The lovely girl had wiped her eyes clean with her mother's dishcloth, and now was quite unblemished by whatever her night had been. — Be careful, Daddy. Here — put this down for me. — She took a rose, grown in Aila's garden, out of the vase on the breakfast table.
He had Baby's flower in his hand when Aila met him in the passage with a zipped carryall. He knew what was in it. Toothbrush and paste, towel, soap, pyjamas, change of socks and underpants, sweater. The essentials you were allowed to pack up if you were lucky enough to be taken into detention from home and not while speaking at the cleansing of the graves. She had been gone from the kitchen less than a minute. — How did you do that?—
— I keep it ready. — She was smiling. She shrugged as if to discount herself, excuse some interference.
— It's not necessary. I'll be all right.—
She stood there. She licked her lips. Stood there.
He picked up the bag in the hand in which he held the flower. — Baby's, to put on the graves. — He looked about, out of habit, for the briefcase, took it in the other hand, and she opened the front door for him.
Not ciao, no goodbye. — Don't worry, Aila.—
— I'll be there. I'll hear you. I was going with the DPSC* and Black Sash,** anyway.—
He had time for breakfast, with Hannah. A cup of coffee and half a slice of her toast spread with fish-paste — Because I taste of it already. — She was still in the outsize T-shirt in which she slept, and the slight hollow that trembled along the underside of her soft-fleshed arm from armpit to elbow, as she lifted it about the objects on the table, drew his eye and made him lean over and taste her mouth for himself. Her breasts and belly were so near under the cotton rag that the flesh warmed his hand as if it were held before a sleepy fire. — Couldn't you come with me?—
She took deep, smiling breaths to regain control of herself. — Better not, don't you think?—
— Of course. Maybe I can give you a lift back. You'll find some excuse.—
The treat of spending the short journey together was tempting; she smiled and played with his hand, which recently she had swabbed with cerise water-colour and imprinted on a sheet of paper now pinned to the wall. — No. Unless I get them to drop me off in Pretoria, that I could do — and we'd meet somewhere?—
— Outside the Palace of Justice? — It was at that rendezvous that he had stood trial. His dark, cocky grin that came from prison, happy for battle, delighted her. — Unfortunately I'm going to have to hurry back. There's a meeting around five— I imagine the ceremony should be over by four-thirty… if the police don't shut it down long before. Hadn't you better get dressed? What time's your bus leaving?—
— Oh it doesn't take me ten minutes. is that for me? — He had thrown the carryall in the boot but absently brought in the rose with his briefcase.
— For the graves.—
— What a lovely thing to do.—
He could not lie to her. — My daughter gave it. She came in this morning.—
— Good for her. I must pick up some flowers, too, on the way.—
The face of a woman who uses no make-up has unity with her body. Seeing Hannah's fair eyelashes catching the morning sun and the shine of the few little cat's whiskers that were revealed, in this innocent early clarity, at the upper corners of her mouth, he was seeing the whole of her; he understood why, in the reproductions of paintings he had puzzled over in the days of his self-education, Picasso represented frontally all the features of a woman — head, breasts, eyes, vagina, nose, buttocks, mouth — as if all were always present even to the casual glance. What would he have known, without Hannah!
She had picked up his hand and buried her big soft face in it, kissing the palm. When she lifted her head her cheeks were stinging pink, slapped by pride. — I'm so glad you're the one chosen to speak.—
Sunday peace.
The combis that, sending gusts of taped reggae and mba-qanga into the traffic, transport blacks back and forth between township and city, now carry a strange cargo of whites. The street committees in the township have advised that this is the way to bring them in, the nature of the vehicles in themselves giving the signal to the people that these envoys from outside the siege are approved.
Through the white suburbs. Past bowling greens where figures like aged schoolboys and girls in banded hats genuflect over balls; past the Robin Hood fantasy of an archery club, the whoops of regular Sunday tennis partners in private gardens, the nylon frills and black suits of the congregation leaving a Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk, and the young girls with cupboards full of clothes who choose to stroll barefoot in jeans slashed off at the thigh. Past electronically-operated gates pinnacled with plaster eagles, spike- and razorwire-topped walls behind which peacock-tails of water open over flowers and birds sing. Sunday peace. If it were not for the combi owners' township names and addresses painted on the vehicles, the convoy might be some sort of charity outing on its way to a picnic. Now and then it is paced by joggers who drop back without noticing it.
Mechanical knights — vehicles visored in steel-plating and chain-mailed in thick mesh — barred the turnoff to the township. Before them were mounted police and soldiers with automatic shotguns and R4 rifles, standing legs planted apart.
To most of the white people in the combis the yellow armoured vans, the clumsy brown armoured cars the blacks dub zoomorphically 'Hippos', the stolid figures with the power of death in their hands were ranged like the toys of war children set up. Or it was as if someone suddenly flipped the switch of a TV programme selector and a scene from some mini-series flashed on. Violence was so thin an appearance in the living-room that the shadow of someone's head, moving across the room, was enough to blot it out. Now, why, you could see the hair on a policeman's forearm. No matter if the person in the next seat stood up; when he shifted again, armoured cars, police guns were there. The steel whips of aerials swung in the sun. Alsatian dogs — once desirable and beautiful pets, now tails down in the cowed and coiled bearing of readiness to attack — were weapons leashed in the fists of police handlers.
Everyone had been briefed about how to behave: each combi had its marshal. Accept police provocation calmly, leave the talking to those appointed to do it. Some people climbed out to stretch their legs, proving they were not afraid, and were sent back to their seats. Lawyers and civil rights leaders among the groups were conferring with the comrades from within the township who had arrived to meet the convoy in an old American car lumbering low on its suspension. Others were negotiating with the police. The group broke up and re-formed, gesticulating individuals shouldered their way in upon it, left to approach others, ran back. The group moved, as they argued, from one side of the blockade to the other, pulled this way and that in the arena of their contention; a process in dumb show people encapsulated in the combis craned their necks to interpret. Look at that! That policeman shaking his fist! Can't you see? Next to that Hippo. He hit him, he's hit him! Oh my god. No no no nobody's been hurt! Just look at those brutal clots, that one could press the trigger easily as he's scratching himself. Oh don't you worry, they'd think twice before firing at us — we're white. The major or whatever-he-is — he's walking away — What's happening? No he isn't, he's just giving some instruction. They're arresting someone! Who? Can't see — oh my god, it's Dave! Dave Seaton. No that's not Dave.
Alarm and excitement died away into impatience and a new kind of boredom: was it possible to be bored while in an extraordinary situation? In one of the combis a lay nun in ankle socks offered round a plastic bottle of water, and there was the rustle of rolls of peppermints being peeled. The difference is, if we were black we'd at least be singing. Well, come on then! We were told to keep out of it. Singing! Not to sing! Well, freedom songs could be provocation. Who knows the words. Some students did, they belonged to the new generation who learned from blacks; but freedom songs need volume, and the older people from the church and civil rights movements could participate only by smiling solidarity.