As the picture of the first time he saw her — the young woman monitoring the trial — was reconstructed only later, so the meaning of the moment when she came to comfort his daughter was interpreted by him only later, growing in its power over him, a sign. It was then that it began, that it was inescapable. Needing Hannah. He could not think of what had happened to him as 'love', 'falling in love' any more than, except as lip-service convenience, political jargon expressed for him his decision to sacrifice schoolmastering, self-improvement, and go to prison for his kind. A spontaneous gesture quite in the line of her professional concern for prisoners and their families: she walked across the gallery of Court A into a need that clanged closed, about the two of them.
It was the creation myth of their beginning. That it was not recognized as such at once, by them, added to its beauty. He was a political activist on trial for promotion of boycotts and participation in illegal gatherings. Police videos were shown by the State prosecutor where the accused was speaking on the platform. In other gatherings his identification was disputed by the Defence: Counsel made everyone but the judge laugh when he dryly drew attention to the fact 'plain to see on his face' that this accused had a distinctive feature — his eyebrows. But the lighter moments in evidence and the cheerful atmosphere of airport reunions at tea-break were the 'humanized' part of a process whose purpose was to send these men, who already had spent many months in detention, back to prison as convicts; part of the processing of all opposition to the State pulped into prison. Sonny, like his comrades, was preoccupied with writing notes for the lawyers to use in his defence. Under the effort to recall precisely, exactly, where one had been, whom one had seen, what one had said on occasions over the three years on which the State based its case, all immediate impressions, however indelible, extraordinary, were thrust away.
Sonny was sentenced to five years. On appeal, before another judge, sentence was reduced to two.
— It's bearable. — The first thing he said to Aila when she was allowed to visit him before he was transferred to maximum-security prison. — It'll pass before we know it. — There had to be objectives to make it pass. — Baby'll be working for her matric — I'd like her to have some extra coaching when the time's near. I'll certainly get permission to do some study, myself. — He gave instructions on many practical matters— but didn't want it to sound like making a will, he was leaving her for only two years, not a lifetime. She took the instructions as supports to hold, until his return, the life they had made together. They filled the visit with a rapid, determined exchange of plans. — Not five, remember; only two years. — They smiled at each other continually. When it was time for Aila to go he discarded the ritual — expressions of confidence that she would manage, admonition to take care of herself — he could have taken refuge in to disguise the parting for a definitive period of their lives. This parting between them deserved more than that. He said, Write to me, Aila, you must write to me. She did not speak. She put her arms round her husband and kissed him on the mouth, in front of the warders. He saw that, not to shame him, to strengthen him, she pretended not to see the tears rise in his eyes. He saw that as she walked out she put up a hand to set a stray strand of her hair to rights, as well.
Happy for battle.
Aila wrote every month; about family matters. Five hundred words. That was the limit prison regulations allowed. The letters always ended 'Lots of love from all of us'. One prison day that was just like the last there was a letter in a different kind of envelope, addressed on a typewriter. It was from her, Hannah Plowman. Inside, he saw her handwriting for the first time, that voice which speaks from absence. Just a note to say how relieved everyone was (this he read as referring to the reduced sentence; in the know, she was well aware he was lucky not to get even more than five years). Anything we could do (the inference: her organization) to smooth the way where he found himself, or to assist his family, he had only to tell his lawyer. The last line of the single page abandoned the corporate 'we'. This letter ended: 'I know you'll come out happy for battle'.
He realized the wonderful phrase must be a quotation and he was stirred, intrigued to know from where, from whom. There was a message for him in the three words even beyond their aphoristic meaning, which, in itself, unravelled his whole life— how could she, a stranger, possibly have divined that, in his quiet, schoolmaster's being, joy had come first only when he stepped out and led chanting children across the veld to face the police! The message beyond that extraordinary prescience— that would enlarge upon it, confirm a language of shared reference between himself and the writer of the letter — was obviously something she assumed he would understand. Whoever it was who had said or written those three words must represent something particular not only to his present situation in prison but to a whole context of thought and action in which that situation was contained. The phrase didn't come from Shakespeare. Of that at least he thought he could be pretty sure although he could not reach up to the familiar shelf in the glass-fronted bookcase for verification. There were so many gaps in his education although it had seemed awesomely high to the old people who kept his teacher's training certificate framed in the kitchen where they could always see it.
The phrase filled, for a few days, the hours that were so hard to fill, left over from the disciplined programme he had set himself in his cell — deep-breathing exercises, running on the spot, study, reading. Prisoners were made to keep the bedtime of chickens and children. The cell lights were extinguished early and he had not yet succeeded in being advanced to the grade where he would have permission to keep his on for night study. Happy for battle. He lay on his bed in the dark and sounded over in his mind that phrase, so simple, so loaded, audacious, such a shocking, wild glorious juxtaposition of menace and elation, flowers and blood, people sitting in the sun and bodies dismembered by car bombs; the harmonized singing coming from somewhere in the cells, and the snarl of a police dog leaping at his face, once, in a crowd.
It was Hannah who wrote to him: knew how to say everything in three, let alone five hundred words.
He wrote and asked her to apply to the Commissioner of Prisons for a visit but she answered that she did not want to use up one of the quota of visits his family certainly needed.
Needing Hannah.
Oh Aila, Aila.
Why did Aila never speak? Why did she never say what he wanted her to say?
Family matters. He had never built the tree-house with Will and now the boy would be too old to be interested. Baby was being inducted into women's things; between her and her mother. At least he had been able to provide Baby with a room of her own for the process of becoming a woman.
Oh Aila, Aila.
For I don't know how long we believed my mother didn't know. He and I. We were so clever; he made us such a good team, a comic team. What a buffoon he made of me, his son, backward, stumbling along behind, aping his lies. Poor Tom to his Lear (I should have told him that, sometime, it's the sort of sign he'd appreciate that my education hasn't been wasted). I don't think he ever told direct lies, at least when I was around. When he went off to his woman he never said he was going to be somewhere else; he didn't have to, my mother respected the fact that a man doing underground political work (his full-time clandestine occupation once he came out of prison) cannot reveal his movements without involving and endangering his family.