He went to the Institute for an hour to set his team the tasks of the day and explain why both would be absent—she was employed there, too, in a humbler capacity, having had the opportunity, through their marriage and his encouragement, to satisfy her longing for some form of scientific education. When his colleagues asked what he was going to do he realized he didn’t know. If it turned out that Teresa’s family were detained under Section 29 they would have no access to lawyers or relatives. Between his colleagues’ expressions of sympathy and support were (he saw) the regarding silences shared by them: they could have predicted this sort of disaster, inconceivable in their own lives, as a consequence of his kind of marriage.
He found her talking on the telephone. She was clutching the receiver in both hands, her feet were bare and wet, and the dog—the dog had undergone a change, too, shrunk to a bony frame plastered with fringes of wet fur.
She had bathed the dog? On this day?
She saw his face but was hysterically concentrated on what she was hearing; signalled, don’t interrupt, be quiet! He put his arm round her and her one hand left the earpiece and groped up for his and held it tightly. She was cutting into the gabble on the other end:—But I must be able to reach you! Isn’t there anywhere I can phone? If I don’t hear from you, who will tell me what’s happening? … Listen Jimmy, Jimmy, listen, I’m not blaming you… But if I can’t phone you at work, then… No! No! That isn’t good enough, d’you hear me, Jimmy—
There was a moment when he tried to hold steady the shifting gaze of her eyes. She put down the phone.—Call box. And I’ve forgotten the number he just gave me. I’ve been waiting the whole morning for him to call back, and now… I didn’t know how to get myself away from sitting here looking at that phone… do anything, anything… He phoned just after you left and said he had a lawyer friend-of-a-friend, someone I’ve never heard of, he was going to find out details, something about approaching a magistrate—
The phone sprang alive again and she stared at it; he picked it up: there was the voice of her brother, hesitant, stumbling—Ma and them, they in under Section 29.—
She sat at the phone while he tried to activate the house as if it were a stopped clock. To keep them going there would have to be lunch (he cooked it), later the lights switched on, the time for news on television. But she couldn’t eat not knowing if her mother was able to eat what there would be in a plate pushed through a cell door, she couldn’t read by lamplight because there was darkness in a cell, and the news—there was no news when people were detained under Section 29. She telephoned friends and could not remember what they had said. She telephoned a doctor because she suddenly had the idea her mother had low blood pressure or high blood pressure—not sure which—and she wanted to know whether her mother could have a stroke and die, from the one, or collapse, from the other, in a prison? She did not want to go to bed. She brought out a small cracked photograph of her mother holding a baby (Robbie, she identified) with a cross-looking tiny girl standing by (herself). A piece of a man’s coatsleeve showed where the rest of the photograph had been roughly cut off. The missing figure was her father. Exhausted, the two of them were up again until after midnight while she talked to him about her mother, was filled with curiosity and flashes of understanding about her mother, the monotony and smallness of her mother’s life.—And it has to be this: the only big thing that’s ever happened to her has to be this.—Her whole face trembled. He suffered with her. He was aware that it is a common occurrence that people talk with love about one they have despised and resented, once that person is dead. And to be in prison under Section 29, no one knows where, was to be dead to the world where one did not deserve to be loved.
In bed, she would not (of course) take a sleeping pill but they had each other. He made love to her while her tears smeared them both, and that put her blessedly to sleep. Now and then she gave the hiccuping sigh of a comforted child, and he woke at once and lifted his head, watching over her. There was a smell of clean dog-fur in the bed that third night.
Teresa.
He woke to find she was already bathed and dressed. She turned her head to him from the bedroom doorway when he spoke her name; her hair was drawn away tightly from her cheekbones and ears, held by combs. Again something had happened to her in his absence; this time while she was beside him, but they were parted in sleep. She was ready to leave the house long before it was time to go to work: going first to see an Indian woman lawyer whom they’d heard speak at protest meetings against detention without trial. He agreed it was a good idea. That was what must have come to her overnight, among these other things: if she was right about her mother’s high tension (or whatever it was) Jimmy must contact the doctor who treated her and get a statement from him confirming a poor state of health—that might get her released or at least ensure special diet and treatment, inside. And something must be done about that house—it would be rifled in a week, in that neighbourhood. Somebody responsible must be found to go there and see that it was properly locked up—and tidy up, yes, the police would have turned everything upside down; if they arrest, they also search the scene of arrest.
—Shall I come with you?—
No, she had already phoned Fatima, she was waiting at her office. Teresa paused a moment, ready to go, rehearsing, he could see, what she had to say to the lawyer; blew him a kiss.
There were no more tears, no more tremblings. She came to the Institute straight from the lawyer’s office, reported to him on the advice she had been given, put on her white coat and did her work. She found it hard to concentrate those first few days and had a dazed look about her, from the effort, when they met for lunch. They would seek a place to sit apart from others, in the canteen, like clandestine lovers. But it was not sweet intimacies their lowered voices exchanged. They were discussing what to do, what should be done, what could be done—and every now and then one or the other would look up to return the wave or greeting of a colleague, look up into the humid, cheerful room with the day’s specials chalked on a board, people gathered round the coffee and tea and Coke dispensers, look out, through the expanse of glass the sea breathed on, to the red collage of flamboyants and jazzy poinsettias in the Institute’s park—and her mother, brother and sister were in cells, somewhere. All the time. While they ate, while they worked, while they took the dog for his walk. For that progression of repetitions known as daily life went on; with only a realization of how strange it is, in its dogged persistence: what will stop it covering up what is really happening? In the cells; and here?
