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.
Sh
e 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.
None to Accompany Me Page 27
