Debriefing is like destabilization, the term doesn’t describe the method and experience. Day by day, divested of the boots, fatigues, the beret and the beard, first-class flights, the house in Europe, the dinners of honour, the prestige of intelligence — his life. He has been discovered there beneath it, sitting quite still on a chair in a dark room, only a naked full neck pulsating. In the silence after the tape ends it is possible to think there is the distinct sound of ants moving in an unwavering path.
They knew they couldn’t have it for nothing — his life. They haven’t provided the house with a garden that was part of the deal. Or the car. Of course, he can go out. Go where he likes, it was only for the first six months that he was restricted. Once they know they can trust him, he’s not of interest to them any longer. Nothing more, now, to lead them to. Once he’s told everything, once he’s been displayed, what use is he to them?
They are right. Perhaps they will never come to him again.
The girl emerges from the bedroom, she sleeps late.
There is a girl. They didn’t supply her. But they might have; she was there in the waiting room when he went under surveillance to a doctor. He politely let her take her turn with the doctor first, and when she came out they got talking. I don’t see how I’m ever supposed to follow this diet, she said, what can you buy if you haven’t got foreign currency — you know how it is, living here.
Yes — for the first time he saw it was so: he lives here. Perhaps it was possible for him to get what she needed? She didn’t ask questions; access to foreign currency is not a subject to be discussed.
The girl’s been in the bedroom all morning, just as if there was no one there. Now the dim room prolongs her lassitude, no break between night and day. Pink feet with hammer toes drag over the floor; she makes tasting sounds with her tongue against her palate. She takes a deep breath, holds then expels it; because he doesn’t speak.
So you don’t want to eat?
She has lifted the covering plate and touches the yellow mound of the yolk with her forefinger; the congealed surface dents shinily. She wipes her finger on the T-shirt that is her nightgown. A sprig of houseplant she brought and put in a glass, one day, is on the table where she set it down then; in the cloudy water, the darkened room, it has sent out one frail, floating thread of root. Ants are wavering at the rim of the glass. The thin buttermilk smell of her fluids and his semen comes to him as she bends to follow the ants’ trail from the floor. After he had finished with her, last night, she said: You don’t love me.
He was assailed by the sight of the twelve-year-old child and the Commander.
Then she heard something she couldn’t believe. The man weeping. She drew away in fear and repugnance to the side of the bed.
She hangs about the room behind him, this morning, knowing he’s not going to speak.
Why don’t we go to the beach. Let’s have a swim. I’d love to go and eat some prawns. We can take a bus. There’s a good place … it’s cheap. And don’t you feel like a swim, I’m dying to get into the water… come on.
She waits patiently.
Has he shaken his head — there was some slight movement. There is nothing in the room she can turn to as a pretext to keep her there, waiting to see if he accepts her forgiveness, her humble understanding of her function. After a few minutes she goes back into the bedroom and comes out dressed.
I’m going. (Qualifies:) Going for a swim.
This time he nods and leans to take a cigarette.
She hasn’t opened the door yet. She’s hesitating, as if she thinks she ought to make some gesture, doesn’t know what, might come over and touch his hair.
She’s gone.
After the inhalation of the cigarette has become his breath and body, he gets up and goes to the window. He pulls aside the curtains to left and right. They are parched and faded, burned out. And now he is exposed: there is the bright stare of the beggared city, city turned inside out, no shelter there for life, the old men propped against empty façades to die, the orphaned children running in packs round the rubbish dumps, the men without ears and women with a stump where there was an arm, their clamour rising at him, rising six floors in the sun. He can’t go out because they are all around him, the people.
Jump. The stunning blow of the earth as it came up to flexed knees, the parachute sinking silken.
He stands, and then backs into the room.
Not now; not yet.
Once Upon a Time
Someone has written to ask me to contribute to an anthology of stories for children. I reply that I don’t write children’s stories; and he writes back that at a recent congress/book fair/seminar a certain novelist said every writer ought to write at least one story for children. I think of sending a postcard saying I don’t accept that I ‘ought’ to write anything.
And then last night I woke up — or rather was wakened without knowing what had roused me.
A voice in the echo-chamber of the subconscious?
A sound.
A creaking of the kind made by the weight carried by one foot after another along a wooden floor. I listened. I felt the apertures of my ears distend with concentration. Again: the creaking. I was waiting for it; waiting to hear if it indicated that feet were moving from room to room, coming up the passage — to my door. I have no burglar bars, no gun under the pillow, but I have the same fears as people who do take these precautions, and my windowpanes are thin as rime, could shatter like a wineglass. A woman was murdered (how do they put it) in broad daylight in a house two blocks away, last year, and the fierce dogs who guarded an old widower and his collection of antique clocks were strangled before he was knifed by a casual labourer he had dismissed without pay.
I was staring at the door, making it out in my mind rather than seeing it, in the dark. I lay quite still — a victim already — but the arrhythmia of my heart was fleeing, knocking this way and that against its body-cage. How finely tuned the senses are, just out of rest, sleep! I could never listen intently as that in the distractions of the day; I was reading every faintest sound, identifying and classifying its possible threat.
But I learned that I was to be neither threatened nor spared. There was no human weight pressing on the boards, the creaking was a buckling, an epicentre of stress. I was in it. The house that surrounds me while I sleep is built on undermined ground; far beneath my bed, the floor, the house’s foundations, the stopes and passages of gold mines have hollowed the rock, and when some face trembles, detaches and falls, three thousand feet below, the whole house shifts slightly, bringing uneasy strain to the balance and counterbalance of brick, cement, wood and glass that hold it as a structure around me. The misbeats of my heart tailed off like the last muffled flourishes on one of the wooden xylophones made by the Chopi and Tsonga migrant miners who might have been down there, under me in the earth at that moment. The stope where the fall was could have been disused, dripping water from its ruptured veins; or men might now be interred there in the most profound of tombs.