—Can hardly ask to have them back now.—
—No don’t. It must have been because she wanted them so badly, she thinks your work was so good.—
Do you lie to him often. Vera knew that Lou had admired them, Lou had thought they were—how did she put it—exceptionally explicit. Lou was the one who had chosen the paintings, collected the old furniture, designed and put into effect the adaptation of an old house to express a chosen way of life without disturbing the shell of its style, formed to contain a way of life the women lovers rejected. The quaint wooden valances on the verandahs and the white-painted wrought-iron fence were in place, but the nursery was some sort of private retreat the two women shared and where others were never invited; the family bedrooms, with the exception of a single guest-room, had been knocked into one grand space, the room where the heart of the house stood, a great low Oriental bed under a canopy mounted on carved posts adapted from Zanzibar lintels.
Ben had created Vera for himself as body, a torso without a head. As such it was (indeed, connoisseur Lou had observed) exceptionally explicit of the power of the body. It had no identity beyond body, and so the body that was Vera, that Ben could not live without, was transformed into the expression of desire between woman and woman. In Annie’s house the headless torsos were become household gods.
Arrivals
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 t
he 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.
None to Accompany Me Page 21
