for the war bride was worn and abraded.

She would pour herself a stiff vodka with a prickle of tonic water and put up her feet on the coffee-table elevated with stacked newspapers. She watched the news on television and then listened to every other version of it, switching from station to station on the radio. Events were in the house with her, nothing else. The voices of events peopled it, speaking to the preoccupations of her day, and the responses she made mentally were as if she were answering. The evidence of personal life was around her; but her sense was of the personal life as transitory, it is the political life that is transcendent, like art, for which, alas, she’d never had time after Bennet read wonderful poetry to her in the mountains. Ben himself had so easily given up what had attracted her to him along with his sexuality — his artistic ability, his sculpture. Politics affects and is evolved endlessly through future generations — the way people are going to live, the way they think further. She had no illusion about politics; about her part in it. People kill each other and the future looks back and asks, What for? We can see, from here, what the end would have been, anyway. And then they turn to kill each other for some other reason whose resolution could have been foreseen.

Yet there’s purpose in the attempt to break the cycle? On the premise that the resolution is going to be justice? — even if it is renamed empowerment.

Sometimes, after a second drink, when the news gave way to some piece of popular music revamped from the past, Vera, too old to find a partner, danced alone, no one to witness, in the living-room of her house, the rock-’n’-roll and pata-pata her body remembered from wartime parties and the Fifties in the Maqomas’ Chiawelo house. That was the time, she accepted, tolerant of her young self, when all other faculties of judgment were blinded by sex. She would stop: laughing at herself giddily. But the dancing was a rite of passage. An exaltation of solitude would come over her. It was connected with something else: a freedom; an attraction between her and a man that had no desire for the usual consummation. Ben believes their marriage was a failure. Vera sees it as a stage on the way, along with others, many and different. Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self.

Chapter 27

After Vera signed the deed of sale of her house she went to spend a week with her daughter Annick in Cape Town. As she was leaving she stood a moment in the doorway and looked at all that had been there over decades, in place still. Buildings, rooms, witness; the inanimate stand outside time.

Lou came to meet her at the airport. Annie had taken the baby to her surgery for routine inoculations; Annie and her lover had adopted an infant. It was female, like themselves, and black, chosen whether as their form of political commitment against that of sitting on commissions and committees or in their concern for one of the abandoned children of adolescent schoolgirls Annie came upon in her round of clinics in the squatter camps and black townships outside the city.

Annie and Lou were in the state of distracted preoccupation of new parents. Lou called to Annie to listen to the infant’s breathing or sniff at its stool in case there was something to be worried about her professional skill would detect; Annie summoned Lou all through the house to witness that she was the first to get the little creature to smile. The room that had been a Victorian nursery and was converted to a lovers’ retreat where Annie and Lou had kept to themselves was restored to a nursery with the door kept ajar so that the baby’s summoning cries could be heard. The baby girl was not beautiful. It had feet and hands too attenuated for its body, wavering about like the legs of an insect trapped on its back. Its sad oil-yellow face crowned with hair like a black sponge bore the aspect of something unloved and unwanted in the womb.

— Here’s your grandchild. — Annie placed the baby in Vera’s arms. She had sensed Vera’s reaction; perhaps because it was her own, that in her case moved her to love and protect. — They’re all a rather pale muddy colour when they’re new. But her mother’s a beautiful Xhosa from the Transkei.—

Annie and Lou had rearranged their working schedules so that one stayed at home to take care of the child on alternate days. All such arrangements were discussed, told to Vera in the conviction of parents that every detail concerning the conduct of life around a child is of the same interest to others as it is to themselves. — We tried turns taking her with us to work, Annie to the hospital and I to the lab, but the one who was without the baby always got so worried about what was happening — we were phoning each other madly all the time! Hopeless! When she’s a few months older we’ll get a good day-care woman in.—

