—I said ?—
—I didn’t like the way you went around and how you spoke.—
The receiver took on shape and feel in her hand; blood flowing to her brain. She heard his breathing and her own, her breath breathing garlic over herself from the half-digested sausage.
—I don’t know what to say. I don’t understand why you should say this to me.—
—Look, I didn’t like it at all.—
—I said ? About what ?—
—Lionel Burger, Lionel Burger, Burger—
—I didn’t make any speeches.—
—Everyone in the world must be told what a great hero he was and how much he suffered for the blacks. Everyone must cry over him and show his life on television and write in the papers. Listen, there are dozens of our fathers sick and dying like dogs, kicked out of the locations when they can’t work any more. Getting old and dying in prison. Killed in prison. It’s nothing. I know plenty blacks like Burger. It’s nothing, it’s us, we must be used to it, it’s not going to show on English television.—
—He would have been the first to say—what you’re saying. He didn’t think there was anything special about a white being a political prisoner.—
—Kissing and coming round you, her father died in prison, how terrible. I know a lot of fathers—black—
—He didn’t think what happened to him more important.—
—Kissing and coming round you—
—You knew him! You know that! It’s crazy for me to tell you.—
—Oh yes I knew him. You’ll tell them to ask me for the television show. Tell them how your parents took the little black kid into their home, not the backyard like other whites, right into the house. Eating at the table and sleeping in the bedroom, the same bed, their little black boss. And then the little bastard was pushed off back to his mud huts and tin shanties. His father was too busy to look after him. Always on the run from the police. Too busy with the whites who were going to smash the government and let another lot of whites tell us how to run our country. One of Lionel Burger’s best tame blacks sent scuttling like a bloody cockroach everywhere, you can always just put your foot on them.—
Pulling the phone with her—the cord was short, for a few moments she lost the voice—she felt up the smooth cold wall for the switch: under the light of lamps sprung on the voice was no longer inside her but relayed small, as from a faint harsh public address system in the presence of the whole room.
She hunched the thing to her head, clasping with the other hand the wrist of the hand that held it.—Where did they take you when you left us ? Why won’t you tell me ? It was Transkei ? Oh God. King William’s Town? And I suppose you know—perhaps you didn’t—Tony drowned. At home.—
—But he taught us to swim.—
—Diving. Head hit the bottom of the pool.—
—No, I didn’t hear. Your little boss-kid that was one of the family couldn’t make much use of the lessons, there was no private swimming-pool the places I stayed.—
—Once we’d left that kindergarten there wasn’t any school you could have gone to in our area. What could your father or mine do about that. My mother didn’t want your father to take you at all.—
—What was so special about me ? One black kid ? Whatever you whites touch, it’s a take-over. He was my father. Even when we get free they’ll want us to remember to thank Lionel Burger.—
She had begun to shiver. The toes of her bare feet clung, one foot covering the other, like those of a nervous zoo chimpanzee. —I just give you the facts. He’s dead, but I can tell you for him he didn’t want anything but that freedom. I don’t have to defend him but I haven’t any more right to judge him than you have.—
His voice danced round, rose and clashed with hers—Good, good, now you come out—
—Unless you want to think being black is your right ?—Your father died in jail too, I haven’t forgotten. Leave them alone.—
—Vulindlela! Nobody talks about him. Even I don’t remember much about him.—
The shivering rose like a dog’s hair along its back.—I want to tell you something. When I see you and we talk. Not now.—
—Why should I see you, Rosa ? Because we even used to have a bath together ?—the Burger family didn’t mind black skin so we’re different for ever from anyone ? You’re different so I must be different too. You aren’t white and I’m not black.—
She was shouting.—How could you follow me around that room like a man from BOSS, listening to stupid small-talk ? Why are we talking in the middle of the night? Why do you telephone? What for ?—
—I’m not your Baasie, just don’t go on thinking about that little kid who lived with you, don’t think of that black ‘brother’, that’s all.—
Now she would not let him hang up; she wanted to keep the two of them nailed each to the other’s voice and the hour of night when nothing fortuitous could release them—good, good, he had disposed of her whining to go back to bed and bury them both.
—There’s just one thing I’m going to tell you. We won’t meet, you’re right. Vulindlela. About him and me. So long as you know I’ve told you. I was the one who was sent to take a fake pass to him so he could get back in from Botswana that last time. I delivered it somewhere. Then they caught him, that was when they caught him.—
—What is that ? So what is that for me ? Blacks must suffer now. We can’t be caught although we are caught, we can’t be killed although we die in jail, we are used to it, it’s nothing to do with you. Whites are locking up blacks every day. You want to make the big confession ?—why do you think you should be different from all the other whites who’ve been shitting on us ever since they came ? He was able to go back home and get caught because you took the pass there. You want me to know in case I blame you for nothing. You think because you’re telling me it makes it all right—for you. It wasn’t your fault—you want me to tell you, then it’s all right. For you. Because I’m the only one who can say so. But he’s dead, and what about all the others—who cares whose ‘fault’—they die because it’s the whites killing them, black blood is the stuff to get rid of white shit.—
—This kind of talk sounds better from people who are in the country than people like us.—Impulses of cruelty came exhilarating along her blood-vessels without warming the cold of feet and hands; while he talked she was jigging, hunched over, rocking her body, wild to shout, pounce him down the moment he hesitated.
