one of the biggest diamonds in the world after the Koh-i-noor’s hundred-and-nine carats but that was found in India
The hand, his hand, pressed fingers into her thigh through the cotton flounce as if testing to see what was real about her; and stopped, and then out of the hesitation went down and, under the rug, up under the gauze of skirt, moved over her flesh. She did not look at him and he did not look at her.
and there are industrial gems you can cut glass with make bits for certain drills the hardest substance known
At the taut lip of her pants he hesitated again, no hurry, all something she was learning, he was teaching, the anticipation in his fingertips, he stroked along one of the veins in there in the delicate membrane-like skin that is at the crevice between leg and body (like the skin that the sun on manoeuvres couldn’t reach in the crook of his elbow) just before the hair begins. And then he went under the elastic edge and his hand was soft on soft hair, his fingers like eyes attentive to her.
look at this veld nothing suggests one of the greatest ever, anywhere, down there, down in what we call Blue Earth the diamondiferous core
She has no clear idea of where his hand is now, what she feels is that they are kissing, they are in each other’s mouths although they cannot look to one another.
Are you asleep back there? — the mother is remarking her own boredom with the mine — he is eight years older, able to speak: Just listening. His finger explores deep down in the dark, the hidden entrance to some sort of cave with its slippery walls and smooth stalagmite; she’s found, he’s found her.
The car is passing the mine processing plant.
product of the death and decay of forests millennia ago just as coal is but down there the ultimate alchemy you might say
Those others, the parents, they have no way of knowing. It has happened, it is happening under the old wooly rug that was all they can provide for her. She is free; of them. Found; and they don’t know where she is.
At the camp, the father shakes the soldier’s hand longer than in the usual grip. The mother for a moment looks as if she might give him a peck on the cheek, Godspeed, but it is not her way to be familiar.
Aren’t you going to say goodbye? She’s not a child, good heavens, a mother shouldn’t have to remind of manners.
He’s standing outside one of the tents with his hands hanging open at his sides as the car is driven away and the attention is upon her until, with his furry narrowed sight, he’ll cease to be able to make her out while she still can see him, see him until he is made one with all the others in khaki, replicated, crossing and crowding, in preparation to embark.
If he had been killed in that war they would have heard, through the grandmother’s connections.
Is it still you; somewhere, old?
HOMAGE
Read my lips.
Because I don’t speak. You’re sitting there, and when the train lurches you seem to bend forward to hear. But I don’t speak.
If I could find them I could ask for the other half of the money I was going to get when I’d done it, but they’re gone. I don’t know where to look. I don’t think they’re here, anymore, they’re in some other country, they move all the time and that’s how they find men like me. We leave home because of governments overthrown, a conscript on the wrong side; no work, no bread or oil in the shops, and when we cross a border we’re put over another border, and another. What is your final destination? We don’t know; we don’t know where we can stay, where we won’t be sent on somewhere else, from one tent camp to another in a country where you can’t get papers.
I don’t ever speak.
They find us there, in one of these places — they found me and they saved me, they can do anything, they got me in here with papers and a name they gave me; I buried my name, no-one will ever dig it out of me. They told me what they wanted done and they paid me half the money right away. I ate and I had clothes to wear and I had a room in a hotel where people read the menu outside three different restaurants before deciding where to have their meal. There was free shampoo in the bathroom and the key to a private safe where liquor was kept instead of money.
They had prepared everything for me. They had followed him for months and they knew when he went where, at what time — although he was such an important man, he would go out privately with his wife, without his State bodyguards, because he liked to pretend to be an ordinary person or he wanted to be an ordinary person. They knew he didn’t understand that that was impossible for him; and that made it possible for them to pay me to do what they paid me to do.
I am nobody; no country counts me in its census, the name they gave me doesn’t exist: nobody did what was done. He took time off, with his wife by the arm, to a restaurant with double doors to keep out the cold, the one they went to week after week, and afterwards, although I’d been told they always went home, they turned into a cinema. I waited. I had one beer in a bar, that’s all, and I came back. People coming out of the cinema didn’t show they recognised him because people in this country like to let their leaders be ordinary. He took his wife, like any ordinary citizen, to that corner where the entrance goes down to the subway trains and as he stood back to let her pass ahead of him I did it. I did it just as they paid me to, as they tested my marksmanship for, right in the back of the skull. As he fell and as I turned to run, I did it again, as they paid me to, to make sure.
She made the mistake of dropping on her knees to him before she looked up to see who had done it. All she could tell the police, the papers and the inquiry was that she saw the back of a man in dark clothing, a leather jacket, leaping up the flight of steps that leads from the side-street. This particular city is one of steep rises and dark alleys. She never saw my face. Years later now, (I read in the papers) she keeps telling people how she never saw the face, she never saw the face of the one who did it, if only she had looked up seconds sooner — they would have been able to find me, the nobody who did it would have become me. She thinks all the time about the back of my head in the dark cap (it was not dark, really, it was a light green-and-brown check, an expensive cap I’d bought with the money, afterwards I threw it in the canal with a stone in it). She thinks of my neck, the bit of my neck she could have seen between the cap and the collar of the leather jacket (I couldn’t throw that in the canal, I had it dyed). She thinks of the shine of the leather jacket across my shoulders under the puddle of light from a street-lamp that stands at the top of the flight, and my legs moving so fast I disappear while she screams.
The police arrested a drug-pusher they picked up in the alley at the top of the steps. She couldn’t say whether or not it was him because she had no face to remember. The same with others the police raked in from the streets and from those with criminal records and political grievances; no face. So I had nothing to fear. All the time I was being pushed out of one country into another I was afraid, afraid of having no papers, afraid of being questioned, afraid of being hungry, but now I had nothing to be afraid of. I still have nothing to fear. I don’t speak.
I search the papers for whatever is written about what was done; the inquiry doesn’t close, the police, the people, this whole country, keep on searching. I read all the theories; sometimes, like now, in the subway train, I make out on the back of someone’s newspaper a new one. An Iranian plot, because of this country’s hostility towards some government there. A South African attempt to revenge this country’s sanctions against some racist government there, at the time. I could tell who did it, but not why. When they paid me the first half of the money — just like that, right away! — they didn’t tell me and I didn’t ask. Why should I ask; what government, on any side, anywhere, would take me in. They were the only people to offer me anything.