When she caught sight of herself in the steamy bathroom mirror, she saw the United Nations High Commission for Refugees Regional Representative for Africa there in the familiar pudgy face. (She could not stop smoking, even to please him, because she would get fat.) Hannah never had liked her own face. She had no vanity; and this was one of the qualities, conversely, that attracted Sonny to her. An unsought reward. She would have agreed with Sonny's Will that her kind of looks were too pink-fleshy — though his comparison with the animal by whose name he reviled her to himself certainly would have hurt her cruelly. Particularly coming from him.
She saw the Regional Representative for refugees so often there that she had to tell Sonny. She would have to tell him, anyway, now. The High Commission wanted an answer.
She did not know whether to tell him before love-making or after. Each time she heard his step coming over the cracked cement of the cottage stoep she was taken by an agitation of indecision, moving restlessly about their one room to escape the necessity. It seemed to Hannah a terribly important difference: before or after. A matter of honesty, precious between them. They had never seduced one another. What were known as feminine wiles and male deceptions were denials of equality, an ethic of the wide struggle for human freedom they belonged to. If she brought up the subject after they'd made love, it could seem calculated to catch him in a mood of tenderness, shorn like Samson, not fit to put up resistance. If she told him before, then the love-making (their compact made in the flesh) would seem an attempt to divert him from something on which it was his right to make her concentrate. Yet it was in the end in her disarmed state, love casting out fear or the tranquillizing drug of sex blurring judgment, that she told him. She had put out her hand to feel for the cigarette pack on the floor and he drew his arm from under her head to stop the hand. She smiled with her eyes still shut and curled the hand into the damp nest of hair in his armpit instead. He gave her the childhood kiss on the forehead. She loved him so much she could have told him anything: we're going to die, you'll go to prison again one day, I'm going away — no consequence of words spoken existed.
— An extraordinary thing. I've been offered a job.—
He answered sleepily. — That Council of Churches one? You can certainly get it if you want it.—
— No. It's really something I can hardly believe—
There was a faint encouraging pressure, his arm and chest against the hollow where her hand was held.
— United Nations. The High Commission for Refugees. — And then it all came from her: —They've actually offered me a post at the level of director — that's just one below the Assistant Secretary General.—
He seemed not to want to move, not to wake fully.
She thought for a moment he would fall asleep again and not remember what she had said. Let him sleep, let him be asleep.
— When did you hear this?—
— A little while ago. I didn't take it seriously.—
— What kind of position. Where.—
— Well, the actual title's the High Commission's Regional Representative for Africa. Based in Addis Ababa. But working all over, of course.—
— Yes, it's a vast continent, Hannah. and many wars.—
Sonny disentangled himself gently from her and sat up. — How did all this come about? How do they know about you?—
— Apparently a recommendation from the International Commission of Jurists. I had no idea.—
He nodded slowly; he was rubbing his naked arms, crossed over against himself. — Addis. Eritrea, Sudan, Lebanon. God knows where, there are new camps every day, new populations wandering homeless.—
— Mozambique. — She added somewhere nearer by, within reach of him.
He turned and gazed down at her. She kept quite still in her shelter of blonde hair, a straggling wisp sweaty from love-making streaking one cheek. But Sonny only smiled, the smile that lingered and turned into that painful grin of his he couldn't relax. — A wonderful opportunity, my Hannah. An honour to be chosen.—
— Offered.—
— No; chosen.—
— I've just left it. I haven't even replied. they've written again. By courier.—
— Of course. They want you. Highly recommended.—
— Lie down, I can't talk to your back. please.—
He sank beside her. They were stretched out like two figures on a tomb commemorating a faithful life together. She took his hand. — I don't know what to say to them. I mean, what can I do. I'm. I've got my work here—
— They know about that, don't they. They know how good at that kind of thing you are; that's why. They know you're capable of something. more. bigger. important.—
— Nothing's more important than what's happening here. For me.—
— You don't know what to say to them.—
— No. I don't. I just don't know.—
—You've thought about it.—
— Yes, in a way. I haven't really. it doesn't seem to be something I can take in—
— But you've thought about it.—
— What it would mean — yes. — He had drawn it out of her, he was making her face what she had not, did not want to.
She could not turn to him the fatuous, what do you think?
She got out of bed and padded barefoot into the kitchen, the familiar sight of the Van Gogh sunflowers, to make some coffee. She supposed he would have to go, soon; he always had to go. She did not return to the room while the water was boiling; she left him alone there, god knows what he was thinking — but she knew what it was he was thinking, she did not want to see it. She picked the dead leaves off the pot of orégano growing on the windowsill. There was the whoosh of the lavatory cistern releasing its content; he had used the bathroom, and she found this reassuring — life going on humbly with its small demands of the body.
She brought in two mugs of coffee. He was back in the bed. — I wish they'd never asked me.—
I was the one to open the door again.
I actually heard them before they hammered on it. I woke and knew immediately what was coming with the screech of the gate and the tramping up the concrete path he laid for my mother so we wouldn't trail mud onto the stoep. It's as if there's a setting in my brain like a wake-up call programmed on a radio clock.
I got up and without even turning on the light went down the passage and unlocked the door with a flourish.
— He's not here.—
Within three silhouettes I made out a pale blur and two dark blanks — a white officer, and the others our kind. One of them shone his torch at my face: —Dis net die seun, man. —
— You want to come and search? My father's not here. I don't know where he is, so no good asking.—
One of them pressed the switch of the stoep light, the darkness whisked from them — the officer in uniform and the other two in their kind of drag, dressed in jeans and split running shoes to look like disco-goers instead of fuzz. The white was young but had false teeth, I saw when he smiled at my cockiness to show he was used to the lack of respectful fear you can expect from the families of men like my father. He spoke in Afrikaans. — But you know where your mother is, hey — go and call your mother.—