Sibongile has the compulsion to leave nothing half-done. The most trivial task; before she leaves the house in the morning she goes from room to room, putting things in place, fitting new batteries in the cassette player Mpho has left empty, sorting the disorderly files Didymus piled on the kitchen table, as if these tasks will otherwise never be completed. She is agitated at any disagreement left unresolved when Mpho closes the door behind her on the way to the computer course she now attends, even at the casualness with which such daily partings take place. She will rush to snatch a kiss on Mpho’s cheek and watch, from a gap in the blinds supposed to be kept drawn so that movements inside the house may not be followed, while the girl’s high little rump pumps under her scrap of denim skirt as she hurries. Didymus finds notes in various places. He sees they are not Sibongile’s usual reminders to herself but instructions for others that would keep continuity in life if she went out, like the one who bought a newspaper at the corner, and did not get back. He says nothing. Crumples the notes and aims them at the kitchen bin. He himself had never succumbed to the temptation of rituals of this nature; but then he had had the talisman of disguise.
They continued to sit in the house in the evenings, he reading or at the computer making notes for the book he was expected to write and she studying documentation from various committees who reported to the Negotiating Council. Would it happen when she went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of that rooibos tea which in her old fussiness about her health she thought was good for her? Or when she said, I’m off now, and, on the way to bed, in the bathroom would have time only to turn the taps on? The slam of a door or the crack of gas exploding from a car’s exhaust in the street made them both swiftly look up; then Sibongile assuming careless haughtiness, and Didymus wryly smiling to her. Mpho sat with bare feet up on the sofa arm, little mound of well-fed stomach showing in her slouch, rustling a hand into a packet of her favourite cornflakes as she watched the TV parody of their lives in simulated violence and shootings.
Sibongile and Didymus went about as a team, and with others on the list were the initiated, set apart from people who had not been singled out, even close comrades and friends. These did not seem to know how to deal with the situation, though the victims appeared to be managing the unimaginable well enough. Vera Stark came to the house fairly regularly with silent Ben. What was happening in the Starks’ lives? At least this was one way of getting friends off the subject of the List, away from the endless going-over who was behind it. Vera is battling with the Advisory Commission on Land Allocation—‘as usual’, she dismisses. They talk of the first sitting of the Technical Committee on Constitutional Issues due soon, assuming she is going to be part of it. Didymus is not resentful at himself being passed over; the threat of death, close by, drains ambition of all importance, for the time being. —You’ll be taking leave from the Foundation next week, then.— He grins and gives a tap on her hand; wonderful she’s been chosen. Vera glances at his assurance, a moment of exchange between them.
—Yes. Next week.—
It is the first Ben has heard of a decision to accept. He studies her in his silence, he is alone in the room among the others. She doesn’t look at him and he sees that her profile— thumb momentarily tested between her teeth—asserts that her life has no reality for her in the context of the situation of Sally and Didy, this stage-set on which, in a dread adaptation of Chekhov’s maxim for the theatre, a gun whose presence is unseen but everyone is aware of may go off before the end of the act, before the Technical Committee makes its measured deliberation and a new constitution is created under which—it is the only hope—assassins come to realize that the gods to which they sacrifice have abandoned them.
Ben half-believes, has to believe, Vera has spoken only to ward off further questioning about the Committee, she doesn’t want to discuss her indecision. For these old friends, Sally and Didy, he is coaxed out of his preoccupation by a sense of Didy’s need for distraction, for a show of normal interests, and he offers that his business is in trouble. Faith in the promotional value of Zairean crocodile, South American lizard and Cape ostrich skin luggage with gold-leaf initials and logo was low in these times of recession and political uncertainty. The sanctions-busters who liked to travel equipped this way had had their day, and the succeeding affluent class who would come when sanctions were lifted and unemployment dropped, were not yet in place. He joked dryly against himself, for diversion; the irony of his attempt to secure the old age of his Vera, a woman like Mrs Stark, by profiting from the vanity of the Government’s officials, expressed in contrast with the distinction of his face, his black eyes deep as the eyes of antique statues suggested by dark hollows. —The regime’s ambassadors know they’ll soon be recalled for ever, no more boarding for London and Washington with a dozen matched pieces.—
—Well if you’re selling off stock cheap, I wouldn’t mind a smart new briefcase. Doesn’t matter if it has some Pik Botha or Harry Schwarz initials and the old coat-of-arms, I don’t care even if it’s embossed with a vierkleur, 5 I can always stick one of Mpho’s decals over it.— Sally matched the spirit. —And maybe if you’ve got any off-cuts handy we could order a nice holster for Didy. Something cowboy-style, you know. The lining of the pockets in his jackets is getting worn from the weight of the damn gun carted around all the time.—
—Some people wear buttons on their lapels, I wear the gun, that’s all.—
—At least you’re not the only one. Everyone carries guns about these days … without your reason.— Vera turned to Sally. —Ben even wants me to keep a gun in my car …—
But Vera is small fry. A terrible privilege to which Sibongile and Didymus belong changes and charges everything about them, to the outsider; the sound of their voices in the most trivial remark, the very look of their clothes, the touch of their hands, still warm. When every old distinction of privilege is defeated and abolished, there comes an aristocracy of those in danger. All feel diminished, outclassed, in their company.
