Mandela’s voice said that should the government fail to summon a national convention before declaring a republic, all sections of the population would be called on to stage a stay-at-home, a general strike, for three days. This would be a protest against the establishment of that republic based completely on white domination over a non-white majority, and also a last attempt to persuade the government to heed blacks’ legitimate claims. The last day of the strike would coincide with the day on which the government intended to proclaim the republic. Pauline read out something again: Nelson Mandela’s statement to the press that these demonstrations would not be anti-white, and would be peaceful.
Round about the Easter holidays — must have been; Sasha was home — a heavy brown paper parcel arrived at the house. Joe saw it first. — What’s this?—
— Leave it to me. — Pauline slit the wrapping with a bread-knife, taking care not to penetrate the contents. Inside were piles of leaflets with the terminology that brought comfort, a confirmation of what that house was, as the art dealers’ catalogues, giving evidence of the survival of rare and beautiful objects, did in Olga’s house. All freedom-loving South Africans are called upon to make the next six weeks a time of active protest, demonstration and organization against a Verwoerd republic. Carole went round the neighbourhood stuffing the leaflets into people’s mailboxes and racing embarrassedly away while their dogs barked to get at her; Pauline kept a pile in her car from which she stuck sheets under the windscreen-wipers of other cars all over town, wherever she happened to park. Joe could not make any unprofessional outward show of partisanship but even Sasha put up a leaflet on the door of his room. It was discussed at table that blacks were stock-piling mealie-meal, sugar, and cheap tinned fish, in some rumour or premonition of being starved into submission while the police would hold the townships under siege.
Sasha was in a phase of anxious concern for physical fitness; he and Hillela played squash at a health club, that month before the stay-at-home. So it was known where Hillela was passing her time. Sasha and Hillela also went very often to the cinema together on those Highveld autumn afternoons when there is no wind, no cloud to move across the sun, summer growth has ceased but no leaf falls: the day stands still. A crime to be inside a dark stale cinema on such an afternoon, Pauline would have said. There were few other people; expanses of empty seats separated dim figures. Sasha’s forearm stayed aligned, rigid and tight, against Hillela’s along the single armrest between them. They saw any film, many films; neither ever told Carole, Pauline or Joe about these films.
Sasha did not accompany his cousin again to her warehouse haunt; no-one was surprised that that sort of thing did not have much appeal for him. He played chess with his father, instead. One evening Joe got up in the middle of the game the moment Pauline came home. In Joe’s pale face expression was buried in complicated folds; even urgency did not show.
— You’d better get rid of those leaflets.—
— I don’t think there are more than a dozen or so left … why? What’s happened?—
— Get rid of them now, tonight. It’s what might happen. There are raids all over the place. Four whites have been detained in Pretoria. Liberal Party people. They’re watching everybody.—
— Are we going to burn them?—
Pauline didn’t answer Carole; her big head was lowered, not seeing her invisible audience, now.
— Put them down the lavatory, do whatever you like. Only get rid of them. And Pauline, we’d better go through other papers arid stuff we may have. If they come, there isn’t anything they won’t manage to find incriminating, at the moment. And don’t use our dustbin. They grub everywhere.—
Joe took two cartons of papers away in his car before he and Pauline went to bed. But nobody noticed that Sasha had not taken the leaflet off his door. All freedom-loving South Africans are called upon to make the next six weeks a time of active protest. Only Hillela. — What about that? — She was passing him in the passage.
— What about it?—
It was not for her to say. She was accustomed to different practices in the different houses where she was taken in as one of the family.
He did not like to linger with Hillela just outside his bedroom door. He went inside and closed it.
On the Highveld in May the sun is still bright — always bright, up there, while the air enters the nose with a whiff of winter’s freezing ether; something to be remembered in tropical parts of Africa, where much of the time it gives great heat but no light, buried in soggy cloud. May was the month when Olga changed her wardrobe. When Hillela used to come back from Rhodesia to spend the holidays with her, she would help Olga carry silky dresses and delicate-coloured sandals to the store-cupboards, and bring back from them garments of suède and angora against which she would pass her cheek. Olga still regarded it as her pleasure and her duty to fit out the girl at the same time as she shopped, each change of season, for new fashions for herself. An arrangement had been made for Hillela to come shopping with her, but she telephoned to postpone their date. — People say there’s some trouble in town. We’ll put it off until things settle down again.—
It was the appointed day for the beginning of the stay-at-home. As young freedom-loving South Africans Carole and Hillela had been kept home from school.
— Olga planned to take you shopping this afternoon? Today?—
Pauline smiled, shook her head, shook her head, over her sister. — Hundreds of people are being arrested, but of course they’re black, and so far as they’re concerned, she only knows her treasure Jethro and her treasure the cook and her treasure the gardener. Meetings are prohibited. You can be detained without trial. The place is swarming with police. And Olga’s shopping trip is postponed.—
Hillela went to the city, anyway — with Carole and Pauline, to see how effective or not the strike was. Joe had told Alpheus not to come to the office but the black servants went about their work and moved as usual along their own backyard network, placing ten-cent bets with the Fah-Fee runner and borrowing a cup of sugar or an onion in the exchange of plenty from white kitchens. The garbage had not been collected but rot doesn’t begin to smell in one day. All the white suburbs were quiet.
So was the city; but it was a different kind of quiet. There was only the static cackling gibberish from radio communication in passing police cars. Without its volume of blacks the city had gone mute. Without its blacks it was a place of buildings. — Like Sunday. — Carole was right; on Sundays the blacks were in their ghettos, that was where they were supposed to be, then, but this was a Monday, and they had not come back. The rhythm of life of this city, that had its black morning spate and black afternoon ebb, was withheld. The half-empty streets waited for a drama that was still to be written. For the present, there was an aspect strange as natural disaster, about which there is never anyone to question: the few blacks in straggling queues at the bus-stations, in the streets, looked the woman and two girls in the eye without a flicker of any acknowledgement. Why they had come to work, whether these white people approved them as the good kind of black or thought them traitors to their cause — that was not whites’ business.