Stale, stale. Sonny was unaware that he was slowly weaving his head from side to side, away from the rhetoric and melodrama of this performance given by a man as brave as he was vain—how to explain that someone who had endured without breaking seventeen months in solitary confinement could talk like this; that such conviction should be expressed in this overblown way associated in everyone’s ears with cant. He believed the disaffected should be expelled; better a split than a schism within. But now he was filled with distaste at the idea of associating that decision with bombast. He clung desperately to the straw of truth in plain speech, plain words; he did not speak.
But someone had to. A movement cannot be run by fastidious abstention. He should know that. The leadership that had protected him (from nothing! from a shadow!) and who exhibited him at their side, already had arrived in private at a compromise that would be carried by the majority.—Comrades—the chosen spokesman looked round quietly at them all and fingered along the ridge of his jaw-bone a moment while attention gathered—I propose, in the best interests of unity combined with the security of the movement, we do not publicly expel these men from the executive. We suspend them, with their agreement—leave of absence—until the executive is automatically dissolved at our Congress. They will not attend any further meetings, they won’t present themselves to speak on our behalf in any capacity. They won’t give press interviews. We know they’ll agree to this …the whole business will become a non-event.—
Everyone waited for another to speak.—They’ll remain members—the rank and file as well?—
—Yes. No split. They’re being re-educated—if anyone should bother to ask.—
The orator threw back his head and stiffened an heroic profile.—Comrades, I bow to the majority.—
Sonny left with his proper companions, the leaders. A hand took his elbow.—It’s the way to deal with it, Sonny.—
—You know what I think.—
Hannah was expecting him to come and report. He drove to the cottage, parked in the lane, pushed through the shrubs where piebald-breasted Cape thrushes flew, whistling, before him. Involuntarily his hands went out to them. There was a pile of cigarette butts beside her, he tasted the smoke of her anxiety dry in her mouth. He told her the decision and then went back to his account to describe how the meeting had gone, leading up to it, paraphrasing even with a little exaggeration for her wry amusement, the speech that, at the time, had embarrassed him. She knew, as he did, the real qualities of that man—what did pomposity matter, despite his sudden yearning to have it otherwise—nothing is simple in a life and a country where conflict breaks up all consistency of character. They’d often talked of that. With particular reference to Baby—his Baby. Her frivolity, the way she manipulated through charm, and the purpose suddenly (who knew?) surfacing in her—the strongest purpose in human society, to change the world.
To change the world. Trumpeting words again.
He leant over and emptied the full ashtray into the garden. —That’s enough. No more.—
She pushed the cigarette pack away.—I promise. Not while you’re here.—After a pause:— …So it’s all right. Somehow. Everything’s the same again.—
—Not the same.—He tried to answer her smile but his was a strange grin that stayed and stayed with him under the contradiction of those dark thick brows bunched over blackly intense eyes.
—Can you eat with me?—
He couldn’t, he’d promised to let Aila have the car that evening—some invitation he’d managed to get out of, pleading paper-work to be done. So he left soon, and that was his second homecoming. Aila didn’t expect any report from him, thank god. He was late—but she was accustomed to that. She took the car keys without reproach and hurried off, smelling of perfume. The boy was out, he’d found a girl at last. Sonny could go to bed in blankness, if not peace.
Hannah did not know her lover was a grandfather—and if only he had realized this, nothing would have changed if she had: with his wife and grown son and daughter the news would have belonged to that dimension of his personality which, without her having any place in it, enriched her share. From the first, when she saw him in prison and visited his home, she was fascinated by the complete context of Sonny, half in love with his family as with his political associates.
There was something she hadn’t told him, either. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees wanted her to take on a high-level post. She hadn’t applied for it—she wouldn’t have thought of changing jobs while she was fortunate enough to have one that kept her where he was. One of the observers from the International Commission of Jurists who had made her acquaintance in knots of discussion at Sonny’s and other trials, apparently had recommended she be approached. She was gratified at this unexpected estimation of her, surprised and slightly alarmed. It stirred her like a new sense experienced, the touch of something other than a lover. She enjoyed the esteem of the offer as if that were the beginning and end of it; did not think of it as a decision to be made—she was far from even considering that. But she felt this was not a time to tell Sonny anything; anything unexpected. He had just dealt with a conflict he could not have imagined ever would happen. It was not the moment to present him with anything but herself just as she had existed for him since she visited him in prison. Not even the pleasure, as she thought of it, of something to be proud of, in her. Sonny was her farthest horizon. It would take some other sort of courage, one she didn’t think she had, to hoist herself up past unease at the prospect; see that, from there, it was no jump off the edge of the world.