Annie and Vera sat in the sun on the verandah. Tea and scones under the valance of white wooden lacework. Annie with Ben’s beautiful face, the black eyes lowered, the fine nostrils white with concentration, fed the baby from a bottle, but it kept nuzzling towards her breast, pushing up the cushiony flesh above the open neck of her shirt. There were clean cloths handy in case the baby should regurgitate and one of the cats, adjusted to banishment from the lovers’ retreat, lay bubbling a purr, a kettle coming to the boil, in appreciation of having a household where now there was always someone at home. Vera watched Annie listening to the other rhythm, the infant sucking, Annie’s breathing becoming adjusted to it, as if she would fall asleep; it had been easy to fall asleep while giving the breast, yes. The baby might have been Mpho’s if the old gogo in Alex had had her way and it hadn’t ended in a bucket at the abortionist fortunately procured. So often Vera had felt like this, far removed from what was steering her daughter’s life, further and further, unable to check the remove.

Grandmother and daughter and baby; appearing so natural to anyone passing in the street. A squirrel gibbered in one of the old oak trees carefully tended in the garden and Annie looked up — the closed circuit of infant, Annie, Lou, broken by Lou’s absence at work — realizing her mother’s presence, Vera’s presence, having time for it for the first time. — Dad wrote a few weeks ago. I’d written about our acquisition … Perhaps we should give him a call, while you’re here? He seems quite happy with my rich brother. But what about you? Couldn’t that kid Adam at least have stayed until papa comes home? Are you safe in that house alone?—

— I’ve sold the house.—

Annie was instantly, frighteningly indignant: home, the old home, it must be kept intact even if one never sees it again, doesn’t want to. — You’ve what? For God’s sake! When? And what about Ben, when he comes back? Where’ll you live?—

Vera let her lift the baby against her shoulder, patting it in the ritual of aiding digestion, before she spoke.

— Ben won’t come back.—

Annie did not look at her mother. — And when was that decision taken.—

— There’s no decision, but he won’t come back.—

— Don’t tell me you and he are getting divorced at your age.—

— No, not divorced. No. I’ll go and see him and Ivan when I’m overseas.—

She was amazed to see Annie’s face reddening as it did when as a child she was about to lose her temper. The black eyes hostile behind a thick distortion of tears.

— How nice of you. What has he done?—

— Done. Nothing.—

So now she — Vera, the mother — who came home to him fucked out from another man, was abandoning that home, nothing for her father to come back to. Shut out.

— For Christ’s sake, why do you do this?—

Vera was looking with incomprehension at something else before her, the baby back at the breast of a woman who wouldn’t have a man. — Because I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.—

— That’s right. Answer in riddles.—

— When someone gives you so much power over himself he makes you a tyrant.—

A few tears fell on the baby’s spongy filaments, glistening there, Annie brushed off the contamination fiercely. — Like the penis business. You and the penis, I couldn’t understand that, either, could I.—

Vera wanted to bow her head, walk indoors hangdog, and despised herself for it. Always she had had a masochistic need to be chastised by Annie in expiation of the times when, loving her, she had neglected her by having her out of mind, that most callous form of neglect; while caring for nothing but making love in One-Twenty-One Delville Wood. She resisted the need by coldness. — By now we ought to have accepted there are things about each other neither of us understands.—

Above the head of the baby Annie screwed up the left side of her face as if to focus better, ward off. — And what are you going to do?—

— When the Committee’s finished, I’ll be back at the Foundation of course.—

— You know I don’t mean that. Where’re you intending to live? You’re not going to buy another house, are you? A flat? I can’t see you in one of those buildings where you have to sign in and out every time with some security thug in the foyer.—

— I’m moving to the annexe of Zeph’s house.—

No recognition of the name.

— Zeph Rapulana. You know him. He was at the party we gave when you and Lou were staying with us.—

— When my grandfather died. — A reproof asserting the order of events in better proportion to their significance.

