As a hypochondriac runs to his doctor with every personal problem transmuted into a diagnosable ache or pain, he went to the lawyer who had represented him during his detention and trial. Metkin looked like a rabbi and listened as his client thought a psychiatrist would listen; in this presence of contemporary and ancient wisdom, divination, surviving between the telephone and intercom on a desk, Sonny felt humiliation as he might have been experiencing some physical urge. He was explaining that he wanted to hand the whole matter over to the lawyer; he himself could do nothing to help anyone in conflict with the authorities. This person had no-one else to speak for her, within the country; she was not in contact with her few relatives, and they were not the sort of people to act in this type of matter. Whatever the government did they would believe was justified.
But he saw in the lawyer's face that he had explained nothing, and he tried once more to evade the complete understanding there. He sat back in the chair on the other side of the desk and looked into eyes black as his own, the eyes of old races. — She's an invaluable person.—
Despite the unwelcome understanding of the lawyer he felt relieved — when you are in a political trial every hidden motive, every vestige of contradiction, every hesitation of purpose must be confided, so that you may be defended even against your own high principles, the dangerous licence of confidence cannot be revoked. The matter was in hand — the lawyer's soothing phrase. For results, one must be patient; and as she said, she could not come back for some weeks, anyway.
Right from the first day she had been less alarmed than Sonny; he realized he had discounted the preoccupation of her feelings at the loss of her grandfather, who had been also a father — and mother — to her. She was back there sorting the old missionary's papers and simple possessions, sorting through her childhood, unable even to point it out to him in passing as he had done the place in the veld outside Benoni, to her, when they were driving by. Action on her behalf was being taken at home and in London. He was kept busy planning and running workshops—'resistance education' (the name he coined for it, approved) — in shanties and mud churches, under the guise of local club meetings, since the National Education Crisis Committee was restricted by a ban, and in the spare time he would have been able to spend with her there was the quiet house, thank heaven, with only the boy around. And Will was less hostile, sometimes it seemed even possible to touch him. Ah, without women, what is always subliminally taut between men is relaxed. The boy was a man, almost a man. He could be trusted; hadn't he proved he could be trusted, he would not even meet your eyes to show he remembered. If told to forget he had heard someone visit the house he would do as he must.
The men who had come that night sought to form a cabal (how poor and melodramatic the political vocabulary was) to oust certain leaders. They were 'putting out feelers' to individuals from several organizations to see who was 'like-minded'— sidling euphemisms. They had not succeeded in gaining a recruit; but they read a certain distraction in 'Sonny' as reason to take the chance that he would allow himself to forget they had come, and give no warning to anyone.
There was something on the stoep. A bundle.
As he stopped, coming through the bougainvillea which concealed the side entrance to the garden, he saw an object; suspiciously — explosive booby traps as well as ordure can be placed on the doorsteps of political prisoners' friends. Coming closer, he made out a sleeper — some meths drinker must have found the deserted cottage convenient to camp against — then, seeing that the sleeping bag was new and a man's hand (young, white, with one of those twenty-four-hour military format watches on the wrist) was visible over the hidden head, stopped again.
Who was Sonny to intercept an intruder. How could he account for himself, approaching this cottage, key in his pocket. He had better go away. Come back later. The telephone would ring and not be answered; he called out as if the place belonged to him — What do you think you're doing here! Hey!—
The hand flew away from the head. A young man struggled out of the bag, unembarrassed, with a sleepy glance of recognition, confirmation.
Sonny had never seen him before in his life.
The young man circled his shoulders in their sockets to ease stiffness and breathed deeply. He had pollen-coloured spiky-cut hair too short to be tousled by sleep, a woman's pretty nose and long-lashed grey eyes, and a man's dark strong growth of a few days' beard. He half-smiled, and nodded, as if his man had arrived as summoned, on time.
— This is private property. What do you want here? — This person knew him; must have seen him in newspaper photographs.
Or it could be on video as one of the Security Police's film stars. He believed he had learnt to be alert without becoming paranoid, but the place where this intruder was waiting — waiting for him, clearly — her cottage, their room, to which he would return again and again, unable to keep away, and the move— the entry restriction timed to get rid of her without arresting or deporting her — these circumstances experience entitled him to interpret as put together by the people who knew all about him, the majors and sergeants who had interrogated him in detention, watched him through the Cyclops's eye of his cell door in prison, and were aware, without seeing, when she took him into her body in this cottage. He, like all his kind, educated in political struggle, knew them, too; the majors and sergeants. He knew what could be ready to follow the circumstances: re-detention, blackmail — not with money, between police and revolutionaries there is a higher exchange, the selling of trust. Not a domestic affair, telltattling to the wife that you're playing around (their kind of vocabulary) if you don't answer questions satisfactorily. They know 'Sonny' wouldn't betray his comrades for that; the wife knows about his blonde and she's the submissive type who would forgive him, anyway. Then what? What? His woman in Lesotho; but if they had wanted to strike one of their dread barters with him (we'll detain her for the political confidences you've made to her, unless you give us some confidences) — if they wanted to do that, they would have kept her in the country, not shut her out!
The young man was standing there, the jeans, the sneakers, the haircut, like any roadside figure thumbing a lift; but in front of her door. — We'd better go inside.—
Sonny gave an authoritative high laugh. — Look, you take your bag and get out of here. Just go.—
— I've got something to tell you. But inside. From a friend of yours. I was with her the day before yesterday.—
— I'm not expecting any messages from anybody, and I want you out of here. I don't want to know who you are and where you come from.—
The young man listened with assurance and condescending understanding. — All right. I have some sort of fancy credential. 'Sermons in stones, and good in everything'.—
The young man was living in the cottage while he was back at the house with his son, Will. It was what Hannah asked of Sonny, her message: let this person stay in the cottage, give him the key. The key? He stood in a hardware store while a duplicate was cut, and a slow depression sank his gaze to the tools and gadgets that furnished other people's lives — his own, part of Saturday purchases, when he did house-proud repairs in the first, the ghetto home.
The man called himself Nick, since there had to be something to address him by. She must have thought the clandestinity of the cottage was ready-made for another kind, as well; a good place for an infiltrator. As it was known she was away, no-one would have any reason to approach it. And the people in the main house? What about them? Sonny was choked with such questions during the phone calls, unable to ask her anything, unable even to indicate that the guest had arrived and was in the room while the call was made, since he went out only at night. Did she understand it was dangerous for her lover to be in the cottage with this guest even for the duration of the phone call? If the man were discovered to be in the country, were followed and picked up, Sonny would be picked up with him and detained for interrogation about his association with him, charged with aiding and abetting whatever it was he was doing— and what that was Sonny could not ask. The discipline of the struggle prevailed between them; each to his own task. But when the young man was asleep (he slept during the day) Sonny went through the cupboards and likely places in the cottage where guns or explosives might have been stowed away; he would not allow such material to be there to compromise her with some charge that her cottage was in fact a cache for arms. He could not warn her that she might come back and step straight into a Security Police vehicle. He could only say: don't hurry back, take your time…