"Please." Craig heard the desperate note in his own voice. "Just a minute more. I have been searching' for a chance to apologize."
"That isn't necessary," she said. "It was presumptuous of me to expect you to like my work." Her tone was not in the least conciliatory. "I guess I asked for it and did you ever let me have it! "Your work your photographs-" his voice dropped they frightened me. That was why my reaction was so spiteful, so childish Now she turned to look at him for the first time and the moon silvered the planes of her face. "Frightened you?" she asked.
"Terrified me. You see, I wasn't able to work. I was ing to believe that it had been only a one-off thing, beg inn that the book was a fluke, and there was no real talent left in me. I kept going back to the cupboard and each time it was bare--2 she was staring at him now, her lips slightly parted and her eyes mysterious cups of darkness and then you hit me with those damned photographs, and dared me to match them." She shook her head slowly.
"You might not have meant that, but that's what it was a challenge. A challenge I didn't have the courage to accept. I was afraid, I lashed out at you, and I have been regretting it ever since." "You liked them? "she asked.
"They shook my little world. They showed me Africa again, and filled me with longing. When I saw them, I knew what was missing in me. I was struck with homesickness likea little boy on his first lonely night at boarding school He felt a choking in his throat, and was unashamed of it. "It was those phQjographs of yours that made me come back here."
"I didn't understand," she said, and they were both silent. Craig knew that if he spoke ago , in, it might come out as a sob, for the tears of self-pity were prickling the rims of his eyelids.
Down in the encampment below them someone began to sing. It was a fine African tenor voice that carried faint but clear to the hilltop, so that Craig could recognize the words. It was an ancient Matabele regimental fighting
_.(7 chant, but now it was sung as a lament, seeming to capture all the suffering and tragedy of a continent; and not even the hyena cried while the voice sang: "The Moles are beneath the earth, "Are they dead?" asked the daughters of Mashobane.
Listen, pretty maids, do you not hear Something stirring, in the darkness?" The singer's voice died away at last, and Craig imagined all the hundreds of other young men lying in wakeful silence on their sleeping-mats, haunted and saddened by the song as he was.
Then Sally-Anne spoke again. "Thank you for telling me," she said. J know what it must have cost you." She touched his bare upper arm, a light brush of her fingertips which thrilled along his nerve ends and made his heart trip.
Then she uncurled her legs and dropped lightly off the parapet and slipped away down the communication trench.
He heard the sacking flap fall over the entrance to her dugout and the flare of a match as she lit a candle.
He knew he would be unable to sleep, so he stayed on alone listening to the African night and watching the moon. Slowly he felt the words rising up in him like water in a well that has been pumped down to the mud. His sadness fell away, and was replaced by excitement.
He went down to his own dugout and lit one of the candles, stuck it in a niche of the wall and from his holdall took his notebook and ballpoint pen. The words were bubbling and frothing in his brain, like boiling milk. He put the point of the pen to the lined white paper and it sped away across the page likea living thing. Words came spurting out of him in a joyous, long, pent-up orgasm and All spilled untidily over the paper. He stopped only to relight fresh candles from the guttering stump.
In the morning his eyes were red and burning from the strain. He felt weak and shaky as though he had run too far and too fast, but the notebook was three, quarters filled and he was strangely elated.
His elation lasted him well into the hot brilliant morning, enhanced by Sally Anne change of attitude towards him. She was still reserved and quiet, but at least she listened when he spoke and replied seriously and thoughtfully. Once or twice she even smiled, and then her too-large mouth and nose were at last in harmony with the rest of her face. Craig found it difficult to concentrate on the plight of the men that they had come to study, until he realized Sally-Anne's compassion and listened to her speaking freely for the first time.
"It would be so easy to dismiss them as brutish criminals," she murmured, watching their expressionless faces and guarded eyes, "until you realize how they have been deprived of all humanizing influences. Most of them were abducted from their schoolrooms in their early teens and taken into the guerrilla training-camps. They have nothing, have never had any possession of their own except an AK 47 rifle. How can we expect them to respect the persons and properties of others? Craig, please ask that one how old he is"
"14
"He does not knoW," Craig translated for her. "He does not know when he' was born, nor where his parents are."
"He does not even have a simple birthright," Sally' Anne pointed out, and suddenly Craig remembered how churlishly he could reject a wine that was not exactly to his taste, or how thoughtlessly he could order a new suit of clothing, or enter the first-class cabin of an airliner while these men wore only a ragged pair of shorts, without even a pair of shoes or a blanket to protect them.
"The abyss between the haves and the have-nots of this world will suck us all into destruction," Sally' Anne said as she recorded through her Nikon lens that dumb-animal resignation that lies beyond despair. "Ask that one how he is treated here," she insisted, and when Craig spoke to him the man stared at him without comprehension, as though the question was meaningless, and slowly Craig's sense of well-being burned off like mist in the morning.
In the open huts the lessons were political orientation, and the role of the responsible citizen in the socialist state.
On the blackboards, diagrams showed the relationship of parliament to the judiciary and the executive branches of the state. They had been copied onto the boards in a laboured, semi-literate hand by bored instructors and were recited parrot-fashion by the rows of squatting detainees.