Only then did he and his wife have a few minutes alone together; he put his palm on her waist to guide her to the only other room of the house, where through the door, in a mirror, a crocheted bedspread was reflected. The door was not closed behind them but their voices were so low they could not be heard in the kitchen. Whether they embraced, whether they said to one another what could not be said in the company in which the visit had passed, no one could know. They were soon back. He hugged his children, he joked again with the women: a man, a lover, a husband, a father. His wife stood aside—displaced by an arrival without a letter, without warning in the life she held together by herself; in her stance, the way her full neck rose, she alone, of all the other women, in possession of him; lonely. That was how Vera saw her and did not know she would never forget her.
Driving away. To say he was so happy: how to explain what this was. He might have expected to be sad. Depressed, at least, at taking up with the road the split in his life. But he was talking about his children, boastful of their excitement at seeing him, he was drinking deep of being loved. —Man, I wish you could’ve seen my big boy, last time, he was nearly as tall as I am—right up here to my ear. And he’s clever, there he’s already bigger than me, I’m telling you … He can do everything. At Christmas, one of my other uncles was here at their place with his car, so this kid says, Ntatemoholo, I bet you I can drive, so his uncle gets in next to him and hands over the keys. And off! That kid manages the clutch, gears, everything. Just learnt from watching people.—
To say he was happy: it’s to say he was whole. He’d accepted himself again; husband, father, Freedom Fighter, womanizer, and clerk at the Legal Foundation. At that moment when, glancing at his profile, she found the definition, he saw someone flagging him down on the road. A black man was waving a plastic container. A good mood overflows in openness to others; the Foundation station-wagon slowed and pulled up level with a brother in trouble, run out of gas. He leaned from the window and spoke to the man in the language of the district. An arm thrust through and snatched the keys from the ignition. She heard the gurgle as the forearm struck against Oupa’s windpipe in passing and saw the mound of a ring with a red stone on a finger. Tswaya! Get out! A voice that of a man giving routine orders.
All the muscles in Oupa’s body gathered in a storm of tension that sucked into a vacuum his shock and hers, she felt it draw at her as if he had had his hand upon her. He burst out of the door knocking the man back with its force. The scuffle and animal grunting and yells of two men fighting. She saw another man run from behind the decoy car with a gun and she jumped out of the passenger seat hearing a woman’s voice screaming screaming and ran screaming, another self, screaming, to where the two men fought on the ground. The keys were thrown, the hand that had held them struggling to get something out of his pocket as he fought. She and the third man were racing towards the ring of keys shining in the dust; she was terrified of what she was converging with, thumping tread like hooves making for her, there was a loud snap of giant fingers in the air—! and then another that gave her a mighty punch in the calf. She lost herself, more from lack of breath than whatever had happened to her leg. The first thing she was restored to was the ordinary sight of a man picking up a ring of keys. He came over and not looking at her face, tore off her watch and grabbing her left hand, pulled at the ring on her finger. She put her finger in her mouth, wet it with saliva and gave the hand to him. He made a disgusted face and signalled her to take off the ring. She worked it over the knuckle and handed it to him; she didn’t know what had happened to her leg, she didn’t know if she could get up, he was there above her ready to strike her down if she did. The sling bag—her money, the Foundation’s money, all her documentation—was in the station-wagon, was his, taken possession of without any further effort necessary. As feeling came to her leg in the form of pain making pathways for itself, she saw as he left her that he was not like the other, he was a puny man and the thumping tread that had pursued her had come only from the pump-action of jogging shoes below skinny legs.
The two vehicles were driven away. He—Oupa—lay gasping over there. There was a tear in her jeans, quite small, some ooze of blood, she did not want to roll the pants leg and see more, she had the desire to sit up and wrap her arms tightly round the leg but she moved, squatting on one leg and supporting the other, to where he was. They clasped hands, dumb. Tears of effort, of the violence with which he had fought, were finger-painting the dirt on his face. He patted his ribs on the right side to show her where: blood was blotting out the face of Bob Marley printed on his T-shirt. They were castaways in the immensity of the sky. They were abandoned in the diminishing perspective of an empty dirt road, leaving them behind as a speck to be come upon as hornbills come upon a cowpat. They helped each other somehow to the side of the road.
Tears and blood. It was a country road, it was miles from anywhere. But they are everywhere, the violent. To meet up with them again: Je-ss-uss! I’d be terrified. He carefully rolled the leg of her pants and fonnd —Oh my God, there’s a hole on the other side, the bullet went right through … it should’ve been there, where you were standing, did you find it … — But neither had the strength to go back and search. She lifted his shirt and saw the hole, like the socket where an eye had been gouged; on his back there was no exit wound.
