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.
None to Accompany Me Page 22
