The car door slammed behind her outside the district police station with the blow of sun striking her with dizziness of the long solitary drive. Dust, sparkle of the wire security fence; she passed under a drowsy-lidded gaze of a black policeman with his sub-machine-gun hitched on his stout thigh. Inside, a white policeman, elbows on the counter and forearms shielding his flirtatious face over the telephone, was engaged in one of those calls made up of sniggering silences and intimately curt remarks between young men and girls. Another policeman was standing before a filing cabinet, smoking and hesitating over papers. While she questioned him he continued to glance sideways at this sheet and that; shrugged without answering and called towards an open doorway through which someone of more senior rank appeared. He was a handsome Afrikaner with a glossy moustache and a Napoleon haircut, a well-groomed stallion of the kind with a special manner when dealing with women, since he felt himself to be pleasing to them somewhere under their complaint or distress, like it or not, in their female innards. Even to this tannie3 he extended the patronage, listening to her rap of questions with the air, yes, yes, he knew how to deal with over-anxious ladies concerned about their black servants. That business with the squatters last night; nine deaths confirmed but no names available, the bodies still to be identified —if the relatives can be found, you never know with them, they’re spread around in these camps. He scribbled the name of the Foundation without reaction to her revealed connection with that trouble-making organization; yes yes they could phone and ask for him personally, yes yes ready to be of any assistance. He cuffed the head of the young man at the telephone as he passed to his office.
She drove to a complex of garage, chain restaurant and restrooms in a loop off the highway and found a bank of telephones. At the store, someone who sounded like a child listened, breathing gustily, and then put aside the receiver. Vera called loudly, hullo! hullo! possessed by a useless impatience with everyone, the police, the unknown storekeeper, the wild-goose chase of calling culpability to account, finding interstices in official obduracy and solutions to ignorance of the uneducated that was, had been so long, her working life. The gaping receiver at the other end of the line, the background noises lazily conveyed, ignoring her—this was nothing but another customary irritation, but it brought her to despair and destroyed the control within which she held the fact of nine unnamed dead. If that child had been within reach she would have struck it. Violence boiled up in her from somewhere. If Odendaals kill, kill back. If they killed that good man, why not deal back death to them—she understood with all her impatient angry flesh the violence that, like others, she called mindless. When the receiver was picked up she gave her name and business testily. A man’s soft hoarse voice said no, it’s all right, my cousin is well, everything it’s all right, nothing is happen, if you want see him I can send someone—
She was given instructions to find her way to the shop. Lost, turned back by police road-blocks, she found another route— there it was, so that was it, she remembered dropping him off at that store the first day when they had left Odendaal’s house.
He was there, standing, waiting for her, wearing a tie, right arm in a sling and, oozing through gauze, the pursed red lips of a deep cut drawn together by surgical clips on the black flesh of his cheek. Smiling.
She was overcome by a kind of shyness, because the man was alive. She began to shiver—not tremble—it was the quivering wave that comes when you give way to fear or are going to be sick. Certainty that he had been killed by Odendaal, that she had not allowed to rise in her, now struck at the sight of him.
—I’m so sorry. You were worried. My cousin told me.— A gentle and calm voice.
She stood there, someone dropped from another planet, the outer space of safety, in the dim little store’s light moted by the dust of grain and spilt sugar, thick with the closed-in smells of the night, snuff, soap, sweat-dried secondhand shoes and army surplus coats, mouse-droppings and paraffin. He saw, came over at once and with his left hand strangely clasped her forearm above the wrist, held it there, between them. Tentatively, her other hand came to rest over his.
He tramped before her to a shed behind the shop. There were plastic chairs and a bed in disarray where someone had slept. He turned off a radio and gave some instruction to a child who brought cups of sweet milky tea.
She didn’t ask whether the squatters had approached Odendaal’s house armed with stones and weapons. She didn’t ask if he led them. He told drily, now and then touching with a middle finger along the gash on his cheek, how Odendaal and his commando had gone through the squatters’ shacks, firing, dragging people out. A pause, tracing the gash. A considering, rumbling murmur, expressive in his own language, that she understood from experience with blacks who have status in their communities as always some sort of warning or preparation for what was about to be said. —Now Administration will act. Now they’ll have to buy his land. No more trouble for him. Lucky Odendaal. He’ll get money, plenty of money, he’ll be happy. And the land—
Their eyes held, and shifted.
—Nine dead, so we’ll get it.— Now it was possible to say this to this man. —We’ll have to make sure it’s for occupation by your people there, no one else.—
—Quickly. When shall I come to the office? I’d better bring the Chief with me, it’s always better for Pretoria if anything is backed by a chief. First I have to make the funeral arrangements.—
She had no preparatory murmur such as he could use. —Perhaps near escapes from death are always a resurrection. Perhaps that’s how the whole legend of Christ rising from the tomb came about—I was thinking, they took him down from the cross and couldn’t believe he wasn’t dead, couldn’t believe he was there, alive, in front of them … that was the resurrection, really. The whole tomb story, the miracle came from that.— Then she remembered he was probably religious. When they first met, that day they went to see Odendaal, the man had about him the kind of modest self-righteousness, prim bearing, an overlay on the African spirit that regular church-going seems to bring about in rural people; at the roadside he sat circumspectly as if he were in a pew. This surface had burned off like morning fog in the heat of the events in which he was involved, as she had come to know him—or rather as he had come to reveal himself released by that involvement. Yet beliefs inculcated in childhood often remain uncontradicted by mature reasoning and experience. He might be offended by a Christian heretic’s doubts of Christ’s divine powers.