—It’s still inside?—
—I don’t know too much about anatomy. But it’s far from your heart.—
Their watches were gone. They did not know how long after but it must have been quite soon that a cattle truck loaded with beasts huddled together for the abattoir stopped and the driver, calling out in his language, came over with the face of dismay and curiosity with which a man meets a disaster that could happen to himself. The cattle jostled to the bars of the truck to stare and low, giving off the ammoniac stench of their own instinctive fear of their last journey. Under the panicked whites of the beasts’ eyes he and she were helped into the cab. She was a leg, her whole being stuffed down into a leg, a concentration of pain filled to bursting down there. Blood trickled from her; she kept her gaze on a vase with its branch of artificial carnations hooked above the windscreen. Oupa and the driver talked in their language; although short of breath he was fortunately in less pain than she, the bullet inside him perhaps was lying in some harmless space of the mysterious human body.
Oupa had his bullet on the cabinet beside the hospital bed between the bottles of orange squash and bunch of bananas his friends at the Foundation brought him. No longer any segregation of black and white sick and injured, but the elegant Indian lady who shared a ward with Vera rang for a nurse to come and draw the curtains round her bed when Oupa, in a dressinggown, came to visit Vera; on crutches, she went to visit him. Animatedly they pieced together over and over again the details rescued from the confusion of the dog-fight blur in which the attack happened. —You noticed that big ring with the red stone— —Oh I can see his hand as the back of it hit your throat, I don’t think I’d recognize the face but I feel I’d know that hand anywhere— —I heard you screaming, I thought my God they’re killing her— They shuddered and they laughed together: lucky to be alive.
Oupa’s bullet had been removed cleanly through an incision just below the ribs. It had missed both lungs and liver, merely chipped a rib and lodged in muscular tissue. He was proud of this form of resistance to the attackers. —I think I got so tough on the Island, you know, and I’ve done some weight-lifting, well, I used to, so I’m sure that’s helped me.— He took his bullet back to One-Twenty-One with him in a cigarette pack. Vera’s wound at the point of entry of the bullet became infected and she was kept in hospital a few days after his discharge.
Ben telephoned Annie with daily bulletins and requests for professional advice, insisting she keep in touch with the hospital surgeon. He related Annie’s reassurances with a lack of confidence in doctors’ judgment, sitting through long silences at Vera’s bedside looking at her as if piecing her together, out of d
estruction, from images in his mind. When she came home he returned from Promotional Luggage at odd hours of day to make sure she was following doctor’s orders for healing to be established. —We ought to take a break somewhere.—
She was reading documents from the Foundation, sent by messenger, strewn on the sofa. —I must get back to work. It’s piling up there.—
—Just three or four days together.—
She tried to give her attention to understanding the need; his need or hers. —Well, where.—
—To the sea … —
—I don’t suppose I should put this thing in water yet.—
—To the mountains.—
The mountains.
Ah, so there was no practical reality to be understood, she was obtuse in objecting to the sea because she would not be able to swim in it just as she would not be able to climb—these were not mountains for climbing, they were the site in themselves, herself and Bennet, proposed to return to. —I ought to get back to work.— No more assertive than a murmur.
The words fell from him with the clatter of a weapon concealed on his person. —I couldn’t live without you.—
A jump of fear, of refusal within her.
He began to straighten and stack the sheets of paper lying haphazard as fallen leaves over the outline of her legs under a rug. In her appalled silence his continuation of the senseless task, picking up sheets that slithered off the sofa, putting an order into documents, whose sequence he did not know, understood the rejection.
She could not see the violence at the roadside as evidence of her meaning in his life. She could not share the experience with him on those terms. She was not responsible for his existence, no, no, love does not carry that covenant; no, no, it was not entered into in the mountains, it could not be, not anywhere. What to do with that love. Now she saw what it was about, the sudden irrelevant question, a sort of distress within herself, that came to her from time to time, lately.
When he had gone back to his office she lay, holding off confusion and resentment, stiff, head pressed into cushions. She rose slowly and pushed back the rug, rolled up the leg of her track suit to the place on her calf where the punctured flesh, still an outraged blotchy purple, had been secured by metal clips.
The sacred human body is only another object that can be patched together, like a tyre. This is one meaning of what had happened on the road. Something to be traced with a forefinger. There are many. Violence has many: now, in this country, as the working out of vengeance, as the return of the repressed, for some; the rationalization for their fear, of their flight, for others. But the experience of violence is for the victims their conception of a monster-child by rape; only they share its clutch upon their backs. Only they, in the privacy of what has been done to them, can search through the experience for what they should have done differently in resistance, where there was a failure of intelligence, of courage, of wiliness, of common sense; of how much they were influenced, even in panic, by the conditioning of the rules of the game, their society’s game. Never stop for anyone on the road. Let them die there. Break the rule for a brother, Oupa, and you stop a souvenir bullet. You admired the criminals you were forced to share a cell with—but to meet them outside —Those people? I’d be terrified. The attraction of power predestines us as its victims. And if I hadn’t been wasting my breath screaming I might have reached the keys, run over the bastards. Oh easy to swagger in retrospect. While you were fighting, while I was screaming, weren’t we conscious of getting what we deserved, according to the rules? If I had stayed home as a white woman should in these times (what other times have there been in the efficacy of a country run by fear) it wouldn’t have happened, serve you right. There’s someone there at home who can’t live without you. What were you doing about that when you got yourself shot in the leg?