Twice lately while I’ve been alone in the house the phone has rung and when I’ve answered whoever was on the other end of the line has hung up. I wonder if he’s going to be arrested again: Security checking to find out if he’s living at home. I supposed I’d better warn him; but he gave a sceptical smile—Don’t worry son. He doesn’t come home so often with that current of—what was it exactly—vigour, excitement, shamelessly, hardly hidden from us when he’s been with her, his lips full and that curly black hair combed back to make innocent the tousling in bed he’s just left; nor with something of the same fast-flowing blood we used to sense in him for different reasons, when he’d been making one of his speeches and defying the cops. Maybe he and his woman have had a row. Perhaps she’s the one who calls, hoping he’s alone in the house and he’ll answer. But I’m the man who’s likely to be around at home in my room because I’ve begun a project—call it that—that needs solitude. I’ve found a use for the state, compromised and deserted, he dumped me in when he walked off so calmly with his blonde after an afternoon at the cinema.
Then last week there were two more calls, and this time, after a humming silence (could have meant long distance) someone asked to speak to my mother. A man. What he said was not her name but ‘the lady of the house’. The second time—I was irritated at the interruption of my train of thought—I asked if this was a sales pitch, direct marketing (a subject in the curriculum of my business-school courses). The voice said no, apologized politely, but hung up when I thought I’d better be polite, too, and asked if I could take a message. No! It’s not possible that now my mother as well—my mother has a lover somewhere. But I find myself snickering, first with embarrassment and then because it’s so funny—the joke’s on me, and now I can laugh out loud at myself. The clown really is capering for once. Our family in a completely different scenario: one of the sitcoms our State television stations buy from America, where every member of the family is cheating on the other, straight-faced. My mother and I sometimes watch them in the kitchen while she’s cooking dinner—it hurts him, after the Shakespeare he used to privilege us with, to see us giggling at such stuff.
My poor mother with her ugly shorn head and her brave show of having a life of her own, knitting baby clothes and trying to make new friends among her employer’s patients. I’m old enough, now, almost to wish it were true. I understand the reassurance to be found in a stranger to whom one is something, so
meone, outside the triangle—father, mother, son; Sonny, Aila, Will—of this house.
A congress had not been called for two years because of Government restrictions on the movement. When this one was held clandestinely the executive council was dissolved as it had been pointed out it would be.
Then the old executive was re-elected en bloc, to applause. The two who had belonged to the cabal of the disaffected had not been phased out; they were there in their seats, the one acknowledging, as his due of honour, the spatter of clapping, the other with mouth drawn down modestly and eyes lowered. This must have been condoned by the leadership, Sonny’s peers, because there are ways of preventing these things—blocking candidature with authoritatively-lobbied support for other nominees. Even democratic movements must work like this, for the ends of the struggle. Sonny had been in liberation politics long enough to have been involved in such means himself a number of times.
So those night visitors had been disciplined, brought into line—and obtained their price in the bargain. He had heard nothing further about it. There they sat, his comrades like any others. Just as before. But when the executive council elected among themselves their office bearers, Sonny did not retain his key position. That was arranged, too; he saw this in the eyes of the leader who had taken him by the elbow and said, It’s the way to deal with it, Sonny: a look with the disguise of a slightly cocked head so that the blow would be a glancing one, a quick signal of the eyes that Sonny should step down before a stronger nomination—for the good of the struggle. There could be no question in Sonny’s mind that his peers, his comrades-in-arms, would not put the struggle above any and all other considerations. Like himself. In spite of what had happened. Therefore there must be good reason; they must be right in giving him some high-sounding but minor responsibility in place of the ones he had fulfilled—unsparingly. His life belonged to them. What had he kept back of it—abandoned a career he loved, given up the forming of minds of a future generation for the bubble reputation (curse learning by rote) of a popular platform demagogue, left the cosy circle of family for the existence under surveillance, the prison cell; broken up—yes, and gladly, for the struggle he’d do it again—the entire containing structure of his emotions so that he was defenceless, anyone could enter him, anyone take up possession there. If he was responsible to the struggle, then the struggle was responsible for him, Sonny become ‘Sonny’. He had no existence without it.
And this was being done to him within the purplish brick walls, on the red cement floors, under the tin roof crackling expansion in the heat, of some religious seminary in the veld; exactly the odour and feel of education-department buildings where the schoolteacher had taken petty orders from inspectors and been given his official dismissal for marching children out of the humble and submissive place in society alloted them and him under the sign CARPE DIEM.