While he took care of that daily life (she had too much on her mind to be expected to shop and take clothes to the dry cleaner’s) she spent all their spare time seeing lawyers, collecting and filling in applications to magistrates, chiefs of police, government officials, and consulting organizations concerned with the condition of detainees. She was no longer dazed; hair out of the way, her attention never deflected, determination hardened her gestures and emboldened her gentleness, sloughed it away. She importuned anyone she could use—that was how she put it—Maybe we can use So-and-so. He’s supposed to be a good liberal, let’s see what he’ll do. Fatima says he’s an old Stellenbosch buddy of the Commissioner of Police.—To ask for help apparently was too weak a demand, people would reply ‘I’d help you if I could but…’;—We must pick people over whom there’s public leverage of some sort.—
He marvelled at how she had come to this knowledge; she, who had always been so endearingly primly principled, even went to see a Nationalist ex-member of parliament who was said still to be close to the Minister of Justice. She, who had always been so sincere, revived acquaintance with people he and she had avoided as materialistic, incompatible, pushy, because now their connections might be of use. Her entire consciousness was a strategy. When she had managed—through Fatima’s consultation with lawyers in the city where the mother, brother and sister were held—to get a parcel of blankets and clothing to them, she turned pressure on her mother’s doctor, t
elephoning him at his home late at night to urge that the prison medical officer attend her mother; when that succeeded, she contacted the friend-of-a-friend, who lived in the city, to take food to the prison (dried fruit, yoghurt, these were the things, she ascertained from those who had been political prisoners, one most needed) and try and get the Chief Warder to accept it for her mother, Robbie and Francie. She was always on the telephone; he brought her plate to her from their interrupted meals, where she sat, elbows on knees, on a stool—it was her corner, now, just as Dudu had his particular place under the table. That terrible ivy, daily life. How to pull it away and see—what?
She was constantly on the telephone because what was happening in the cells was far away, in Johannesburg. She became stern with impatience—sympathy irritated her and he had to realize that, for all their closeness, apartness together, he couldn’t really claim to be feeling what she was feeling. Every enquiry or instruction from her had to be referred through a third person. Jimmy’s timidity made him even less intelligent, she said, than he had ever been. He wasn’t to be relied on and he was the only member of the family there. Where she should be; every time some proxy bungled, it came up: she should be there. And then it was he who became distraught, couldn’t concentrate on anything but the cold anxiety that she would go there, walk into the waiting car of the Security Police, he saw them ready for her, counting on her coming to that house, to that prison where her mother, brother and sister were held. Hadn’t he said to her, of Jimmy’s fears, that it was a fact that anyone in the family… ? And she was the one who had connections with Robbie beyond blood ties!
—Exactly! They might turn up here any time and take you and me. Both of us. How do we know what’s come out, in there… what he might have told my mother or poor frightened Francie—my sister’s only nineteen, you know … Those two women’ll never stand up under interrogation from those beasts, they couldn’t even judge what’s compromising and what isn’t.—
His physical size seemed to hamper him when opposing the will that tempered her slender body. He spoke, and it was as if he made some clumsy, inappropriate move towards her.—But they haven’t. I mean, thank god they haven’t. Maybe they don’t know about you.—
She gave a disparaging half-grunt, half-laugh.
—Maybe no one’s said anything about us… you. But if you go there, at once they’ll decide they might as well see what you know. And there is something to be got out of you, isn’t there.—
She gestured away the times her brother had appeared for refuge; the packets of papers that had been hidden under research documents about the habits of fish, in the desk of the Institute’s Swedish expert.
—Teresa, I won’t let you go!—He had never before spoken to her in that voice, probably it was the ugly voice of her father—he felt he had struck her a blow; but it was on his own sternum that his fist had fallen. He was shouting. —I will not have it! I’ll go, if someone must, I’ll go, I’m not one of the family!—
The dissension was like a sheet of newspaper that catches alight, swells and writhes with flame, and quickly dies to a handful of black membrane.
She dropped the idea. He thirsted with relief; she watched him go to the cupboard and pour himself a whisky, but she didn’t need anything like that. Every few days, something would happen that would precipitate the ordeal all over again. By now she had made connections that had ways of smuggling news out of the prison: Robbie was on a hunger strike, her mother and Francie had been moved to another prison. Why? She ought to be there to find out. The lawyer’s application to the Minister for her mother’s and Francie’s release was awaiting decision. She ought to be there to see if something couldn’t be done to hasten it. Her husband brought in friends to back him up; he, they, wouldn’t hear of her going.
