Hillela’s old benefactor, Udi, would have agreed with Arnold on one point, at least: a prediction that she would never look back. Udi probably meant it in both senses. She was nicely fixed up, for a penniless, deserted girl whose refugee status no-one would vouch for. From the kitchen floor through a guest bedroom to an ambassadorial residence; no need to return, ever, with her blankets to the hospitality of the Manaka flat. When she met Christa and Sophie as she came out of the bank one morning (Emile insisted that her salary be paid into a bank account, not left lying about as a temptation to the black staff in the Residence) she had not seen them for months. Being Hillela, she made no apologies or excuses; but she clung to them and kissed them in a different way from the bird-necked dart from cheek to cheek, grazing contact, she had learnt to exchange with the ambassadorial family. Christa looked after her affectionately: Poor Hillela! Sophie’s cheeks concertinaed up against her eyes: —Are you mad? Oh I’m glad she’s so okay in this bad place. — Archie Harper was encountered at British diplomatic cocktail parties that included local personalities from the old regime. He would put his arm round her and squeeze her to his enormous globe of a body; but nobody could interpret this as predatory on his behalf or a sign of availability on hers. Only after she had gone were there stories that although she dropped her political refugee friends once she’d installed herself at the Embassy, she still used to spend afternoons at Archie’s house, when he would dress up in women’s clothes, some elephantine duchess or brothel madam (that was how people could imagine it), and they’d dance with his Arab boys and drink black market champagne. The stories originated with Mohammed, who knew the boys, and had made her bed; the details were visualized by gossip among white people. While she was still in that country, a letter came from Canada to the hotel where her lover had left her. The proprietress propped it up, visible, in the bar for a few days, then threw it away. The girl’s other lover (his rivals and political enemies among the gathering on Tamarisk said) was seen entering the garden of an old house where the ambassadorial car that the girl was allowed to drive was parked, even after it was well known she had become the Ambassador’s mistress.
Those who have choices have morals, he says, after love-making, smelling home in the flesh, the rank sweetness of polished floors and gardener-tended roses, the leather-scent of three-car family garages beside backyard rooms with their clandestine fug of beer and cold pap. The smell of all things lost and repugnant, that is home, and that must be destroyed. It prompts him to talk of acts people are having to go through with, back there — the bombs and grenades whose targets are monolithic but whose shrapnel may pierce, three centuries of murderers cry, an innocent white. Who is innocent, after more than three centuries, among more than twelve generations of people who have paid for labour with a bag of mealies a month, beaten, imprisoned, banished, starved and killed? Those who can choose a candidate for a parliament — they can have their morals. The others have no choice but to meet, after three centuries, violence done to them with a violence of their own.
And all this while lying in the house that serves as a foreign news agency, the foreign correspondent himself out interviewing the Minister of Agriculture about a collective scheme for coffee farmers.
No mention, ever, of what is planned up the rotting stairs, only what already has been done. Because how can there be trust? What is there to go by? One who left that home uninstructed, ignorant, like most of her kind — for personal reasons which are no reason, in the measure of what has to be done. What credibility has she to show for herself, now, but the protection of yet another man?
Without a cause is without a home; lying here. I’ve learned that. Without a cause is without a reason to be. That’s all decreed by others, as elsewhere everything was decreed by the absence of one sister, the decisions made by two more, and the long-distance authority of a putative father on the road. Looking at him; gazed at by him. How well does he see, how well does he see into the other self, this man who swims and makes love with his glasses on to see better — this man in whose narrow crowded face is concentrated the pull of a gravity that excites while it excludes.
What choice is there?
He could take her in hand, maybe, with help from Christa and others. She might be made useful. But the real life of exile isn’t giving the boys an eyeful on Tamarisk Beach, you know.
Ah no, I’ll tell about that, the real life of exile is, for your whole life, going home for the holidays wherever it’s been decided you’re to go.
Exile is the inevitable — for whites like us, he is instructing. But the claim doesn’t enter, the way his body does; it talk away from her without purchase, the way she now slides off his body. This one won’t accept to be a humble apprentice to the only objective worth living for. Who does she think she is? Unreliable: and this judgment tantalizes him to come back into the flesh again, to find that just consolation, that peace and freedom that is certain, and lasts only minutes.
The glisten of black eyes opening again.
Why don’t you go back? Let them deport you. Probably you’d be let in; your lawyer uncle could maybe get you off prosecution for having come out illegally: you’re still under age. You’ve got a guardian or something? At worst you’ll get a suspended sentence and a fine — your rich aunt’ll pay, won’t she?
But he is nibbling, kissing, feeding on me, his face wet with me, exasperated. Because if she isn’t the right material, she isn’t one of that kind, either. God knows what will happen to her — it is not his affair — but she has one sound instinct to share with him, it’s expressed in her laughter if not in conviction, it’s dense in her flesh: she will never go back to the dying life there, never.
What choice? When the Ambassador and his family are posted to another country, of course I’ll go with them. Of course; the credentials of the household contingent of such people are never disputed by immigration officials.
*
At certain times, in certain places, harmony settles over a human nucleus like the wings of some unseen sheltering bird. Marie-Claude was a woman who had constantly to be going through the wardrobe of her blessings before others. Sometimes her actual wardrobe was invoked: —Emile insists he must give me a fur coat for leave in Europe, but I’m not the kind of woman who needs that sort of present, I’m not repressed in any way, not deprived of any kind of satisfaction, I mean, far from it — Hillela was so responsive; she stroked the fur against her cheek, so that Marie-Claude knew, could see the present was beautiful and rich in meaning; that she lacked for nothing; And in this country on the other side of Africa the language of the former colonists was her children’s mother tongue, and she was freed of the tedious afternoon hour of acting schoolteacher. She could sleep, sleep, for that hour after lunch, knowing the children were not left in the care of some local black or half-caste. Her breasts released from straps and lace, her waist free of elastic, she lay naked in the shuttered dark of their room — hers and her husband’s. Sometimes — now that she didn’t have to shut herself up over schoolbooks — when he came in quietly to fetch something on his way back to the office, she murmured, so that he would come over to her, and then deliciously tense but playing sleepy, she could put his hand on her soft, heat-dampened pubic hair, and after merely submitting for a moment (of course, she knew he was thinking he ought to be going back to his office) he would silently and efficiently take off his clothes (of course, he had to keep them uncreased to put on again immediately for the office) and make love to her. It was years, and several postings, since they had made love like lovers, in the middle of a working day. No child would burst in; they were safely with Hillela.