— I think you and Lou talked to him for a while, in the garden that night.—

— The man who sits on boards and is a director of banks and whatnot, you told us? The smooth-talking representative of the new middle class?—

— The squatter camp leader I’ve known for a long time. A good friend.—

Annie was looking at her in sour derisory disbelief. — You’ve always dominated in your own house. You’re going to share with someone, now? Why?—

— It’s an annexe. Quite separate, own entrance and so on. There’s no question of any intrusion, either way. We respect each other.—

— But how did this decision come about? Not out of thin air! Not because you answered an offer of accommodation in the newspaper!—

— We talked about it together.—

— So you’re such great friends. — No reaction: something else Annie sees she is not expected to understand. — And how will you get on with his family. The wife? D’you at least know her? All very well your professional friendships, Vera—

— She lives in the house he built in an area the Foundation fought a successful action over. She doesn’t like the city; the children are all away, grown-up — like mine.—

Annie’s body began to rock gently back and forth, soothing the baby to sleep, and, as if with the movement, her sense of her mother changed, she felt that her mother needed protection from herself — her headstrong naivety. — Ma, so you’re virtually moving in with a man. What will people think?—

From Annie! Vera laughed. What a consideration, from a lesbian, a lesbian parent — Annie! — D’you mean a black man, then?—

— I mean just what I said: my father’s gone to live in London, you move in with another man.—

— I don’t think anyone could think anything about someone my age, and a man.—

Vera had her palms raised in a steeple against her mouth in her familiar attitude of obduracy. Annie seemed to have to capture her attention against the fascination with which she was following the darting ballet of the squirrel approaching and retreating near the verandah.

— Ma, you’re wrong. They’ll think. — She continued to rock, in embarrassment at what she was about to deliver. — And they’ll laugh at you.—

Vera was deeply curious rather than hurt in some residual sexual vanity. — Do you think so? That’s interesting.—

And this roused Annie’s curiosity, or wonder. — What are you experimenting with?—

— Not experimenting. — Vera kindly, but to the point. — You’re the one who’s doing that.—

— We’re doing what we know we want, Lou and I. Simple. I don’t know what it is you think you want. Still. Oh I know— your work, what’s coming for the country — but you? What have you wanted?—

Only someone young could ask this as the single question. Yet she was forced into response. — Now. To find out about my life. The truth. In the end. That’s all.—

— Oh Vera! — A gesture with a hand free of the baby, flourishing the size, the presumption of the answer. — And have you?—

— I’m getting there.—

—‘The truth about your life.’ But that’s not the question. Was it worth it?—

— What?—

— Everything. All that you made happen. The way you’re suddenly making something else happen now.—

— But that’s not the question. It’s not a summing-up. It’s not (Vera has the expression of someone quoting) a bag of salt weighed against a bag of mealies.—

— And so? You’re not obliged to answer because I’m your daughter. I’m not looking for a guiding light …—

But a key opening a door they had looked for entry to only once before, they were in some place of confidence.

Vera searched there for something partially, tentatively explanatory that would not make some homely philosophy of a process that must not be looked back upon with the glance of Orpheus. — Working through — what shall I say — dependencies.—

— What a strange way to see life. Yours, or others on you? — But the sound of Lou’s third-hand Karmann-Ghia (relic of the days when she was a carefree bachelor, so to speak) braking at the gate made Annie forget about an answer. Lou was coming with a smiling here-am-I stride up the path. A cancelled appointment had given her the chance to slip home for lunch — she brought it with her, a hot loaf and a tray of avocados. She dumped these and kissed Annie, was kissed back while she caressed Annie’s nape and both hung over the padded basket where their baby slept.

Home.

Vera is the onlooker to domestic serenity.

Somehow, she and Annie have exchanged places. She has left home, and Annie is making home of a new kind entirely.

Chapter 28

Perhaps the passing away of the old regime makes the abandonment of an old personal life also possible.

I’m getting there.