She took leave of absence from the Institute. He didn’t know whether that was a good idea or not. At least work was a distraction, thinking about other matters, talking to people who had other concerns. This one had been cleaned out—a burglary, lost everything—things? He saw the question in her face, flung back. That one had a dying wife—death? Of course, death’s natural; he reflected that if her sixty-something-year-old mother had become ill and died, in that house, it would have been an event to accept.
So the practical preoccupations of her mother’s and siblings’ detention became her work, as well. Even her few pleasures—no, wrong word—her few small satisfactions were part of the disaster: there was the news that a banner calling for the release of her mother, brother and sister had been displayed at a meeting of a liberation movement broken up by police and dogs. There were messages from the movement in exile for which Robbie was active: they preferred this lawyer rather than that to be engaged on his behalf. And the fact that they knew to contact her drew her into another kind of cell, of new associates for whom detention was a hazard like a traffic fine, and clandestinity with all its cunning a code for survival in or out of prison.
It was on their advice that she started sleeping away from home. Well, it was a disinterested confirmation of the fears he had had for her; and, at the same time, of her conviction that she could just as well be picked up there as in the region of her mother’s house or place of imprisonment. She went to this good friend or that.—I may be at Addie’s tonight, if not with Stephen and Joanna.—She held him tightly a moment, buried Dudu’s slim snout against her before she slipped out, and she would be back early in the morning for breakfast. But he lay in their bed full of deserted desire for her, although they had not made love for weeks, not since the second night after the news came. He sensed she was ashamed of their joy happening while the others—that family—were out of human touch in prison. Once, he gave in to the temptation to hear her voice and phoned her where she said she would sleep, but she wasn’t there; and of course it would defeat the whole purpose of her absence if the friend who answered the call were to have told him where she had moved to; it was more than likely that the phone he was using at his bedside was tapped. He was too ashamed, next day, to confess to her his childish impulse.
She never wore her hair loose, now. No doubt it was because she didn’t have the heart to spend time putting it up in rollers and brushing it out, innocently enjoying the sight of it in the mirror, as she used to. Yet she looked differently beautiful; a woman becomes another woman when she changes the way she wears her hair. The combs scragged it away from her cheekbones and eye-hollows. She looked like a dusky Greta Garbo (he was just old enough to remember Greta Garbo). When the front door banged and she came in to breakfast in the mornings he felt—and it was like a fear—that he was falling in love with her. But how unpleasant and ridiculous, he had loved her for seven years, Teresa, Teresa—there was no need for abandoning that, starting something new.
And then there came to him the mad thought—mad!—that it was not he who was falling in love with her; someone else was. There was the mark of it on her, in the different beauty. She was the way someone else saw her. That was what he confronted himself with when she arrived in the mornings.
There was a day when the hair was wet, twisted up and the combs pushed in any-old-how.
—The sea looked so cool, I couldn’t resist a dip on the way.—
—I’m glad, min lille loppa, was it lovely?—
At the time he was tenderly pleased, as at the sign of recovery to a normal interest in life by an invalid. But walking through the Institute’s aquarium, while the fish mouthed at him he was overcome by what could not be said: who was it who swam with her, and she must have been naked, or only in her panties, because surely she didn’t take a swimsuit with her when she went away to elude the Security Police at night.
An hour or two later he could not believe he could have thought so cheaply about her, Teresa, Teresa. There was a little beach where he and she had often swum in the nude, sheltered by rocks; it was their beach she would have been to, alone, without him.
Because he had these moments of thinking badly of her, he became shy of
her. They had always shared the discomfort of one another’s small indispositions—her period pains, his bouts of indigestion if he sat too long crouched over a microscope. Now he suffered, all to himself, an embarrassing ailment, a crawling sensation round the anus. It seemed to him it must be one of the signs of middle age, the beginning of the deterioration of the nervous system. What would such a distasteful detail mean to her, at this time? Getting older, decaying, was natural. And she was young: why should she want to be bothered with his backside while her mother and brother and sister were still in prison—it was nine weeks now. And she had a young lover.
Oh why did these thoughts come!
Why should she not have found a lover, young like herself, brought up in comradely poverty, someone who had already been in prison, whose métier, outwitting those bastards of policemen, warders, government officials, was newly her own?
And now, every sign could be interpreted that way. She, who had always been so love-hungry, passionate, had not come to him in weeks and had created an atmosphere round herself that made it indelicate for him to come to her. When she had slept out and arrived home early in the morning, she could have slipped into their bed, where he still lay; she didn’t. The night he had phoned Stella’s flat—she wasn’t there; and how had Stella sounded? Hadn’t the voice been constrained? Lying? Covering up? Teresa, Teresa. He was thinking about all this in Swedish. What did that mean? He was retreating, going back to what he was before they made their life apart from the past, together… she was thrusting him back there, leaving him, she had a lover. He began to try to find out who it was. When she talked about fellow members of the Detainees’ Support Committee he listened for the recurrence of certain names; and there was new dismay for him—it might even be that she was having an affair with someone else’s husband. Teresa! At the occasional parties they had gone to, over seven years, she had not even danced with any man because he did not dance; she would hold his hand and watch.
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