— When you are tired with your work, it’s time for me for an hour. And even that time — you are working, maybe.—
— For Christ’ sake, what do you think I am — a spy? An agent of the South African government? — The laughter came back.
— No. But you are working too much. And I don’t know … if you are right for what you are doing.—
— I know what I’m working for, Pavel.—
— All right. I believe it. You are good material, yes. But I’m not sure you should be typist and translator — things like that. Sitting in an office. Oh yes, don’t be offended, yes I know you make a speech to women sometimes … But it’s not for you … A functionary. I feel it. You try to be, what is it in English — not ‘nice’—careful, no, ‘tactful’ that is it, but you can be something different! You got your own talent.—
— What are you talking about? I get on very well with the others. With Citagele. With Arnold. So what are you talking about?—
— How to live. We’ve got some people like you. In the end, valuable if they are, you can’t do much with them in bureaucracy, and even freedom movement, it has bureaucracy. You can say: dangerous individualism; you shut them away. Because if they know something, it’s not what other people can know. So what is use? But you are too clever for anything to happen to you, Hillela.—
Winter is burial. The days are shorter and shorter intervals between longer and longer nights. Everything that had opened, everything that was full to overflowing has contracted. The snow falls like the clods of red earth, on the living. Layer by layer, month by month, frozen then sodden then frozen, buried deeper. How to emerge from it, from the yellow ceiling-bulb that is daylight and the suffocation of human and cooking smells that is the warmth of their sun. There is no rainbow-coloured family. Only the one who came out black; there remains, black-to-white, the little foot that feels for the comfort of the white thigh, under covers, while steam in the pipes hisses; the small, open-mouthed face that is all there is on the other pillow. No rainbow-coloured family; that kind of love can’t be got away with, it’s cornered, it’s easily done away with in two shots from a 9-mm Parabellum pistol. Happiness dancing in a shop window behind glass, while outside there are hungry crowds in the street, looking on. Not for long. The glass explodes; their arms reach up to drag, to claim. The only love that counts is owed to them. Waves of resentment towards him, for not firing first, for not saving himself for the rainbow-coloured family, the only love made flesh, man gloved inside woman, child emerging to suck the breast the man caressed: the perfect circle, cycle. But he never belonged to it, the beloved — the bastard! — he belonged to the crowd outside and he died for them. The other wife, whom he left behind in Krugersdorp location, would not be lying in bed alone reproaching him. She was one of the crowd, she knew what belonged to them. The balancing rocks seen through a rep’s car window; embraces fall at the soundwaves of the next word spoken, the first crack of a bullet discharged.
The dear old one says, White people who settled in other countries have no past, so you’re not surrounded, like me … but you tried to live — there’s something von Kleist wrote—‘in a time that hasn’t yet come’! Ridiculous, crazy, but I like it.
And the other one: You’re too clever for anything to happen to you. Repeats it, another night, adding, Oh I know, I smell it on your skin.
What you smell is the black market perfume you bought for me.
The handclasp is the only love made flesh. Learn that. Read the handclasp, learning the kind of love in the calibre and striking power of hardware.
The slums along the river destroyed by bombardment had made way for a park and as the snow melted it was there: sheen on the grass and the namesake running after a ball. Pale sun unrolled slanting rugs. Water trickled under remnants of ice like cracked wine glasses. An age of winter remained shut up in apartments, offices, and on the other side of restaurant doors. Perhaps it would never leave, it would store next winter there as it did the one before. Pavel took Mrs Kgomani and her child to the woods to pick early snowdrops. He made boats out of sticks and leaves and the three of them raced these vessels on a stream. He lay on wet ground with his pure-pale wild face and delicate eyelids up to the weak sun as if it were blinding; this was the ‘they’ many people in that country resented and feared, this young man to whom the season of emergence from snow was a worshipful ceremonial. Karel, following the same impulse to share pleasure that the young woman brought out in people, drove her and the child to the town where the country’s first king had had his palace, in the 13th century. The ruins of European feudalism were the namesake’s playground, that day; she rode worn heraldic lions and griffins. Near the town was a garrison with the red star over the barbed wire at the sentry gates. — Poor devils, the men are kept shut up for the whole time they’re posted here, only the officers are allowed to mix in the town. — Pavel Grushko says they help people with the harvests. — Karel turned to look at her with sleepy-eyed compassion for the soldiers, for the youth of all men. — Once a year, in autumn? Never to see a girl for the rest of the year? Mr Grushko doesn’t deprive himself of anything, does he.—
They must have missed her when she emerged from her winter as the park did, as the woods did, as the streams did. The old man for quite a long time, whether as a lover (no-one knows) or more likely — once again, for her — as if she had been a daughter. Pavel not for long, because he was young and very attractive to women. Karel did not live to hear of the times that have come, for her. Grushko — his position merits that he be referred to by surname alone — has surprised nobody by making a career for himself, first as a diplomat in English-speaking and Arab countries, then as his country’s representative at United Nations, where, at a reception recently, he recognized her instantly. He remembers her, in their youth, with an English phrase he does not know is long out of date: a good sort.
Why she left the Eastern European mission is a matter for speculation. It happened very abruptly: one week she was in the thick of the midday clique at the café, already gathered at outside tables for the touch of the spring sun. The next week people were asking where she was. Suppositions were carried by particular turns of phrase in their language that had gathered ironies from dour discretion under many foreign occupations. — Pavel has flown her off for a weekend at his dacha. — But while they were laughing (and what was there to laugh at? He was to have his dacha before long, and his chauffeur-driven limousine) he arrived with his quick, wide stride and flying scarf and joined the table. Where was Hillela Kgomani? Nobody could tell him.
When Citagele was approached in the office, his raised brows lifted his bald pate, through which he felt, he had complained to his efficient assistant, the cold reached right into his brain in winter. (She had found for him — maybe knitted it herself? — a cap like those black workmen wear down to the eyebrows in all weathers, at home, and it comforted him when they were alone in the office and there was no-one to see.) — Her time was up. She’d been here what — two years?—
— You should know, of course. But not two years.—
— Okay, about … well, nearly.—
— Why did she not say? She never told me.—
Citagele clasped his hands and looked at Grushko to see what he might know. Then he spoke within the four walls, as he would wear the knitted cap. — It wasn’t what I wanted. But there you are. You’ll hear about it eventually, I suppose. There has been some discussion, we’re making some changes.—