The mound is slowly going to disappear; maybe the vehicle is about to take the party back to the lodge, the weekend is going to be over. He is walking back to the rest of the party, still gathered round the carcass and the black man. For the space of a few yards he is alone, for a few seconds he is equidistant between those at the dung mound and those up ahead, part of neither one nor the other. A sensation that can’t be held long; now he is with the group at the kill, again. There is some special stir of attentiveness in them, they crowd round and then herd back a step, where Siza, the black man, is crouched on his hunkers. He is business-like, concentrated, not taking any notice of them. He has given them all he could; now he has the air of being for himself. He has a knife in his hand and the white man who has just joined the group recognizes it, it is the knife that is everywhere, nowhere without the knife, on the news, at the dark street-corners, under the light that the warders never turn out. The black man has thrust, made his incision, sliced back the black-and-white smooth pelt on the dead beast’s uppermost hind leg and now is cutting a piece of the plump rump. It is not a chunk or hunk, but neatly butchered, prime—a portion.
They laugh, wondering at the skill, curious. As if they can’t guess, as if they’ve never sunk their teeth into a steak in their lives. ‘What’re you going to do with that, Siza?’ Ah yes, put it in a doggy bag, take it home when you’ve already stuffed your own guts, taken the land (as the jailbird would say).
The black man is trimming it. Along with the knife, he has brought a sheet of newspaper. ‘For me. Eat it at my house. For my house.’
‘Is it good meat?’
‘Yes, it’s good.’
One of the men chides, man to man. ‘But why not take the whole haunch—the whole leg, Siza. Why such a small piece?’
The black man is wrapping the portion in newspaper, he knows he mustn’t let it drip blood on the white people.
He does it to his satisfaction in his own time and looks up at them. ‘The lions, they know I must take a piece for me because I find where their meat is. They know it. It’s all right. But if I take too much, they know it also. Then they will take one of my children.’
Safe Houses
He’s one of those dark-haired men whose beards grow out rusty-red. He could have dyed his hair to match—more or less—but a beard is the first thing they’d expect to find you behind. He’s lived like this several times before; the only difference is that this time he came back into the country legally, came home—so much for the indemnity promised to exiles, so much for the changed era there, now bans on his kind of politics were supposed to be a thing of the past, he was supposed to be—free? He knows how their minds work—not much imagination, reliance on an Identikit compilation of how political subversives look and behave Underground. Underground: this time, as at other times, he’s aware of how unsuitably abstract a term that is. To hide away, you have to be out in the open of life; too soon and easily run to ground, holed up somewhere. Best safety lies in crowds. Selective crowds; he goes to football matches with beer in a knapsack, and a cap with a plastic eyeshade over his sunglasses, but not to pop concerts, where the police keep an eye on young leftists whose democratic recreation this is. He goes to the movies but not to concerts although he longs for the company of strings and brass; someone among his intellectual buddies from long ago would be bound to gaze at him, reaching back for recognition. Small gatherings where everyone can be trusted are traps; glowing with the distinction of the secret encounter with a real revolutionary, someone will not be able to resist boasting to another, in strictest confidence, and that other will pass on the luminous dusting of danger.
The good friends who provide a bed sometimes offer the use of a car as well, but driving alone is another sure way to be traced and picked up. He walks, and takes buses among ordinary workers and students. He’s a little too forty-five-ish, thickened around the jowl and diaphragm, to pass as a student but with his cravat of tangled black hair showing in the neck of a sweat shirt and his observance of the uniform jogging shoes with soles cushioned like tyres, he could be anyone among the passengers—the white artisans, railway and post office employees, even policemen. Reading a newspaper with its daily account of the proceedings at the group trial where he is a missing accused, worrying about these comrades in arms, he tries not to feel self-congratulatory at his escape of arrest, a form of complacency dangerous to one in his position, sitting there in a bus among people he knows would be glad to hand him over to the law; but he can’t suppress a little thrill, a sort of inner giggle. Perhaps this is freedom? Something secret, internal, after all? But philosophizing is another danger, in his situation, undermining the concept of freedom for which he has risked discovery and imprisonment yet again.
One afternoon in the city he was gazing inattentively out of the window waiting for the bus to set off when he became aware of the presence just seating itself beside him. Aware like an animal: scenting something different in the bus’s familiar sun-fug of sweat and deodorants, fruit-skins and feet. Perfume. Real perfume, at the price of a month’s wages of the other passengers. And a sound, a sound of silk as a leg crossed the knee of another leg. He straightened away from the window, looked ahead for a decent interval and then slowly turned, as if merely fidgeting because the bus was taking too long to leave.
A woman, of course—he’d scented that. Grey silk pants or some sort of fashionable skirt divided like pants, with an arched instep showing in a pastel sandal. Below the neckline of a loose blouse, silk slopes shining—breasts rising and falling. Out of breath. Or exasperated. He moved a little to give her more room. She nodded in acknowledgement without looking at him; she didn’t see him, she was going through some sort of dialogue or more likely monologue in her head, annoyance, exasperation twitched her lips.