The Island is ours.
Chapter 26
Vera’s house is empty.
Promotional Luggage closed down, bankrupt but honestly so; Ben paid out creditors, owed nobody anything. He did not know what to do next and to disguise this went to fill the interim with a visit to Ivan in London. Ivan had parted from the Hungarian; a treat offered, Vera anticipated for Ben an interlude of male companionship between the generations without the intrusion of women. What would Ben do, around the house, while Vera was occupied and preoccupied, every day, every hour, between the Technical Committee and her attempts to keep in touch with work at the Foundation? Shop in the supermarket? Bennet? Regard himself as retired? Take up as a hobby, like joining a bowling club, the sculpture whose vocation he had given up in passion for Vera? Vera was his vocation; Promotional Luggage had been intended to provide for Vera.
Adam stayed on for a while in Ivan’s room. He and Vera had the curious loose accommodation of individuals who, though vastly divided by age, by the commitment to ideals in one and the lack of ideals in the other, are at some base alike in following their instincts and will. His grandmother did not give him advice (the one occasion on which she had done so was to protect her friends rather than himself), make his bed, sew on his buttons or supervise his activities, so she was no grandmother. They took telephone messages for one another, ate independently at no fixed meal times whatever was in the refrigerator or each left for the other in the oven, sometimes met up late at night and chatted like contemporaries simply sharing a convenient roof. At one of these incidental meetings he remarked that a friend had found a cottage in Bezuidenhout Valley and wanted someone to share it. A week later he moved out in a party atmosphere, borrowing Vera’s car to make several trips with the possessions he had acquired, helped and hindered by the to-and-fro of volunteers among his friends. There was fondness between Vera and him but both knew they would see one another rarely once they did not sleep under the same roof. The family roof: it was that, the
house built in the Forties in the style of whites of the period, half colonial bungalow and half modernist with a split-level living-room and coloured slate stoep they called a patio, the house provided for the young bride and their soldier son by people who did not know what they themselves were, part of Europe or part of Africa; the house that was Vera’s loot by divorce, the roof under which she took her lover home, where her children were born, where the ‘patio’ meant for white teaparties had been converted to a study where strategies for restoring blacks to their land were worked out. In every room the house retained the life lived there. Scratches and stains, makeshift (bookshelves built of planks mounted on bricks) the newly married lovers, caring only for love-making, nothing for material things, had made do with. A sculptor’s chisel among counters from a children’s game and someone’s collection of labelled stones, rose quartz, crystal, geode. Clothes hanging limp, lost the shape of the body that wore them, never given away because someone (Annie?) once had had the intention to pick them up some time. Boxes that hid the remains of Promotional Luggage, ‘vanity’ cases and elephant-hide wallets nobody wanted to buy. The scent—her own particular body-smell of the house, independent of the perfume she used—of the documents and newspaper cuttings she hoarded, a calendar of her days and years, live as paper in its organic origins is, secretly wadding together in damp and buckling apart thinly in heat. Broken pottery, a Mickey Mouse watch stopped at some hour in childhood, postcards and photographs. It is impossible for anyone, tidying after the departure of a sojourner, not to stop as Vera does and look through photographs come upon. It is then that she turns up, once again, the postcard photograph sent to Egypt during a war. She had not thrown it away, torn it up; only slid it back under all this other stuff.
And who was that?
I’m the one in the photograph whom no one remembers.
