He looked at her hand for a moment as if it held one of the grenades whose features and performances she was studying. He came over to her. — Don’t you see? The label is still there. Like a can of beans. It’s Zyklon B, the gas the Nazis used in their death chambers. It was issued with — what d’you call it — rations to the camp commandants. — He translated from the German: —‘For the control of vermin’—and there are instructions to be careful not to contaminate yourself when using it. —
He took the canister slowly from her and replaced it on a scroll-ended bibelot shelf stained with circles made by wine glasses at long-past parties. He adjusted the position so that the label would not be obscured. — I was with the Russians who went in when Berlin fell. Most of Hitler’s men had fled but we opened doors and found some. One had this can on his desk. — His head seemed too heavy for him and under raised eyebrows his face sagged before her. — A sample. Something to (he ran his fingers round some invisible gadget) play with, while talking on the phone. I put the can in my pocket. That was the looting I did. And I keep it here where I can see it every day among the books, and the photographs of the women and children and friends because that’s where it belongs, that’s how it was used, as some ordinary … commodity—
An urge came upon her crudely as an urge to vomit or void her bowels. She began to tremble and to flush. Her eyes were huge with burning liquid she could not hold back. She wept in his arms, blotted against the solid body thick with life in which the constricted breathing of age was like a great cat’s purr. He knew she was not weeping for the man he had shot dead at his desk, or even for the innocents for whom death was opened like a can of beans. The kitchen floor; it was the kitchen floor.
She came from so far away, down there in a remote country, belonging to a privileged class at home, and far, far from the bombardments, the childhood existence on frozen potatoes, the firing squads for partisans set to dig their own graves, and the gas chambers for families. The necessity to deal in death, no way out of it, meeting death with death, not flowers and memorials, was just coming to the people among whom she had grown up.
*
Where the city of the intermediate thousand years had been bombed to rubble in the war, excavations for a new subway line had unearthed Roman baths belonging to a garrison from the first foreign occupation of the country. With enough time, foreign occupations become part of a treasured history which is threatened by the latest foreign power: asserting national heritage in stone restored everywhere, the local authorities raised the marble columns in a park laid out above the subway. Behind, at the distance of a crowd from a spectacle, was the solid horizon of workers’ housing blocks. The nursery-school teacher who lived there took Nomzamo’s mother home for coffee to what she called ‘The Great Wall’. In a kilometre of ten-storey buildings with windows set like close type she pointed at one she alone could distinguish from all others. — That’s where we are.—
The mythical wooden beasts of a children’s playground were furred with snow, here. The women and their small children moved at once into the hot, echoing concrete walks beyond double doors. — Everybody in this block has not less than three children. That’s the way housing is allotted. In the school holidays you can’t think, you can’t hear yourself speak … your own children are among them, and they make a hell. — The teacher was studying to improve her qualifications and become an official translator for a State publishing house. — I’m lucky, my two eldest can look after themselves and my mother takes the little one, so I can go and work at night in a library. — Here, too, were neat beds disguised as livingroom furniture; the preoccupations of different members of the household staked out in corners and shelves of territory: musical instruments and reference books (the husband taught in a college of music), children’s sports banners and bicycles, models on box-lids, an ironing board before a television set. — D’you want to go away?—
She was a soft-voiced blonde with all her tension and emotion in her neck. — Only to a better apartment. That’s all. To have another room! I know very well why we can’t have it, it’ll take another generation to make up what was destroyed and provide for all the people who have come to the towns. But I want it. If I had money, I know I’d try and buy the way … although I think it’s wrong.—
— Can people do that?—
— Always, everywhere, people do that. It can’t be stopped, altogether.—
— We’ve got something … a charter. Something like this ‘… the people shall have the right to live where they choose, to be decently housed’.—
The coffee cups were special ones, the teacher’s laugh rang from the cupboard where she sought them. — Oh yes, that’s what the leaders say, but when they are in power, they have to do it … that’s the trouble. But it’s a rich country down there? You didn’t have wars. Maybe you can.—
There was no African family here in which the namesake was common responsibility. Mrs Kgomani could not go out at night unless she could find a baby-sitter. Pavel took up the instruction begun long ago by a naughty boy and girl in Joe’s study among documentary evidence of the kind of activity she was engaged in now. Pavel came to the apartment and taught her chess. Snow did not keep him away; looking out the window at the expected hour she saw him in his fur boots and elegant coat, moving through the white like one of those antlered creatures in his own latitude who graze in cold wastes, digging for nourishment only they know is there.
— The longer the revolution takes to come in your country, more danger there is to be a bourgeois revolution. That is what people like your lady friend — she wants to have here. She will tell you she is glad the big estates are gone. State has taken over banks and capitalist industry. She is glad for that, because she was not big land-owner, not factory owner. So she is glad those people have not got what she did not never have. — ‘Never had’.—Yes, never have. But she wants, wants to get house to leave to her children, and then it’s a shop, and so it must go on … She’s dreaming of unearned income — no good for the old regime, but good for her … Do you know that those apartments are heated, free? Maybe that’s nothing for her, she was always living in a heated house. But generations of peasants, and those who became proletariat with industrialization in nineteenth century, they never knew what it is to have heat, electric light! Danger is, for your country, with industrialization maybe there is coming a class — blacks — like here. They want the little house, the little shop, the little farm, for their children. Even some who come here … Bourgeois in the heart. What does Citagele care for landless peasants? He doesn’t need land, he wants a fine office. Kotane, J. B. Marks, Tambo, Nzo, Makatini — they care for the people. But him … You must not forget what kind of a life, what kind of an education does a little black kid get on your farms, and in your ghettos, before you tell us in Eastern Europe we haven’t solved the housing problem for the masses.—
She needed no reminder. — I’ve got a little black one of my own, you know.—
— Yes, and I love her. She is just like her mother, only nicer—
Laughter at the double-edged compliment. — Only darker.—
— Why you don’t let me finish? Nicer to me.—
The change of subject stopped the laughter.
— What have you to complain of, Pavel.—