She sought his hand as a good friend: she had wanted, hadn’t she, never to give up their friendship for any other intimacy, and he had confirmed it never would be. You are the only friend I ever had. If his opinion did not count for what it should, for some unknown reason, some momentum lost, it was an injustice that did not recognize his worth. A good man.
—This country’s always been way ahead in industrial and technological development, considering its history, and way behind in ideas, political culture. British liberalism tottering on with its form of racism long after it was overtaken by Boer nationalism with its form of racism, white power hanging on long after it’s been defeated everywhere else; I hope to god we’re not going to cling to something that’s had its day, when we take over. If the old socialism’s dying, let’s admit it and make sure we can find our liberation in the new Left that’s coming.—
—You sure about that? What’s coming also begins to look a lot like the return of old nationalism.—A good man; her paradox was that what she revered in him was a trusting idealism she herself—whom she saw as a lesser being—questioned.
He felt the twinge of her scepticism.—Sure as you and I are in this room. You can’t make what you don’t believe in. If we don’t, what is there …—
Talking of change was a danger to the weekend among the orange blossom. That was exactly what Hannah was obeying: the need to change. How would change come, for her, if she stayed on in the cottage, conveniently near for visits from Sonny? How does such a love affair—come about, made inevitable by the law of life between a man and woman—obey the other law of life: moving on? He would never leave Aila; she could never really want him to leave Aila, and Will and his daughter who was an activist, like him, away over the border. He no longer would be Sonny if he did. He always would have to get out of bed and go back home; there would always be an eye on a watch to cut off the long talks, side by side, like this one, the limit of an occasional weekend lies could allow them together. The lies had spread. He knew she lied by omission when she concealed from him under laconic practical references to her future post the excitement working in her at the idea of the vast continent of Africa. The important responsibilities she would have, the visitors’ room of the prison where she had sat behind the barrier (a fair caryatid existing as head and shoulders only) opening out for her to a power of ordering life-shelter and food—for starving thousands, thousands upon thousands, the world manufactures an endless wealth of refugees. The important personalities she would meet, the international circles of influence she would move in; the men who would occupy the place made for love in this, as every other way of life—a law of life he had learnt from her.
They walked hand in hand under the trees lit up by pendant oranges, the pale globes of lemons and vivid baubles of naartjies, on a tour of where they had been happy. The variety of citrus cultivated there bloomed and ripened at the same time, even on the same branch; with the perfume of blossom there was a sickly graveyard decay of rotten fruit, fallen and fastened on by flies. It squelched underfoot and she paused on one leg, holding his shoulder for balance, while she scraped her shoe clean against a trunk. He took her head in his hands and began to kiss her cruelly, he pushed hard fingers under her clothes out there where people could have come upon them, like any coarse drunk dragging a woman outside during a party. She had to fight him to stop a mating with her then and there. But back in the rondavel, her head on his arm, looking up together at the thick, smooth-stroked orderliness of thatch, a canopy for them, he was tender Sonny, wondering Sonny at the pleasure of their being. And he made love to Hannah. He would make love to her, this one weekend, make love to her so that she could never forgo it, never leave; needing Sonny.
When he came back there was no thought of killing him.
We went together to the lawyer and then with the lawyer to John Vorster Square to find out where they were holding her. The police wouldn’t say.
After they took her away they came back on Sunday morning and searched the house and garage and the room in the yard that must have been a servant’s room when white people lived in the house. It was our storeroom. There were garden chairs that needed new canvas and gardening tools and Baby’s old bicycle and a broken food-mixer. There was a wooden mushroom I remembered my mother used to use for darning our socks. There was a box of schoolbooks, some off-cuts of material, and wrapped in the material were three hand-grenades, two limpet-mines and two land-mines. The stuff was what was left over from the curtains in my room, she’d made them when we moved in. The hand-grenades looked like small metal pineapples, I recognized them from the charts put up in post offices to alert people to the presence in the city of weapons that might blow them up. I also recognized the tubular limpet-mines. The two other objects looked like air filters from a small car engine. I wouldn’t have known them for what they were.
I had followed the search through all our things in the house with smiling rage, enjoying the fruitless and disgusting rummage which discovered, as I knew it would, nothing. My father is too experienced to keep so much as a scrap of compromising paper here in our own house. I said, now you’ve made your bloody mess, will you go and let me clear it up—but the louts were weaving about our place like dogs who know there’s a bone buried somewhere and they started on the yard. They lifted the hood of my car. They emptied the dustbin. And then among the schoolbooks and the bits of cloth left over from the curtains they found what they’d known was somewhere to be found.
He and I worked it out together; in the kitchen grabbing tea and bread to keep us going, in the car driving from police station to police station, determined to find where they were holding her. He had no doubt that it was because of him. A frame-up to trap him. They were after him and couldn’t pin a new charge, so they’d come for his wife, hoping that in his anxiety for her he would reveal himself, do something that would give away real involvement with activity like the one they had set up for her. They had planted the explosives and then come back to ‘find’ them.