It was within this calm that she worked with the Technical Committee on Constitutional Issues. What came out of the Committee would be anonymous in its effect on millions, only a small sample of whom she had known and knew, and whose lives she had affected personally, the people of the Mogopas and Odensvilles. She and Zeph Rapulana talked together under the jacaranda as perhaps they would not, elsewhere. It was necessary to believe that elections and the first government in which everyone would have a vote would stop the AK—47s and petrol bombs, defeat the swastika wearers, accommodate the kinglets clinging to the knobkerries of ethnic power, master the company at the Drommedaris; no purpose in giving satisfaction to prophets of doom by discussing with them the failure of the mechanisms of democracy, of elections ‘free and fair’, in other countries of the continent.
—At last—a year, a month, an actual day!—our people are coming to what we’ve fought for. They can’t be cheated! It can’t happen! Not to us. We can’t let it! What a catastrophe if people started thinking it’s not worthwhile voting because whatever they do the old regime will rig the thing.—
She took his determination as a reviving draught. —But if we’re going to deliver the goods there has to be a real anticipation of what could happen, Zeph. How to deal with the Homeland blacks who’ll still want to keep their petty power even if their territories have been reincorporated into the country before the elections. What if their alliance with the white right-wing holds, grows? What if the white generals become their generals? And the regular army becomes their source of weapons?—
—They have to be shown—absolutely, no other possibility—they can’t win. After all the years with their guns and their armies, after all the thousands they’ve killed, all the laws they’ve made, all the millions they’ve robbed of land and chased about the country to take it for themselves, they had to let Mandela out of jail and sit down and bargain with him. Didn’t they? They must know they can’t win! Not even if they do what UNITA did in Angola and refuse to recognize election results when we win, not even what Babangida did, and declare elections null and void. They can’t win.—
—So somehow they must be convinced to take what’s offered them. But this has to be done now, they have to be accommodated somehow, before. And that may betray everything.—
—How everything, Vera?—
—If we have to give in to that crazy idea—the white extremists—the bit of the country they want exclusively for themselves! The ultimate laager. What corner of the country doesn’t also belong to others? What about the blacks who live there, or once did? The land, Zeph, the land. You know all about the land. We promise redistribution of the land to the people and then we so much as consider giving even a metre to those who stole it in the first place? Are we going to start endorsing people out again, this time in the name of the good of unity, one South Africa, one people? And are we going to have to settle for federalism, or some sort of regionalism that’s a disguise of federalism, so the old power blocs of whites—maybe with some black satellites, or their alliance with ethnic ambitions—remain?—
—We’ll deal with that with regional powers, that’s being tackled. The regions aren’t going to be a disguise for anything. It’s a difficult game, but it’ll come off.—
—But the other! Those whites we laughed at until they drove an armoured car into the negotiations building.—
—That track goes nowhere. They’ll run out of steam. You and I can’t tackle that one, Vera.— He was kindly amused at consideration of the presumption. —We have to trust the leaders to find the right signals to send them on their way. We can only stick to what we’re doing. Each of us.—
Chill comes quickly these afternoons. The last light intensifies evergreen foliage to black, with a brush of thin gold across the fading jacaranda that will shed only when winter ends. In pure radiance far off a plane floats silently, linking their vision as their eyes follow it. The presence of shrubs rises. And then the incineration of the vanished sun blazes a forest fire behind blackened trees.
In some eras what would seem the most impersonal matters are the most intimate. Becoming part of the massed design of the dark, there was nothing either felt more intensely than these political fears and exaltations, no emotion that could draw two individuals more closely than this. A strong current of the present carries them headily: this is the year when the old life comes to an end.
Ben and Vera exchange regular telephone calls. Tacitly they were supposed to alternate but if a week passes in silence when it is Vera’s turn to call, he will call instead.
When the phone rang late at night she knew it was him.
He heard the rings and followed them through the empty rooms of the house to find her: the stoep-study under the gooseneck lamp, the piece of fruit she had beside her when she worked at night, the kitchen where she would be squeezing a lemon to make herself a hot drink, the bedroom where her body emerged from her clothes in an unconscious ritual he could have described.
