— When you touched me at the beginning (she takes his black hand and spreads it on her hip) this was a glove. Really. The blackness was a glove. And everywhere, all over you, the black was a cover. Something God gave you to wear. Underneath, you must be white like me. — Or pale brownish, it’s my Portuguese blood. — White like me; because that’s what I was told, when I was being taught not to be prejudiced: underneath, they are all just like us. Nobody said we are just like you.—
The smile deepens. — That wouldn’t be true either. Then you’d have a skin missing.—
— If you are white, there, there’s always a skin missing. They never say it.—
She says everything now. — When we are together, when you’re inside me, nothing is missing. — The train leaving Rhodesia behind, the Imari cat, the expectations of benefactors, the deserted beds — everything broken off, unanswered, abandoned, is made whole. She never tires of looking at his hands. — Not wearing anything. They’re you. And they’re not black, they’re all the flesh colours. D’you know, in shops — and in books! — ‘flesh colour’ is Europeans’ colour! Not the colour of any other flesh. Nothing else! Look at your nails, they’re pinkish-mauve because under them the skin’s pink. And (turning the palms) here the colour’s like the inside of one of those big shells they sell on Tamarisk. And this — the lovely, silky black skin I can slide up and down (his penis in her hand), when the tip comes out, it’s also a sort of amber-pink. There’s always a lot of sniggering about the size of a black man’s thing, but no-one’s ever said they weren’t entirely black.—
— And what d’you think of the size, now?—
— I suppose they vary, same as whites’ ones. — While he laughs, she is even franker. — I still don’t much like African hair. I couldn’t say that there, either. Once when I was with my cousins on holiday, some hairs from the black cleaner’s head had somehow dropped into the bath, and my Aunt Pauline was furious with me because I pulled a face and wouldn’t bathe. I don’t know why I felt like that… all sorts of muddled feelings — the kind you get down there, you know? I suppose they haven’t all worn off … I like the feel of your hair in the dark, oh I like it very much, but I don’t think African hair is as beautiful to look at as whites’ hair can be, d’you? Long blonde shiny hair?—
— I want you to grow your hair long, very long …—
— Then you also think European hair is nicer, on the whole? But you won’t dare say it!—
— What if the baby has my hair?—
— I told you, I love your hair. I wonder what colour the baby will come out, Whaila?—
— What colour do you want? — Len had let her choose her cold drink with that gentle indulgence.
— I love not knowing what it will be. What colour it is, already, here inside me. Our colour. — She buries her head on his belly.
Our colour. She cannot see the dolour that relaxes his face, closes his eyes and leaves only his mouth drawn tight by lines on either side. Our colour. A category that doesn’t exist: she would invent it. There are Hotnots and half-castes, two-coffee-one-milk, touch-of-the-tar-brush, pure white, black is beautiful — but a creature made of love, without a label; that’s a freak.
One of her protectors took his texts not from the bible but from whatever book he chanced on in his library. Riding in a Ghanaian taxi she saw a legend placed for her on the dashboard: IT CHANGES. She was too big, for the time being, for the high-life on Saturdays. The dance of life didn’t have to be performed in a shop window: at that moment the jolting of the vehicle without shock-absorbers caused the foetus to turn turtle inside her. A queer feeling. It changes: exhilaration surfaced, as a wave turns over a bright treasure.
James and Busewe were suspicious of her when she appeared up the stairs; now she was installed among them, in their makeshift office, in their house. But it was not as they had thought it would be: teach me, she said, not only in words but in her whole being, that body of hers. And as she had picked up protocol in an ambassador’s Residence she picked up the conventions to be observed, signs to be read, manoeuvres to be concealed in refugee politics. She cultivated friendships at the university so that she could borrow the standard works of revolutionary theory she could have taken advantage of in Joe’s study, and whose titles had shone at her in vain in Udi’s livingroom. The application and shrewdness with which she studied all cuttings, reports, papers, journals, manifestos brought an intimate aside from Whaila: —Never mind Portuguese — that’s your Jewish blood. Studious people.—
— Is it bad for you … I mean, that I’m white?—
— But you know there are whites with us, Hillela — Arnold, Christa, the Hodgsons, Slovo—
— Yes but it’s agreed, ‘the leaders will come from our loins’. It’s written. It means black. It must.—
Comically, she put a hand on either side of her hard, high belly. He leaned over, felt the warmth and liveliness that always came to her face at his approach, and stroked the belly as if over a child’s head. — Hillela, Hillela, I can see you’re ambitious for your children, you’re worried in case you can’t make a future prime minister in there.—
Her mouth bunched in derision of herself. — No, no, I only wonder about you. You’re one of those who decided that. ‘From our loins.’ You’ve told me you were only eighteen when you joined the Youth League. And you’re still an Africanist, you’ve always been one, haven’t you?—
He was accustomed to a woman becoming placid while carrying a child; there were times when he did not know what to say to this one, in whom sexual energy was not quieted but instead fired a physical and mental zest that kept her working all day, racing about through the crowds in the stunning heat, and questioning him at night. He wanted to say: what have I done to you? What am I to you, that you transform yourself?
— If you look for contradictions in individuals you’ll always find them. I’m not any different. There’s never been anything laid down about marrying a white. It’s of no importance.—
— What about the people in the camps. The things that are being said by some of them about the way the leaders are living.—
He smiled to catch her out. — So it’s a luxury and a privilege to have a white woman?—
Her black eyes shamed him. — Like whisky and nice houses and big cars — the things white men have at home. People can’t help judging by the way it was for them at home.—
— Well I haven’t got any whisky or big house and posh car, I’ve only got you. There are plenty of real problems to worry about. I don’t know what we’ll find when we go to Morogoro next week… The trouble is, the life in the camps is so monotonous, and we can’t send many people back down South to infiltrate yet. We’re not ready. The men want to get out and get on with it. That’s the real dissatisfaction. It’s not whether the leaders eat meat while they get food they don’t like. And Tanzania’s own people are poor, you can’t expect them to give ours more than they have for themselves … It’s the isolation. There’s nothing to do every day when the training’s over. You’re miles from anywhere. Think of being in a remote hole like Bagamoyo.—
— I was almost there. It was beautiful. — She smiled at an old life where one caught butterflies.
Arnold was the first to meet, hatched from the cocoon of the little tramp on Tamarisk Beach, Mrs Whaila Kgomani. There she was in the office, sitting on the edge of the head-of-mission’s table, arguing over the telephone with the owner of the building about responsibility for unblocking a drain. Huge, her belly and those wonderful breasts like elaborate vestments serving to emphasize the alert composure of that bright head, and those black eyes that absorbed all gazes, as they did his. Pregnancy did not blunt but made more powerful the physical presence that had once drawn him after her into the sea. On the bare boards of this no-place, no-time, she was an assertion of here and now in the provisionality of exile, whose inhabitants are strung between the rejected past and a future fashioned like a paper aeroplane out of manifestos and declarations. She got up and she and the dignitary from the Command kissed, not in the style of a foreign embassy, but as comrades in the cause, smiling.