An odd couple. The women friends, not the Montgomerys or the Kgomanis. But while Hillela chattered and Sela, silent, attentive, overcast the seams of tiny dresses Hillela was sewing for her daughter, they complemented each other in a way nobody saw. Hillela, who had been like a daughter, had no longer a comparative status; was at the centre of a life in her marriage to a black man. Sela, in her marriage to a white man, for all her dowager dignity assumed at thirty-six was only making out; and Hillela had been a prodigy at that.
*
Yes, she knew them all. Except Mandela and the others with him. Mandela remained the voice on tape heard when she was a schoolgirl. Mandela was in prison down South, off the very last peninsula of Africa, pushed out to an island in the Atlantic by white men who frightened themselves with rhetoric that his kind would cast them back into the sea by which they came. Her old friendship with Tambo dates from those days when she used to serve him tea at Britannia Court and somehow produce enough food to go round whomever Whaila brought home. There hasn’t been anything she hasn’t profited by, at one period or another; the cuisine at the Manaka flat stood her in good stead, in its day. Oliver Tambo, even then, had the eyes of sleepless nights behind his thick glasses, and the opacity of flesh that, as it did in Whaila, marks the faces behind which decisions must be made: loosed boulders whose thundering echoes a passage out of sight, into consequences that cannot fully be foreseen. Tennyson Makiwane was one of those who came to Britannia Court, too — another namesake; inheritor of Victoriana — who was there in a Xhosa family who admired Tennyson? Tennyson Makiwane gave Nomzamo a stray kitten he had taken in — Makiwane who outcast himself, years later, from the cause for which, like the other frequenters of Britannia Court, he lived then; a man whose shame was obliterated for him by a traitor’s death.
Whaila knew at least an edited version of his young wife’s life; she had told him how she had got to Tamarisk Beach via Rey; and when she had expressed wonder that anyone (Rey) who seemed so committed to the cause had abandoned it (she had this wider interpretation, now), Whaila gave one of his held-back sighs that became a grunt. — We’ll have them, too. Casualties. And not only operational ones… There’ll always be some who won’t go the whole way.—
On the 8th of August 1967, he told her. The little girl had climbed into bed with them, early in the morning. She sat astride her father’s chest and he spoke it straight at her, who couldn’t understand and couldn’t betray. — Umkhonto is crossing the Zambezi today.—
Hillela turned her head to him, he saw her eyes, that were never bleary in the morning but opened from sleep directly into acceptance of the world as it is. — It’s begun?—
— It’s begun. Two parties. Nothing big in numbers.—
— How many?—
But even in the telling there was some instinct to hold back. — Enough. — The little girl rode him as her mother had loved to ride the playground’s mythical bull. — There’d be no hope of getting through with a whole company. I only hope the ZAPU crowd really know what they’re doing. Ours have to depend on them to find their way hundreds of miles through the bush. It’s all the way sticking to Wankie.—
— What about animals? Can you just walk about among lions and elephants?—
— That’s not the problem. Lions don’t come looking for men and if you sight a herd of elephants you can turn and head the other way for a bit. The danger is running into the Rhodesian army patrols; Wankie’s the only route you’ve got a chance against that.—
The child bounced her laughter into gurgles, thumping him. He lifted her gently under the arms, to regain his breath, gently put her down again.
Hillela sat up with one of her surges of energy, her sunburned breasts juggled between tightened arms. She took his hand, hard. Then she was out of bed and moving about the room as on the morning of some festival. She rushed back to kiss him, holding his head, her possession, between open palms. She rolled on the floor in play with the child and trod by mistake on the kitten. Amid laughter and miaowing he watched from the bed the excitement she felt, for him.
While he shaved she lay in the bath trickling water from a sponge onto her navel. Her belly was coming up; the creature in there was beginning to show its presence. She did not ask him, this time, what colour he thought it would be; they would be a rainbow, their children, their many children.
— What will happen when they get to South Africa?—
The sound of the razor scraping. — They’ll split, into smaller groups and operate in different areas. They’ll join up with people inside. There are specified targets to go for.—
— In the towns or in the country? Where they cross the border it’ll be farmland, won’t it? Are they going to attack white farms? Or is it going to be pylons and things like that, in the cities?—
— Military installations, power stations — hard targets.—
— There won’t be bombs in cafés and office buildings, or in the street? I can’t imagine what that would be like—
He dried his hands, ridding them of something more than shaving foam. He was aware of her waiting for him to tell her what she should be feeling about the unimaginable. — If the government goes on doing what it does, torturing and killing in the townships, in time … well, we’ll have to turn to soft targets as well.—
— Soft targets. You mean ordinary people. People in the streets. — Pressing her fingers into her belly, testing for a response from the life in there. She thought she felt a faint return of pressure and he mistook, with a flicker of displeasure, the beginnings of a smile relaxing her lips as lack of understanding of what she really had said.
— Ordinary people? What ordinary people? Our ordinary people have always been the soft targets. Our bodies, hey? Our minds. The police use violence on us every day and white people think they keep out of it, although the beatings-up and the killings are done on their behalf, they’ve let it happen for so many years. One day the blacks will have to carry the struggle into white areas. It’s inevitable. The violence came from there. Violence will hit back there. It must be, we know it. But not yet. Not now.—
— Innocent people?—
The answer echoed from another bed, another time. — Are there really any innocent people in our country?—
She was communicating in nudges with the third person present, inside her. — And me?—
Down on him came all the sorrow of pain and destruction that his people had endured, were suffering, and would endure no longer, and all the suffering they might have to inflict in consequence, in the knowing horror of victim turned perpetrator. Of course she brought it upon him; he had brought it upon himself by making such a marriage. Sometimes her lack of any identification with her own people dismayed him, he who lived for everything that touched upon the lives of his; there was something missing in her at such times, like a limb or an organ. — This secretly felt, paradoxically, in spite of the fact that he saw their own closeness as a sign; the human cause, the human identity that should be possible, once the race and class struggle were won. With her, it was already one world; what could be. And yet he looked at her lying pearly under water, the body prettily shaded and marbled as white flesh in its uncertain pigment and peculiarly naked nakedness is, and had to say what there was to say. — Yes, you too. If you happened to be there. You were born in sin, my love, the sins of your white people.—