The girl brought no problem to Joe, so she must have been all right. Whatever that meant in the way she must be living.
It is not easily understood why Pauline did not think about what the problem might be, if there were to be one. Perhaps she assumed that a girl who could do what Hillela had done would know how to look after herself. And that practical conclusion, in itself, referred to all that was unthinkable, must be forgotten.
It had to be forgotten for Sasha’s sake, so that he could come back, always come back, without sensing the restraint of tolerance in the feel of home, come back to looking at the stars, chess games with his father and fierce political arguments with his mother. Sasha wrote letters but he never asked about Hillela, even in those addressed to Carole. Forget it. He had always, since it began, forgotten ‘it’ when he was at school; put it away, folded very small, and in code, in the centre of himself where no-one could get at it. Whether it was shameful or precious he had not needed to know until Pauline and Joe looked at it. Now he knew it had to be forgotten. It was all right at school; he feared the feel of home, the having to come back to its smell of fruit and Hillela’s hair that was home; to sensing the odour of that hair that wasn’t there anymore.
At school there was nothing to fear, until one weekend that term a girl in his class hanged herself in the gym. It was a Sunday, those who wanted to go to church had been in the town, others, including himself, had gone to help build a village school for the children of black peasants. She was a white Catholic girl and had stayed behind from church that day to hang herself; one of the juniors went into the gym to fetch cricket stumps and saw her dangling from the wall bars. She was not a particularly popular or pretty girl — people laughed behind her back at the dark hair that made her upper lip look dirty — but she had her little group, played tennis in the second team, was not left out at the Saturday night disco in the school hall. Sasha was among those brought running into the gym by the screams of the small boy, and her body hanging there was something without explanation. Another girl gave it to him: their classmate was pregnant. Her terror of her parents had been greater than her fear of death.
Sasha wrote in his weekly letter home about the brick-laying he was doing, building the village school.
Sasha had no fear of his parents. They were enlightened people. They had only looked. His mother had tried to hurt simply because she was hurt. He had not been afraid until now; he had only now remembered, discovered, there was something to be afraid of. This was the time when he would telephone home apparently for no reason; was there anything he wanted sent, anything he needed? They were always cheerful, pleased to hear from him. He tried, whenever he had a chance, to reach Carole when they were out, but never succeeded. The immense shock of curiosity with which he had seen the body of the girl turned into an obsession that blocked his co-ordination in the science laboratory and at games. He was able to bury himself in sleep the moment he went to bed at night in his senior boy’s private cubicle, but he woke very early in the morning, as if something had taken him by the shoulder and shaken him. Or slapped him this way and that across the face. He did not open his eyes but was wide awake behind this sham of sleep, and what he saw was not a dream but like a film he had never seen yet remembered, or the images accompanying the reading of a book. He saw the carcasses he had passed so many times unremarked, hanging from hooks in the country butcher shop near the school, where dagga could be bought from old women in the yard behind. The pigs and sheep dangled; the girl dangled, the laces of one of her shoes untied. Her face was the face of Hillela with head drooped to one side, like the plaster statues of Christ on the cross. How many weeks passed? How soon did girls know for sure what was going on in their bodies? With the knowledgeable girl who was his friend he brought up the subject of their dead classmate, for whom prayers had been said at school assembly. — She could have had an abortion. I’m sure we’d have found someone to do it. Poor stupid, thing. It’s not the end of the world …—
How many weeks to half-term? At last he could wander into Carole’s room. She was putting safety-pins round the torn hem of a skirt; he watched for a while. — Any news.—
She kept her head down.
— You haven’t seen her?—
The head nodded, so that no-one other than he would witness, by the spoken word, an admission.
— What’s she doing.—
— She wanted to leave the job she had, I don’t know what she’s found now.—
— You do know.—
Carole’s hair hung over her face, a little long-haired dog whose muzzle can’t be seen.
— Is she okay?—
A splotch fell on Carole’s hands, and another. — She’s okay, but I’m not going to talk about her with you.—
There came from him, riled by her tears of loss: —It’s not the end of the world.—
Yet what sort of assurance was Carole’s ‘okay’. Who would confide trouble to little Carole? He spent a great deal of that weekend searching: the old haunts he remembered, the warehouse where Hillela had played her guitar, and the kind of places he thought she might frequent now, Hillbrow discos, pizza joints, jazz clubs. He ended up, the Saturday night of his half-term break, alone in one of the cinemas where they had sat on autumn afternoons.
Sasha never saw her, not then or any other weekend or in the school holidays. It was not that she was not to be found; she was there, in the city, all right, but not for him, or surely he would have seen her somewhere, as he constantly encountered others he knew. How many months passed? Slowly, he became used to the fear. He lived with it all the time. And then too much time had gone by; if what he feared really had been, something terrible already would have come to pass, by now. And so this meant she was safe. She would not hang from a butcher’s hook with one shoelace untied. It’s not the end of the world. Forget it.
This is not a period well-documented in anyone’s memory, even, it seems, Hillela’s own. For others, one passes into a half-presence (alive somewhere in the city, or the world) because of lack of objective evidence and information; for oneself, the lack of documentation is deliberate. And if, later, no-one is sure you are really the same person, what — that is certain to be relevant — is there to document? Everyone is familiar with memories others claim to have about oneself that have nothing to do with oneself.
In the lives of the greatest, there are such lacunae — Christ and Shakespeare disappear from and then reappear in the chronicles that documentation and human memory provide. It is not difficult for a girl of seventeen (out of sight of the witness of family and friends) to be absent from the focuses of a woman’s own mnemonic attention in later life: to be abandoned, to disappear.
Time Off for a Love-Letter
Where was the seventeen-year-old on the Day of the Covenant, 16th December 1961, when bombs exploded in a post office, the Resettlement Board Headquarters, and the Bantu Affairs Commissioner’s offices?
The public holiday of that date had only recently been renamed. On the 16th December 1838, the Boers defeated the impis of the Zulu king, Dingane (tradition misspelt his name), in revenge for his attempt to save his land and independence. Some months before, Dingane, pressed into trading for a token of cattle a vast tract of his kingdom, had first agreed and then killed the Boer, Piet Retief, and his parleying party, routed the Boer settlements already established in the kingdom, and chased the other whites, the British, from what they called Port Natal. At the cost of three white men wounded, the Boers slaughtered three thousand Zulus. Dingaan’s Day curiously was then named for the vanquished rather than the victors. It was perhaps this aspect of the commemoration that moved the government to shift the dedication of the holiday to a biblical, less equivocal focus. The Covenant had been made, before the battle, with God — another piece of cattle-trading; in return for victory over the blacks, the whites would vow to hold an annual service of thanksgiving for the preservation of white civilization as carried into Africa by the guns of the Boers.