Among such talk her protégée must have felt at ease, even if she were an impostor in its implied status. She had listened for years to people talking about these people; now they were real, the daily strategies of survival preoccupied them also, as these did her. There was much grumbling talk to which, at least, she could contribute, of where to get ordinary comforts they had taken for granted under oppression at home — soap and razor blades, batteries and insecticide sprays, in short supply here. People from the Command office might not meet these men on Tamarisk, but they kept close to them beneath barriers of sophistication and education through that other place in themselves nothing could alienate, where no bane of conquest, law or exile had ever touched them — the relationships codified in their language, the common embrace of their own tongue. People from the office ran classes in political and general subjects in the camp, and often one or the other would come on to Njabulo and Ma Sophie’s to continue a point of discussion that would ravel into small-talk in English and their own language. Johnny Kgomani was there a few times, when the girl was; the one who had swum out with bad news. — We are spoiled, man, that’s what it is. We all had it too soft. Wilkinson’s Sword, passes in our pockets, first-class prisons … — He watched faces waver from solemn acceptance or resentment to laughter. He had a way of drawing his lips to a line and giving a twitch to his nostrils, the skull mocking himself within the tight modelling of his face. Sophie translated for Christa and Hillela what the laughter was about.
There were not enough tin spoons or forks to go round at the Manakas’. Everyone got a plate piled by Ma and ate neatly African-style with their fingers, balling stiff pap the way a dung-beetle efficiently rolls together its cargo with the tips of prehensile legs. It was easier to learn to do that than to handle chopsticks at a Commissioner Street Chinese restaurant; and further than a few streets away from the embroidered place-mats, Bavarian crystal glasses and Zitronencréme where Hillela had herself nicely fixed up, now. There was not much chatter to join, round Udi’s table. He sometimes went out to dinner but the impression left with her was that while she was staying with him they had always been alone at meals; the servant, with that air servants have (even Bettie, Jethro) of suppressing judgments that await their time, passed behind the two chairs, presenting each dish silently to the master of the establishment before dispensing the interloper’s share. After she had been occupying her large, cool room for a few days, Udi asked her not to continue making her own bed in the mornings. — Mohammed thinks you don’t sleep in it. It upsets him.—
Her laughter, her guitar, the slap of her sandals, the clear-struck notes of her voice — each time these sounded they seemed to make a splash into the stillness of those rooms. — Does he think I liked sleeping on the floor so much I can’t give it up?—
— I don’t think he knows you slept on the floor. Though I could be quite wrong … in the kitchens, they know everything about all of us, it’s all picked up in the markets.—
— So where does he think I sleep?—
The ferny, magnified lashes moved dismissingly. Udi did not quite smile. — That’s the trouble.—
Arnold had warned her. But if this was the to-be-expected approach, broached in a European way she was supposed to interpret, she could always appear not to understand. And it would not be Udi’s way to be obliged to be explicit; although there were many things she did not know or understand that he did explain. Why wouldn’t he get up out of his eternal chair and turn off his eternal Bach and Penderecki (the latter had to be explained, his music had not been among the records in Joe’s collection) and come along to the Manakas’? He had said Christa’s friends were his friends, any time. Christa had invited him again and again. The flat was only just down the road, in the old part of town.
— I am not lonely. A dear girl to worry … I am alone, that’s different. Like the difference between the pink flamingo balanced on one leg and someone else wearing a pink skirt.—
She told him he was a stick-in-the-mud, coaxingly. Alone must be lonely. — To have another meaning for ‘alone’ there have to be two of you.—
— One can love one’s neighbours at a distance, but at close quarters it’s almost impossible. D’you know who said that true thing? Said it for me. A man named Ivan to his brother Alyosha, in a book called The Brothers Karamazov.—
Among all the possessions he had in that deep room with the frieze of live swallows, the African drums each with its ashtray and pipe beside each chair, the collection of Malian and Nigerian masks on the walls, the Fon hangings, the rugs from Khartoum with their counter-pattern of his pipe-burnings, the wall covered with shelves of damp books that gave the place its own bodysmell — there must have been that same novel. Again that novel. He didn’t have to explain about that! — I’ve read it, long ago. — She wouldn’t be expected to remember the whole of such a long book, even if she had.
— That’s why, although I believe all this (the room was kept dim against heat, the spines on the shelves shone titles of studies of revolutions, of colonialism, communism, social democratic theory) — all that Christa goes to prison for, I sit here in this chair … I can’t take part. That’s why I’m worried about this trade-union foundation thing … nearly as bad as politics. If only what Teacher — you know that’s what the people call him, our President? — says could be true: ‘People, not money’ make development. The trouble is, I’m stupid enough to believe in what is being attempted in this place since the British got out … and anyway… I can’t go away. And I can’t just sit here and approve out of books. So there you are … at this time in my life … It’s funny, some people open the bible to see what message a page has for them. I find my message any-old-where. Listen to this I’ve just read, here. ‘He avoided all the confusion and absurdity present in the efforts of those who say they are living for others’—now it goes on—‘but in fact are living on others — on their gratitude, their opinions, their recognition’. The first part of that sentence — that used to be me. The second half — that’s what I am now. The president invites me. The minister thanks me.—
— We all thank you. — She pulled a prim, pert face, her aubergine-coloured, shining eyes contradicting it. He saw that he amused her; she would not say ‘I thank you for taking me off the beach, off the kitchen floor, using your influence with the immigration men to let me stay on in this town that has no place for me, where, if I have a reason to be, it is not the kind provided for on application forms!’ Impossible for this girl not to be flirtatiously elusive, even with someone as clearly out of the running as himself; it came naturally from her as the sweat that, with the rising humidity of midday, painted on her lip a little moustache of wet that must taste salty to her lovers.
Udi showed Hillela something of the country. Around about that time — just before she started working in the curio shop, — he drove her along the coast for the weekend. — I am going to take you to Bagamoyo, where Livingstone started out to cross Africa from east to west. — But when they got as far as the new hotel where he had intended they should return to spend the night on the near side of the historical destination he had in mind, she hung back irresistibly. She ran to marvel at it from all perspectives, from sand so hot she danced across it as a fakir over the white ash of a bed of coals, to the cool of palms, remnants of the oil plantation the site once had been, now reified by a Scandinavian landscape gardener into his idea of a tropical garden. Her benefactor took his first photograph of Hillela there; the shadow of a palm tree falling before her. It could be measured for progress, like notches on a doorpost, against that other souvenir image under a palm.