Finding two coasters in the corner cabinet in the lounge, she set down the cups on the coffee table. Mark was watching the news and had failed to look at her when she entered the room.
‘I hope it’s all right,’ she said, indicating the coffee. ‘I’m rather lost in a kitchen.’
‘Thank you, I’m sure it’s fine.’ He spoke without looking at her, his eyes on the screen. Not bothering to ask if he minded, Clare turned off the television.
‘Can’t you speak to me as though you were my son, and not just my interlocutor?’
Mark sighed, sipped his coffee, and put down the cup with a force that surprised Clare. ‘You’re expecting me to play too many parts, Mother. You seem to want me to be your confessor and judge, as well as your child. Sometimes I wonder if you even want me to be the last man in your life. I can’t be all of these things at once. If it’s a confessor or a judge that you most need right now, then I suppose that’s what I can be. But if you want a child I can’t play that part any more. You didn’t raise us to be warm. Is there more to your confession about Aunt Nora? Are there further horrors you feel you have to tell me?’
‘If you can bring yourself to listen to this old woman, there is yet only a little more, if you will hear it,’ Clare said, her voice brittle and off-key in her own ears.
‘Of course I can, Mother. That isn’t what I meant. I’m tired, and I’m sorry if I sounded brusque. It wasn’t my intention.’
‘What remains of the Nora saga is the exact circumstance of my betrayal, if it is possible to betray one who is already objectively one’s enemy. After her campaign against me—’
‘Such as you saw it.’
‘Fine, my sense of her campaign against me, or what felt like her attempt to have me declared an unfit mother — after that there was a change of events in my favour. As you know, Stephan was more than a rising star in the Party, but something like its hoped-for Messiah, and he was appointed to a diplomatic post that took him and Nora to Washington, DC. I cannot express how relieved I was to see them leave the country. At last, I thought, she is out of my life! Almost a year passed in great peace and then one day I heard from Nora herself that she and Stephan were returning, and would be in Cape Town for only a few nights before moving to Pretoria. Stephan was being promoted to a senior position in the executive, and all signs pointed to him being tipped for elected office, she told me. As you might guess, the prospect of Nora’s return, and of Stephan’s promotion, filled me with dread. I had visions of her doing whatever it took to remove you from my care, and as soon as I hung up the phone began planning for our own emigration, assuming that would be the only way to keep you safe from her.’
‘And did you see them when they returned to Cape Town?’
‘In a manner of speaking,’ Clare said, the image of Nora and Stephan’s faces as she had last seen them flashing up out of her memory. ‘The day before their return I went to a meeting of one of the groups with which I had begun to affiliate myself. I believed it was mostly a talking shop for like-minded radicals. We had no formal affiliation, no name for what we were. I knew little about the other members except that they were young men and women who were united by their abhorrence of oppression. There were rumours that one of the group, a man who seldom spoke, might have connections with MK, or was even an MK cadre himself. I don’t remember his name, might never have known it, so I can’t be more specific. Everyone knew that Nora was my sister and somehow Stephan came up in the course of the conversation. Here was a chance, I thought, to prove myself interesting to these people I respected, and in the case of the man who seldom spoke, who may or may not have been part of the liberation movement’s armed struggle, perhaps even to prove myself useful. I announced that my sister and brother-in-law were returning home, that Stephan had been recalled, and that they would arrive in Cape Town the following day for a stay of a few nights. The man who seldom spoke suddenly looked more alert and asked if they would be staying with me. I told him no, they would be staying at a guest house in Constantia. I gave him the name, knowing as I did that it was quite possible I was putting my sister’s life in jeopardy. Nora had intimated on the phone that their return was not public knowledge, and that the place they would be staying was also secret as Stephan had received death threats. There had been stories about Stephan and his activities in Washington in the national press, stories about the money he was winning from international investors and the IMF — it had all been widely reported, critically by those who had the courage to criticize, in celebration by the mouthpieces of the Establishment. I knew that in giving away not only their itinerary but also their location in Cape Town I might be endangering both of them. And rather than feeling remorse, what I felt was this torrent of excitement, and even a kind of ecstatic terror, that I had shown myself to be not just a faculty wife and mother, not just a writer who had published very little, but someone with information and knowledge who knew when that knowledge might be useful and was not afraid to act. The man who seldom spoke thanked me for the interesting information, and we moved on to other matters.’
‘And in the following days …?’
‘Two days later they were dead. The police woke me in the middle of the night and took me to identify the bodies. Their faces had been disfigured. Their supposed assassin, John Dlamini, was a man I had never met at any of the gatherings I attended, certainly not the man who seldom spoke and was rumoured to be involved with MK. Dlamini, as you know, was arrested shortly thereafter and, unlike other assassins and would-be assassins in this country — Tsafendas and Pratt, for instance — Dlamini was not found to be insane and unbalanced, but was promptly sentenced to death. He did not protest his innocence or claim to be controlled by a foreign body (human or animal or national), but insisted he was working alone and wished only to destroy the quintessence of the apartheid state, or something to that effect. He died in custody before the execution could be carried out.’
‘Is that the end of your story?’
The coldness of Mark’s voice, the abrupt thwack of his speech in the room, pulled Clare out of her own narrative. She looked down at her lap to find that her hands were shaking. ‘I suppose it is. Will you cross-examine me? Will you call other witnesses?’
‘There can’t be a trial where no crime has been committed. If anything you’re merely a gossip, and your gossiping resulted in the deaths of two people, at least one of whom was wholly innocent.’
‘You mean your Aunt Nora.’
Clare watched as Mark wove his fingers together and frowned. She knew what he must think of her, that she was a monster, that he could never love her again, assuming he ever had. He sighed once more and she wondered whether, in his meetings with clients, with the unambiguously criminal, he showed his frustration and impatience so openly. She hoped for the sake of the innocent that he did not.
At last, his eyes blinking with what looked like fury, he spoke. ‘Nora didn’t do anything wrong apart from trying to intervene in your life and make trouble. I don’t see that she had a political function. If we started killing off everyone who made ordinary mischief, we’d soon depopulate half the planet. But it’s my guess you wouldn’t think that such a bad thing.’
Clare
The vision of you caged and naked, under the beating sun, tethered to the shore and waiting for the sea to take you, for the predators to consume you, is nothing but a vision. If you had been captured I have to hope your fate would have been more prosaic. They would have taken you to the women’s jail in Johannesburg, and after spending time in the block for prisoners awaiting trial, and then submitting to the trial itself, you would have passed the term of your sentence, assuming you were not sentenced to death, in one of the few small but comparatively comfortable whitewashed rooms.