She would have been satisfied to see him go on painting scarves for the white shop in town, all his life; at least that was what he told himself when he began to find that he couldn’t talk to her on Sundays, when they were at home together. She looked at his paintings, when he really was beginning to paint, as the wife of a gangster might look at the guns and knives present in the house. She cared only for prettiness, for the little sweetnesses and frills that clerks acquire to soften the rough chunk of the labourer’s life. She was only concerned with covering ugliness and did not know the possibility of beauty. In three years he had outgrown her as inevitably as a child outgrows its clothes. Every time he looked back at her, she was lagging a little further behind. When he thought he was going away on the scholarship, it was natural that she should go to live in Bloemfontein with her mother and sister for the year that he would be away. Then had come the lengthy passport trouble, the postponement of the scholarship, the final refusal of the passport, and the months when he was mostly drunk and had no job. She had stayed on and on with her family, and she had quite a good job in a small factory. He and she simply lost sight of one another.
As he walked out of the shop and along the streets of Alexandra, the naked-bottomed children, the skeletal dogs, the young girls in nylon and the old women who shuffled along under the weight of great buttocks, the decaying rubbish in the streets, the patched and pocked houses, the bicycles shaking as if they would fall apart, the debased attempts at smartening up some hovels that made them look more sordid than those that were left to their rotting drabness—everything around him spoke of her. It was the ambition of her life to be clean and decent, yet this squalor thrust her existence upon him. Isolation rose higher in him every minute, a drug beginning to take effect at the extremities; it was his defence, but it was also alarming. From it he saw, fascinated, that she did not think it impossible to regard as “husband” a man she had lost touch with three years ago; she accepted what any housegirl or cook accepted—that a black woman cannot expect to live permanently with her man and children; she must shift about and live where and how poverty and powerlessness allow. He might have been an indentured labourer, away from home for long periods out of necessity. Three years’ absence had no significance for her so far as the validity of marriage was concerned.
He tried on himself some specific moment of her existence—licking her lips before she spoke, fastening a wide shiny belt round her middle—as a tongue goes to test the sensitivity of a tooth. She could have been one of the women passing him in the street. He was approaching the row of Indian shops at the top of the township, now, and there were some pretty ones about, girls coming from or going to the bus terminus. He saw the thickness of their calves and ankles, the selfconsciousness of their plastic smartness. He had in his mind, mixed with the shapes and colours, the coming together of objects and movement that was always working towards the moment when he began to paint—the thin wrists and ankles, the careless style of Ann. Little breasts of a woman who bore no children. Flat belly with the point of each hip-bone holding a skirt taut. Soft thin hands smelling of cigarette smoke. “What’ll we do today?” A woman without woman’s work or woman’s ambitions. The idea of her possessed his imagination entirely, so that when he went into a shop to buy cigarettes he unconsciously adopted the manner that came naturally to her, of assuming without offence that she must have what she wanted before anyone else’s claims of time or precedence.
There had been days, lately, when he had left the flat, the Stilwell house—all of them in the city, and their life there—with an almost gleeful sense of escape. He left them and plunged back where they couldn’t find him, couldn’t follow, didn’t know the internecine life of his home, the townships. All ambiguities fell away there, while he drank with Sol. They were never free, now, of him. The Stilwell house was grouped invisibly round him as an empty chair at a dinner table affects the seating of those present. But he could disappear where there was no trace of their existence, in the places to which they had banished his kind.
He turned back from the shops down one of the dirt streets. An orange-seller sat beside a bright pyramid, paring the hide of a horny big toe. Gideon walked past him and went to a yard he knew. He bought himself a brandy, but he spoke to no one and the usual talk of the other customers, of bribes to get houses, of how much a week went on hire purchase, of gambling, of police raids, of the man found murdered just near the bus sheds last night, did not draw him into its familiarity. He had meant to look in at his room, but he did not go there and took a bus to the city and went straight to the flat, where, taking on at once the automatic watchfulness that the city exacted from him as a presence that was perpetually clandestine, he went, hiding himself, up the back stairs and let himself in. When the door was safely locked behind him, he went into the living-room and sat smoking, in one of the big chairs. A knock came at the door but, as always when he was in the flat, officially there was nobody there to answer it. He heard the footsteps retreating down the corridor, and the sough of the lift dropping through the building. As he smoked he looked slowly round the objects in the room and, in the silence, a strange feeling came over his body: his skin contracted like the skin of water wrinkling under a shiver of wind.
The one place in which he felt in possession of himself was when he was in some small room with the men with whom he planned, argued, and several times had been in prison. They talked too much, they intrigued too much—these things he could criticise when he was away from them. But when he sat with them, again and again he was so much like them, so much one of them, that he was as guilty as they of the faults he criticised. Here he knew himself to be what Callie Stow had reminded him a black face didn’t necessarily make one—an African. Listening to Zeke Zwane who was pompous, or Mdaka Mkwambi who was long-winded, or Mabaso who was too cautious, or Dr Thabeng who saw himself as another Nkrumah, he was at peace, he was secure among the members of an outlawed organisation who themselves, as individuals, many of them, were banned from attending meetings anyway. Here there was no shade of ambiguity; he was a man who had given up the futility of a life of choice (oddly enough, he did not admit to himself that he was actually painting again; like his presence in the flat, the fact had no official existence) and accepted the one thing possible—struggle. The struggle of a beetle on its back, most of the time. Bungling, slow as history, muddled, impeded by ignorance, growing by fits and starts, crushed, unkillable—he belonged to it and whatever happened to it would happen to him.
