Joe had to remind her that when she drove a certain friend of hers and his family to the border one night years ago, the friend was one of those who, at that time, merely put it another way: ‘did not want to dance with whites’. Her theatrical laugh spluttered upon him again. — What are you saying? And we found him dancing with our daughters!—
So they sold the house and he took Pauline away to London. She was convinced they could stay only as collaborators with the whites, now, whatever they did, however many legalistic triumphs he had. All conversations or arguments with her ended in reiteration of this. Their divorced daughter Carole and her small boy left the country with them, the elder boy had been given into the custody of his father. Joe found a position with a firm of solicitors who employed him mainly on litigation over football-team disputes. He worked as conscientiously as he had done against charges of treason, the documentation of which he had taken with him to Frognal Green, where it occupied one whole wall of bookshelves in the livingroom (the flat was too small to provide him with a study) and was available to the Anti-Apartheid Movement, the African National Congress, the Defence and Aid Fund, the International Commission of Jurists, the National Council for Civil Liberties — Pauline went out as soon as someone from any of these arrived, or shut herself in the kitchen and cooked. Carole — at this stage in her life, after having two children and emigrating — had decided she wanted to study law, after all, and was articled to her father’s firm; he helped her with the degree course at London University she studied at night. On the other hand, Sasha, of course, had given up law; he was the only member of Hillela’s adoptive family who had stayed behind. Unless she would have counted (who knew, with her) Olga and the other cousins.
The one who had contingency plans had not left. Olga had had both breasts amputated and was no longer afraid of blacks. She went courageously to the knife and would do so again if the cancer were to recur elsewhere in her well-cared-for body; she had had fitted artificial breasts that couldn’t be told from her old shapely ones, even in a swimsuit, and she lived on in the house with her antiques — that selection from the past only of what is beautiful, lifted cleanly from the context of its bloody revolutions — her étagére, guéridon, George IV dining table and gilded Blackamoor. She lay beside her pool; only Jethro was gone; one of Jethro’s sons, a cook in a resort hotel in the Vumba Mountains in Rhodesia, was imprisoned for provisioning and hiding freedom fighters, and Jethro went home. Her own sons had all been commissioned during their military service in another kind of army. There was no correspondence between the two sisters after Pauline left and it is unlikely Olga received hearsay about the platform career of the girl she would have brought up to a different life as her own daughter.
Sasha heard because Pauline passed on the news to him. They could not leave one another be, Sasha and his mother. Pauline phoned once a month and he spoke to her. Before she went into the bedroom and shut the door and dialled the long-distance call, she washed her hands and combed her thick-streaked grey hair at the bathroom mirror: still not too much the old hag. The haughty eyes in the mirror saw Sasha — many Sashas, after even a few months had passed, the last sight of him became a reconstruction out of many, many, like the changing face produced by riffling the pages of one of those booklets of ‘moving pictures’—the expression on the same face drawn on each page different from that of the previous page — that are supposed to have led to the invention of cinematography. There was never much to say to each other. Not ‘What are you doing?’; god knows what he was doing with himself. At least it was something to relate: —I bumped into a woman I know who heard Hillela speak, in Boston recently. Apparently she’s working with some institute concerned with refugees in Africa. It was a seminar at M.I.T. This woman said she was good — knowledgeable. I’d hardly think it was Hillela’s field. — Sasha didn’t respond; what could one find to talk about that would rouse his interest. That old childish fuss over Hillela was forgotten long ago, otherwise Pauline herself couldn’t have brought up her name, to him, so easily. But maybe it was just as well he was crossing her voice with his own, asking whether an acquaintance of his could look up Joe for advice, in London. If she had annoyed him by a judgment in her remark (didn’t she know they annoyed each other always, unavoidably, inevitably, making judgments) and he had pressed her over the implication of what she did think was Hillela’s field, then she would only have made things worse by coming out with it: Hillela’s field was, surely, men.
Liberated Territory
What has been, what was, what will be: nobody else can decide.
That was understood, lying tenderly apart in the biggest bed in America. His choice, to lie apart; he could have been comforted, why not, he knew he was still loved the way he had been loved. It was never any different. Staying would not have made this house safe for him.
But that is what is always said by the one who is going.
No need to leave yet — nobody knew, and nobody could know there was happiness in that house, yes, still there, during those months. Like brother and sister lying there, tempting — but he thought it was wrong. Not for us. Sometimes he panted in his sleep, from his wound. But nothing to be done; tenderness only salts. There would have been many more wounds, because that love would never be any different.
That’s what is always said.
He was thinking about the other one all the time — nearly all the time; sometimes both forgot, in the little American family of three, playing in pyjamas in the tropical warmth of the brownstone’s insulation. What’s he like? What’s he like? You were thinking of nothing else but never said it. You sweated it. The child sensed something; tugged uneasily at those frizzy plaits. You tweaked her ear or nose — What’you staring at, Nomikins, what’s the matter.