—I don’t know who you are. You hear me, Rosa ? You didn’t even know my name. I don’t have to tell you what I’m doing.—
—What is it you want ?—the insult thrilled her as she delivered herself of it—You want something. If it’s money, I’m telling you there isn’t any. Go and ask one of your white English liberals who’ll pay but won’t fight. Nobody phones in the middle of the night to make a fuss about what they were called as a little child. You’ve had too much to drink, Zwelin-zima.—But she put the stress on the wrong syllable and he laughed.
As if poking with a stick at some creature writhing between them— You were keen to see me, eh, Rosa. What do you want ?—
—You could have said it right away, you know. Why didn’t you just stare me out when I came up to you? Make it clear I’d picked the wrong person. Make a bloody fool of me.—
—What could I say ? I wasn’t the one who looked for you.—
—Just shake your head. That would’ve been enough. When I said the name I used. I would have believed you.—
—Ah, come on.—
—I would have believed you. I haven’t seen you since you were nine years old, you might have been dead for all I know. The way you look in my mind is the way my brother does—never gets any older.—
—I’m sorry about your kid brother.—
—Might have been killed in the bush with the Freedom Fighters. Maybe I thought that.—
—Yeh, you think that. I don’t have to live in your head.—
—Goodbye, then.—
&nb
sp; —Yeh, Rosa, all right, you think that.—
Neither spoke and neither put down the receiver for a few moments. Then she let go the fingers that had stiffened to their own clutch and the thing was back in place. The burning lights witnessed her.
She stood in the middle of the room.
Knocking a fist at the doorway as she passed, she ran to the bathroom and fell to her knees at the lavatory bowl, vomiting. The wine, the bits of sausage—she laid her head, gasping between spasms, on the porcelain rim, slime dripping from her mouth with the tears of effort running from her nose.
Love doesn’t cast out fear but makes it possible to weep, howl, at least. Because Rosa Burger had once cried for joy she came out of the bathroom and stalked about the flat, turning on all the lights as she went, sobbing and clenching her jaw, ugly, soiled, stuffing her fist in her mouth. She slept until the middle of the next day: it was another perfect noon. This spell of weather continued for some short time yet. So for Rosa Burger England will always be like that; tiers of shade all down the sunny street, the shy white feet of people who have taken off shoes and socks to feel the grass, the sun wriggling across the paths of pleasure boats on the ancient river; where people sit on benches drinking outside pubs, the girls preening their flashing hair through their fingers.
Three
Peace. Land. Bread.
Children and children’s children. The catchphrase of every reactionary politician and every revolutionary, and every revolutionary come to power as a politician. Everything is done in the name of future generations.
I’m told even people who have no religious beliefs sometimes have the experience of being strongly aware of the dead person. An absence fills again—that sums up how they describe it. It has never happened to me, with you; perhaps one needs to be in the close surroundings where one expects to find that person anyway—and our house was sold long ago. I didn’t ask them for your ashes, contrary to the apocryphal story the faithful put around and I don’t deny, that these were refused me. After all, you were also a doctor, and to sweep together a handful of potash...futile relic of the human body you regarded as such a superb example of functionalism. Apocrypha, on the other hand, has its uses. It’s unlikely they would have given me the ashes if I had asked.
I cannot explain to anyone why that telephone call in the middle of the night made everything that was possible, impossible. Not to anyone. I cannot understand why what he had to say and his manner—even before the phone-call, even in the room where we met—incensed me so. I’ve heard all the black clichés before. I am aware that, like the ones the faithful use, they are an attempt to habituate ordinary communication to overwhelming meanings in human existence. They rap out the mechanical chunter of a telex; the message has to be picked up and read. They become enormous lies incarcerating enormous truths, still extant, somewhere. I’ve experienced before the same hostility: being treated as if I were not there—the girl and the young man once at Fats’ place, for example; and then I didn’t feel mean and vile and find weapons ready to hand. Like liberal reaction to understand and forgive all, this vengeful excitation is foreign to me. The habit of sorting into objectively correct and false assumptions the position taken—the sane habit of our kind saves me from the ridiculousness and vanity of personal affront. ‘A war in South Africa will doubtless bring about enormous human suffering. It may also, in its initial stages, see a line-up in which the main antagonists fall broadly into racial camps, and this would add a further tragic dimension to the conflict. Indeed if a reasonable prospect existed of a powerful enough group among the Whites joining in the foreseeable future with those who stand for majority rule, the case for revolt would be less compelling.’ Your biographer quoted that to me for confirmation of a faithful reflection of the point of view. Then why be so—disintegrated, yes; I dissolved in what I heard from him, the acid. Why so humiliated because I had—automatically, not thinking—bobbed up to him with the convention of affection, of casual meetings exchanged with the cheeks of the Grosbois, Bobby, Georges and Manolis, Didier—a rubbing of noses brought back from a trip to see Eskimos. What did that matter ?