Nguni was talking, in terms picked up from the liberation papers and news-sheets being printed all over the continent from Egypt to Cape Town, of “the weapon of withholding the people’s labour”.
They argued, as they had done since the failure of the last strike, to find out why it had failed. Everyone had a theory, something to fill the void of not knowing what to do next. Resolutions were approved to go from this, a special action committee, to the central committee of the national executive. Co-ordination, co-operation—all the big words flew about. People who had been lobbying watched those who had promised to back them up. The chap, Khoza, who thought slowly through a long discussion and then always came up with an objection just when the whole thing was threshed into agreement, began to talk. “I’d like to say one thing. We should put it to the national executive that we shouldn’t have a stay-at-home except in summer.”
Everyone ceased to listen the moment he opened his mouth. Someone gave a snorting laugh. Jackson Sijake, the lawyer, had professional attentiveness. “Yes? On what basis?”
“People need their pay more in winter. If a man loses a day’s money there’s no coal in the house, perhaps. It’s bad psychology.”
Thabeng flashed out at him, at everybody. “That’s something our people have got to learn. Man, you don’t get freedom from sitting over the fire, you can’t choose the weather the day you’re going to bring the country to a standstill.”
Gideon didn’t take Khoza seriously, but he put in, with
his chuckle down in his chest, “I don’t think it’s a bad idea to plan a stay-at-home when it’s likely to be easier for us. Let’s think of everything, anything at all that will make the chances of success greater. But what we ought to do, man, is to concentrate on our organisation in small places. We must go all out to be active in the country, specially the Reef towns. It’s all too loose and patchy … complete stoppage here, everyone at work a few miles away. If you want to make a success you need months of preparation, getting people ready.”
“The most successful things have been things that have just come up—look at Kgosana’s march on Cape Town,” Nathan Xaba said. He had still the eyes of a countryman, intelligent, slow-blinking, as if he were looking into flames.
Sijake put his hand, with the thick linked watch-strap covering the wrist, palm down on his varnished chair-arm.
“That’s it. Enthusiasm, people get carried away, and then it’s gone. And what can happen to you as a result of a protest march? The leaders get arrested. Perhaps some of the crowd, too. But the rest go home, pleased with themselves. A strike calls for less excitement, more staying power, and your job at stake. That’s what we’ve got to concentrate on getting over to people.”
“You’ve forgotten that a march can end up with shooting,” Xaba said.
“Yes, with shooting. But when you’re dead you’re dead. You don’t have to think what’s going to happen to you next.”
Sijake was young and plump with a diaphragm that bulged his shirt-front over the belt of his trousers. He liked sports coats of hairy tweed, and his initials were embroidered, in tiny letters, unobtrusively, on his shirt-pocket. He had the authoritative manner that often goes with a smooth, square face. He had been, illegally, to Accra and to Cairo, and got back undetected. In prison he was the one who represented them all and prepared memoranda concerning their rights as prisoners, headed delegations to the governor, and primed them with answers for the Special Branch interrogations. He was constantly being arrested, between political imprisonments, for not having his identity or tax papers in order, for fast driving, and for breaking the banning order against his attendance at gatherings or travelling outside the area to which he was confined. He defended himself and was acquitted on one legal technicality or another, time and again. He and Gideon had done a lot of jobs together. With complicated arrangements that sometimes involved changes of borrowed cars from town to town they drove over the borders into Swaziland or Basutoland to visit people who were in exile since the last State of Emergency. Gideon was not under a territorial ban at present; Sijake said to him that night after the meeting, “You’ll be around in July, I hope?” He was referring to the school holidays.
The woman whose husband’s house they were in entered, looked at them as if she expected them to be gone, ignored their greeting and went out again. She was dressed in her day-clothes but her head was tied up for the night in a doek.
“Sure.”
“I think it would be a good thing if you went all over the Transvaal in that time—every dorp and little town. We’ll arrange contacts everywhere. Draw up a report on what they’re doing, how active branches, are and so on. Spend a few days wherever they need help with organising.” He added in English, “We’re lost in this rabbit burrow of underground, Boetie.”
Gideon had an impulse to give himself time by lying: “I don’t really know. I said something about doing some coaching. Indians whose kids are trying for matric.”
“We need someone to go, man, we need it.”
“I’ll let you know. I’ll find out what’s going on.”
There was a gleam on the bathroom floor that turned out to be a lipstick-case, and the dregs of red wine had dried sourly on glasses. “They must have had a party last night,” Ann said. “Were you there?”
“Looked in,” he said, without interest. “Their friends are not up to much.”