Usually she was in bed, her arm went out for the phone. Each gave an account of those of their activities they thought the other would like to hear. There were pleasantries, small anecdotes. Ivan had had a party and one of the guests had brought a two-year-old boy who had been put to sleep on Ben’s bed and wet it. Vera had been driven round the block on the back of the motorbike Adam had acquired and brought to display. Ben asked, with in his disembodied voice the assumed concern of one to whom such things are a story in the foreign news pages of a daily paper, how the negotiations, committees and commissions were going, and whether the killings were as bad as it seemed on TV flashes. She asked if Ivan was away in some other capital or at home with Ben. He reminded her of routine obligations she might forget—he knew how little time Vera had to think of such things. Licences to be renewed, tax returns—although she was the sole earner now. She passed this over quickly: another kind of reminder, one she wished to avoid, for him—the failure of Promotional Luggage to provide for her as he wished. This was the progression to the moment when there was nothing left to say. In a pause before goodbye—she was lying looking at the ceiling as if she were a stray fly walking there in
the silent room—his voice reached her. —Are you lonely.—
—No.— A laugh. —No.—
After she had dropped the receiver she cringed with remorse. She must pick up and call him back, call Ben, Bennet. Say what? If she could lie to him before, times before, why couldn’t she find it in herself to give him a lie to grasp at, now. She turned out the light and slept, her empty house drawn up around her.
Forgive me, for I know quite well what I do.
Ben and his other beloved, Ivan, were having a good time in London as bachelors together. Ben was in a rage of sorrow no one knew of. A rage of sorrow for all Vera has done and will never know. And if she had? Would things have been different, better? If he had told her that he had felt another man on her, in her, those years, he knew that she was enjoying two men at once, she was capable of it then, he knew there was a flat or a hotel room somewhere she came from, back to him—would she be lonely without him, need him now? Oh not as in the mountains, the delicious and wonderful seduction of him by someone else’s wife. But as the husband he became. He saw that Vera never ever really wanted a husband—only for a time, when it excited her to have her lover domesticated, a kind of dressing-up in other garments, perversely, looking after babies together, telling each other confidences, having friendships as a couple, tandem in political beliefs even if she lived them in her work, risked herself, while he built the beaver dam to shore up, provide for her … the dam that breached, wrong enterprise for the wrong era. Not that she cared about that; it was part of her not having wanted a husband, ever, not the first or the second: not needing security, which he supposed is what a husband represents to most women. She’s getting old and she understands something about security, down there he’s far away from, he can’t fathom. She’s getting old, even his Vera’s ageing; and she’s not lonely. He searched himself for the bitter comfort of her inadequacies, the things in her that irritated him. She had no plastic, tactile feeling—except for flesh, of course, fondling him, making him rise in terrifying excitement, stroking his lips and eyes, she used to, telling him how beautiful that face of his, that he still bears with, was. A mask for a performance he can’t take off. He has all the time he’s always needed for reading, now. There is exegesis in everything he reads. Going back to the books that had been the essential texts of his youth, rereading Rilke, he seems sought out, signalled to: Vera is Malte Laurids Brigge’s ‘one who didn’t want to be loved.’ ‘That inner indifference of spirit’: it was written of Vera. And he was reading an Irish poet—not Yeats this time—he wanted to let the words tell her that although he’d failed to share the credo with her in the end, he understood: What’s looked the stronger has outlived its term, I The future lies in what’s affirmed from under. (But it’s the beauty of the assonance, perhaps, that holds the meaning for him.) She had listened in his arms when he read poetry to her, Yeats and Lorca, in the mountains, she had said she was entranced. Entranced! Vera never read anything but newspapers and White Papers, Blue Papers, a house full of Reports. For her the condition of existence was what happened in the power of politics, while the very power of life itself, the all-beneficent sun, god-symbol eternally of a future rising, was turning out to be the source of death rays humans are letting in upon themselves by tearing their only shelter, the atmosphere. She nagged him to ‘keep up’ sculpture in his spare time of being a husband; she didn’t know volume, shape, the smooth skin of wood and the grainy one of stone, and the full time these needed. She favoured her daughter openly, cold Annick, and seemed, even when he was a baby, her firstborn, to have some kind of unexplained resentment against her son, perhaps because Ivan was formed in her image—did this mean Vera did not like herself? God knows. Lover, husband, you never know the one to whom you are these. He wanted to call out, call out to her—Yeats again—lines that came back to him as a blow: What do we know but that we face I One another in this place? He hated—not Vera, but his dependency on loving her. He has gone away knowing that he does not know how to carry on his life alone.
None to Accompany Me Page 26