What was said has been rearranged a hundred times: all the other things I could have said, substituted for what I did say, or at least what I remember having said. How could I have come out with the things I did ? Where were they hiding ? I don’t suppose you could tell me. Or perhaps if I had grown up at a different time, and could have had an open political education, these things would have been dealt with. I could have been helped. Katya was surely ineducable, in that sense. Our Katya—she exaggerates for effect; I would gladly be censured, by you or the others, for being able to say what I did. ‘Unless you want to think being black is the right.’ Repelled by him. Hating him so much! Wanting to be loved!—how I disfigured myself. How filthy and ugly, in the bathroom mirror. Debauched. To make defence of you the occasion for trotting out the holier-than-thou accusation—the final craven defence of the kind of people for whom there is going to be no future. If we’d still been children, I might have been throwing stones at him in a tantrum.
I took my statements (I thought of them that way; I had to answer for them, to myself) one by one, I carried them round with me and saw them by daylight, turned over in my hand while I was sitting at my class, or talking softly on the telephone to Paris. How do I know what it is he is doing in London ? Maybe he goes illegally in and out of South Africa as his father did, on missions I should know he can’t own to. ‘This kind of talk sounds better from people who are in the country than people like us.’ To taunt him by reminding him that he is thousands of miles away from the bush where I thought he might have died fighting; I! To couple his kind of defection with mine, when back home he’s a kaffir carrying a pass and even I could live the life of a white lady. With the help of Brandt, I don’t suppose it’s too late for that.
Is it money you want ?
But those five words that came back most often presented themselves differently from the way they had been coldly thrust at him to wound, to make venal whatever his commitment is. They came back not as the response to the criminal hold-up, but as the wail of someone buying off not a threat but herself.
There’s nothing unlikely about meeting a man on holiday whom one comes to love, but such a meeting—with Baasie—is difficult to bring about. There was no avoiding it, then? In one night we succeeded in manoeuvring ourselves into the position their history books back home have had ready for us—him bitter; me guilty. What other meeting-place could there have been for us ? There have been so many arrests, trials, interrogations, fleeings: failures. The Future has been a long time coming, and who’s going to recognize the messiah by the form he finally takes ? Isaac Vulindlela called his son ‘suffering land’ and probably never translated the name for you, his comrade, either, and you called your daughter after that other Rosa—ah, if you’d heard us at each other... What a bastard he is! What a bitch.
But at least you know; you still know—there is only one end to the succession of necessary failures. Only one success; the life, unlike his or mine, that makes it all the way to the only rendezvous that matters, the victory where there will be room for all.
A squabble between your children.
My Chabalier—of course I told him about the meeting, the phone-call in the middle of the night. The family history, Baasie and me. My poor darling. You of all people. But he was drunk, eh—poor devil. You really should have put down the phone. To hell with the stupid cunt, then. I don’t care who he is! ...Maybe a bit crazy ? You know, an exile, black, it’s hard. Je hais, done je suis. What else is there for such a one ? An exile, living it up in London, sponging...just drinking themselves to death...self-pity, even in Paris there are some, hanging about out of favour with this regime or that.
All these things; and once my love said (I wish it had not been over the telephone. If I could have seen his face, the gestures—I might have found, at that point, how to explain what was happening to me, I might have foun
d he was moving to come between it and me)—he said:—There are some things you can tell only in the middle of the night...and what you mean is that next day they will have disappeared for good—probably next time...if you ever see him again it will be all right.—But there was only the voice of Bernard Chabalier. The chance was gone. Don’t be upset, my darling. Of course you lost your temper. Your father! It’s absurd. Everyone, black and white...no matter what political differences. Whatever happens. A noble life. What does it matter if some crazy chap comes along with his own frustrations in the middle of the night—that’s all it amounts to... We really shouldn’t even get excited. But it’s natural, you were outraged.
He hit upon the word I sometimes use to describe your kind of anger; but of course mine was not like that. A foreigner, he had probably picked up the word from me.
The fact is that after a few days my obsession with what had been said to me that night and what I had said or should have said, should have done (nearly twenty years, and then that borrowed, bar-room embrace!) left me. Deserted me. I solved nothing but was no longer badgered. There’s no explanation for how this comes about. Silence. In place of the obsession were the simple, practical facts of a life being planned. A little apartment had been found with a tiny balcony not big enough to put a chair out on but enough for a pigeon to have found a ledge where to lay an egg. That was sufficient to tip the decision in favour of taking the place—the pigeon already in residence on its egg. It was impossible to be lonely in the company of that pigeon, êh. There was no view because unfortunately the rooms faced one of the narrow side streets (quieter, anyway) but the building was actually on a very old forgotten square, almost like a courtyard, where there was a church with a clock that whirred before it chimed. Two chestnut trees. No grass, but a bench. A good baker nearby. A hole-in-the-corner shop run by a nice Arab couple, maman and son, where yoghurt and groceries and even cheap wine could be bought at all hours—apparently they never close. The metro to dive into at the corner—and it was one of the old ones, green copper curlicues, genuine art nouveau—two stops exactly from the lycee.
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