— What about ’60, that leaflet the communists put out? The police were picking them up from gutters everywhere … The Party called upon communists, then, to work with the Congress Alliance. They’d found a way to get round the national versus socialist revolution wrangle. For whites, South Africa is an advanced capitalist state in the last stage of imperialism; but for blacks, it is still a colony. So a traditional national movement like the ANC has a ‘progressive function’ that a workers’ party can support. Well, now they’ve got where they wanted to be; the government’s done it for them. Protest politics has come to a dead end. The time’s come when blacks must think about revolutionary tactics. Whites are invited to join Umkhonto, and who’s going to join? — the CP whites, those in the Congress of Democrats, and those Underground. ANC’s become a front organization, a national monument, and the white communists are entrenched in its avatar, Umkhonto. So they’ll make sure the national black revolution is a red one.—
— Oh my god, here’s another who sees a red under every bed.—
— We all made a mistake, not joining the Congress of Democrats.—
— But why?—
— We should have got in there and kept it what it was supposed to be, kept the communists out of control.—
— And what would you have made of it? Another dead end?—
— Oh Joe, I know you think we’re all dodos—
— No, no, I know I am. My wings are atrophied; I don’t expect anything, of myself—
Their laughter prodded him; they were drinking wine as part of their ceremonial palaver.
— But we do! I do! — Pauline’s fierce cry. — I wish I’d joined COD when I nearly did, after Maritzburg. Then I’d be in it up to the neck now.—
— You’d be prepared to see things blown up?—
— Things, yes. Buildings. Their white House blown up, there in van Riebeeck’s garden; that would shift their backsides if nothing else will.—
— And people?—
— Controlled violence against symbolic targets doesn’t take life.—
— Oh no? Some old nightwatchman who gets in the way? Passersby? There’s no such thing as completely controlled violence.—
— Oh I don’t know … Of course you’re right. I just don’t know.—
— It’s necessary to demystify, always demystify. Controlled violence is a sanitized term for killing. Killing anyone who gets in the way of your symbolic target. Including your own people, if a bomb blows up in their own hands. Yourself. Killing is killing. Violence is pain and death.—
— The police have been handing those out to blacks, year after year.—
— Yes. Let the blood be on the government’s hands.—
Killing is killing. Violence is pain and death. Torn streamers from the fabric of adult life, drifting across the imaginary scenes and dialogues in the busy consciousness of a seventeen-year-old girl match nothing there. To kill or not to kilclass="underline" her urgent choices are not these, could not even conceive of these. Indecision is between which group of friends she should choose to ‘go with’ more steadily than the other; whether to enjoy being swayed by some dominating personality in the one, or to enjoy being herself the boldest, the brightest, the most magnetic, in the other. She would be smouldering over some piece of injustice meted out to her at school and seeing herself — where? — anywhere she has never been, some apartment in a city never seen, Los Angeles or Paris, as comfortable as Olga’s house but of course not at all like Olga’s, or Pauline’s or anybody’s, with good-time friends (but not like the friends she makes do with now) or just one person, a man older than herself who adores her and makes love to her and takes her all over the world. Or perhaps with a boy her age whom she has not yet met, but who would have a certain family likeness without being in any way connected with, not even speaking the same language as any family she knew — a boy with whom she would play the guitar and grow vegetables, make love and have babies the way ordinary people (even Alpheus and his girl) did.
Violence is pain and death. That was an after-world that might not exist at all, like heaven or hell, for her — a girl who did not have the Jewish faith under which one school had listed her, nor the Christian faith in the promises and threats of morning prayers at the next school; at most, something like old age, in which no seventeen-year-old can believe for herself. They — the voices elsewhere in the house — had thoughts that did hot reach her; and she had some — and some experiences relived and pondered not more than the thickness of a room’s wall away from, but unknown to them: inconceivable. The girl must have known that: they never made the emotional show Olga did, but she knew she was their own child to them, just as their son was.
It is unlikely that Hillela will have remembered at any time the exaggerated emotions and highly-coloured scroll of unrolled life that absorbed her totally when she was seventeen. It is the torn streamers that were to come back to her: killing is killing, violence is pain and death.
Sasha worked in a bottle store that winter’s school holidays and his cousin and her current band of friends came in one lunchtime to buy beer and a yellow concoction they had a craze for, called — the sort of useless detail that is all that remains of a period — Neptune’s Nectar, made of cane spirit and synthetic passion-fruit flavouring. Sasha, stacking wine bottles, lifted his head from behind boxes only to meet Hillela’s eyes (she gave him an imitation of himself for Carole’s sisterly amusement, later) and then disappeared as if he had not seen the band. For her it was the old game of shop, from the occasions when all the cousins played together. The band surrounded him. It was his turn as shopkeeper; but Sasha refused to serve them. — You’re under age.—
Sasha changed so much each time he was away at school; once it was his voice, now it was his jaw which, anticipating the man’s face it would one day support, had set out the structure of a squared chin dented where the two halves of his face had joined in Pauline’s womb. It always took a few days for Hillela to forget what he had looked like the last time he was home; to find him again.
— Oh don’t be wet. — She balanced between irritation and wariness, and he knew it, knew Hillela. By claiming family influence over him, she would gain prestige if he gave in, but if he refused, she would on the contrary be associated with his ‘wetness’.
— Go and ask one of the others. — He indicated, eyes on his uninterrupted activity, two men attending to customers along the aisles of bottles glaucous as cabochon rubies and emeralds.
— The hell with it, let’s push off.—
— There’s another place right on the corner.—
Hillela stood willing him to turn round and do her bidding. Two girls and a boy began pulling bottles at random out of cases and clinking them onto shelves all around Sasha, pushing and laughing. — Let’s give him a hand, man. — Slow’s a funeral.—
Hillela looked at them as if she had just walked into the shop and had had her attention to her own errand momentarily distracted by an incident taking place there. The cashier’s head was turned; the pudgy ears of the man behind the counter responded with shopkeepers’ alertness, specific to petty theft as a hunting dog’s to gunshot. They were Hillela’s friends; Sasha could have turned, now, and cried out—Hillela …! To save his pocket-money job, schoolboy well-fed by Pauline and Bettie, being educated for higher occupations at a school open to all races? (There were things Sasha was cursed, from the beginning, to know beyond his years.) Or to give her ‘friends’ the satisfaction of confirming that he didn’t have his share of their mindless boldness, happily, swaggeringly defying harmless conventions of behaviour while remaining perfectly safe within the terrible conventions of this country. Hillela! He didn’t cry. She didn’t hear.