To be with such people is like opening a cupboard and burying a nose in the folds of a forgotten garment.
Despite — or more likely because of? — the sometimes unseemly prominence of the woman the President brought with him when he came back to power, theirs appears to be what is called a happy marriage. Which, in the curiously mysterious while too public sense of the relationship between symbolic figures, surely means a good combination of accommodation. She is said, by the small faction in the South of the country who still support their leader exiled to Zaïre, to have unnatural powers over the President and — a foreigner — too much say in the ruling of a country which is not her country and a people who are not her people. More sophisticated circles remark that she sees herself as a Madame de Pompadour if not an Evita Perón; but no-one who really knows anything about the President believes he would allow anyone, or needs anyone, to be more than his peer; his choice wisely has been a woman who can keep up with him in the reality of the position his power, like that of every country in Africa, straddles — between Africa and the world, neither of which can do without the other.
After a few years, the President was known to have a passing fancy. Another foreigner, far more foreign. The Scots wife of the Swedish Ambassador. Nomo, when she was out on a visit, dubbed her The Albino or The Bloodhound — she was unrelievedly blonde, with blue eyes that showed a wet pink rim at the lower lids and a skin so fair it shone in the dark gardens of State House in the evening, when receptions spilled outdoors. Nomo could not understand why her mother laughed so much at the names. In due course, the Swedish Ambassador’s tour of duty was up, and a successor took his place, a bachelor.
The President has never deserted his wife’s bed, even during the pursuit of passing fancies; and she has never ceased to please and, still, surprise him — for him, there is no one like her. She must have had several affairs of her own — some people would even give names — but the skill of discretion, like any other, comes with the experience of adaptation to circumstance. She travels alone to visit her daughter in Rome, London and Paris, she is invited as an honoured guest to gatherings of socialist women’s organizations in Eastern Europe and feminist congresses in Africa and the West; the Colonel knows better than to keep her under surveillance. And if, after all, the President has some idea that a woman he continues to find so attractive may attract and not resist another man, from time to time — well, Chiemeka is not like other women, she is a match for him in this way as in all others.
Burtwell Nyaka, Makekene Conco, Thabo Poswao and Sasha served their full sentences. The end to it all did not come before then.
During the years Sasha was in prison Joe died one summer night in London while preparing a case for Manchester United. Pauline was in their small garden, restlessly pacing it out; she was due to leave for South Africa next day for a contact visit with Sasha. She came inside under the clematis tapping on the open glass doors and saw the figure dropped sideways in the desk chair. She called him — Joe—exactly as she had called at Sasha’s bedroom door, her voice as a young woman was back in her throat.
Olga died. Arthur remarried. He became richer than ever, during those years, as a subcontractor to Armscor, the South African government’s armament corporation. His new companies made parts for the four-barrelled 7.62-mm cannon, one of the variants of the GA 1 Servo-Controlled aircraft weapons system, and the CB cluster bomb system which could fire 40 six-kilogram bombs like ping-pong balls from its apertures. He was invited to Chile to exhibit home-grown skills South Africa had developed in response to arms embargoes. He did not care for these tropical countries full of half-Redskin, half-Latin coloureds, but to be an honoured industrialist in Chile or Paraguay, almost an official emissary for South Africa, was not like being there as any ordinary tourist.
Neither the four barrels of the cannon nor the deadly juggler was any protection. When the time came, he realized it and went with his wife not to the villa his cultured wife Olga had wanted in Italy (the new woman was a simple person who agreed that as in America there were no servants it was best to put up for auction at Sotheby’s all those fancy things that needed dusting daily), nor, God forbid, to one of those dirty, run-down republics where he had displayed his achievements, but to California, where one of his sons, the eminent urologist, had moved.
Sasha came out of prison, was banned from resuming his tradeunion activities, and worked clandestinely with the liberation front, going Underground every time there were new waves of arrests and reappearing whenever one might be able to count on a respite; he, too, became experienced in adaptation to his circumstances, although nothing in the advantages of his youth had prepared him for them. The death of his father was part of the deaths all around him. A country where the dead breed more dead — that was written in the letter that had become only a document, addressed to nobody, a testament, an exhibit among pamphlets. And death was still breeding. The whites wouldn’t see that their structures were bursting at the joints with the pressure of massed bodies, alive and dead: a country courtroom (this one in a town smaller than the one where Sasha had stood trial) was built to hold only thirty people, and three thousand came to the trial of a few rebellious schoolchildren. The fences fell, the municipal gardens were trampled, the walls shook with the press of the living, the edifice of white justice, big enough only for a minority, could not hold. The police shot into the three thousand as they had shot before, year after year, as they were shooting day after day, hopelessly killing, unable to keep back the living who kept coming on and on, endlessly replacing the dead. The petrol bombs that burned the wives and children of traitors, the stones that hit tourist buses, the limpet mines that blew up police stations and the AK 47s that bred with the dead — the homemade and the smuggled instruments of death could not be kept out, even by a Servo-Controlled weapons system and the cluster bomb. Against her own wishes, Pauline stayed in London after Joe’s death. She understood that her presence in the last days of the old South Africa would place a strain on Sasha that would be at the cost of the work he had to do; for which he had gone to prison, and for which he had now emerged. One day he telephoned Pauline from Amsterdam. Sasha had no passport, she knew he must have come out the way she had helped a black family escape when he was a schoolboy — not by the same route, for a long time there had been no safe houses in Botswana that the South African army hadn’t destroyed — but with the help of someone like herself. She had seen on television the bombed walls of police headquarters in two cities. A limpet mine had been placed in the women’s lavatory, in one, and in the men’s lavatory in the other. Pauline thought how obvious it was that the first must have been placed by a woman, and the other by a man; an error on the part of the saboteurs to give away this clue. Then she read that a young woman had, indeed, been arrested, a white woman. When her son called from Amsterdam she believed she knew the identity of the man.
This year, the President is Chairman of the OAU. It is an honour at which some say he (and his ambitious wife) set his braided cap and his black, leather-bound beret from the beginning of his second regime. The fact is that he was an almost unanimous choice of a body known for its dissension: thrice-over victor in the anti-colonialist struggle, first against the colonial occupation, then in his coup against the government that colluded with the former colonial power, and finally against Europe’s and America’s covert backing of his usurpers; a professed socialist with a mixed economy in his own country, a man of high intelligence whose emotional style makes him popular in Africa and the Eastern bloc, and whose humour and sophistication do the same for him with the West.