— You’ve got a boy you want to keep yourself for.—
Her answers were always so unmistakably hers. — No, Ben, not at the moment.—
Like a chemical change in the blood, he felt his attempt to put himself in his place with fatherliness turn to jealousy. Yesterday, tomorrow, another man; not today. — Why, Hillela? — He could not delude himself that hers was a moral objection, his wife etc. She spoke kindly, it sounded like a privilege: —I don’t want to with you, Ben.—
He bought her an expensive leather sling bag, a gooseneck reading lamp (had noticed there was only a central naked bulb on a cord in her hole of a room) and an anthology of poetry in which one of the names of contributors was his nom de plume. He did not confess authorship until he had asked for and been given her reaction to the poems. She said she liked one of them very much, it reminded her … — Of what? Oh, something she’d once read in a book by that Russian …
So she read Dostoevsky? What a pleasure to talk with her about Dostoevsky, to give her some psychoanalytic insights into the irrationality of his characters.
No, not exactly — she’d looked into the book while someone else was reading it.
— Who?—
— A cousin of mine.—
He wrote poems to her in which she did not recognize herself. In his professional experience of human vanity, her lack of it was amazing. He learnt something he didn’t know; it is difficult to make oneself necessary to one who is free of vanity. He offered something better than hamburgers on the couch where nobody ever lay; they began going to lunch at Chinese restaurants down in Commissioner Street, the Indians’ and coloureds’ end of town, where no colleagues would be likely to be met with. They drank white wine and she teased him. He was treating some patients for alcoholism: —What about your drunks? You, breathing at them across the desk!—
— Doesn’t matter. I can control my impulses within the pleasure principle, they can’t! You’d better worry about Mrs Rawdon — if she gets a whiff of you in the office …—
In the little shops of the restaurant neighbourhood he bought her a slippery satin dressing-gown with a gold dragon embroidered down the back, and incense she liked to burn in the hole of a room where she would take a man yesterday and tomorrow. — You’re going to get more money from next month. Then you can move out of that place.—
— More money?—
— I’m going to raise your magnificent salary. And in six months, I shall do so again. I’m beginning to get the kind of patients who’ll stick with me for years.—
She shook her head as if refusing a chocolate or another glass of wine. — I won’t stay much longer, Ben. They’re so solemn and miserable there in the waitingroom. Those ladies with perfect hairdos, those horribly skinny girls, those sulky kids who look as if they’re handcuffed between mothers and fathers. And there’s nothing wrong with them! Any of them! It’s all made up, imagination? Isn’t it? Those kids go to nice schools, they have toys and bicycles. Those girls can have as much food as they want, they’re not starving, they just don’t eat. Those men who talk to you for hours about sex — they never even take a glance at any woman who happens to be in the waitingroom … just sit there looking at the same old ratty magazines Rawdon arranges every morning.—
For the moment, fascination distracted him from the shock of her casual farewell. — Oh my god, Hillela, you are so healthy it appals me! It’s wonderful. I don’t know where they got you from!—
Indeed, he literally never knew who ‘they’ might be, apart from that one piece of absurd information about her father. She was there, for him, without a past before yesterday and a future beyond tomorrow (she had just announced it), unlike those bowed under the past and in such anticipatory dread that they were, as she rightly observed, unable to look up and eat, learn, fuck in the present at all.
The psychiatrist never again suggested that he might make love to her. They sat at lunch in a Lebanese restaurant also unlikely to be frequented by the medical profession. — I am going to divorce Elaine and we’re going to get married. You and I are perfectly matched. It would be a terrible waste of my life and yours to leave things as they are. It would be unfair to Elaine for me to go on living with her; you are the only woman I can live with. So you don’t have to see my patients ever again. You don’t have to go, away.—
But she went; the darling girl with the hamburger and the book, the only woman, the one who was not a beauty but completely desirable to him, the one who was not an intellectual but whose intelligence was a wonderful mystery to him. She walked out the way she had walked in, the little tramp, clever cock-teaser, taker of free lunches and presents, bitch — she became these successively as he treated himself for the morbid obsession of his passion for her. And when in London, all those years later, his wife recognized her with Indira Gandhi in a newspaper photograph, he could not admit to remembering her because she had once reduced him to the condition of being one of his own patients.
Carole saw her suddenly, at the Easter industrial and agricultural fair. Hillela, in red shorts, black boots and a Stetson, handing out publicity at a stand displaying stereo equipment. Carole was with a boy; Pauline and Joe, the family, did not patronise this fair, which at that time was still segregated, for whites only. Carole squeezed the hand of the cowgirl, but the cowgirl hugged her. The pamphlets took flight and Carole’s beau gathered them up. The beat of the music was so loud that speech appeared as mouthing. Hillela wrote an address on the back of one of the pamphlets. So Carole saw another one of the places in which Hillela lived at that period. (She had visited her at the first commune.) Carole arrived at an old flat with leaded light panes in the front door. She rang the bell for a long time, looking at the dead swordferns and empty milk and beer bottles in the corridor. The bell didn’t work but when she rapped on the glass Hillela came. Carole had in her hands the record player from their shared bedroom; Carole had brought it to give to Hillela because the music at the stereo equipment stand reminded her that Hillela had no player; just as she had seen Alpheus and his wife had nothing beautiful in their garage home, and had given them the Imari cat she treasured, her gift from Hillela.
At the Resettlement Board Headquarters it was decided from where and when black people — African, Indian and of mixed blood — would be moved away from areas declared for whites only. At the Bantu Affairs Commissioner’s offices it was decided for how long and in what capacity black people could live and work in the city. In the city, during the eighteen months Hillela was somewhere about (at least there was the evidence that Olga’s stipend was drawn regularly, and under the circumstances, in all good conscience, there was nothing else her mother’s family could do for her) there were thirty-one other targets. Most were hit by incendiary bombs. It was long before the Underground organizations were to have limpet mines, SAM missiles and AK 47s; these bombs were homemade, with petrol bought in cans from any service station. Letter boxes, electrical installations, beerhalls owned by the white administration boards in the black townships and railway carriages owned by the State monopoly — explosions attacked what represented the white man’s power where blacks could get at it: in the places where blacks themselves lived. A man named Bruno Mtolo, a traitor to the liberation movement who turned State witness at a treason trial, said that ‘recruitment presented no difficulty’ if volunteers were promised they would be allowed to undertake sabotage immediately. And Joe was right; it was not possible to adhere completely to the intention to avoid bloodshed. Timing devices or the indiscipline of recruits caused things to go wrong. In the beerhalls and railway carriages black people were killed or hurt.