Sela was right, Mrs Kgomani had gained an equilibrium that discarded girlish fantasies. She was also discovered to have an ability to talk to women’s worker-groups, herself through a translator. She crossed borders to the North, was useful in still colder places, Stockholm, Oslo, Moscow — everywhere that Whaila had gone, on journeys for which she now needed no proxy. Most of these were taken with Citagele Koza, head of mission, who had been Whaila’s close friend, but several times she was deputed to accompany Arnold, who came back and forth between Africa and Europe. She kept notes for him. Perhaps he had asked specifically to have her assistance; the decision would have to be Citagele’s. Alone together in dusty hotels like the museums of the Europe before the war and revolutions, afternoons in the colonial house rapped out in memory by a press agency’s telex were never resumed. Arnold grieved for the loss of the beach girl. In her place was a young woman who had experienced tragedy and who did not have the same appeal for him. She was no longer a distraction to catch the eye. She was part of the preoccupation she once had disrupted so naturally. They were concentrated together in a struggle within the struggle, bargaining or begging (there was only the collateral of an uncertain future to offer) for arms and money. He did not need to take her in hand, although he had the opportunity to do so, now. The education Whaila had begun, she completed alone. She taught herself not the old theories of ends, but the diplomacy and technicalities of means, that were immediate. She mastered specifications of guns and missiles and their relative suitability for the conditions under which they would have to be used. The men who had crossed the Zambezi again before Whaila was killed in his ambush had lasted out three months in the bush, lugging these weapons towards home, towards the army, the police, power lines and government buildings — Soft targets. No. Not yet. But the other side, they were not waiting, they had no distinction between steel-and-concrete and human bodies. Whaila’s warm black flesh dissolved red.
She toured factories where women with kerchiefs on their heads made parts for guns as neat as the components the street watchmaker put together in perfect functional harmony. On flights between one city and the next, liquid shudders in glasses and, watching it, thoughts surface. — If Whaila had had a gun he might have got them before they got him. We should all be armed with Parabellums.—
Arnold has told people, over the years: —If things had turned out differently, she was the type to have become a terrorist, a hijacker. A Leila Khaled. She had it in her, at one time. I don’t think we’d have been able to contain her. It wasn’t that she was undisciplined; no discipline was demanding enough for her — you know the sort of thing. — When he himself spoke out of his drowsiness in a plane, he asked a question. — What happened to the yellow swimsuit? — She did not seem to find the reference odd or suggestive. — In this climate?—
Other men had no beach girl to regret, of course. A man she was known to be associated with, eventually, had — like everybody else in that city — experienced tragedy and survived grief. Among such people she was not changed; they knew no other state of being. She was sent to a meeting for cultural solidarity of the Eastern bloc with the Third World, one day — contacts at all levels had to be kept up — and the chairman had a big, Balkan head with thick, grey-black hair rising from a peak like a dart set in a broad low forehead, a short, humorously-obstinate nose, and a brush moustache to show off well-worn lips and teeth. The details remain because the head was all that was visible of him above the rostrum; the head of handsome maturity to which years cannot be accurately attributed. When the meeting was over she saw that he was heavy and had the sideways gait of ageing. She went up dutifully to present her credentials and he asked her to stay on and allow his committee to take the opportunity to discuss African literature in English with her over a glass of wine. She knew much less about the subject than he, but when his committee members had all left and he and she were still talking, he took her to dinner at a restaurant she would not have known still existed in that city. They crossed the river and walked a long way in the cold. His left leg swayed him and he was short of breath, never stopped talking. Until then, all the city had run together for her in the overlapping stone statements, destruction, reconstruction, of its past; such density impenetrable, not only by reason of the ignorance of the historical significance of architecture in which the advantage of a colonial education had left her, but because she was accustomed to a thin layer of human settlement in countries where cities are a recent form of social focus. Underneath the skyscrapers of Johannesburg were only the buried gin-bottles of a mining camp where her great-grandfather Hillel had hawked second-hand clothing to blacks who came in their blankets to earn hut-tax. And she was not even aware that he had had this role in history. Under Britannia Court were the migratory trails by which Whaila’s and the namesake’s ancestors had explored their continent, begetting living monuments in their descendants rather than marking their generations in stone. The European read off to her as they walked the history of his city that he knew by heart, in marble stumps of Roman ruins, the iron rings embedded in medieval walls, the church with the bombed tower, the scaffolding round the restoration of a 17th-century palace, the piles stroked by the flow of water where a bridge was blown up, the withering forbidden wreaths placed at an empty lot where victims of the last uprising were shot down.
— They’ll never build anything on that spot. They know if we can’t have a monument there, there must be nothing else. — A rough bronchial laugh. — So they just let the weeds grow. It’s a way of dealing with realities you can’t handle: neglect. Not such a bad way. It works with other things, too. — He pointed at a red star which hung crookedly from the pinnacle of a public building and was lit up only on three neon points.
— You were mixed up in it? That uprising? Nobody else mentions it.—
— No. Because it’s not, how do you say, my dear, healthy … if you were in it, it’s better to keep quiet. And if you were not, well, some people have a reason to be ashamed because of that. It did bring some benefits, you see. Apparent lost causes always do … Mixed up! Yes, I was in prison for thirteen months. But I have friends … The President and I were at the gymnasium together — young boys, we joined the youth group of the Party while it was still an Underground movement… One night, they come for me, in my cell. (It wasn’t so bad, that time, I was allowed books, I worked on my translations of Neruda.) I thought, they’ve changed their minds, they’re going to shoot me. I’m on the journey to the river, where they threw the others. But they push me into a car and the next thing, I’m in the State chambers. He’s there in his windowless study — it’s like the last of the Chinese boxes, nothing can get at him once he’s inside there. A big fire burning, and a chair with a glass of brandy beside it. For me. He reads me a lecture, and then he comes over and gives me a push in the chest, like this, the way we used to start to wrestle when we were boys. Then he said to me, he pleaded with me, ‘You know I can’t do what you people asked. You know that. “Freedom”—we used that kind of talk when we were waving banners at sixteen. We give them our coal at their price, and they close their eyes to our trade union independence. We never criticise them in our newspapers, and they ignore the books we publish here by writers they ban. That’s freedom. We didn’t know it would be like that, when we were young. But you, Karel, you know, now.’ So they let me out. Again. Each time I’ve been rescued by someone different; the Russians let me out when the Germans imprisoned me as a communist, our first communist government let me out after the Russians imprisoned me as a nationalist. Oh, and our fascists had to let me out, of course, when the war came, and I was sent to the army.—