Schoolgirls tramped onto the bus with their adolescent female odours and the pop of gum blown between their lips like the text balloons in comics. An old woman opened a bag of vinegary chips. The bus filled but the driver was absent.
This misplaced person, this woman, this pampered almost-beauty (he saw as she turned, throwing back her long, tiger-streaked hair cut in a parrot-poll over the forehead, and smiling on perfectly conformed teeth) had now accepted where she found herself. She indicated the driver’s seat.— What d’you think’s happened to him?—
Taking a leak.—Having a cup of coffee, I suppose.—They shared the polite moment of tolerance.
—I thought they had a strict timetable. Oh well. D’you know if this takes us along Sylvia Pass?—
—Pretty near the top of the Pass.—
She pulled a face and blinked her thick-lashed eyes in resigned dismay. Secretive, glossy eyes, knowing how to please, and folding at the outer corners an attractive, experienced fan of faint lines.
—Where do you want to get off?—
—That’s the problem—at the bottom of the Pass. I suppose I should have taken some other bus… I don’t know why taxis don’t cruise in this town as they do in any other civilized place! I’ve been looking for one for half an hour, traipsing…—
—There should have been taxis for tourists at any hotel.—
—No, no, I live here, but this just isn’t my day… my car’s stuck in a parking garage. Underground. Infuriating. Battery dead or something. I couldn’t find a telephone booth where the receiver hadn’t been torn out… this town! I had to ask a shopkeeper to let me phone for a mechanic… anyway, I couldn’t wait any longer, I’ve left the keys with the attendant.—
She felt better now that she had told someone, anyone. He was anyone.
When the driver appeared and fares were to be paid of course she had neither season card nor change for a ticket. While she scrabbled in her bag, gold chains on her wrists sliding, he gave the conductor two tickets.
—Oh you are kind…—She was suddenly embarrassed by her privileged life, by her inability to cope with what for all the people surrounding her on the bus was daily routine. In their ignoring of her s
he felt a reproach that she had never travelled on the bus before, perhaps not this bus or any bus, at least since she was a schoolchild. He was no longer anyone; somehow an ally, although from his appearance he probably could ill afford to waste a bus ticket on a stranger. Yet there was something in his self-assurance, the amusement in his regard, that suggested he was not merely one of the other passengers. Unsure of this, in a habit of patronage—she was the kind who would treat her servants generously but send her children to segregated schools—she chattered to him to show she considered him an equal.—You make the journey every day? Isn’t it always bliss to get home, out of this town?—
—Every day, no. But what’s wrong with the city?—Too full of blacks for you, now, lady, blacks selling fruit and cheap jewellery and knitted caps, dirtying the streets, too full of men without work for whom you see your bracelets and that swish Italian suède bag as something to be taken from you.
She shifted to safe generalization.—Oh I’m no city girl. Not anywhere.—
—But you live in one?—
—Well, you’d hardly know it was there, from my house. Luckily. It’s an old suburb … the trees—that’s one thing about Johannesburg, isn’t it, you can hide yourself in trees, just the highways humming, well out of sight!—
—Really?—He suddenly gave way in a great, open smile like the yawn of a predator.
She had the instinct to withdraw.—You don’t live here?—
—Oh yes, I’m living here.—
She suppressed her casual curiosity as unwise encouragement.—Could you tell me when to get off? The nearest stop to Sylvia Pass.—
She did not know if she imagined a pause.
—I’ll be getting off there.—
He stood behind her as she stepped down from the bus. They began to descend the steep and winding road. There was no distance between them but an aura which established they were not together, merely taking the same route.—Thank God it’s down and not up. My heels are not exactly appropriate for this.—
—Take them off. It’s safer. The surface is very smooth.—
—But it’s hot! I’ll burn my feet.—
She clattered along awkwardly, amused at her own manner of progress.—Isn’t it typical? I’ve been jogging around here every morning for years and I’ve never come down the Pass before.—
—It would be up the Pass, wouldn’t it—if you live at the bottom. Quite a strenuous jog.—An observation rather than a correction. And then:—Typical of what?—
None of his business! Who was he to quiz a manner of speaking, as if to find out if it had some significance in her life.
Yet she attempted an answer.—Oh… habit, I suppose … doing what you’ve become used to, not noticing… where you really are—
And wondering, now, no doubt, whether it was possible that this man off the bus really could be living in the suburb of large houses hidden by trees where she lived, or whether he had left the bus to follow her, and was to be feared, although he was white, in this city where so much was to be feared. It was true that he had picked one of his maze of trails about the city and suburbs in order to walk with her—an impulse like any of the impulses with which he had to fill in the days of his disconnection from consecutive action. The unexpected was his means of survival. To be Underground is to have a go at living without consequences. The corrupt little wriggle of freedom—there it was again. Shameful but enjoyable.
—Here’s my corner.—She bent to pull the slipped strap of her sandal back over her heel and looked up ingratiatingly to soften dismissal.
—Goodbye then.—Again, that greedy warrior’s smile, contradicting the humble appearance.
