When such young men die it's usual to speak of a senseless death. There's anger that a life should be so short and brutally ended. Well, for those who shot and killed these nine young comrades last week these really are senseless deaths, because this killing, and all the other killings of our people in the ghettos and in the prisons, will not stop us from winning our freedom. That, for this government, is the meaning of the deaths of the nine young comrades who lie buried here. That is the message. They are senseless deaths, because no amount of killing will mean that the oppression of our people can continue to survive. No violence against us can shoot down the struggle for peace and justice.
How much of this blew over in the wind to the formation on the hill is not known, but the litany of freedom cries that interrupted Sonny at expected points (he knew when to pause for them) certainly must have. Father Mayekiso's closing prayer did not, for a minute or two, quiet calls that still came from here and there. The Amen stirred deeply through the crowd, seemed to sway them towards the graves. The comrades held them back; there was silence. Gusts of wind sculpted the soft earth mounds. The silence came from there, down there outside time, so that Hannah did not know if it lasted seconds or minutes, only that for its kind of duration she had no awareness of him, Sonny, he did not exist in it. And then the nun came forward and knelt on the earth, laying a flower. A thick straggling queue shuffled past the nine mounds with their new bright tin numbers. The township people stretched out everywhere for flowers. Small children took them to be gifts for themselves. Hannah's irises were laid by many hands. Soon the mounds were transformed by a disguise of the lovely temporal; colours and fragrance and petals that would not last. She saw Sonny again. He was delivering his daughter's rose to the dead. In a sideways glance with only a few feet between them they acknowledged each other across the graves like people who cannot put a name to a face.
The crowd began to thin at the edges, slowly turned away from the graves. The small children were running with the treasure of their single flowers. The young people were singing, We greet you, Mandela, call us, Mandela… in the rhythm of a walking song, gently harmonizing rather than rousing, parting from the dead with respect. Hannah and the other whites took their pace, flowing with people, people flowing past, life draining out of the graveyard. Somewhere behind, Sonny, Father Mayekiso — the official group — were waylaid by members of the street committees and crones and drunks who wanted to take their hands to receive the vague benediction believed to emanate from important people. Then a kind of seismic tremor went through the trooping crowd. There was no shout, but everybody began to bump into everybody else; some had stopped abruptly: up there, from the hill, the men with pointing guns were racing down upon them. The broad swathe of people broke into a hobbling run from which the young surged out ahead. As people ran they pulled rags from somewhere in their clothing, doeks from their heads, and tied them across noses and mouths. The whites trotted embarrassedly: they were not used to having to flee anything or anyone. Some foolish idea of dignity, some armchair idea of courage, inhibited them. Even Hannah had never before experienced what the blacks, with their rags kept on their persons as protection against tear-gas as white people carry credit cards, were ready for every day. Canisters were exploding at the tail of the crowd; the foul cloud pursued them and a shot — in the air, perhaps only triggered by the scramble of the police and soldiers through trash and bushes — cracked a whip over them.
Hannah was young and her strong freckled legs could carry her fast, but an agonizing brake of resistance fought against the instinct. She wanted to stop her legs; she stopped and ran, stopped and ran, crashing into the path of others, looking back, looking everywhere. Now there was a scream; the police had plunged down into the crowd, long wails of terror were cut through by the dry syllables of shots, a sound hard as the steel that flies and pierces flesh and bone, goes to the heart that is bursting with the effort to run away and to the throat where the yell rises. She was running back, sideways, thrust aside, sometimes clutched by someone determinedly making a way, she caught a whiff of the gas, the wind had blown it back to the hill, her eyes were streaming and there he was, there was Sonny, his shiny black curls, the bar of his eyebrows above desperate eyes like black holes in his head. He clutched her arm so that it was almost wrenched out of its socket; she thought she was weeping at the sight of Sonny, the tear-gas tears were something else. — Get to the combi! Get to the combi! Go! — She pulled against leaving him, he pushed her away; and then amid shots and screams he began to run with her, run as if he were chained to her. The people were racing and flying into their street-burrows in the township. From there came the stare of hundreds of others gathered on walls, on roof-tops, afar, their murmur a tumultuous lament. Mayekiso appeared level with Sonny and Hannah. His arms were raised, he was shouting, intoning in his own language; but the people tore past the crucified one's representative in their midst, nothing could cast out their fear. There was a shot like all the other shots: this time a young man fell face-down in the path of Sonny, Hannah and Father Mayekiso. People shrieked and backed off, struggling to get away from what had become a target; a single woman dropped to her knees at his side, calling out, tugging to turn him over. Blood came glistening through the black fibrous mat of his hair and, as she moved him, ran, obliterating the slogan on his trade-union T-shirt An Injury To One Is An Injury To All.
Buffetted on all sides, Sonny and Hannah were dragged on, managed to resist, turned to fight their way back to where the boy lay. Mayekiso was with him, the woman was hysterically beating the ground. They saw this one second and the next it was obliterated by the press of fleeing people, appeared again, disappeared. They were forcing their way back against shoulders, backsides, flailing arms, and now there were shots smashing right past their heads. Sonny suddenly was looking at her as if he were making a terrible discovery. His face was distorted by anguish and incoherence. He pressed down her head with his raised arm and they ran, ran away with the crowd.
In Sonny's car, Hannah sat gasping, saliva at the corners of her open mouth. — The others will look for me. combi won't go without me.—
— The drivers saw us. They'll tell them you left with someone else.—
— I'm afraid they'll think something happened to me.—
He did not answer for a moment. He dropped his head on his hands, on the steering wheel. Then recovered himself. — Nothing's happened to you, Hannah.—
Her hand was squeezed bloodless where it had been in his clutch. She was sure, as lovers imagine at such times, that she would relive the sensation of that grasp to the end of her life.
What was she slipping out to do for him, now? What were they saying in the passage? They have nothing private, from me, now. She has no right to talk to him behind my back.
I went to the kitchen window and then I saw — ah, she's given him the carryall, that was what it was all about. I saw him throw the carryall into the boot before he got into the car.
My sister shoved my plate away from under my nose as I came back to the table. — What're you spying on him for? What d'you think you're trying to do, man, hinting… 'I never asked for it'—