He understood she was talking about—himself.
—I managed to drive. I took two of them to the hospital in my car. There’s blood all over. The woman died before we arrived around midnight. Yes … The youngster may be all right. That’s how I got this stitched up.— He moved his lower jaw against the stiffness of the flesh drawn together on his cheek.
In Vera’s car they went to what had been Odensville.
A stunned aftermath of disaster slowed the pace of existence to its minimum; people were breathing, just breathing. Children with lolling-headed babies on their backs sat about, there was no way of knowing whether outside where they had lived—every element that could identify shelter and possessions cast in turmoil. Dried tears were the salty tracks on the grey-black cheeks of women who must not be gazed at. Men wandered, turning over splintered wood, torn board, plastic burned black-edged into fantastic whorls and peaks like the frozen waves in Japanese prints. A sewing machine under kicked-aside crazy mounds of pots and clothing was an artifact uncovered from a destroyed culture. To Vera’s eyes it had never seemed that the squatter camps she had been in could represent what anyone would be able to regard as home. Now in the destruction of the wretched erections of rubbish-dump materials she saw that these were home, this place had been home.
He talked quietly to people; he and she did not speak to one another, everyone ignored her, as if she could not be seen, the events of the night imprinted on their eyes, blinded to the day.
What happened.
There
are always explanations expected.
—I can’t … You can read in the papers what happened, you’ll see on TV what the place looks like now. That’s all. Who has ever explained what a war is like—everyone witnesses something different.—
Ben had a fingernail in his ear, something worrying him in the aperture; the private moment like an offended inattention.
She tried again. —When you’re there yourself, it’s not anything you’ve thought. And everyone who went there would know something else … it wouldn’t be the same for you as for me, or for others as for you.—
—Isn’t it that you didn’t live through the night there.— The tone of one who assumes he knows the other better than she could know herself.
—No no. No no. That’s obvious. It’s not what I’m trying to talk about.—
—After the event: isn’t that what your work is. Always the same thing, not something different: consequences. It’s not the first time you’ve seen such things.—
In her office she dictated to a tape recorder an account of on-site investigation of the Odensville attack. It came back to her desk with neat margins and headings in the flat print-out of a computer. As she read it over for secretarial errors it seemed what Ben had annoyed, almost hurt her, by describing as having been a routine part of case work. The pain of catatonic inertia, yet another aspect of despair in addition to the many she already understood, was a terrible knowledge she would carry, because she never could be, never could wish to be inured to feeling by professionalism. That was what happened at Odensville; that she understood. The other happening was something she came to realize slowly, returned to as a distraction from work and all the preoccupations of her life, interrupting, like a power failure of all the main lines of consciousness and memory, seeking a new connection with responses untapped, as there are known to be connections in the brain that may go unused through a lifetime. At first, with a beat that was half-distaste, half-fear, it came to her suddenly that the gesture of the man, grasping her arm, and her automatic placing of her hand, for a moment, over his knuckles, was a repetition of the compact to begin a love affair with her Hitler Baby, Otto, years ago. Yes—that had been a sexual question-and-answer by sudden contact, but the advance of this other man towards her and his assumption of the right to touch her strangely, her hand placed over his, was something quite other. And yet again quite different from shaking hands, which also has as little to do with any kind of intimacy as greeting by the shoulder-bobbing accolade has to do with kissing.
Any kind of intimacy? She turned away from the problem of interpretation again and again. Certainly not sexual. She knew without doubt from the impulse in the hand that had gone out to cover his that she was not making or responding to a sexual invitation. She knew, even in the tight warm grasp of his big hand, that the gesture from him was not sexual; the nerves of skin and flesh instantly recognize the touch of sensuality. Good god, was she not too old? Wasn’t it even ridiculous, a vanity, that she should imagine this gesture could have been any repetition of the other? She had sometimes feared, in the want, the involuntary yearning of her body for the man Otto, for One-Twenty-One, after he had gone, that when she began to grow old she would become one of those women who have a fancy for young men, that she would dye her hair and undress in the dark to hide drooping buttocks and sad belly from a lover paid with—what? Gold weights and silk shirts are only the beginning. Thank god, no sign of any taste for young men was occurring; but the passing mistrust of self projected upon the commanding outer reality of a community only just breathing under its own rubble, nine dead, a man with a slashed cheek driving while a woman was dying on the back seat—what meaning could the mistrust of self have, what reality, standing against that! To whom could she pose the very inappropriateness of any personal preoccupation arising from a situation where all individuality was in dissolution in terror and despair. Not the lover-husband to whom she used to tell—or thought she had—everything. Only to herself. First the schoolgirl confessional falls away, then the kind of friendships with men and women where, the awareness comes, confidences are regretted as weapons handed to others; finally, the bliss of placing the burden of self on the beloved turns out to be undeliverable. The beloved is unknown at any address, a self, unlike a bed, cannot be shared, and cannot be shed.
