He did not, however, take along one of the other two wives, the black ones, either. Hillela’s place, for him, cannot be filled by anyone else. The first wife resented her but scarcely had any opportunity to demonstrate that resentment. She was already fifty when the President brought Hillela to his capital, and more because of her venerable position as his first wife than her age, regarded as in retirement. She had her house and retainers in the village where she had spent her childhood. The President took Hillela to be presented to her; his escort keeping its distance, they drove alone as they had when they encountered the elephants but his monumental profile with the curved chip of nose was heavily sad: he would have wished to be taking her to his mother, but she had died while he was winning his war in the bush, and he had not even been able to be at her funeral. He repeated, as people do for themselves rather than the one to whom the observation has been addressed again and again: —The eldest is the best of them. All my children. And this one gave birth only to girls. She was very annoyed … blamed me! And then I had five sons with the other. That was worse, because since then she hasn’t been able to blame anyone but herself. Poor woman, she’s all right with her house and her farm, plenty of relations to work it for her. But I think she drinks. When our women drink, their faces get dead-dark and the red from inside their mouths begins to grow out to their lips. She was never a pretty girl, but lively.—
She lived among altar-like pieces of 19th-century furniture which must have come down to her not only from her father — a chief — but from some European missionary family before him. The room was dark and the silences long as Sela’s; the first wife was put out rather than disarmed by the ease with which the white woman made herself at home where she should have been ill at ease in strange surroundings, feeling the reserve of a way of life that doesn’t belong to white people. In the kitchen with the relatives, she got talking as if she were back somewhere she knew well, and tasted the wild spinach being cooked to go with the maize porridge as if it were a treat. When asked whether she had any children: oh yes, a daughter. — A black child. — The old wife took the President’s smiling remark as a boast: this one was young enough to bear him black children.
But the old wife did not live to see whether this would happen. The news came to State House that she had died; as customary with Africans, the President said, there were a half-dozen versions of the apparent cause. He gave her a funeral in keeping with her status. There are many sides to the President no-one would suspect but that Hillela seems to know through some matching in herself, although outwardly they have always appeared an incongruous pair — it is not the matching of beauty in the couple of the Britannia Court photograph. Sadness, like every other emotion, is diffused powerfully by the President’s physical presence: after the funeral it was again in the lament of the rhythm of his breathing, the lie of his hands and the look of the nape of his neck, so broad that the delicate, tiny ears appear stamped back into it. He was ashamed because he could not manage to weep at the funeral. (Hillela was listening, if he wanted to talk.) It was his first woman he was burying, the mother of his daughters; the young man who had been her husband was going down into the grave, too. Yet he had no tears.
Hillela lay in bed and patted the place beside her. He padded over the cool marble floor of what had been the governor’s bedroom, reluctantly; but took her nightgown off over her head and gazed at what he had revealed to himself. He moved in beside her; moved on.
The mother of the Colonel, the second wife, has treated Hillela with respect that Hillela has sometimes been able to cajole into some kind of affection — but the second wife cannot make a sister out of a white woman. The respect — for her usurper, a foreigner, it’s not as if the President had done the normal thing and simply taken a third wife from among his own people — probably comes about because the second wife knows Hillela went to protect the eldest son in some far country, after he had done a wicked thing and joined the people who wanted to kill his father. The Colonel himself must have told his mother; and told her never to talk about it, because it has never been mentioned between Hillela and her. She does not live in State House but has a large house of her own, in town, and maybe the President still visits her occasionally; she was married at fifteen and is not much older than Hillela. Visitors entertained at State House in the last few years have come upon charming young children chasing the peacocks and tame guinea-fowl from their roosting places in the flamboyant trees, and riding bicycles over the lawns. The visitors presume these are the children of the President by his present wife (although they look quite black — it is said those genes prevail in mixed progeniture). But no-one knows for sure whether Hillela has had any children as the President’s wife; whether she ever had any child other than the namesake. It seems unlikely; the President has seen her in a light other than that of perpetuator of a blood-line. Any woman could be that. In fact, no man wanted Hillela to be like any other woman, would allow her to be even if it had been possible for her, herself. Not even the one who supplied a brown-stone. The charming children, who have the composure and good manners of black and the precocity of white upper-class children, dressed by Hillela and educated at schools chosen by her, probably have been born to the President since his third marriage, by the second wife. Anyway, that one will never lose her position as mother of the best of them. That is something between the President and her no other woman will ever have. It would not trouble Hillela. What others perceive as character is often what has been practised long as necessity; the President’s highly intelligent intuition, that has made him so successful in his allocation of portfolios in his government, recognized the day she hopped into the hired car and set off for Mombasa with him that Hillela is a past mistress of adaptation. But Hillela has not been taken in by this African family; she has disposed it around her. Hers is the non-matrilineal centre that no-one resents because no-one has known it could exist. She has invented it. This is not the rainbow family.
The President and his wife were hosts to experts from Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Hungary, East Germany and the Soviet Union attending a workshop on his country’s trade and economic links with Eastern European countries (Hillela entertained some old friends at State House). The President succeeded in obtaining a loan from the World Bank to form his Rural Development Corporation for the upgrading of provincial towns. Abdu Diouf of Senegal (an old friend of the President, this one), then Chairman of the OAU, paid the President’s country a state visit. It was also the year Pauline was back in Africa.
The monthly telephone calls to her son had tailed off several years earlier. But at least he made the effort to reply to her letters irregularly, and she wrote regularly although the letters were about people he did not know and a life far removed from what mother and son had experienced together. That was childhood and adolescence; their battleground, to be avoided.
There were no letters from him and when she tried to telephone, she heard the plaintive siren of disconnection. It was a voice that was no voice; an alarm. Joe got in touch with his old colleagues in Johannesburg and they investigated. It was as Pauline had known, as she had told Joe, she knew from that mindless voice — Sasha was in detention. It was logical for Joe to be the one to fly back, since he was the man to deal with the law, legal representation, prisoners’ rights—