— It's not so bad as the other time.—
Aila, Aila, what has she said. The other time, he was not making a speech at a graveside, he was in bed with his woman. He remembered the only thing he had found to say to Aila: Will there be scars. Now she believes, she does, she does, he has made his daughter into a revolutionary, sent her into exile, to live in a camp, never to come home, perhaps to die even if she didn't bleed to death that other time. He has done this although it is the truth that he did not even know she had joined the military wing of the movement. That truth is not all the truth.
The danger drained from him. His heart hesitated from beat to beat. Aila went out with the carryall under her arm and he left behind her. She put the bag into the hall cupboard where they kept old newspapers, cleaning utensils, and the cheap luggage in which they had moved their possessions to the city. He took his briefcase and went to Hannah, needing Hannah.
A storm raided the sky. Flashed its beams on them in the darkened afternoon and tramped away, rolling tanks of thunder. So they had fallen asleep: his gaze came into focus on lilies.
Flowers he had bought for her from a street vendor the day before it happened — the cleansing of the graves. Last week it was roses. Red roses, furled like umbrellas; roses have the scent of sex, she said, lilies the shape: he discovered all these delights while with her. They came up close, under magnified senses.
Neither was asleep any longer, but not yet on the waking level of speech. When he arrived at her cottage his mood transformed: the loss of his daughter — her totally unexpected commitment to revolution — became a matter for pride and even excitement. — On her own! She made the big decision on her own! That little girl of mine! — This realization cleared suddenly from where it had been obscured, with Aila; by Aila's very existence.
Hannah was moved — and proud, for him, too. Hannah's emotions were those of the world of commitment he and she shared, emotions changed, by harsh circumstance, to enable one to deal with a whole order of situations not accounted for in family affairs. Hannah had comforted that same girl, now on her way to a Freedom Fighters' training camp, when she was a tearful child at her father's trial; comforted her not 'like a mother', no, but as a comrade who is never a stranger to another's (Sonny's) distress. There was a filament of continuity from that day to this. With Hannah he felt what he ought to feel. His Baby was not the dainty little daughter of a schoolteacher, now. Aila must realize they were not living humbly in their designated place outside Benoni.
His high emotion over Baby naturally flooded into desire between Hannah and him and there was no conflict to taint it because in her — needing Hannah — sexual happiness and political commitment were one. They made love half-clothed and fell asleep.
His awakening linked disconnected impressions and recall as he gazed at the lilies. Baby's rose. The brilliance of petals and leaves on graves. Hannah… her voice, one day when they were talking, criticizing someone in the movement… — But perhaps all action springs from self-preservation — paradoxi-cally? If someone's drowning, and I jump in to save him, what's behind my compassion (which — all right — fires my courage, because I'm scared)? Isn't it the fear that if I were drowning someone might walk away and ignore me? — With a contraction round the heart he suddenly was flung awake (the glare of the bulb that watched him in prison) to what had been completely avoided by preoccupation with Baby. Not come up, in speech or silences, before they loved and slept. The shot man fell again before them, and Sonny's own body, obedient to instilled principles, the old Benoni ghetto avowals, turned to drive him somehow back through the crowd to lift up the fallen and then a bullet missed her head by not more than an inch of her blonde hair and he disobeyed and ran with her. Mayekiso was beside the man; the bony structures of Mayekiso's forehead gleamed under sweat, the persistence of that irrelevant image was testimony to how it really happened. The man was probably dead, anyway. And Mayekiso stopped dead, as the saying goes, no-one thinks of the meaning it can have, he could have been shot dead while he bent there over the dead man. By luck (God's will, Mayekiso with his dangling cross would believe) the bullets missed Mayekiso, too, although he didn't turn.
The old Benoni ghetto avowals. Not living for oneself, etc. etc. Not living only for oneself, that was the qualification. She was not oneself; neither she nor the man who fell. The other— the other life, outside self — was either of them. To run or to stop: a choice between them. Who was to say which was the most valuable? But this woman whose hand was curled against his neck, wasn't she oneself, his need?
Saved himself.
Now he had something he would never speak, not to anyone, certainly not to her.
For what if she took it smugly as a proof of love? A female triumph. What would that do to him? To his judgment of himself. To his belief that she was not like any other woman and their relationship was formed in a special and different morality: the excruciating recasting of the meaning of love in the struggle, that made him celebrate a particular kind of parting from his own child.
But her mind surfaced on the periphery of his, maybe through the contact of their bodies, not divining what he was experiencing there beside her but instinctively circling the danger of its context. — When people make violence the ultimate test of who's right and who's wrong, here — you know the argument I mean—'the struggle is no better than the oppression because violence on the part of the oppressed can never be justified', it reduces them to the level of the oppressor and so on… people like that are so naïve… I'd almost say innocent. I don't mean that excuses them. But they babble like toddlers who don't know what they're saying because they haven't lived enough to connect words with the reality of acts. Most white people here haven't lived — not lived what life really is here. if you define the life of a country by the most general experience. If they could have been there the other day, just once, seen the police come down on us, no reason, we were all leaving the place, anyway. just shooting, and three people dead. That man, dead. If they could be there when it happens, only once, and it happens somewhere every day. They'd understand why people murder informers with whatever weapons they can lay their hands on.—
She had given him safe passage to the open waters of generality.
— Yes, but it's more than that. If you define when violence
is a necessity, then you're accepting it can't be done without in this world. And that's hard to take, even here, even now.—
— Oh Sonny, at least we know one thing when we're forced, in ourselves, to accept it. We know the spit and polish of armies is to conceal the truth that war is blood, agony, rot and shit. That's all it's ever been. The high technology of ARMSCOR Magnus Malan boasts about. The marvellous sophistication of the latest killer, what's-it, the Rooikat, the tank they say outranges and outfires anything the Russians or Americans have made. Napoleon's grand army crawling back from Moscow on frozen feet. The Japanese skinned alive by the thing that was dropped on Hiroshima. That's the famous military tradition. Our wars — guerrilla wars with their ragged improvisation have put an end to the lie. No more going off to fight with a brass-band send-off. If you blow yourself up with the bomb you're placing, only the police are going to pick up the pieces. Take even the hijackers and hostage-takers: they shoot their victims or they get shot themselves when they're overcome; or both. It's nothing but suffering. Any kind of war, any kind. So at least if we have to accept violence, we know what we're doing, we're not dolling it up. I find that helps.—