I want to tell her, so she'll know what it's like to know. Why shouldn't she. I've tried. I said to her, he's different since he's out of prison — I mean, do you think Dad's all right? She laughed, impatient with me. She's always in a hurry. — All right! Who wouldn't be feeling good to get out! D'you expect him to be moping around like you?—
And of course she doesn't have anything to do with his body, any more, she's touching boys. My mother doesn't know about her either. I'm the only one.
Another thing he used to do, like going straight to the fridge for a glass of water, he used to call, Aila? Aila? if she wasn't in the first room he entered. He doesn't do that. If she's busy in another room he's sometimes home for half an hour or so before she knows he's there. In her innocence she takes this as one of the benefits we've won for ourselves, for the cause, for freedom: this house has privacy, it's not like the old one in the ghetto where we were together all the time. It's a space he deserves. It's something we have to be grateful to him for. He's been to prison for principles like this. When they came and took him away she kept looking around where she stood, as if a cleaver had come down as I'd seen it split a sheep carcass when she sent me to the butcher, lopping away a part of her she couldn't feel, yet. I went and took her hand but mine wasn't what was lost. I think they'd always been together in everything, she couldn't believe he was going off calmly (as he did) to an experience neither could ever have imagined would happen to them when they were young. (She was only eighteen when they married, just about the same age as my sister is now.) All the times away at meetings hadn't prepared her for this; from those he had always come home and called, Aila. And then he came out of prison with an experience she hadn't gone through with him, the way I suppose they'd had us — the children — together, and made the move to Johannesburg, and taught Baby and me to be polite but not to be afraid of the whites living in the same street because to be afraid was to accept that we didn't have the right to live there. It isn't exactly that my mother seems to want to find a way to make up, to him, for the unimaginable experience he has had on his own. (Visiting someone in prison you only have them shown to you for a few minutes, Baby and I went with her sometimes and he had been taken out of his cell, we never saw it, he talked through glass.) It's more that having been in prison for the cause of freedom has made him someone elect, not to be followed in his private thoughts by ordinary people. Like herself. Like us. She once told Baby and me she remembered, when she was very small, her grandfather looking so different, wearing a white turban when he returned from Mecca, that she ran away and hid.
What I'd like to know is does prison give my father the freedom to do what he's doing. Is it all right so long as she doesn't know. That is what he was getting me to agree to when he made me look at him across the table that night after the cinema. But it works both ways. I can play hooky whenever I like; he can't ask where I'm going, where I've been. Because I know where he's going, where he's been. He can't order me, during the holidays, to finish reading the set-works for next term. He sees me with Sportsday, under his nose, instead of King Lear that he can quote reams of. An ungrateful child is sharper than a serpent's tooth. I don't want to be in the know with him. I don't want to ask him for anything. in case he can't refuse. I'll bet I could bring up the question of a motorbike again now, and maybe I'd get it.
It's easy to refuse to ask for things. But he knows I can't speak — to my mother; I can't refuse to be in the know, with him.
I'm not a child. If people come out oí prison, if they've been lopped off, lost; there's love. Isn't there? It's a way to make up for anything, so people say, from the time you're a kid. Adults. In church, in school; in sex magazines. How to love, all kinds, all love. She comes out of the bathroom and smiles goodnight at me, I'm too old to be kissed unless it's a birthday or some other occasion, and she goes into their bedroom with her hair in her shiny plait down the back of her dressing-gown. They sleep in the same bed, but does he love her, after he's come from the other one? I never used to think about them — him, my mother — that way. I don't want to think about it now. I don't want to think he pretends she's pink and thick and soft; as I pretend, in dreams, that I'm doing things to them, the blondes in full-page spreads I tear out.
Sonny was not prepared for a visit granted to someone monitoring for a human rights organization. Friends and even relatives who had applied to see him had been denied permission; political comrades dared not show themselves for fear they'd be locked up, as well. For three months he saw no-one from outside. Then he saw only Aila, and once or twice the children were allowed to accompany her. That was as he had expected. He knew he was on his way to prison from the days back in the coloured location of his home-town on the Reef when he had led his pupils across the veld to the black location — as he still called those places, then. Or if he didn't know it, he should have; he realized this as, instinctively taking up one form of political action after another, he understood that the mystery of the meaning of life he and Aila had vaguely known to be contained in living useful lives was no mystery. For them, their kind, black like the others, there was only one meaning: the political struggle. (As he loved the magnificent choices of Shakespearean language, the crudely reductive terms of political concepts were an embarrassment to him, but he had to use them, like everybody else.)
Family matters. It was the rule in prison that only family matters could be discussed during visits. Well, these were what always had been discussed between Aila and him. He asked if Will was managing to keep up, in maths. If Baby was being helpful or spending too much time at parties. Aila reassured him; everything was all right. The very look of her conveyed that to him; at home, indeed, everything was the same; her black hair smoothly coiled, a necklace chosen to pick out a colour in the elegant tweed jacket she had sewn for herself. Her beautiful lips carefully drawn. The same; that sameness seemed to recede from him the more they talked about it, about family matters. And he had expected to yearn for home. The silences between Aila and him that were so comfortable, natural in their closeness, at home, were now a real silence without communication of any kind. He had been taught, in the tactics of the struggle, that it was possible to use a private, oblique language to receive information from intimates, but Aila didn't seem to catch on. She was calm but he noticed she held her arms close to her sides as if to draw away from the presence of the warders who flanked him. What private language? They had had love-names, tender and jokey euphemisms for what was hard to express, key words that recalled events in their life together or the antics of one or other of their children — who could expect Aila to put love-talk to the use of a prison code?
The stranger from the human rights organization had no family matters, with him, to confine herself to. He didn't know how she managed to get permission for such visits, but it was clear she had somehow obtained it and already seen several of his comrades. She conveyed this ingeniously in an abstract vocabulary that the two warders, blinking dully and even yawning, could not follow and clearly soon ceased to listen to. He didn't know what she had been told she would be allowed to talk about; presumably only to ask him if he was receiving adequate food, exercise periods and medical care. Talking about food she was actually letting him know that in another prison some of the comrades were on a hunger strike, and apparently innocently relating the weather report she was able to indicate— remarking which cities were receiving heavy rainfall — where many other comrades were held. When she began saying how very stuffy it was, by contrast, in Pretoria, she quickly noticed he was bewildered, straining to follow, and gazing at him in a pause, a silence of greatest aliveness reaching out to him, drew him to realize she was telling him she had been to the Supreme Court where others who were detained when he was were now charged. — And in crowded places it's going to get hotter. — She had narrow blue eyes, the kind that do not have much depth or variety of expression, like the glass-bright eyes fixed so realistically in furry stuffed toys yet which hold attention by their surface colour. He eagerly understood she was passing a message that he might expect to be charged soon.