‘I suppose I cannot, if you put it that way.’
‘So if your crime was not political, then amnesty is not possible. Assuming you are guilty of what you suspect, you are a mere criminal in the eyes of the law, and should be treated as such.’
‘And what does that mean?’
‘It means nothing. Because you are guilty of nothing. Loose lips sink ships. You spoke when you should have had better sense, but you didn’t pull the trigger. You did not plan the killings. You are not even an accomplice. You have overplayed your role in history, Mother, and I suggest you do nothing else but get over it. I should find you in contempt for wasting the court’s time and let them put you in irons and send you down. Perhaps a little punishment would silence your mind.’
‘You make me out to be just some cloistered housewife, peddling words. Nothing but a paper tiger in a paper cage.’
‘You’ve sentenced yourself to your own imprisonment, Mother.’ Mark stuffed the newspaper in his attaché and clicked it shut, scrambled the twin combination locks on the case, and straightened his tie. ‘You never needed me in the first place.’
Clare spent the rest of the morning trying to read but found it easier to plot other plantings of tulips with Adam than to focus her mind on words. Words were too prone to suggest other words, and in reading an innocuous sentence like ‘the fish leapt from the lake and turned in mid-air, catching the light as the gemsbok charged into the water’, Clare’s mind could drift to memories of herself as a child, and her sister as a teenager, and, once again, the cake emerging from the pantry, crowned with shit, the accusation that followed, the whole history of their lives as sisters. Tulips and weeding, the silence of garden work with a man she had come to understand a little and trust a bit more — it was an easier way to make the day pass as she waited for her son’s inevitable return.
At least, she assumed it was inevitable. She checked the guest room and found his suitcase was still there, his clothes in the closet. He had left the house after breakfast, and she expected he would be coming back for dinner, although he had given no indication of his plans. But for the suitcase, she might have assumed he had already returned to Johannesburg, to the wife who disliked Clare and the grandchildren she never saw.
As evening came, and still with no word from Mark, she put her defrosted dinner in the oven and watched the news while the nut loaf baked. Taxi drivers, irate that their monopoly should be challenged, had opened fire with automatic weapons on a city bus full of morning commuters coming from the townships; three were dead, scores injured. This was not what was supposed to happen, not how things were intended to work out after all the decades of darkness, but Clare could no longer force herself to feign surprise. Surprise and outrage were taxing emotions. It was easier and less exhausting to resign oneself to the state of things and hope to live out the full span of one’s natural life as little disturbed by the world as might be possible.
Following the news were the soaps and, after discovering that Zinzi and Frikkie were going to be married against the protestations of their two families, Clare began to feel herself nodding off. She made a cup of coffee and lowered the blinds in the kitchen, so that Donald Thacker, his kitchen windows open and lights on next door, could not look in on her. He had taken to waving from his own windows when he caught sight of Clare in hers. It was an intrusion too far, to be hailed like that as one went about one’s evening.
Perked up by the caffeine, she decided to watch a locally made espionage thriller about a mercenary who had been involved in every ‘low-intensity conflict’ of the second half of the twentieth century — the Congo, Angola, Nicaragua, etc. — and specialized in infiltrating liberation movements believed to have Communist backing. In the film, the man finally meets his match in the head of a special MK unit planning the Church Street bombings in 1983. Over the course of the film the mercenary infiltrates the unit, but begins to find himself sympathizing with the very ANC agents he is attempting to undermine, and whose bombs he has been ordered to sabotage, in hopes that they will blow up themselves instead of the South African Air Force headquarters.
Clare fell asleep before she could discover what happened to the mercenary — whether he became a turncoat and helped the ANC, or proceeded with the sabotage. She could not remember the details of the actual case, but seemed to recall that things had not gone strictly as planned. She assumed, though, that the film was fiction, that no mercenary mole working on behalf of the apartheid government had been involved, at least not in that particular case.
She opened her eyes to find the test pattern humming on the television screen, and above that the insistent buzzing of the intercom. It was ten past midnight.
‘Who is that? Mark?’ she shouted, squinting at the intercom’s video monitor and turning on the floodlights to illuminate the front gate.
‘I’ve lost your clicker, Mother,’ he said, leaning out the window of his hire car. ‘You don’t need to shout. It’s not a transatlantic link.’
‘Are you alone?’
‘Yes, I’m alone. It’s perfectly safe for heaven’s sake. Just hurry up before someone does come along.’
Clare pushed the button to open the gate and watched on the monitor as Mark’s car lurched up the drive. She waited until the gate had closed, certain that no one had followed him in, before opening the front door. Perhaps Marie’s idea for a double set of gates was not so ludicrous. It was possible to imagine how one might be followed or ambushed. It drove Clare mad that her own country could make her think in this damnable way, make her lose all trust and belief in the best nature of her fellow citizens.
‘What are you still doing up?’ gesturing at Clare’s creased day clothes, her shirt stained with red wine and a glob of drying gravy.
‘What else did you expect me to do? You didn’t call, you didn’t let me know when to expect you.’
‘I thought I said—’ stammering, unknotting his tie, out of breath and still holding his attaché case in one hand ‘—I thought I explained that I had an all-day meeting with clients, and dinner with colleagues this evening.’
‘You charged out of the house without saying a word to me. Perhaps you mentioned it yesterday.’
‘I was feeling distracted this morning and not in the best of moods. I apologize unreservedly. Honestly, Mother, I’ve had a guilty conscience about you all day, after what I said to you this morning.’ He paced around at the entrance to the lounge, still working his tie with one hand, until it came loose and he was able to whip it off and throw it over a chair. It was unlike him to shed something in this way, to be anything less than fastidious.
She picked up their earlier conversation as though there had been no lapse. ‘Perhaps I have held an inflated sense of my own importance, but I hoped you might understand why this should be so. There is nothing to prove that Nora and Stephan’s deaths were not the result of my carelessness, Mark, just as there is, admittedly, nothing concrete to say that they were. But I cannot help feeling what I do. Harsh words or the suggestion of draconian punishment, those do not help in a case like mine. I do not respond well to threats of punishment. When I raised the matter with you, what I wished for was an open engagement. I spoke of it only because I respect your mind, and your sense of justice, not because I wished to burden you. I want you to understand what haunts me, what increasingly and quite literally keeps me awake at night. If I cannot tell you, then whom can I tell?’