— No. Not really. No. — She kept her eyes closed, screwed up; the sun was making her see fire. — How can anyone know what hasn’t happened to them? People like you, who’ve been in prison … and once or twice others, I’d heard talking, back there. You can describe what it was like, but I … I never, I don’t really believe it’s all it’s like. The same with leaving the country. I was always hearing about it. I even once saw someone on his last night. But it’s only now that I’ve done it … it’s different from what you’re told, what you imagine. You are all different, all of you … from the speeches. Where I lived — at home, when I was still in what was my home — everything was read out from newspapers, everything was discussed, I went to a court once and there was another kind of talk, another way of words dealing with things that had happened … somewhere else, to somebody else … I couldn’t know. I can know what happens to me.—
— You’ll burn your eyelids. Turn over. — But what you read, what you learn, what people tell you, what you observe — good god, that’s what happens to you, as well! Not everything can be understood only through yourself — what do you mean? — and anyway, isn’t your comprehension, your mind, yourself? What are you saying? You don’t trust anything but your own body? It’s a nice one, my god, certainly — but I don’t believe you know what you’re saying.—
— Thinking about what happens to myself — yes, of course, that I can know.—
— Someone needs to take you in hand, my girl. You are not a fully conscious being. I wish I had the time. And it would be quite pleasant … I can imagine the sort of home you come from. Girls the ornaments who spoil their decorative qualities and betray their class as soon as they begin to think. How in god’s name did you get here? I mean I know — but how’d you ever take up with that fellow? You know he was a liar and a double-dealer? He was for us and at the same time he was really working for PAC*? And maybe if we’d not run him out of here he would be working for the government back there, as well.—
— He was collecting material for a book. That’s why he went all over the show, he had to talk to all kinds of people.—
— And you believed that? What did you believe? That he was really one of us?—
A pair of talking heads, buoys bobbing on the water, tethered to lazy fin-movements of hidden arms and legs. — Yes.—
Impatiently, he gave her a chance to explain herself. She would not or could not. What a thicket of roses surrounded the power-drugged intelligence of the white sleepers; even dragged out through the thorns by some would-be prince turned betrayer, she could not recognize the lesson of wounds.
— Why?—
— I’d have to tell you too many things … Well, the family where I used to live — I just naturally thought, because of them, if white people were mixed up in that sort of thing at all, it was on your side. When I met his black friends, I didn’t take much notice … whether there was any difference. Between them, I mean. Whether they were yours or some, others’. It was part of his work to know them all.—
— Yes, his work!—
— And he was in danger—
— Danger! — He scoffed.
— The police came and raided, you know that, they turned out all our things, took all the stuff for his book … He was writing for the papers under different names—
— And pushed different politics—
— Really, I think you’ve got it wrong. He told me, he had to have cover, that’s why. Even his name. He even had to show up at parties given by people where I worked — and nobody talked about politics. Just there for a good time. Nobody gave a damn.—
— Not you, either. — It was said in the tone of one wanting her to be otherwise.
A man was swimming out towards them, his flailing arms black and defined in the heat-hazy radiance as the wings of a cormorant that skimmed the water.
Their voices changed key with the approach of a third presence. — So you see … well, if you’re right, what I think is true: I believed him because I believed what he was telling me; and none of it was happening to me.—
The swimmer was almost upon them; he didn’t wave; he might not be making for them at all, just setting for himself the limit of his own horizon.
— Until the police came and gave you a big fright, ay?—
Wet hair slapped her throat as she shook her head. — Until I came here.—
By saying ‘I’ and not ‘we’ he saw she had begun to promise better human material. The girl was no longer jetsam on Tamarisk Beach. His desire for human dignity was gratified, his desire for the beach girl twinged with apprehension of loss. There was just time, before the black man, his sideways regard turned regularly upon them and away as his face was alternately hidden in water and lifted for breath in the movements of strong over-arm strokes, was upon them: —Don’t suppose I’ll be seeing you again.—
Low enough, but she heard. — Why?—
— Your elderly benefactor might object.—
— I’ve told you.—
— You’ll come?—
As she slowly smiled the gestures and nod became a polite greeting for the head of the black man, now among them. To eyes accustomed to the radiance above water his blackness was a blow, pure hardness against dissolving light, his head a meteorite fallen between them into the sea, or a water-smoothed head of antiquity brought up from the depths, intact; basalt blackness the concentration of time, not pigment. Even the hair — black man’s kind of hair — had resisted water and remained classically in place as a seabird’s feathers or the lie of a fish’s scales.
The man’s urgency did not acknowledge the girl. — Nwabueze’s been killed. A bomb in the car.—
Neither man noticed her go, the siren turning yellow tail and diving away from the navigators of the world’s courses for whom, at that moment, in that ocean, she was no more than a distraction totally out of place.
A series of mini-biographies of outstanding women cites the news of the assassination of an important West African leader as the turning-point in her political development. Why should it ever have been contradicted?
But in that hour she was gliding and turning through water as perfectly tempered to the body as amniotic fluid, she heard no commotion but the sound of water getting into her ears and air breaking free in them through bubbles; the dead leader was a name. The real significance of the moment when the news was announced within a coral reef of the Indian Ocean was there, in another man, corporeal.
They love you. They tell you they love you. Len when making the necessary despatch from Rhodesia because of that boy being coloured, Olga when handing over to Pauline, Joe — dear Joe — when he gave the money with which to escape them. When he called his son a bastard because nothing was said in that bed, not about love of fellow man, not about family love, not about sisterly, brotherly love, but it was done. Loved, let love. Used what you have to love with, you know? It is there, you feel it, it happens all over and inside you and there is no difference between you and the one you’re doing it with, you don’t have to try to reach him, help him, teach him — you can’t lie, or spy or kill, so what could ever be wrong about it? Left behind by my mother, they say, because of it; because they told her it was wrong. The man they call a double-dealer, who lied about Sweden and Germany: the place he told the truth was in bed, with his lovely body, the feelings he gave me were not his fantasies or his boasts. Those others, on the beach; they have no home — not out of clumsiness, a tendency to break what is precious — but because they are brave and believe in the other kinds of love, justice, fellow man — and inside each other, making love, that’s the only place we can make, here, that’s not just a place to stay.