Proposals to the Technical Committee on Constitutional Issues come from all groups and formations. And the groupings scarcely can be defined with any accuracy from week to week. Wild alliances clot suddenly in the political bloodstream, are announced, break up, flow in and out of negotiations. Everyone wants their own future arranged around thein, everyone has plans for a structure of laws to contain their ideal existence. It is the nearest humans will ever get to the myth of being God on Creation Day. Vera Stark and her colleagues sit week after week, sometimes into the night, considering the basis of proportional representation, parties qualifying with five per cent or ten per cent, consensus in Cabinet decisions or on the vote of a two-thirds majority; the percentage by which the President should be elected, the percentage by which amendments to the constitution could be made, the percentage by which the Bill of Rights could be amended, the extent of powers and duties to be assigned to regional legislatures. And on and on. The principle of each proposal is almost without exception the same: every cluster or assembly of individuals wants to protect itself from the power of others. The fallible human beings on the Committee are occupied with the task of finding a way through this that would protect all these without danger or disadvantage to any. Politics began outside the Garden; the violent brotherhood of Cain and Abel can be transformed into the other proclaimed brotherhood only if it is possible to devise laws to bring this about.

Zeph found her in the garden where a place seemed to have been ready for her for some time. He had dinners and evening meetings and she often was in late session with the Committee, so they seldom coincided on working days. But on Sundays they were there. Vera had pensioned off her three-times-a-week maid with her house, but Zeph had an old woman brought in from the country, perhaps a relative, to whom he referred as his ‘housekeeper’ since it was delicate for blacks to admit to employing servants. The woman went to the allday open-air gathering of some religious sect on Sundays, as Zeph went to early service in an Anglican church: Vera cooked breakfast and set it out under the jacaranda mid-morning. He was used to being waited on by women but did not expect it of her, always thanked her as if it were a surprise, and carried the dishes with her back to her small kitchen when they had eaten. They read the papers, passing particular pages to one another without comment; each, out of their particular activities and connections, had knowledge to exchange in private of what was omitted there, not for publication. — No one’ll trust we’re impartial, whatever we put forward to the negotiations, every day when I get to that chair where I sit I have to remind myself of this. And perhaps they’re right? I know, for myself— I’m influenced by the land, at the back of my mind I’m seeing every possible check and balance in terms of how it might affect the question of land distribution. It comes from all my time at the Foundation, it’s been the perspective of my life for so long.—

— I don’t think everyone thinks the Committee isn’t impartial. I wouldn’t say that, Vera. Just a few who don’t understand what impartiality tries for, because preventing ‘abuse of power’ only means to them they haven’t a hope in hell of succeeding with their own kind of domination.—

— But that’s just the problem. You and I, here, we can see those people for what they are, and dismiss them. We know what they are, we’ve decided they’re a dangerous hindrance. But the Committee has to consider all submissions, has to take every one seriously, there we have to correct in each other any personal judgments. Remember I once said to you, a constitution’s the practice in law of a Bill of Rights? Well I’ve found impartiality really means listening to the most obvious contrivances thought up by people who don’t care what they’d do to claim legality to hang on to power, finagle power. The use to which they’ll put beautiful legal formulations! We’re caught up in a jungle of our own negotialionspeak.—

—‘Technical Committee’ … yes … sounds so simple … Like knowing how to wire up some lights or keep the airconditioners going … They could have called it something else. But that’s a hangover from all the names we had, nothing to do with the circumstances we were supposed to believe were described by the names — remember Separate but Equal, Extension of Universities Act, Immorality Act, whatnot … It’s a habit we took over.—

They laughed, matching alone together in the winter sun many of the curious aspects of the changes of which they were part, the time through which they were moving.

If she was grappling in difficulty with what were supposed to be the technicalities of people’s future lives, he had no such officially defined euphemism to protect him. There were scandals in the financial enterprise of empowerment. His face appeared among others in the newspapers they opened. A tangle of loans, debts, transfer of funds from one company to another, and accusations of these being fronts for the Movement. — So are they going to ask you to write into the constitution that no one in a political party can have business interests? That’s something, after the way big business and the mines kept the old regime in place since our grandfathers’ days!—

— How did it happen? Is there really embezzlement somewhere, people you thought you could trust?—

— I don’t like to think so, straight off. We have to sort it all out. It began to get too big too quickly, out of hand. Some sectors — I told you when the figures came out last month how well the insurance company’s investment in housing is going? — they’re doing well, but the papers don’t make much of it. Blacks can’t succeed. They mustn’t. The old story.—