In the weeks that followed when Zeph Rapulana was back and forth at the Foundation on the matter of Odensville she slowly came to understand—not so much thinking about it as accepting, unknowingly as a physical change or change of mood come about—that what had disturbed her as a mimesis of the past was the beginning of some new capability in her, something in the chemistry of human contact that she was only now ready for. This country black man about whose life apart from his place in the Odensville case she knew nothing (wife, children, web of relatives and friends) already had this capability. That was why he was able to claim her with what was neither a sexual caress nor an impersonal handshake such as they customarily exchanged. He understood her fear that he was dead was an indication that for reasons not to be explained, nor necessary to try to explain, he was not one more individual at risk in the course of her work. There was between them a level of knowledge of one another, tranquil, not very deep, but quite apart from those relationships complicated and profound, tangled in their beings, from which each came to it, a level that was neither sexually intuitive nor that of friendship.
The circumstances of the lives backed up behind them each had lived so far were an obstacle to the shared references of ordinary friendship. She a middle-class city woman—that was as much decisive as whiteness, ordering the services of her life by telephone or fax, taking for granted a secretary and a bay for her car at the office; his status in his rural community marked—it was not difficult to picture from experience of these places—by neat clothes hanging on a wire and the small pile of books and papers in a shack—what did they share of the familiar, outside the Odensville affair?
His sexuality in late middle-age was no doubt satisfied elsewhere; although it was clear, from the sense even of her reserved persona behind her office desk, that her whiteness would not be taboo for him, or his blackness for her, sex had no part in their perception of each other except that it recognized that each came from a base of sexual and familial relations to a meeting that had nothing to do with any of these. Vera had never before felt—it was more than drawn to—involved in the being of a man to whom she knew no sexual pull. And it was not that she did not find him physically attractive; from the first time he sat across from her desk, his face wide-modelled and firm as polished basalt, his heavy but graceful back as he walked out of a room, his hands resting calmly palm-down on his thighs as he spoke, brought her reassurance she had not known she no longer found elsewhere with anyone. It was as if, in the commonplace nature of their continuing contact through the Foundation, they belonged together as a single sex, a reconciliation of all each had experienced, he as a man, she as a woman.
Chapter 10
Didymus’s left eye flickered open while the other stayed gummed with sleep. In the artificial night when curtains kept out the early morning—she stood, a burglar caught in the act. The eye held her. But this was no intruder: Sibongile off an early plane, the swirl on tarmac coming up in the silence as the taxi that brought her home turned in the empty street.
She released herself. Put down the suitcase. He closed the bleary greeting ashamedly, better pretend to be asleep, drop back into sleep. She drew the suitcase on its wheels across the carpet, fluttered papers and clicked objects against surfaces. Then the waterfall of the shower in the bathroom. The bed dipped to the side as she entered. He knew she wanted him to know she was trying not to wake him: as if she were not there; or had never been away.
He spoke. How was it?
He couldn’t dredge up in his mind where she had been sent, where was it this time, Japan, Libya, not the UN, no. Better not risk how was Qaddafi.
—Ex-tr-a ordinary.—
She lay w
illing sleep, all she had heard and done alight inside her, could not be extinguished, as he himself had felt when he returned from his missions about which she could not have asked, How was it.
The thick atmosphere of the world of discussion and negotiation came from her hair and skin as smoke clings to the clothing of one who has been in a crowded room. He scented it as a dog sniffs the shoes of its master to trace where he’s been.
She was a stranger and she was as familiar as his own body; that must have been how he was for her, those years when he came and went; if he thought of it at all, he had thought that was how it was; something for women. She slept, suddenly, with a snorting indrawn breath. This body beside him invaded the whole bed, lolled against him. His own felt no stir of desire for it.
He must have slept. Both woke at the sound of the door slamming as Mpho left for school, and Sibongile was out of bed instantly, padding over in her slippery nightgown to the half-disgorged suitcase and packages on the floor. —Look what I found for you.— People are happy bringing the consolation of presents to those left behind.
It was a handsome staff (he saw at first), no, a walking-stick, ebony, carved with a handle in the form of a closed fist over a ring, and chased all down the shaft to a copper ferrule. —Isn’t it great? Look at the work that’s gone into it. I knew you’d love it. I’d looked everywhere in the market but I had so little time—and then there was this damned hawker pestering outside the hotel, one day the moment he held it up I knew, that’s for you. See—all carved in one piece—
She loved it, she sat back on the bed as he received the stick from her and followed its features under her eyes, her feet with magenta-painted toenails waving, her thighs shaping shifting curves of shine on the satin that covered them (he always had been proud of her clothes, her ingenuity in devising the appearance of flamboyant luxury, even to go to bed in, even when they were poor in exile and this had to be contrived out of odds and ends). —And look at the grain, here, these lighter stripes going down the fingers—isn’t that amazing—and feel how solid—
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