She leant to pick up the phone and ask him, Oupa, already back at work, to come by when the office closed, and then remembered she expected Sally that afternoon. Sally had put her hostility to Vera aside, as people do when its object encounters some sufficiently punishing misfortune, but it was unlikely that this clemency would be extended to the young man, if he were to arrive before she left. The experience of violence on one’s person also makes one self-absorbed and forgetful of other people’s preoccupations—Vera had failed, while she was in hospital, to ask if all had gone well with Mpho. —I’ve brought Didymus!— And there were flowers. Vera got up and went to fetch drinks. —Don’t let her hobble about for us, Didy! You do it— But Vera was already in the passage, he followed her. —The young man?— A clatter of ice cubes he was releasing covered the question in that same kitchen where an umfundisi had drunk coffee behind closed curtains.
—Back at work. And Mpho?—
—The whole thing’s never mentioned at home. She laughs a lot, girl-friends in and out, very busy. It’s what we wanted, I suppose.—
Vera looked round into the pause. —Well, what else?—
—It seems a bit callous, the way she is. But I don’t believe it’s forgotten, inside her. In a way, we gave up her confidence in us. I don’t think Sally realizes we’re not going to get it back.—
As they were leaving the kitchen he blocked the way. —The doctor told me, it was a boy. Apparently you could see already.—
—He shouldn’t have done that!—
—Of course she doesn’t know, neither of them does.—
Vera was careful to enquire again, of Sally. —How are things with Mpho? Were there any problems?—
A momentary coldness, in admonition, flexed the muscles in Sally’s face. —She’s working quite well. She’s been given a leading part in the school play. The school accepted she was away for a week with flu—that time.—
Everything can be patched up. Everything knits somehow, again. Souvenirs are the only evidence: a bullet in a cigarette pack, a half-formed blob of flesh dropped in an incinerator.
I couldn’t live without you.
Her visitors had gone and the threat returned. She lay listening to the inanimate counsel of the house, creaking in its joints with the cooling of afternoon. The hand of a breeze flicked a curtain. The blurt of an old rubber-bulb horn announced six o’clock; as every day at this hour the black entrepreneur on his bicycle was hawking offal from a cardboard box, her gaze on the ceiling saw him as always, lifting portions squirming like bloody spaghetti into the basins of backyard residents who were his clients. Attackers take everything. The sling bag of documents. Address book. Wedding ring. She feels the place where it was, as she investigated the other scars of the attack. The place where the ring was is a wasted circle round the base of the finger, feel it, frail, flesh worn thinner than that of the rest of the digit. Documents, address book—ring; on the contrary, to live: without all these.
Until the man on the road forced her to do so, she had never taken off the ring since Bennet placed it on her finger. She had worn it while making love to Otto. Her finger is naked; free.
They went to Durban for a week. The break fitted in with an opportunity to have a look at a trade fair where Promotional Luggage was displayed.
The ring has never been replaced.
Chapter 16
Mrs Stark returned to her office on Monday morning and was told Oupa was back in hospital. It was early, the story vague. Only the receptionist at his desk: Oupa had sat about ‘in a funny way’ last week, he was bent and couldn’t breathe properly. Then he went to the doctor and didn’t return. Someone phoned the doctor and was told he’d been sent to hospital. And then? What did the doctor say was the matter?
No further sense to be got out of a young man who didn’t pay attention to what he heard, was incapable of reporting anything accurately. No wonder messages received at the Foundation were often garbled; irritation with the Foundation’s indulgence of incompetence distracted her attention as she called the doctor’s paging number. She reached him at the hospital. Slow internal bleeding, the lung. Well, it was difficult to say why, it seemed there was a
n undetected injury sustained when the bullet penetrated, perhaps a cracked rib, and some strenuous effort on the part of the patient had caused a fracture to penetrate the lung. It was being drained. The condition was stable.
At lunchtime Mrs Stark and Lazar Feldman went to visit their colleague. What should they take him? They stopped on the way to buy fruit. At the hospital they were directed to the Intensive Care Unit. Whites habitually misspell African names. Mrs Stark repeated Oupa’s: wasn’t there some mistake? The direction was confirmed. As they walked shining corridors in a procession of stretchers pushed by masked attendants, old men bearing wheeled standards from which hung bags containing urine draining from tubes attached under their gowns, messengers skidding past with beribboned baskets of flowers, unease grew. The community of noise and surrounding activity fell away as they reached the last corridor, only the squelch of Lazar’s rubber soles accompanied a solemnity that imposes itself on even the most sceptical of unbelievers when approaching a shrine where unknown rites are practised. She shook her head and shrugged, to Lazar: what would Oupa, his bullet in a cigarette pack, recovered from what had happened to him and her on the road, be there for as she pictured him, sitting up in bed ready to tell the story to his visitors?
At double doors there was a bell under a no entry sign. They rang and nobody came, so Vera walked in with Lazar lifting his feet carefully and placing them quietly behind her. Cells were open to a wide central area with a counter, telephones, a bank of graphs and charts, a row of white gowns pegged on the wall. A young black nurse in towelling slippers went to call the sister in charge.
None to Accompany Me Page 18
