— You were not. You are not. Not my kind of kid.—
— You were exceptional. From what you’ve told me.—
— No. Go to church if the parents do. Exactly. You’re all atheists, yes? But being brought up in a house like your father’s is growing up in a devout family. Perhaps nobody preached Marx or Lenin… They just lay around the house, leather-bound with gold tooling, in everybody’s mind — the family bible. It was all taken in with your breakfast cornflakes. But the people who came to your house weren’t there for tea-parties with your mother or bridge evenings with cigars. They weren’t your father’s golf-playing fellow doctors or ladies your mother went shopping with, ay? — They came together to make a revolution. That was ordinary, to you. That—intention. It was ordinary. It was the normal atmosphere in that house.—
— You have the craziest ideas about that house. — She was brought up short by her own use of the definition ‘that house’, distancing the private enclosures of her being.
— Keep still. You’ll be nicked.—
— You seem to think people go around talking revolution as if they were deciding where to go for their summer holidays. Or which new car to buy. You romanticize. — The cartilage of her nostrils stiffened. The patient manner patronized him, displayed the deceptive commonplace that people accustomed to police harassment use before the uninitiated.
— I don’t mean in so many words — their preoccupations supposed the revolution must be achieved; the scale of what mattered and what didn’t, what moved you and didn’t, in your life every day, presupposed it. Didn’t it?—
She had stayed the attack of the scissors, holding up almost aggressively a jagged piece of mirror to see what he was taking off her nape hair. She was murmuring, complaining of him without attentive coherence. — I went to school, I had my friends, our place was always full of people who did all sorts of different jobs and talked about everything under the sun…you were there once, you saw—
— What’d you celebrate in your house? The occasions were when somebody got off, not guilty, in a political trial. Leaders came out of prison. A bunch of blacks made a success of a boycott or defied a law. There was a mass protest or a march, a strike… Those were your nuptials and fiestas. When blacks were shot by the police, when people were detained, when leaders went to jail, when new laws shifted populations you’d never even seen, banned and outlawed people, those were your mournings and your wakes. These were the occasions you were taught (precept and example, oh I know that, nothing authoritarian about your father) were the real ones, not your own private kicks and poor little ingrown miseries. — But where are they, those miseries, and your great wild times? I look at you…—
— Oh there were parties, all right… Christmas trees, weddings. People had affairs with other people’s wives… — You don’t have a corner on that. I don’t know about my mother and father — I doubt it. Although Lionel was very attractive to women. You probably saw that at the trial — I think most good doctors are….There were terrible rows and antagonisms between people…—
— But between the faithful; yes, political ones.—
She continued her list. — And there were deaths.—
In the middle of the night, he began to speak.
— But isn’t it true — you had your formula for dealing with that, too.—
She lay and listened to the seething and sweeping of the bauhinia tree against the tin roof.
— Isn’t it? A prescribed way to deal with the frail and wayward flesh that gets sick and wasted and drowns. Some people scream and beat their breasts, others try to follow into the next world, table-tapping and so on. Among you, the cause is what can’t die. Your mother didn’t live to carry it on, others did. The little boy, your brother didn’t grow up to carry it on, others will. It’s immortality. If you can accept it. Christian resignation’s only one example. A cause more important than an individual is another. The same con, the future in place of the present. Lives you can’t live, instead of your own. You didn’t cry when your father was sentenced. I saw. People said how brave. Some people say, a cold fish. But it’s conditioning, brain-washing: more like a trained seal, maybe.—
— What do you do when something terrible happens? — Before he answered she spoke again, from the outline of her profile seen as the valleys and peaks of a night horizon beside him. — What would you do — nothing like that’s ever happened to you.—
— Want to pull the world down round my ears, that’s what.—
— Pretty useless.—
— I don’t give a fuck about what’s ‘useful’. The will is my own. The emotion’s my own. The right to be inconsolable. When I feel, there’s no ‘we’, only ‘I’.—
They whispered in the dark, children telling secrets. He got up and closed the window on the swaying, battering windy blackness. He kept a cassette player on the floor beside the bed, and he felt for the keys and pressed one on the tinkly, choppy surprise of Scott Joplin’s music. The gay, simple progressions climbed and strutted about the room. Her feet fidgeted under the bedclothes, slowly took on rhythm like a cat’s paws kneading. He threw back the covers and they watched the silhouettes of their waving feet, wagging like tongues, talking like hands. Soon they got up and began to dance in the dark, their shapes flying and entangling, a jigging and thumping and whirling, a giggling, gasping as mysterious as the movement of rats on the rafters, or the swarming of bees, taking shelter under the tin roof.
The one in the church-going hat who came to hear sentence pronounced on Lionel Burger was the relative to whom the children were sent the single time when both parents were arrested together. She was a sister of Burger and she and her husband had a farm and ran the local hotel in the dorp of the same district.
Rosa had been armed very young by her parents against the shock of such contingencies by the assumption that imprisonment was part of the responsibilities of grown-up life, like visiting patients (her father) or going to work each day in town (once her mother was banned from working as a trade unionist, she ran the buying office of a co-operative for blacks and coloureds). At eight years old Rosa could tell people the name by which the trial, in which her father and mother were two of the accused, was known, the Treason Trial, and explain that they had been refused bail which meant they couldn’t come home. Tony perhaps did not realize where they were; Auntie Velma encouraged the idea that he was ‘on holiday’ on the farm — an attitude the parents would not have thought ‘correct’ and that their daughter, resenting any deviation from her parents’ form of trust as a criticism and betrayal of them, tried to counter. But the five-year-old boy was being allowed to help make bricks: if he had lived to be a man perhaps he would never have outgrown — given up? — this happy seclusion of what he himself was seeing, touching, feeling, from anything outside it.
Baasie was left behind. Rosa had flown into a temper over this — the way to tears through a display of anger — but she was told by Lily Letsile that Baasie wouldn’t like to be out in the veld.
— He would.—
— No, he’s scared, he’s scared for the cows, the sheeps, the snakes—
A lying singsong. Lily and Auntie Velma both used it; whereas Rosa believed her parents never lied. Baasie, the black boy almost Rosa’s age who lived with the Burger family, went to the private school run illegally by one of the Burgers’ associates that Rosa herself had attended until she was too old and had to go to the school for white girls. He was not afraid of anything except sleeping alone, Alsatian dogs, and learning how to swim. He and Rosa had often shared a bed when they were as little as Tony, they scuttled wildly together from that particular breed of dog and fought for the anchorage of wet hair on Lionel Burger’s warm breast in the cold swimming-pool. Baasie was sent to a grandmother; he did not seem to have another mother (he had Rosa’s mother, anyway) and his father, an African National Congress organizer from the Transkei, moved about too much to be able to take care of him.