Gala township calmed down, too; Mr. Choonara consented to have the Gandhi School opened to the use of the centre again. At the iron mine there continued to be trouble of one kind and another. The phosphate mines in the Eastern Province threatened a wildcat strike. One broke out among the maintenance depot workers and drivers of the road transport company, which carried mail and newspapers to Gala. For a week Gala was without papers, and letters were long delayed. In spite (or perhaps precipitated by the silence?) of irregular mails, Rebecca got a letter from her husband. He had apparently changed his mind about boarding school for the children; he had entered them for a school in South Africa.
“That where he is?”
“He wrote from Windhoek, but the school’s in Johannesburg.”
“And the little one?” Bray said. With the father’s face; surely too young for school — only five years old.
“He’ll stay with Gordon’s sister. For a while. That’s more or less the idea. She’s got twin girls his age. — So’s Gordon can see something of him.”
He said to her, “Didn’t he ask you to come, too?”
She had a shy, cocky way of concealing a danger once it was over. “Yes, he wanted us all to leave — but I’ve explained, I can’t break a government contract, and there’s the money — and the money from the house, too, I can’t just leave that here, all in a minute….”
“What house?”
“The house in Kenya — my father built a house for us when we got married. It was sold last year and we managed to get the money out and bring it here. But you can’t get money transferred from here to South Africa, now.”
“Oh my God.” He saw her stranded in Johannesburg: Gordon Edwards ensuring the ice for his whisky far away in the Mozambique bush; himself unreachable. It was one of those prescient visions of destitution and abandonment that come in childhood at the sight of a beggar asleep in the street.
“What does he say?”
“About me?” Her voice slowed. “But I told him. I couldn’t come. I ought to finish my contract. At least I can’t leave unless Aleke can get somebody else.”
Her full, square jaw set but her eyes were exposed, held by him, like hands quietly lifted at gunpoint.
They went on to talk about the practical details of the children’s departure.
That night at the end of love — making she began to cry. He had never seen her cry before. The tears, released, like his semen, trickled into her hair and the hollow of his neck. He put up his hand to make sure and his fingers came away wet as if from a wound he had not felt. She didn’t bury her head or hide her face; she was lying on her back within his arm. He thought of the little boy, and said, “I know. I know.” He smeared the tears against himself. Because she was not a woman who wept, she became for a few moments just like those others he’d known, who did, and there was nothing to offer her but the usual comfort — he kissed her eyes and ran his tongue over the eyelids. She said, “He’s so independent, but all the same … little, isn’t he?”
He brought her an aspirin and a glass of water and she slept, snoring a bit because of the weeping. A process of dismemberment began to take place in him. She would go with her children. He would tell her. He held her and the current of her body carried him, as if nothing had changed, finally to sleep.
In the morning they overslept and it was impossible to begin to talk. She could not come to him in the evening; Nongwaye was away in the bush and Edna was on night duty, so she had to sleep at home with the children. He went over for supper and again there was no chance — it was Friday and the children were allowed the treat of staying up late. He and the girl played musical chairs with them. She was full of private jokes and was happy and when the children had gone to bed it was not the time to make her sad again. She was happy because Edna’s mother was coming to look after the family next day, and he had promised that they would go alone to the lake. Every day made what he had to say more difficult. Driving to the lake brought back each time a renewal of the first time they had been there alone together. They went to the island — these days they took the spear — fishing equipment with them — and she got her first fish. It was spring; the heat that built up over the two months before the rains was beginning, and he had to drag up the pirogue and balance it against the rocks to make shade — the baobab was not yet in leaf. Even then, the stasis of one o’clock was formidable. Drawn up into their covert of shadow they talked in the mood of animated confidence that, for them, went with being at the lake. At one point she said, “… and when I was miserable — you know. It really was that I hardly mind at all. It’s awful, isn’t it. I look forward to you and I … not having them around, just … The trouble is I want to burst with joy at the idea of us being left alone—” and for a moment he did not quite realize what she was saying — he had forgotten, in the familiarity and pleasure of the day, what it was that had to be said by him.
And so it was not said; there was no need for it.
The children left Gala by car with the United Nations husband — and-wife medical team who were on loan to advise on the country’s health services. They were old friends of Rebecca from her time in one African country or another, and were returning to the capital after a trip to the lake communities. In the capital, Vivien saw the children off in the care of a friend of hers who was travelling on the same jet to Johannesburg.
In the last days before her children went Rebecca was sometimes sad, and wept again — but perhaps this time really because of the parting from them. They were too excited by the importance they assumed and the prospect of flying to their father to have much emotion left — and now and then, when they were babbling all at once about Johannesburg and what “we” were going to do there, there would be a moment of vacancy in the face of one or the other, and the remark— “Silly, Mummy won’t be there yet.” They seemed to believe — or had been told by her? — that she would be following soon. Perhaps it was true, and she had not told him.
Edna Tlume was found sobbing in the Volkswagen after the children left; she had gone there to be alone, and had to be brought out and comforted. Her starched uniform was crushed as if she’d been violated and the ink from the two ballpoints she kept with the scissors in her neat nurse’s pocket had leaked a stain. She said to Bray while Rebecca went to fetch a lemon for tea, “Don’t tell her — I would never leave my children, never. Don’t tell her.”
It was not necessary to creep out of his house back to her rooms at the Tlumes’ before it was light, now. Gordon telephoned from Johannesburg when the children arrived; it was a radio telephone call, the reception very poor, but sufficient for her to understand that all was well.
They sat under the fig, afterwards, she with her sandals kicked off and her feet up because they were swollen from the heat. “He wanted to be remembered to everyone — the Tlumes, and you.”
He said to her, “He asked me to see that you and the children got out in good time, if ever I thought it necessary.”
She was tranquil. “Oh? Well now there’ll be no need for that.” She put out her palm for his, and their hands hung, loosely clasped, between the two chairs.
Part Four
Chapter 15
The Luxurama Cinema was owned by Ebrahim and Said Joshi, second generation of a family of Indian traders who came to the capital before the railhead. A Joshi brother was usually in the foyer at all performances, making sure the unemployed African youths did not push their way in without paying, but neither was to be seen the day of the opening of the PIP Congress and the expanse of red and green tessellated floor quickly being blocked out by feet in sandals and polished shoes, figures in trailing togas, in Mweta tunics, in dark suits and even in suits with a metallic sheen, and the intense gathering of voices in place of the apathy of cinema queues, gave the place the air of forced occupation. Fish lit up in ornamental tanks (the Joshis claimed theirs “the most lavish cinema in Central Africa”) sidled along the glass and gasped mutely at their beaded streams of oxygen, like the playthings of a vanquished people, left behind in panic. The popcorn machine was not working; the soda fountain had been taken over by a committee of Party mothers with hired urns for tea.