—But why take the whole house to pieces first.—
—Because you were there, Will.—
At the reminder of his absence his cheek twitched, I almost felt sorry for him, though where the hell was he …he wasn’t even where he knows I could find him, when it happened.
He insisted they must have planted the stuff when they came to take her; but I answered the door, I saw them leave with her, nobody went near the storeroom.
—They must have come back after you’d gone to sleep again. You didn’t hear anything?—
He was keenly enquiring—I suppose he thinks he might light upon some testimony from me he might use to her advantage; he’s accustomed to finding me useful. But he’s the one who, once again, wasn’t there.
So I stared at him.—I went to look for you.—
—Oh. I see.—
His face closed away, in defence, to an archetype—his big nose carved and dominant, his lips mauvish and curving in a strong dark line. He escaped into an old schoolmasterish gesture, sounding the table with a tapping thumb.
—I left the whole place open, the lights were on. Anyone coming would have thought they’d be bound to be seen.—
No reproach for my carelessness; hardly!
But if we couldn’t be father and son in any other way, we had a single purpose in our determination to get my mother out. A new conspiracy. And he was brave, of course—I’ve always admired his courage—because he constantly showed himself in places and situations where they might have decided to pick him up. They often do this when relatives of a detainee or indicted prisoner are lured to police stations by the presence of one of their own held somewhere behind walls. I was surely in no danger, a ‘clean’ member of the family, like my mother.
—They even gave her a passport—just like that.—He explained that he was, most unfortunately, away on urgent matters (the lawyer knew that could only mean the movement’s affairs) when Aila was arrested but he was taking full responsibility on
himself for whatever that innocent woman might be charged with.—Let them arrest me. I’m willing to be involved up to the hilt, so long as they let her go. The whole thing is insane. Aila! Can’t you do something, get them to let her out and take me as hostage for her? I’m serious.—
I listened and I saw he was. But the lawyer stretched his legs before his chair and pulled at his lower lip.—Sonny, you’re serious about nonsense, then. You know you can’t make such deals with them. For god’s sake …you’re not green …you know it all well enough. It’s the old process; as soon as they charge her we’ll keep pegging away for bail, I’ll press for the earliest possible appearance for the application.—
I wouldn’t let him go alone to police stations when we were looking for her. I don’t know why I should have thought that would be any protection for him; but I knew what she’d ask me to do, even when she herself couldn’t tell me. We took food and clean clothing. He knows what you need in jail. He also knows how to talk to the police; apparently, once they’re aware you’ve been inside and come out again, not afraid of them no matter what they did to you, you can talk to them and they can’t refuse an answer as easily as they do to other people who don’t know prisons, familiar ground to both jailers and jailed. Where the lawyer had no success in finding my mother’s whereabouts, my father did, acting on a tip, I suppose, from the detainees’ support organization. My mother was not at Diepkloof, where we’d thought her to be and he’d argued with the Major who’d refused to accept her change of clothing. They’d taken her to a jail in some dorp. I drove him there. They wouldn’t let us see her but they accepted the food and clothes.
—And now?—I waited for him to give the word to start back because he seemed coiled in a daze; he sat hunched beside me as if he might leap out and hammer on the door as I did—the prison doors.
—It’s a better place than Sun City.5 Better conditions.—
But I’m not an old lag. She’s in prison, that’s all I know.
The big boys—the leadership—come round to the house again, the way people who’ve become too busy or important for old friends arrive to offer condolences. He shuts himself in with them; I suppose there may be something to be gained from their experience in dealing with the ways of Security. But if anything happens to her it’s his doing. He knows that, every time he catches me looking at him. The little girl who’s attached herself to me burst into tears when I told her what had happened, and she’s offered to come and ‘look after us’. But it’s nobody’s business—except his and mine. We eat together and go over the details of that night and anything else of relevance that might be recalled. I’ve told him of the phone calls; no lead there. One of his comrades suggests someone talked under interrogation—but about what? There had to be something to give away if someone talked. My father said, again, alone with me, what the lawyer had dismissed as nonsense from a man of his experience and intelligence. He carried it further.—What if I walk into the Major’s office and tell them I hid the stuff in the yard, the limpet-mines and the hand-grenades planted there are mine?—
No man—no husband—could do more, even if he were to have loved my mother. I don’t know the explanation. If she were one of his comrades—maybe they have to do that sort of thing if one individual were to be more valuable to the movement than another. That’d be more like it. But in this case …my mother!
If he loves her as much as that, he nevertheless goes off some evenings to that woman. He moves about the kitchen aimlessly with his bent back to me. Says to me at the door, I won’t be late, or pauses, not knowing how to say what he really wants to, which is that I’ll know where to find him if anything new happens, to assure me that’s where he’ll be, this time.
He leaves looking as if he’s going to hang himself.
What would he do if he came home and found her here, suddenly released?
Before my father could go to the police and claim he was the possessor of the explosives hidden in our yard our lawyer was shown the signed statement in which my mother admitted she had consented to allow the storeroom to be used to store certain persons’ property ‘for a few nights’.
