Leonie Adlestrop’s special position in Africa made it possible for her to move with ease back and forth from conservative to radical regimes, in fact, everywhere except to South Africa and Namibia, where she had been declared a prohibited immigrant — and so proudly joined the status of political refugees from that country. — We can’t get in, but we can kick up a heck of a lot of dust outside, can’t we, Hillela? — They were in Dar es Salaam for a day or two, and Hillela, keeper of the papers and briefcases, was part of Dr Adlestrop’s gatherings of useful contacts in the bar of the Agip Hotel. Neither Udi nor Christa encountered her, she was not available — in meetings, when Christa phoned — and Udi she called from the airport only just before she left; a voice he could attach only to the flamingo-girl in the pink skirt.
— How do you look now? — It was his way of asking many things.
— I don’t know. — The line drew a long hum of passing time between them. — I really don’t know. I’m so busy.—
— I didn’t know where to reach you — well, I could easily have found out from the office here. But I just wanted to tell you you’d be all right. That time. And it might have been the last thing you could bear to hear.—
— Udi, I’ve got to go now.—
— Yes of course. But if you suddenly phone when you know the flight is going to be called, it means you want to say something, Hillela.—
— Udi? No … just to say hello. I’m too tired to think of anything — and there are meetings to prepare for the moment we arrive back in the U.S. So much I haven’t written up.—
— You, a bureaucrat. I didn’t think that was the way you’d be all right. Well.
— What other way is there. If you’re not carrying a gun in the bush you have to do it with documents and committees. I’m not a bureaucrat, I have to use bureaucracy.—
— You must be formidable. You sound it. But I can’t imagine … Hillela, your voice is just the same, you know.—
— You have to dig up bad consciences and good intentions and put them both on the line. Give them no out. Confront them with the way you’ve calculated they can give you what you want while they’re using this in their own interests. That may be to build up one of their ‘caring images’ before some election or get them promoted to responsibility for a funded project. You have no idea what it’s like, Udi.—
— I hope not. You didn’t ever use those kinds of words … And your child, the little boy—
— Nomzamo. For Nelson’s wife. Oh she’s got the Americans wound round her fat finger, all of five years old now …—
— She must be just like you.—
— The time I wasted. I should have learned the things I need now. I’ve had to teach myself how to prepare budgets and estimates—
— What are you going to do, Hillela?—
— What d’you mean?—
— You know what I mean. Is it going to be for the rest of your life … oh Hillela.—
— Do what I’m doing. Looking for ways to free Whaila.—
That was why she had not been able to go away without reaching him: he was the one who would understand what she had just said. That was his place. He was ashamed to think she could hear the weakness of emotion that changed his voice. — That drudgery … for you … and what can that sort of thing achieve. It will be the big powers who’ll decide what happens to blacks. And the power of other black heads of state influencing the big powers. A waste, yes… it’s this that’s a waste of your life — The line cut off. He waited, but she did not ring again. She must be walking to the plane with that old ghoul who grinned as if from a bridal group in newspaper photographs of people who would kill or be killed when she had gone.
If Hillela Kgomani had not a spare moment to see old friends, she found time to meet people from the African National Congress. Not in their office (which was why she missed running into Christa) but at a private house. This suggests that if it were true she had been expelled from the movement while in Eastern Europe, she was back in favour. Maybe had earned her way by turning some of the paper-rustling drudgery to the organization’s advantage in the unpromising conditions of the United States. It is also possible she was never expelled at all, but that this was a planned pretext to get her into the States in the status of disaffection (as the euphemism for defection goes) so that she could work secretly on the prospects of getting a mission opened there. Certainly in the early Seventies offices were opened in New York, for the first time. Probably she was working for the organization all along, under the spread breast-feathers of mother hen Leonie and her aid and research projects in many African countries. Bradley Burns, who is given to quiet analysis of the time when he was the man in a position to know, says she confused him. Deliberately. At times it was clear that for her only sexual love — and oddly this included her feeling for the little girl — was to be trusted. All the rest (his phrase) was shit and lies. And he did not know whether she was thinking of the killing of her husband, or some other kind of treachery that happened to her while she was in exile politics in Eastern Europe. Then at other times she could also say love ‘can’t be got away with’; or it wasn’t ‘enough’. What she seemed to mean by this last was that in spite of all evidence against it, another kind of love had to be risked.
Acronyms the language of love. United States Institute for African-American Cooperation, USIFACO; Third World Committee for Africa, TWOCA; Operation Africa Education, OPAD; Co-ordinating Committee for Africa, COCA; Commission for Research into Under-development, CORUD; Foundation for Free People, FOFREP. The child plays with alphabetical blocks on the floor, builds houses with them. A career can be built out of acronyms; everyone here must have a career, you fulfil yourself with a career, there are books that specify what a career is by listing what is available. Pauline would be happy, she was more than willing to supply the advantage of a career, whatever Sasha said. Leonie couldn’t have done more if it had been for her own daughter; Leonie will go on with her promotion, beavering away. Leonie knew him. Leonie is the only person in the board rooms, at the working breakfasts in motels, at the Thanksgiving dinner, who knew him — the one who came out just like him does not remember. Not even a trauma to know him by; she was carried away with a towel across her eyes so that she would not see what was on the kitchen floor.
Twenty, forty years after they have received the advantages of a career they still form their version of a songololo, singing their songs as they stride along under the same elm trees in the same avenue. Everything remains in place, for them. The storm windows will be put up, as theirs are, every late autumn and removed to let the smell of spring in. The namesake will grow up as a little black American with civil rights and equal opportunity to protect her, like everybody else, and the distinction of her African names to assert that individuality everyone here says is so important in making a career. She won’t have to have engraved on her bracelet, I am me; she’ll say, I’m Nomzamo Kgomani, and that will impress.
No need ever to run out of acronyms. There is a career of continued useful service ahead; there is the example of Leonie, loverless lover of all those she is entitled to call by their first names, fulfilment (as they sum up, here) shining out of every group photograph in which she appears. But no need to emulate entirely. The documentation will be read in bed beside a young man advancing well in his own career, ready to help with the dishes and to perform — woman, man, and the little black daughter he regards as his own — the safe and pleasant rituals of a family, here; parent-teacher co-operation, playing games, going to the lake shack and Cape Cod house.