— Wish-fulfilment rumours. But the figures they quote?—

— I wish it was just rumours. Other things are shaky. We haven’t kept strict enough control! … when we’ve seen some of our brothers heading for trouble we’ve baled them out on their assurance it was temporary, we believed them, they believed it themselves! We haven’t learned yet to be ruthless, and that’s the first rule in business, make no mistake; we did. — There came to him the jargon that had entered his vocabulary from the Drommedaris. — Not a question of anyone’s hand in the till. I’m prepared to stick by that. It’ll be a terrible thing for me, Vera, if it is.—

Her eyes moved in resentful alarm. — You wouldn’t be involved directly.—

— No. — His hand blotted the photographs spread across three columns. — But I’d be seen, for good, as being among those who were.—

She took an orange and separated its sections. He was looking at her indulgently, carefully, from the very limit of trust between them, testing if he could even accept, from her, that she might think him capable of theft — for which ‘unacceptable practice’ was simply the Drommedaris name in the world where he risked himself now.

— What would my tenant do? Move out?—

She dropped pips from her lips to her cupped hand and looked down as she ate, as if all she had to do to find the answer was finish a mouthful. — I’d know it’s sometimes necessary to do things now we wouldn’t do in another time. That it was done for a reason, someone, something else.—

He smiled. — Ah no. Be careful. We have to make a lot of new rules but that’s not one. A thief is a thief, Vera. You and I cannot be exceptions.—

— You’d be offending God, wouldn’t you. Yes. But Zeph I’m not so sure about myself; that consideration not coming into it for me. I might decide money would achieve more for the people, in one place rather than another. I might cross funds … A good thing I don’t sit on your Boards.—

— Well if you did, at least you couldn’t be accused of being predictable. Black.—

The scandal died down; or was averted by reorganization. Zeph had many discussions with business colleagues at his house. Of course she was not present, kept to her annexe. Sometimes he talked to her later as a consequence rather than a direct account of these discussions. — Can you imagine, there’s the example of a factory that regularly produces nearly double the amount of each order because the workmanship is so sloppy, there are so many items that come out not up to standard that only half the number can be used to fill the order. The waste! The cost! In money, in man-hours! Low productivity can sabotage completely our hopes of raising living standards in the long run. Our talk all these years about redistribution of wealth and land — when we’ve done that with what was stockpiled for themselves by white regimes, we’ll still be unable to compete in world markets if we don’t raise productivity. We’re far behind successful countries, far behind Korea, Taiwan, China … countries with cheap labour. They produce better goods than we do and on a scale that makes our productivity chicken-feed. We’ve blamed exploited cheap labour and lack of skills training for our failure. And that’s been true, far as we could judge, because we’ve never had anything else but an exploited labour force. But when our workers are no longer exploited, will they produce more and better? What about the old ways? What are we counting on? That when you have black management, a black executive director, if in some cases the State you voted into power is your boss, you’ll put enthusiasm into your work? Motivation. I worry. It won’t be a form of protest against the white exploiter to be caught skimping on the job. No more fifty per cent rejects. We need black management that knows how to make people work.—

Vera watched his face, his manner; smiled. — On board. No avoiding it.—

If she happened to encounter his colleagues in passing he introduced her, hand on her shoulder: —My tenant. — If anyone showed curiosity about this tenant, the ageing white woman who lived on his property, he was pleased to have the opportunity to inform them — Mrs Stark is on the Technical Committee. She is one of the people drafting our constitution.—

The tenant. The designation, for the public, suited her well. It was a kind of private play on words, between Zeph Rapulana and Mrs Stark, linking their present arrangement to Odensville, the matter of land, over which they had come to begin to know one another. It was a consequence in which there were loyalties but no dependencies, in which there was feeling caught in no recognized category, having no need to be questioned. On the home ground of the present — violent, bureaucratic, shaking, all at once, expressed in burnt and bloodied bodies, in a passion of refusal, revulsion against institutions, in the knowledge of betrayal by police and army supposed to protect, in the anger turned against itself, in the prolixity of documents — there manages to exist this small space in existence. Yet Vera felt it open, to be traversed by herself: herself a final form of company discovered. She was able to do her work on the Committee with total attention, she wrote letters filled with news of it regularly, addressed jointly to Ben and Ivan, she telephoned Annie to enquire after the progress of the baby, she visited the Maqomas and marked off in silent apprehension the passing of another week, another month that perhaps meant Sally, alone in her danger, would survive.

