So he was beautiful — except for that, it had always been said with suitable regret. Among the commissioned pastel portraits of each of the Burns sons and daughters as children, his was in profile — the ‘good’ side. His mother, when he was small, had made a habit of kissing him goodnight on the birthmark, so that the imprint of the kiss became for him the disfigurement; later, a vague forgiveness for what he did not know he had done — forgiveness for the ‘bad’ side. Now the two sides had come together by the unimaginable means of a rather tactless and childish remark. I thought of a puppy, the kind with a velvety patch over one eye. It had happened as a Zen sage flings enlightenment at disciples in the form of an outrageous and flippant half-sentence.
He sat in the audience listening to her speak on public platforms, sometimes with the namesake on his lap. The young woman up there was scarcely to be distinguished from the other men and women on the panels of the committed, wearing with them the much-washed clothing, varied only by slogans printed across backs or breasts, with which they showed their identification with the causes of the poor and oppressed by assuming their characteristic markings, as a certain kind of moth disguises the fact that it is alive and free by keeping perfectly still and exhibiting the lineaments of a skull on its wingspread. The blunt-cut nails of her clenched hands, as she opened them to emphasize a fact, were short as those of women she had walked with as they scratched for roots to eat, and her curly hair was cropped without consideration for looks but as it was done as a mass precaution for hygiene in refugee camps, among the lice-ridden. Now she was talking not of refugee camps but of three political trials that had taken place in South Africa in a year. — All real opposition is on trial as terrorist and communist. Four people were sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for smuggling anti-apartheid pamphlets and records into the country; only four, because the fifth accused, a schoolteacher, thirty years old, Ahmed Timol, died by falling from the tenth floor of police headquarters while the police were interrogating him. In the Mzimela trial, a young man was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. What had he done? He left the country secretly and fought with the Rhodesian freedom fighters against Smith’s illegal white regime, he attended the Morogoro liberation conference, and he re-entered his home country to organize support for the banned African National Congress. Are these people, risking their lives to be free of racial oppression, criminals? I knew Mzimela in Tanzania. Yes, he was like many others; he went to the Soviet Union and to East Germany for military training because the West, which created South Africa militarily and economically, does nothing to influence the South African government to free people like him, neither will it help them to free themselves. Did any of these people on trial kill anyone in South Africa? There was one act of violence involved — and one only: when Timol’s life, in the care of the South African police, smashed on concrete—
The namesake sang softly in his ear; she did not like attention to be on her mother instead of herself. Her breathy buzzing was warm on his skin; it roused him alarmingly, it was the warmth and humidity of Hillela, who — difficult to believe — existed within the specifications of an impersonal function, up there, the simplified, line-drawn figure from a banner or poster, among the ritualistic paraphernalia of water carafes and glasses, microphone and taperecorders, scratchpads and pencils stamped with the acronym appropriate to the occasion.
She continued with the work although it kept them apart too often; it had more, even, than the connotations of a career, and commanded more respect from him and others. He had frequently to explain she couldn’t accompany him because she was put of town or even out of the country. When there was mumps or measles in the namesake’s usual surrogate homes, he took her into his calm bachelor brownstone during her mother’s absence, and called in one of his willing sisters to help take care of her. Hillela often brought Leonie’s trophies into his company, along with Leonie. He met all kinds of interesting people he never would have met, without Hillela; more than he had known since India. They carried with them demands that stretched muscles of response which atrophy where a common background provides always foreseeable demands and appropriate ways of meeting them. There was the supercilious black journalist from South Africa, a Nieman fellow, who tried to provoke him into academic quarrels over economic theory when sober, but with whom he got rather happily drunk whenever the fellow came over from Cambridge for a weekend. There was the black woman with purplish hollows under her eyes — combined with the bewilderment in her face, these appeared to be the marks of unseen blows — who flung herself in tears to embrace Hillela. That woman drank only Coke. It was another kind of intoxication that compelled her to explain to everyone: —She was just a kid, when we slept at her people’s place that night we left the country. I’ll never forget those people, they did everything for us. And look — how she’s grown up just as good as her mother! How can I forget how her mother drove us to the border in her own car? Packed up food for the children. I always say it to Donsi.—
— We danced with him, that night, my cousin and I. It wasn’t my mother, it was my aunt who drove you.—
Bradley followed attentively the stumbling, laughing excursion into Hillela’s adolescence, which he had tried to explore for himself — wrongly, he knew — in terms of his own.
— Look at her! Even though politically we’re not on the same side—
Leonie put an arm round the woman. — Bongi dear, we don’t recognize any split in the liberation movement, PAC or ANC, in my house. We’re a bit premature, we know, but here we have African unity!—
— Just like her mother, not like other whites at home, she’s in the struggle, like a real black girl.—
— Where’s your real black girl, Hillela? — Leonie gleefully stage-managed her party. — Somebody go get Nomzamo to meet her mother’s old friend Bongi.—
Samora Machel came to the brownstone with Leonie and Hillela, though it was kept out of the papers that he was in the U.S.; Leonie was on such close terms with FRELIMO that she was now a prohibited immigrant in Mozambique as well as South Africa. SWAPO Ovambos from Namibia bent their heads, huge with great beards meeting their thick hair, in comradely embrace of Whaila Kgomani’s widow. Patrice M’ba, slender, neatly-shod and elegant as the French masters who had a price on his head in his own country, talked with another Hillela, one who spoke the language with softness, as if it had been learnt in some intimacy whose cadence it kept. With others, there was no nuance for Bradley to pick up — Marc Nz
kou, the Cameroonian who had been in prison in four countries, having each time sought refuge just before coups that changed Pan-African alliances; disaffected Ghanaians; a Somali novelist for whom Leonie had found a publisher; another exile, Reuel (surname unpronounceable), who always sat aloofly in a room as if there only for someone influential he’d been promised and who wasn’t present. These were the material or rather the subjects of the Work; merely associated in her future husband’s mind with the purposeful young woman’s dedication to their cause.
It was taken for granted by everyone that that was what he was going to be — Leonie’s fine young woman’s new husband. His father thought she was very lucky to have caught his son. He said so to the boy’s mother — fine young woman without much of a background, from all appearances, and saddled with a small child; Brad was so young. The mother was the one who played Schubert with Brad. — Appearances. He isn’t concerned with appearances. If he had been, his life would have been spoiled, wouldn’t it? Have you forgotten that? Brad is used to difficulties, he’s not shallow like some of our other children. He wouldn’t be satisfied with one of the girls he went to college with. He’s like my father.—