She took a clean handkerchief from his drawer, dipped it in the glass of water beside his bed and wiped herself — face, armpits, sex. She didn’t want to meet Kalimo or Mahlope on the way to the bathroom. She dressed.
“I’ll get up and see if it’s all clear.”
“I’m going the golf — course way — the car’s down near the fourth hole. Said I had to go early to do some work I brought home and didn’t do last night.”
“It’s all right — I hear them in the kitchen.” For these practical whispers words would do.
She was gone.
She had not been with him more than half an hour. It was strangely like the very first time she had come. The very re — enactment itself was the measure of the difference: a ritual that had once been gone through in ignorance without remotely knowing what its real meaning could come to be.
He walked into town because he had to use the perfect coordination and balance in his body. Coming down into the long main road under the splendid trees he had a vivid sense of all the things he enjoyed; riding through light and shade in Wiltshire or years ago at Moshi in Tanganyika, finning along in slow motion on the bed of the lake last week — it was all one with an awareness — every minute detail leaving a fresh pug — print — of this road, this place. Everything was immediate and verifiable on a plane of concrete existence. The precise spiciness of the dry season when the dust had not been wetted for several months; the ting of bicycle bells plucking the air behind him; two children wearing only vests and passing a mealie — cob from mouth to mouth; the crows cawing out of sight. An ordinary morning that was to him the sunny square: the last thing the condemned prisoner would ever see, and would see as long as he lived.
The courthouse was part of the old administrative building where people came to collect pensions and pay taxes. Outside a group of ancient women were smoking pipes. Their bodies, bare from the waist except for beads tangled with their dugs, rose snakelike from the coils of cloth in which they squatted. They did not speak. Clerks, hangers — on, young men in white shirts and cheap sunglasses brushed past them. He went into the room that still smelled like a schoolroom; he himself had once sat up there on the rostrum and fiddled with the carafe covered with a glass. On one of the benches among other people, he was the only white man. His two neighbours talked across to each other behind his shoulders, not rudely, but in the assumption that he couldn’t understand what they were saying and therefore wasn’t there. They were discussing a debt owed to one or both of them; clearly they were such close friends it didn’t matter which. They had the same cowboy jeans imported by local Indian stores, the same sort of Japanese watches with a thick gilt band, the same topiary skill of the open — air barbers had shaped their dense hair into the flat — topped semblance of an en brosse cut. The three tribal scars on each cheekbone were worn with no more significance than a vaccination mark.
PIP Young Pioneers solidly filled the first two rows of benches. Most could scarcely be called youths any more. The adolescent force that lingers heavily beyond its season in those whose hopes have not been realized was in their postures and restlessness. They gazed and shuffled, brazen and sullen. Some wore PIP forage caps, others wore the torn sweatshirt of the family’s idle son, and one had a transistor radio with him that a court orderly with creaking boots came across to warn him not to use. He continued to hold it to his ear now and then, just not turning the knob, under the orderly’s eyes.
The usual beggars and eccentrics who had nowhere else to feel themselves accepted along with other people, were deep in blank preoccupation; an old man had the worried, strainedly alert look that Bray knew so well — a kind of generalized concern in the face of the helplessness of all black people before the boma and the law. He wondered who the country women outside were; probably relations of men from the mine who were involved in the case. There were other, “respectably” dressed men and women from the African townships who must be relations, too. The familiar atmosphere of resignation and fear of authority that sat upon country courtrooms and made one the innocent and guilty was stirred by the arrival of the accused filing into the dock just as the slow whirling into action of the ceiling fans, set in motion at the same moment, began to slice the stale air. The court was full and faces kept peering in the windows from a gathering crowd outside. There was even the straggling boompah of a band out there — abruptly silenced. The eleven accused were too many for the small dock and like people whose seats at a theatre have been muddled up, they shifted and changed places and at last some were given chairs in the well of the court. A special detail of Selufu’s men had come in with them, and ranged themselves round the visitors’ gallery. The court rose; the black magistrate came in and seated himself before the carafe. He was an ex — schoolmaster and lawyer’s clerk from another province and now and then he used an interpreter to translate for him into English when he was not sure that he had fully appreciated the nuance of some expression in Gala. Bray had met him at Aleke’s; a cheerful, intelligent man who appeared morose on the bench.
An Indian lawyer from the capital had come down to conduct the defence. The men in the dock moved out of their stoic solidarity to get a good look at him; probably they had not seen him before. The indictment was read. He stroked back the shiny hair at his temples as he listened, as if he were still ruffled from the journey. In his quick, soft, Gujerati — accented English he asked at once for the trials to be separated: that of the nine men who were accused of trespassing and wilful damage to property to be heard independently of that of the two accused of assault and an offence under the Riotous Assemblies Act. The request was granted; the cases were remanded until two separate dates a week or two ahead. The attorney objected that there was not sufficient time to prepare the defence; the cases were postponed still further ahead. Bail was renewed for the nine, but refused for the other two. The Young Pioneers creaked their benches and make tlok! noises in their throats like the warning notes of certain birds. More faces bobbed at the windows. One of the pair who had been refused bail was a slim young man whose bare neck had the muscular tension of a male ballet dancer; he kept twisting his head to look imperiously, frowning like Michelangelo’s David, round at the crowd. Whenever he did so there was a surge in the two front rows, the force there shifted its weight in precarious balance between his look and the stolidity of Selufu’s policemen.
The lawyer was objecting to the refusal of bail; the prosecutor was adamant. The magistrate appeared not to be listening to either; he confirmed that bail would not be granted. That was all.
As the prisoners went out, making use of their numbers by making a slow progress of it, they began to sing a PIP chant and the two who were going off to the cells yelled slogans, the old slogans of pre — Independence days. Bray allowed himself to be carried and hindered by the courtroom crowd. Women in their church — going clothes opened their mouths calmly and ululated. The magistrate banged his gavel and was resigned to being ignored; he mouthed what must have been an adjournment and walked out. Another case was to be heard and the exhibits, including a bicycle with one wheel missing, were carried in while the police moved along the rows of benches and were held adrift, clumsily bobbing. It was difficult to tell whether the movement through the door was people pressing in or the court being cleared. It was not an angry but a strangely confident crowd, talking and shifting about in possession. The ululating women stood where they had risen from the benches, and swayed. It was like being caught up in a dance with them; he was taller than anybody and as he was pressed and shifted he could see everything, the PIP claque taking up the prisoners’ chant and moving their heads like hens as they urged themselves through the people, the bewildered face of the old beggar, the young men turning vividly from side to side. He wanted to grin: a bespectacled white totem, waving ridiculously about on the wake of backsides swinging their cotton skirts magnificently as bells. Slowly the whole crowd, and he with it, was drawn through the door as water circles the hole in a bathtub.