On the way back to Dando’s to pick up his things he was held up, as he had been once before, by the passing of the presidential car. The outriders on their motorcycles rode before and behind — the car was borne on the angry swarm of their noise.
He saw only the black profile of Mweta’s face rushing away from his focus. The next time, next time they met — it was difficult to realize that it had ended like that, this time. But human affairs didn’t come to clear — cut conclusions, a line drawn and a total added up. They appeared to resolve, dissolve, while they were only reforming, coming together in another combination. Even when we are dead, what we did goes on making these new combinations (he saw clouds, saw molecules); that’s true for private history as well as the other kind. Next time we meet — yes, Mweta may even have to deport me. And even that would be a form of meeting.
Part Five
Chapter 18
Her car parked outside the Tlumes’, Kalimo’s washing on the bushes, the fig, like the trees over the main street, under a hide of coated dust, the quality of the silence that met him in his bedroom with the thin bright curtains and in the shabby living-room — he walked through the rooms with clenched hands, suddenly. All here; not a memory; life, now. He entered into it and took possession. Kalimo’s welcome flowed over him like an expression of his own joy.
And soon she came, he heard her walking up the veranda steps and the squeak of the screen door that let her pass — in the rush of assurance that in a few seconds she would be standing there in the room, alive. There she was, herself. The self that couldn’t be stored up even in the most painstaking effort of the mind and senses, the most exact recollection, never, never, the self that was only to be enjoyed while she was there. The moment he embraced her (slight awkwardness of disbelief that it was happening, taste of the inside of her mouth coming back to him, feel of the flesh on her back between his spread fingers) the sense of that self entered him and disappeared, a transparency, into familiarity. She wanted to hear “all the stories” with the amused eagerness of one who has been content, waiting behind — she hadn’t envied him the capital or the company of her old friends. They ate their first meaclass="underline" yes, that was exactly how she was, her way of considering, from under lowered eyelids, what she should help herself to next. He kept pausing to look at her and she, every now and then, reached for his hand and turned it this way and that, squeezing the bones.
“You took the phone call very calmly.”
She was hardly expectant. She said with tentative curiosity, “You were very calm yourself.”
“Don’t you want to know what I wanted the letter for? Aren’t you concerned about what I did with it? Rebecca, I’ve taken your money out of the bank.”
She searched him for the joke. “No, really.”
“I did. The money from the house. I sent it away. It will be there for you in Switzerland whenever you need it. No one else can touch it, no one will block the account. You can use it wherever you are.”
She became at once tense and helpless, an expression that flattened and widened her face across the cheekbones. “Why? I’m not going away.”
“You must be safe. You and your children. Now I feel satisfied you are.”
“I see.”
“You don’t see … you don’t see …” He had to get up from the table and come over to her, enfold her awkwardly against his side. He took her arms away from her face; it was roused, red. A vein ran like a thickness of string down her forehead. He thought she was going to cry. He chivvied, humoured— “You’re a very trusting girl, I could have run off with all your cash. You handed over without a murmur.”
She squared her jaw back against her soft full neck for self — control. “The trouble is that you never try to deceive me. I know what you will do and what you would not do. I could never change it.”
“At least I hope the money’s in a Swiss bank. We’ll know in a week or two whether it’s there or whether I’ve been a gullible ass who’s lost it for you.”
Between the “stories,” the unimportant news of friends, he talked a little of Congress: but it was massive in his mind, it could not be dealt with anecdotally, nor as an account of events, even an explanation. It broke, over the days, into the components most meaningful to him, and these took on their particular forms of expression and found their own times to emerge.
She said that night, “What you did — the money from the house — it’s not allowed, is it?”
He had been asleep for a blank second and her voice brought him back. “No, it’s illegal.” He found his hand had opened away, slack, from her breast; in sleep you were returned to yourself, what you dreamed you held fast to was nothing, rictus on a dead man’s face. She said, “It’s more in Gordon’s line. And if they find out?”
“What’s left of the settlers who had me deported will say they knew all along what kind I was.”
“And Mweta?”
Her nipple was slack for sleep, too. His hand could hardly make out the differentiation in texture between that area and the other surface of the breast; he dented the soft aureole with his forefinger until it nosed back. She shifted gently in protest at this preoccupation, evasion.
He was suddenly fully awake and his hand left her and went in the dark to feel for a cigarette on the one — legged Congo stool that was his bedside table. He smoked and began to talk about the day of the debate on the UTUC Secretary-General, told her how he had gone down to the carpark to persuade Semstu to support Shinza.
“You knew Semstu from before?”
“Oh yes, an old friend. That’s how I could do it. I’ve known him as long as Mweta and Shinza.”
“And Mweta?” she said again, at last.
“I had every intention of telling him. He knew anyway what I thought about the Secretary-General, so I don’t suppose it would have been much of a surprise.… But it seemed to me after all it was my own affair.”
“How d’you mean? You did it for Shinza.”
“For myself, I’m beginning to think. Shinza’s trying to do what I believe should be done here.”
She said, “I’m afraid you’ll get into trouble, Bray.”
“You’re the one who told me once that playing safe was impossible, to live one must go on and do the next thing. You proposed the paradox that playing safe was dangerous. I was very impressed. Very.”
“I didn’t know you then”—she always avoided the word “love,” like a schoolboy who regards it fearfully, as something heard among jeers.
“He will think you’re siding with Shinza,” she said, out of her own silence. “—Won’t he? What’ll he do about that?”
“I don’t think I can be regarded as a very dangerous opponent. Mweta’s the President; he can always get rid of me.”
“That’s what I mean. You may not be dangerous, but his feelings will be hurt … that’s dangerous.”
“Then for his part he’ll be able to say he threw me out because I was smuggling currency.”