There was no complaint to be made by Sonny. It was a principle, application of which to some other comrade he himself had approved whenever it was appropriate, that personality cults should be avoided. If a post is to be well filled, it does not matter who fills it; change is good, the movement must be always in growth, no-one should be in the same position too long. New blood must come from the young cadres. He had used this ready jargon himself. He understood, too—although this did not enable him ever to close the one-man tribunal sitting in his mind—that he would never really know why the wind in his political sails slackened. He could only go on imagining answers that were given behind his back. And these could materialize only out of suspicions he found it possible to have about himself. Things that were forgotten or suppressed, dismissed by him when he was borne and buffeted exhilaratingly at the centre of the movement. He thought of all the criticisms he had made or agreed with, about others. The word goes round that Sonny is too intellectual. Sonny thinks too much. Sonny asks too many questions. Sonny’s style of oratory is getting too predictable … out of date. Sonny’s not a coward, no, no-one could ever say he wouldn’t risk his own life, but … Sonny has attachments, attachments don’t go with revolution, he’s said so himself. Sonny’s position on violence isn’t quite in accordance with policy. And do you remember, that time … the business of the cabal … And that other time, before, the cleansing of the graves …his big speech, and then …
When he confronted the only individuals he could, his closest comrades, if they knew the answers they didn’t tell him. Not the truth; so that must mean the truth would destroy closeness, he would never forgive them.—That’s how it goes, Sonny, a damned shame …some people (a shake of the head), aie! you can’t trust them, they’re too ambitious and you’re too straight …you know what I mean? You don’t manoeuvre, it’s not your nature, man. You today, me tomorrow—who knows what will happen …we just have to hang in there, for the struggle.—
When he confronted Hannah, together with whom, since the first discovery of this possibility between them, every political question had been analysed, she wasn’t able to employ the faculty—not this time, not for this. All she could do was comfort him, touch him and enfold him, her soft thighs clamped heavily over his body, her arms tight round his neck, hands thrust into his hair, as if she were gathering him up and putting him together again. In time he grew ashamed of this cosseting, he was her lover, not some victim to be succoured. He made it clear that this did not accord with the discipline of activists; he did so by no longer speaking of what had happened, put it behind him like any stage in the struggle they had dealt with, and continued with good grace to do the work in the movement now allotted to him. He took her in his arms as her man, needing no consolation; and so, unsought, it secretly came to him. He could not resist it, although it was not what he wanted. What he wanted, from her, was what no-one could give him back; his trust in himself.
When she caught sight of herself in the steamy bathroom mirror, she saw the United Nations High Commission for Refugees Regional Representative for Africa there in the familiar pudgy face. (She could not stop smoking, even to please him, because she would get fat.) Hannah never had liked her own face. She had no vanity; and this was one of the qualities, conversely, that attracted Sonny to her. An unsought reward. She would have agreed with Sonny’s Will that her kind of looks were too pink-fleshy—though his comparison with the animal by whose name he reviled her to himself certainly would have hurt her cruelly. Particularly coming from him.
She saw the Regional Representative for refugees so often there that she had to tell Sonny. She would have to tell him, anyway, now. The High Commission wanted an answer.
She did not know whether to tell him before love-making or after. Each time she heard his step coming over the cracked cement of the cottage stoep she was taken by an agitation of indecision, moving restlessly about their one room to escape the necessity. It seemed to Hannah a terribly important difference: before or after. A matter of honesty, precious between them. They had never seduced one another. What were known as feminine wiles and male deceptions were denials of equality, an ethic of the wide struggle for human freedom they belonged to. If she brought up the subject after they’d made love, it could seem calculated to catch him in a mood of tenderness, shorn like Samson, not fit to put up resistance. If she told him before, then the love-making (their compact made in the flesh) would seem an attempt to divert him from something on which it was his right to make her concentrate. Yet it was in the end in her disarmed state, love casting out fear or the tranquillizing drug of sex blurring judgment, that she told him. She had put out her hand to feel for the cigarette pack on the floor and he drew his arm from under her head to stop the hand. She smiled with her eyes still shut and curled the hand into the damp nest of hair in his armpit instead. He gave her the childhood kiss on the forehead. She loved him so much she could have told him anything: we’re going to die, you’ll go to prison again one day, I’m going away—no consequence of words spoken existed.
—An extraordinary thing …I’ve been offered a job.—
He answered sleepi
ly.—That Council of Churches one? You can certainly get it if you want it …—
—No. It’s really something I can hardly believe—
There was a faint encouraging pressure, his arm and chest against the hollow where her hand was held.
—United Nations. The High Commission for Refugees.—And then it all came from her:—They’ve actually offered me a post at the level of director—that’s just one below the Assistant Secretary General.—
He seemed not to want to move, not to wake fully.
She thought for a moment he would fall asleep again and not remember what she had said. Let him sleep, let him be asleep.
—When did you hear this?—
—A little while ago. I didn’t take it seriously.—
—What kind of position. Where.—
—Well, the actual title’s the High Commission’s Regional Representative for Africa. Based in Addis Ababa. But working all over, of course.—
—Yes, it’s a vast continent, Hannah … and many wars.—
My Son's Story Page 18
