— Not for me. I never thought I ever would accept violence, even if I didn't have to do it myself… Even if others were to do it for me. I sit in meetings, I take part in decisions where it's taken for granted counter-violence. our violence. has its absolutely necessary role. That's what it's called, a role; it's what I call it. Like in a play; and I'm not playing that particular role but I'm in the cast.—
— Could you do it yourself?—
But it was a mystery; Sonny could not even say he did not know. A mystery the schoolteacher had not taken into account, dreamt of, during the period when, remote from induction, he was philosophically puzzling over the extra-religious mystery of power: the power of life and death. He might have said only: all I have had was the courage to be a victim. Until now.
A watery after-light of the storm glossed the everted lips of each lily's single fold. They seemed to be of wet white marble, the pistils rising from carved shadow.
— No scent. — She was remembering his daughter's rose, in comparison.
He stroked her now. — How would you know, you smoke so much.—
A long moment of peace between them. — Could you get me to stop?—
— How? If you'd tell me how.—
She turned on her elbow, in her familiar way, propped up to see again the dark smile, the bold features scrolled about by black curls, the eyes looking out from some forest of her imagination that she had found for the first time across the visitors' barrier in a prison.
For him, the flesh of her face fell forward a little, plumping her cheeks. Her eyes — living all his life among soft dark eyes, he never ceased to see the curiousness of blue as the perception trained on him. — Tell me.—
— I don't know. Only you could find out.—
Where to find out? In her lolling breasts that hung and swung against him, on her pale swollen lips, in the seaweed-coloured hair under her arms and the quiff, like the tuft brushed up on a fair baby's head, over the place he entered her? Nowhere there. Somewhere else, in himself.
Although they talked together often of his family, she seldom mentioned her ex-husband; this was because, and he understood, she seldom thought of him. He drifted to the surface of her mind, now. — Derek used to drink. a lot. He wanted to write something, he always wanted to, and then when he was fed up with law, he tried. It was interesting to watch. Just enough to drink, and it would — seem to — I don't know — dilate his sensibilities. He would say marvellous things. He'd tell me what he was going to write. But next day it was gone. Apparently if you drink you have to write down what you've got hold of, right away. It's a brief flare in the brain. It's gone once the alcohol burns out. He couldn't remember, next day. He never wrote it. I saw how drink wipes out memory; opens a door and then closes it. It was scary.—
— You couldn't stop the drinking.—
By itself, out of habit, her hand took the packet of cigarettes from the floor beside her, shook one free and put it in her mouth, then, in a second of bewilderment, took it out and put it down awkwardly on the pillow. — No. We were finished. I couldn't find out how. I couldn't do anything for him.—
Sonny sank into dread; and from that cold, sucking clay the only escape was unwelcome resentment — women, these two women with their capacity to wound, to threaten. And this one's innocent capacity simply to be needed, resting her healing mouth on his, now, so that he squirmed in a wild tangle of bedclothes to lie over her.
They're more proud of Baby than of me. Even my mother. She cried when we got a message from Lusaka so we knew Baby'd gone, Baby was there, and I didn't know what to do except what you see on television: I put my arm round her and patted her shoulder. The message came through him, one of his contacts, but she cried only when he was out of the house. And I haven't seen her cry again.
I gained three distinctions and a university pass and he's going to get me a bursary through his white fellow-traveller friends. What shall I study (once you've left school, adults ask you that, they don't ask patronizingly what are you going to be, any more); he doesn't say anything, I know he's hoping I'll make use of his old complete works, but I've applied for entry to the faculty of commerce. I'll be an educated shopkeeper with a business-school degree, how's that, a shopkeeper, in the tradition of some of my mother's relatives who run fruit and vegetable stalls and palm off to the blacks produce that's gone bad. What's the difference? It's merchandising, same as the wholesaler who once gave him a job out of charity, and the great supporter of the cause who comes sometimes to our house — the one who's made his fortune out of work clothing sold to the exploited masses he and my father are going to free — he supplies those maroon jerseys you see stretched over the bosoms of black nurses.
My parents wanted to give a party to celebrate my success. And did they think they would invite — his blonde woman?
We still have my mother's occasional big teas for the aunties and cousins and the two grannies from our old place outside Benoni — my grandfathers are both dead, now. If nothing else exists between my mother and him, for some reason I can't understand they co-operate in this keeping up of appearances. He makes a great effort to be there on the day. I wonder what he tells his comrades if they need him, I wonder what he tells her when she expects him in that room where her grubby bras and pants lie about. (My mother irons our shirts, his and mine, and folds them so beautifully you'd think they'd just come from a shop.)
I have to be around on that kind of Saturday afternoon, too. I tell her I think I'm going to be out somewhere, just to see her lovely face giving me full attention, confirming, for me, that without me she's deserted — but of course I don't go. I won't do what her daughter did, leave her to weep.
The conversation of relatives over sweet cakes and fancy biscuits rolled in coconut is all questions and answers—how old is this one now, is that one married, has so and so had a baby, where is so and so living — which reach standard conclusions: that nice oh really what a blessing oh shame ay. And where's Baby, Aila? Aren't we going to see Baby my, last time we see her she's growing really pretty now glamorous, né, I'm telling you, I said to Ma, we was watching a fillum, isn't that actress the dead spit of Aila's Baby…
My mother has her answer. Baby is far away. Overseas.
Overseas! Oh that's nice. And the old ones, out of pride in our superiorly educated branch of the family and a dim notion that the places of learning are designated once and for all, as the Mount is for the Sermon, Mecca for the Black Stone (according to their religious beliefs) think they must have heard Baby is in London or even America — for if there follows another question, and what's she doing, my father answers: furthering her education.
And so it is my mother who's told the lie, not he. He was telling the truth, Baby's learning what's necessary, in our time and for our place in the world. He's a teacher — although they know he's been to prison for his political activities most no doubt believe he still practises the profession they respect as the height of intellectual achievement — and his remark opens up before them, sightseers at the gates, the broad receding avenues of the grand vista they will never enter, while he and his children disappear freely down distant perspectives.
They don't speak the way we do (how could they, they haven't had a teacher in the house to correct their grammar) and, on my father's side of the family, expect to drink too much beer— that's their way of enjoying themselves. Our house wakes up for one afternoon to the tramping back and forth to the lavatory, the coarse harmless laughter, the happy shrills and mournful wails of children, the giggling of hand-holding sweethearts, the loud partisanships of soccer and the exchange of recipes. They are our people, they are what we might have been: our parents who bettered themselves; Baby and I. How could you compare my father with Uncle Gavin debonairly wearing, even in the house, his straw hat with its paisley band, that honey-coloured, wily, quick-eyed man laughing kindly on an expanse of empty gums, who has done time for his traffic in sending stolen cars over the border to Swaziland and made enough profit to set himself up in his transport business? 'Doing time' isn't just their euphemism for 'serving a prison sentence', which my father did: it's the hazard of an entirely different attitude to the meaning of living. I see that, when the relatives are among us — or rather when we're among them. My father went to prison for them— these aunties and uncles and cousins and kids who live back in the ghetto we come from. And I see that my father really loves them — more, he respects them, he hasn't left them behind out of any ambition for himself. He has no GAVIN'S TRUCK AND CAR HIRE to show for the time he's done. What am I to do? When I see my father like this, just as when I've sat, without his ever knowing, at the back of a hall when he was making a speech, I love him — again; forget everything. My mother, myself; that woman.