It was my mother who had talked under interrogation.
I know why she did. It was to be sure neither her husband nor I would be held responsible. She had insisted she didn’t know the name or names of whoever was to remove the ‘property’; and she refused to reveal the name or names of whoever had entrusted the ‘property’ to her, or to say why she had co-operated.
She had been briefed on how to deal with interrogators. My father clasped fist in hand as if stunning himself, his knees spread and his head sunk over his sagging body. The lawyer was embarrassed and alarmed. He tamely filled a glass of water; could not offer it to a man who had been through detention and imprisonment himself, a veteran of challenge to jailers of all kinds. My father looked up all round, wanting to know from somewhere—from me, because I was there, I was always there at home, her boy, mother’s boy, how it happened? When? Where did my mother learn these things? How, without his having noticed it, had she come to kinds of knowledge that were not for her? And what was it she knew? Whom did she know whose names she couldn’t reveal? What was Aila doing, all those months, without him?
I was not stunned; I was elated. It didn’t last—she was charged, the case didn’t look good, the lawyer admitted—but (I have my crazy moments, too) I felt a release soar up from somewhere in me, scattering showers of light. She was in prison and she was free, free of him, free of me.
What nonsense.
She was shut in there. She, who had held us close to her, not wanting our clothing to touch the walls of the prison corridors when she had taken us as children to see our father between his jailers on the other side of a dirty glass screen.
It was Hannah who found out where Aila was being held. Hannah’s connections. It was Hannah who got a note from Aila’s husband smuggled to her. Hannah had helped this family in trouble before. Many families. She had visited the father and husband in prison. The note was a minute tightly-rolled piece of paper—Sonny knew how such things had to be slipped in stuck to the bottom of a tin plate at meal time or under the inner sole of a shoe. Hannah did not read the note before she passed it on for delivery. A note came back in Aila’s handwriting. The scrap of paper was the label soaked off an aspirin bottle. There were four words. Don’t contact Baby. Wait.
Sonny did not tell his son about the notes in case he asked questions. Hannah was, after all, a comrade. Always had been, from the first; and as well. The cause was the lover, the lover the cause.
Hannah’s concern about Aila was a comfort; and could not be. It seemed to him she lay beside him now as if in her professional capacity, as she had come to see him when he was in detention, one among others her persistence in devotion to the cause enabled her to get to visit, and to whom, as to him, she wrote morale-building letters. He did not go to her to talk. He could not talk to Hannah as he needed—about how he had let it happen, how Baby and that husband he had never seen had somehow recruited a woman like Aila, poor Aila of all people, exposed her to danger, used Aila—and all behind his back. He had let it happen, not seen it, not been told (he sometimes didn’t believe the boy hadn’t known, didn’t know) because of this woman in his arms. She knew that and so it could not be talked about. It was something neither could have foreseen could ever happen, she with her romantic respect for his family, he with his confidence that his capacity for living fully, gained through her, never tapped in the shabby insignificance of a small-town ghetto across the veld, made him equal to everything his birth, country and temperament demanded—dedication to liberation, maintenance of family, private passion. She was the only chance. The source of ecstasy and hubris. She still was, when she made love to him. Aila was in prison, this woman was going away because the common good outside self required this. Yet when he sank into the warmth of her and himself, when the nerves of his tongue passed over the invisible down of her skin, the different, goose-flesh
ed texture of her buttocks, when her weight was on the pelt of his chest, blinded and choked they were flung together, curved round each other like mythical creatures fixed in a medallion of the zodiac.
A sign.—I’ll be able to come back sometimes.—Oh thou weed.
Oh thou weed: who art so lovely faire, and smell’st so sweet that the sense aches at thee, Would thou had’st never been born.
They were going to see her. Father and son went with the lawyer to court to hear him argue application for bail. Sonny knew the procedure: Aila would be produced for formal charges to be laid, the case would be remanded for a later date. They would see her; she would materialize out of all the suppositions and talk and fears of the days since she disappeared—Aila in her new avatar. Disbelieving, Sonny, who himself had been the one to be produced from cells behind courts, did not know how to prepare for this apparition. Without being aware of it, he had dressed as he did when he was the one to be led into the dock.
The hearing was not at the great grey block of the city magistrate’s courts in the district of the other great authority, the mining corporations’ headquarters, where already an explosion of the kind that could be caused by the objects wrapped in curtain off-cuts had one day taken place. The court allotted was across the veld in Soweto. They travelled in the lawyer’s air-conditioned car sealed like a diving bell from the mouthing noise and crowded faces in the combis that nosed past close and fast, and the huge shaking transport vehicles coming and going, crossing to industrial sites rearing up off the highway. In between, a green pile, the remnant of reed-beds, parted under gusts set up by traffic. The lawyer changed cassettes in his console dashboard and there was no conversation. Will sat on the back seat behind his father’s head.
My Son's Story Page 20