As he turned his back she suddenly called as she might have remembered an instruction for some tradesman—Have you far to go—that was such a hot trek—would you like to come in for something cool to drink?—
This time she was not mistaken; there was a pause, still with his back to her.—I know I’m dying of thirst and you must be!—
So she drew him round, and murmuring casual thanks, he joined her. Now they were walking together. At one of the pillared entrances in white battlements topped with black iron spikes she pressed the button of an intercom panel and spoke. The flats of a stage set, the wide polished wooden gates slid back electronically. Trees, her trees led up to and overflowed the roof of the spread wings of the house. Small dogs jumped about her. Sprinklers arched rainbows over lawns. She called out in the joyous soprano used to summon faithful servants, and ice and fruit juice were brought onto a shaded terrace. Behind him the colours of Persian carpets, paintings and bowls of flowers blurred in the deep perspective of one of those huge rooms used for parties.
—You have a lovely home.—He said what was blandly expected of him as he drank juice in return for a bus ticket.
She came back with what was expected of her.—But too big. My sons are at boarding school. For two people… too much.—
—But the garden, the privacy.—
She was embarrassed to think how he must be envying her.—Oh yes. But most of the time I don’t use the rest of the place (a gesture to the room behind), I have my own little quarters on the other side of the house. My husband’s away such a lot on business—Japan, at the moment. That’s why I couldn’t even get anyone to come and fetch me from that wretched garage… his secretary’s such an idiot, she’s let his driver go. I always tell him, he’s drained her of all initiative, she’s so used to being ordered about. I can’t stand subservient people, can you—I mean, I want to shake them and get them to stand up—
—I don’t think I know any.—
—Ah, that shows you move in the right circles!—They both laughed.—But what do you do? Your profession, your work, I mean.—Careful to show that ‘work’ might be just as worthy as a profession.
Without realizing he could think so quickly, he began inventing one—a profession combined with ‘work’—that would fit his appearance, he began telling like a fairy tale, a bedtime story, it flowed from him taking turns and details as if it could be true, as if he were making an alternative life for himself:—I’m in construction. Construction engineer—that’s where I was today, on some sites. Things go wrong… when you’re talking about stress in a twenty-storey building—
—Oh if it were to fall! I often look up and marvel how such piles hold together, in fact I don’t have much faith they will, I never walk under those pavement shelters you people erect for pedestrians while you’re building, I always walk in the street, I’d rather get run over, any time—
—Standards are pretty high, here; safety margins. You don’t have to worry. In some of the countries I’ve worked, it’s rather different. And one has always to think of how a construction will behave in an earthquake, how do you build over a fault in the earth, Mexico City, San Francisco—
—So you travel around, too. But not selling; building.—
—Sometimes pulling down. Preparing to rebuild. Destroying old structures.—No—he must resist the devilry of amusing himself by planting, in his fairy tale, symbols from his real life. As in all fairy tales, there were enough improbabilities his listener would have to pass over if not swallow. It surely must occur to her that a construction engineer would be unlikely not to utilize his own car, even if his working garb was appropriate to inspection of building sites.—Have you travelled much with your husband? Go along with him?—Best to know where she had been before elaborating on projects in Sri Lanka, Thailand, North Africa. No, she liked to go to Europe but hot places, crowded places, dirty places—no.
So he was free to transform his experience of guerrilla training camps in Tanzania and Libya, his presence in the offices of an exiled High Command in cities deadened by northern snows or tropical heat, to provide exotic backdrops for his skyscrapers. Anecdotes of bar encounters in such places—he merely changed the subjects discussed, not the characters—entertained her. He was at ease in his invented persona; what would a woman know about engineering? She said it wa
s time for a real drink; ice was brought again, a trolley was wheeled out in which bottles were slotted, a manservant appeared with a dish of snacks decorated with radish roses.
—I don’t allow myself to drink on my own.—
—Why not?—He accepted the glass of whisky and ice she had prepared for him.
At first she seemed not to hear the personal question, busying herself at the trolley. She sat down on a swinging sofa, holding her drink, and let the sandals drop from her feet.—Afraid.—
—Of being alone?—
—No. Of carrying on with it. Yes, of being alone. Isn’t that why people drink—I mean really drink. But I suppose you’re often alone.—
—What makes you think that?—
But now it was he who need not be afraid: she had no inkling of anything real behind his fairy tales.—Well, the nature of your work—always moving around, no time for roots.—
—No trees.—He lifted his shoulders, culpable.—What about family…—
Should he have a family?—Dispersed. I don’t have what you’d call a family, really.—
—Your wife? No children?—
—I had one once—a wife. I have a grown-up daughter—in Canada. A doctor, a paediatrician, bright girl.—
That was a mistake.—Oh where? I have a brother who emigrated to Canada, he’s a doctor too, also a paediatrician, in Toronto.—
—Vancouver. She’s the other side of the country.—
—They might have met at some conference. Doctors are always holding conferences. What’s her name—She held out her hand to take his glass for a refill, gesturing him to be at ease.—Good lord, I haven’t asked you yours—I’m, well, I’m Sylvie, Sylvie—
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