Vera’s annexe was really too small for her to have visitors there; only Adam, on his motorbike, occasionally arrived at a weekend, and once took her with his girl-friend to hear a jazz group from what he thought must be her era, in a café crowded with young blacks and whites to whom the music was quaintly new.

Perhaps he had had a request from Ben. Ben was reassured (guilty, somewhere unacknowledged in himself, at leaving her, even if this was for her reasons) that at least she was living on what must be the safest kind of premises, in present conditions, the property of a prominent black man not overtly involved in politics. But he worried about her way of life, apparently so completely involved, in public, always part of group thinking, group decision, and so withdrawn outside that. Ben searched for her in her letters without success. Ivan, just to satisfy him, suggested she might have taken up some mysticism or other, Sufi or something. No, no — how little could a child know of its own parent! Ben at least had gone far enough with her in her life to know that, wherever she was now, it was not a form of escape. He was diffident to explain to this being who was so much like her in the flesh (the face he addressed himself to made it seem to him it was her he was talking to) that she belonged to the reality back there as he himself never had, never could try to, except through her. Ivan occasionally wondered why it was apparently impossible for Ben to go back; but it was a bargain he made with himself that if he didn’t pry into the parents’ lives they wouldn’t pry into his own. He and this sometimes strange father were close on their own terms; there was no financial burden, he was making plenty of money; so long as he himself didn’t find a woman he really wanted to marry they could go on perfectly well living together in odd bachelordom. His colleagues rather admired him for his affection for this handsome ageing parent they encountered in the Holland Park house. Evidently he had been an artist of some kind. According to Ivan, he kept himself busy going round the exhibitions.

One winter night in that year a pipe burst, flooding outside Vera’s annexe, and she put her leather jacket over pyjamas and went to turn off the main water control in the yard. The tap was tight with chlorine deposits and would not budge in hands that became clumsy with cold. She quietly entered the house. Vera always had access, with a second set of keys Zeph had given her; she kept an eye on the house while he was away on business trips or spent a few days with his family in Odensville. The keys were also a precaution Zeph insisted on for her safety; if anything or anyone threatened her, a woman alone, she could come to him. The disposition of rooms in his house was familiar under her hands in the dark. She would not disturb him by turning on lights. She was making her way without a creak of floor-boards or any contact with objects to the cupboard in the passage between his bedroom and the bathroom where she knew she would find pliers.

Without any awareness of a shape darker than the darkness she came into contact with a warm soft body.

Breathing, heartbeats.

Once she had picked up an injured bird and felt a living substance like that.

Through her open jacket this one was against her, breasts against breasts, belly against belly; each was afraid to draw away because this would confirm to the other that there really had been a presence, not an illusion out of the old unknown of darkness that takes over even in the protection of a locked house. Vera was conscious of the metal tool in her hand, as if she really were some intruder ready to strike. For a few seconds, maybe, she and the girl were tenderly fused in the sap-scent of semen that came from her. Then Vera backed away, and the girl turned and ran on bare feet to his bedroom where the unlatched door let her return without a sound.

Vera came out into the biting ebony-blue of winter air as if she dived into the delicious shock of it. She turned off the tap with the satisfaction of a woman performing a workman-like task. Instead of at once entering her annexe she went into the garden, the jacket zipped closed over live warmth. Cold seared her lips and eyelids; frosted the arrangement of two chairs and table; everything stripped. Not a leaf on the scoured smooth limbs of the trees, and the bushes like tangled wire; dried palm fronds stiff as her fingers. A thick trail of smashed ice crackling light, stars blinded her as she let her head dip back; under the swing of the sky she stood, feet planted, on the axis of the night world. Vera walked there, for a while. And then took up her way, breath scrolling out, a signature before her.