Выбрать главу

What would you want to know? I went with my girl to England, France and Italy last year but I don’t suppose you were there. Or we might have bumped into one another. I have part of a house with her on the old Crown Mines property — you might remember Crown Mines, no longer being worked, although I’m not sure the former staff houses were for rent when you were still around. Seven of us share, two more — nice queers — live in what were the servants’ quarters. No prejudice involved, just that they wanted to fix up their own place in housewifely style, everything just so. The seventh tenant has an unofficial eighth, a black girl who works for some church organization — so we have our token or totem or whatever you want to call it. Big whoopee, as we used to say to bring each other down a peg or two, when we were kids. Alpheus had three more children and had to leave the garage. He never completed his articles with Joe, but him I did bump into recently, and he’s making a good living as a furniture salesman. I won’t complete my articles, either. You probably won’t read this (I haven’t any address for you) so you won’t be able to tell anyone, even supposing there were to be someone around who might be remotely interested. I’m a champion at writing letters that never get sent.

What else? Well, I still read a lot. The other day l read a story, a translation from the Hungarian writer, Dezsö Kosztolányi, where the girl dies and the man longs for her for years, wants to see her again for only half-an-hour. His concentration is so fervent that he actually brings her back from the dead. There she is, just as she was, in his room, and they have nothing to say to each other. All they can think about is how much of the half-hour is still to pass. Eventually, she leaves after twenty minutes.

Why can’t I end off? I never know how to end off. I did my year in the army, you know. A good thing. Good thing to learn how easy it is to be one of them. To you, one of those who killed him; I can come up very close to that fact. My god, that story about the dead was tactless; I didn’t think. Another thing I won’t do — I won’t go to the army camps I’m supposed to spend a month in each year. So far I’ve managed by lying, aided and abetted by my girl, by Pauline and Joe, who approve finding ways of getting round things. When the call-up telegram comes my girl replies I’m no longer at this address, and when another comes to Pauline’s, she does the same. I disappear for a while, and the army calls up a substitute, putting my name down for the next camp. So far, military police came round only once, and my girl put on the innocent act and dealt with them. So that’s where I am: between call-ups. The alternative is to be like the Seventh Day Adventists and go to jail for conscientious objection on holy-roller grounds. But we kids were brought up without all that mumbo-jumbo, weren’t we, to cope with this world, not the next. I’m doing useful work helping prepare defence material for Joe’s cases, when I’m not hiding away. He has had a coronary but still slaves in that study night after night. He has pale moon-rings round his pupils although he’s only about sixty.

I remember when we read it: ‘I want to know you, and then to say goodbye’.

Sasha

They say you did have a baby. I can’t remember whether you liked children.

There were no scandals. Memoranda carefully prepared, files of cuttings up-to-date. No-one could catch her out in inaccurate statistics; she could always support her strongest and most challenged assertions, breaking down in a way new to her any resistance she encountered. At finger-suppers she convinced minority-report dissenters. Before a Senate committee she placed the long-term consequences, for United States interests, of backing repressive regimes in Angola, South Africa, Namibia, when these countries inevitably would become independent black states before the end of the century — and to whom would they supply their oil, gold, platinum, uranium, titanium, then? Those who had recognized them in their struggle for human rights (‘freedom struggle’ was not in the preferred vocabulary for the West) or those who had ‘actively ignored’ them? She showed a quick aptitude for the invention of euphemisms so like that the State Department could have taken them for their own; this one was to be understood to mean that although it might have to be accepted that no ‘military hardware’ would be forthcoming, no ‘humanitarian aid’ was being given, either.

A senator, seated beside her drawing right-angled shapes while she talked, flourished a circle round them. — Mr Chairman, experience has shown that there is no way of controlling how so-called humanitarian aid is used. If it’s given in the form of money, it goes to buy arms, not medicine. We are meddling in destabilization. If it’s given in kind — look what happened to the famous Congo chickens: I’m told it’s a fact that the ‘starving’ Congolese sold the cans to specialty stores down in Rhodesia.—

But the circle was not closed. Hillela took something out of the wallet in her attaché case. — Mr Chairman, may I have permission to pass this round?—

They had already received from her several information sheets; the bush schools run by FRELIMO in the area of Mozambique where it was in control; clinics run for the refugees in Tanzania; figures for the number of villagers harassed out of their homes by the South African army in Namibia. But this was a photograph of the family kind those present themselves had in their wallets. The spokesman for the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs twitched his small moustache like a scenting rabbit; the namesake, her ecstatic black face under a stocking cap, looked out at him from snow. She went politely from hand to hand. What on earth was the purpose? The company was able to glance over human features as if over statistics, as accustomed to concealing embarrassment as to concealing lack of interest. The speaker’s dark and brilliant eyes let her colleagues off nothing. She looked at them all with an acceptance of what they were thinking; with a confidence against which there was no defence. — That black child is plump and cared-for in the United States. She was born a refugee who has never seen her father’s and mother’s country. She’s mine, so she’s lucky. If she were one of those in Africa, her life would depend on a handout of soup powder, the installation of a well to give her clean water, and a clinic to immunise her against disease.—

Leonie embraced her after such triumphs. Though it was not at all certain whether it was this emotional retrogression — intentional or not — or the hard work that went into the rational case presented, that succeeded. Funds were voted. Hank (as the Assistant Secretary of State’s African Affairs man was known to his friends) was quoted at cocktail parties: —Lust is the best aid raiser.—

Not the breath of a scandal, nevertheless. Hank never had the good fortune to pursue further the possibilities he was sensitive to in Mrs Kgomani. Professor Kleinschmidt, a divorced man, returned from his sabbatical and would have liked to let the young woman stay on in the house but could not tolerate the noise of the child. The child was over-indulged by everybody, precocious and spoiled. The brat already knew how to exploit being black. So he had to make the choice. People invited him as Hillela’s dinner partner from time to time but it was apparent that those who schemed to match them failed. Herbert Kleinschmidt was lonely, yes; but who could think of Hillela Kgomani as lonely? She was Leonie’s promotion, Leonie’s working partner; and Leonie’s friendships were thickly gathered in, Leonie’s emotions ran grandly as cables under the oceans back and forth between the developed and underdeveloped worlds. Leonie and Hillela had no nuclear family but their distant ties, obligations, dependants, held them fast.