Although she liked the casualness with which he accepted the run of the flat, because that was just how she herself lived, there were times when he said something cold; a part of her held back for a moment from their presence together in the room and lagged shamefacedly towards some old loyalty. The two advertising men would have no idea that he dismissed them like that. The natural corollary to this thought—that he was living on them—did not come into it (she would have lived on anybody) but the hint that he exacted from them a price of their white privilege under the cover of friendship, set up a distant conditioned opposition.
She had introduced him to the idea of making his own frames for his paintings, because she thought the sort of thing the framers turned out imprisoned his work in something mass-produced and alien to it. Like Len before him, he was amused by the confident way she tackled obstacles: “How’re we going to make these corners right, they ought to be mortised or whatever it is.” “Ah, rubbish. That’s not necessary. There are all sorts of marvellous kinds of glue you can get. That stuff that little boys use—aeroplane glue. I’ll get it. The joins’ll be covered by the linen, anyway.”
They worked outside on the balcony, squatting on the floor, where the mess didn’t matter. He wore a blue and white Italian cotton shirt that she had bought him. She did not bother to paint her face and her grey eyes and thick eyebrows and lashes had the furry darkness of some creature surprised by daylight. They laughed and argued and got things wrong, lapsing into silences of fierce concentration. She broke finger-nails and every so often stopped to suck a finger that had got hurt. They tired and stopped to smoke, leaning against the balcony wall and hidden by it from everything but the living-room of the flat, and the sky. “I don’t see why you shouldn’t be ready for a small exhibition—say, even by July. Eben Swart’s gallery would be good. Or the small one at Howe’s.”
“Wouldn’t have more than twenty pictures—counting the old ones that everyone’s seen too often.”
None of the seven or eight oils and numerous sketches he had done of her could be used; they smiled at each other at the thought of this. “Perhaps in another town,” she said. “On another planet,” he said. They continued to talk lazily of the chances of putting a worthwhile show together, and then, without any change of tone, he said, “I may not be here in July. Most likely not. Something I’ve got to do for Congress.”
She kept smiling at him, a dent between her eyebrows, her mouth pressed together as if she were sure he would go on to say something else. He said nothing and went on smoking.
“What sort of thing?”
He gestured, and the movement put the whole thing out of her ken, took him back to a place where she did not exist. “A lot of travelling about, talking and so on.”
“I’m supposed to go to Moçambique,” she said.
“Going to go?” His voice sounded hoarse with the effort at naturalness.
“Yes, I think I’ll go. Terrific trip.”
He put his hand on the flat of her waist, where her breath rose and fell evenly beneath her dress. He felt an immense pride in her beauty and her toughness. He was filled with arrogance about her. He lifted her pale face distorted between his hands, the lips showing a gleam of teeth, the eyes giving nothing away in their many-coloured mottling, their tinsel fragments imbedded in glassy shadow. She pushed up his loose-clinging shirt and rested her head on his bare chest. To him her eyes seemed closed, but she was gazing out of lowered lids at the smooth skin, hairless, contoured by ribs and muscle; the colour of aubergine, but there was no shine to it. She smoothed the ripple of a rib with one finger. She was ashamed to let him see something that troubled her lately when she was with him, though she forgot about it instantly they were not together: the dark positiveness of his skin, the mattness of it, the variations like markings shading one part of his body in difference from another—some nerve in her had become alive to it. She dwelt on it in secret as soon as she touched him.
She put out her tongue and passed it quick and hesitant where the skin slid over the rib. She was always afraid he would look her in the eyes and find her out. When he
did see her her face was confused, open, something that had been there already breaking up, like a sky of merging and melting cloud. He saw there only what he was feeling himself, the irresolution and confusion that he felt between himself and the one thing that he had had proved to him, that he had decided on, finally, that lay at rock-bottom under all that now obliterated, now exposed it in his being: the validity of whatever he did with the group of men who met in the back rooms of shops and in other people’s houses. All warmth and truth was there; didn’t he know it? Away from that, cut off from it, when his life was over he would be a dead cat flung in the gutter. How could it become cloudy, receding? Something that didn’t strike him deep, where the will is? He lost himself, his confusion in the confusion of her face.
Part Three
Fourteen
The first few nights Jessie awoke suddenly sometime in the night and heard in the sound of the sea the voices of argument and the cries of children teasing one another. She was sure someone was there, walking through the house behind the muffle of the sea yawning away; the little girls were calling her. Things were being knocked aside and slowly falling … She was alone and her mind went on twitching and pulsating in response to all that recoiled upon it up the stairs and in the living-room, round the table and on the landing, from behind the closed door where the strange shapes of musical instruments were and the smell of another woman, in the enclosed verandah where Morgan lay and Tom stroked papers drily one on another.
The Stilwell house was not there. She listened and there was nothing but the sea; all voices were its own, all sounds. The sound was an element, like its wetness.
The mornings were light early. Moths and other flying creatures, clinging to the curtains, fell feebly away in the sun and crawled about the cracked concrete floor as she pulled the curtains aside with the first sound of the day and her occupation of it—the runners screeching faintly along the rust of the rod. The sea moved towards her shiningly out of the night; it was immortality, it had been there all the time. She went back to bed and when she woke again the room was hot, and the water all dazzling peaked surfaces.
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