Then last week there were two more calls, and this time, after a humming silence (could have meant long distance) someone asked to speak to my mother. A man. What he said was not her name but 'the lady of the house'. The second time — I was irritated at the interruption of my train of thought — I asked if this was a sales pitch, direct marketing (a subject in the curriculum of my business-school courses). The voice said no, apologized politely, but hung up when I thought I'd better be polite, too, and asked if I could take a message. No! It's not possible that now my mother as well — my mother has a lover somewhere. But I find myself snickering, first with embarrassment and then because it's so funny — the joke's on me, and now I can laugh out loud at myself. The clown really is capering for once. Our family in a completely different scenario: one of the sitcoms our State television stations buy from America, where every member of the family is cheating on the other, straight-faced. My mother and I sometimes watch them in the kitchen while she's cooking dinner — it hurts him, after the Shakespeare he used to privilege us with, to see us giggling at such stuff.
My poor mother with her ugly shorn head and her brave show of having a life of her own, knitting baby clothes and trying to make new friends among her employer's patients. I'm old enough, now, almost to wish it were true. I understand the reassurance to be found in a stranger to whom one is something, someone, outside the triangle — father, mother, son; Sonny, Aila, Will — of this house.
A congress had not been called for two years because of Government restrictions on the movement. When this one was held clandestinely the executive council was dissolved as it had been pointed out it would be.
Then the old executive was re-elected en bloc, to applause. The two who had belonged to the cabal of the disaffected had not been phased out; they were there in their seats, the one acknowledging, as his due of honour, the spatter of clapping, the other with mouth drawn down modestly and eyes lowered. This must have been condoned by the leadership, Sonny's peers, because there are ways of preventing these things — blocking candidature with authoritatively-lobbied support for other nominees. Even democratic movements must work like this, for the ends of the struggle. Sonny had been in liberation politics long enough to have been involved in such means himself a number of times.
So those night visitors had been disciplined, brought into line — and obtained their price in the bargain. He had heard nothing further about it. There they sat, his comrades like any others. Just as before. But when the executive council elected among themselves their office bearers, Sonny did not retain his key position. That was arranged, too; he saw this in the eyes of the leader who had taken him by the elbow and said, It's the way to deal with it, Sonny: a look with the disguise of a slightly cocked head so that the blow would be a glancing one, a quick signal of the eyes that Sonny should step down before a stronger nomination — for the good of the struggle. There could be no question in Sonny's mind that his peers, his comrades-in-arms, would not put the struggle above any and all other considerations. Like himself. In spite of what had happened. Therefore there must be good reason; they must be right in giving him some high-sounding but minor responsibility in place of the ones he had fulfilled — unsparingly. His life belonged to them. What had he kept back of it — abandoned a career he loved, given up the forming of minds of a future generation for the bubble reputation (curse learning by rote) of a popular platform demagogue, left the cosy circle of family for the existence under surveillance, the prison cell; broken up — yes, and gladly, for the struggle he'd do it again — the entire containing structure of his emotions so that he was defenceless, anyone could enter him, anyone take up possession there. If he was responsible to the struggle, then the struggle was responsible for him, Sonny become 'Sonny'. He had no existence without it.
And this was being done to him within the purplish brick walls, on the red cement floors, under the tin roof crackling expansion in the heat, of some religious seminary in the veld; exactly the odour and feel of education-department buildings where the schoolteacher had taken petty orders from inspectors and been given his official dismissal for marching children out of the humble and submissive place in society alloted them and him under the sign CARPE DIEM.
There was no complaint to be made by Sonny. It was a principle, application of which to some other comrade he himself had approved whenever it was appropriate, that personality cults should be avoided. If a post is to be well filled, it does not matter who fills it; change is good, the movement must be always in growth, no-one should be in the same position too long. New blood must come from the young cadres. He had used this ready jargon himself. He understood, too — although this did not enable him ever to close the one-man tribunal sitting in his mind— that he would never really know why the wind in his political sails slackened. He could only go on imagining answers that were given behind his back. And these could materialize only out of suspicions he found it possible to have about himself. Things that were forgotten or suppressed, dismissed by him when he was borne and buffeted exhilaratingly at the centre of the movement. He thought of all the criticisms he had made or agreed with, about others. The word goes round that Sonny is too intellectual. Sonny thinks too much. Sonny asks too many questions. Sonny's style of oratory is getting too predictable… out of date. Sonny's not a coward, no, no-one could ever say he wouldn't risk his own life, but… Sonny has attachments, attachments don't go with revolution, he's said so himself. Sonny's position on violence isn't quite in accordance with policy. And do you remember, that time. the business of the cabal. And that other time, before, the cleansing of the graves. his big speech, and then.
When he confronted the only individuals he could, his closest comrades, if they knew the answers they didn't tell him. Not the truth; so that must mean the truth would destroy closeness, he would never forgive them. — That's how it goes, Sonny, a damned shame… some people (a shake of the head), aie! you can't trust them, they're too ambitious and you're too straight… you know what I mean? You don't manoeuvre, it's not your nature, man. You today, me tomorrow — who knows what will happen. we just have to hang in there, for the struggle.—
When he confronted Hannah, together with whom, since the first discovery of this possibility between them, every political question had been analysed, she wasn't able to employ the faculty — not this time, not for this. All she could do was comfort him, touch him and enfold him, her soft thighs clamped heavily over his body, her arms tight round his neck, hands thrust into his hair, as if she were gathering him up and putting him together again. In time he grew ashamed of this cosseting, he was her lover, not some victim to be succoured. He made it clear that this did not accord with the discipline of activists; he did so by no longer speaking of what had happened, put it behind him like any stage in the struggle they had dealt with, and continued with good grace to do the work in the movement now allotted to him. He took her in his arms as her man, needing no consolation; and so, unsought, it secretly came to him. He could not resist it, although it was not what he wanted. What he wanted, from her, was what no-one could give him back; his trust in himself.