— You sure about that? What's coming also begins to look a lot like the return of old nationalism. — A good man; her paradox was that what she revered in him was a trusting idealism she herself — whom she saw as a lesser being — questioned.
He felt the twinge of her scepticism. — Sure as you and I are in this room. You can't make what you don't believe in. If we don't, what is there.—
Talking of change was a danger to the weekend among the orange blossom. That was exactly what Hannah was obeying: the need to change. How would change come, for her, if she stayed on in the cottage, conveniently near for visits from Sonny? How does such a love affair — come about, made inevitable by the law of life between a man and woman — obey the other law of life: moving on? He would never leave Aila; she could never really want him to leave Aila, and Will and his daughter who was an activist, like him, away over the border. He no longer would be Sonny if he did. He always would have to get out of bed and go back home; there would always be an eye on a watch to cut off the long talks, side by side, like this one, the limit of an occasional weekend lies could allow them together. The lies had spread. He knew she lied by omission when she concealed from him under laconic practical references to her future post the excitement working in her at the idea of the vast continent of Africa. The important responsibilities she would have, the visitors' room of the prison where she had sat behind the barrier (a fair caryatid existing as head and shoulders only) opening out for her to a power of ordering life — shelter and food — for starving thousands, thousands upon thousands, the world manufactures an endless wealth of refugees. The important personalities she would meet, the international circles of influence she would move in; the men who would occupy the place made for love in this, as every other way of life — a law of life he had learnt from her.
They walked hand in hand under the trees lit up by pendant oranges, the pale globes of lemons and vivid baubles of naartjies, on a tour of where they had been happy. The variety of citrus cultivated there bloomed and ripened at the same time, even on the same branch; with the perfume of blossom there was a sickly graveyard decay of rotten fruit, fallen and fastened on by flies. It squelched underfoot and she paused on one leg, holding his shoulder for balance, while she scraped her shoe clean against a trunk. He took her head in his hands and began to kiss her cruelly, he pushed hard fingers under her clothes out there where people could have come upon them, like any coarse drunk dragging a woman outside during a party. She had to fight him to stop a mating with her then and there. But back in the rondavel, her head on his arm, looking up together at the thick, smooth-stroked orderliness of thatch, a canopy for them, he was tender Sonny, wondering Sonny at the pleasure of their being. And he made love to Hannah. He would make love to her, this one weekend, make love to her so that she could never forgo it, never leave; needing Sonny.
When he came back there was no thought of killing him.
We went together to the lawyer and then with the lawyer to John Vorster Square to find out where they were holding her. The police wouldn't say.
After they took her away they came back on Sunday morning and searched the house and garage and the room in the yard that must have been a servant's room when white people lived in the house. It was our storeroom. There were garden chairs that needed new canvas and gardening tools and Baby's old bicycle and a broken food-mixer. There was a wooden mushroom I remembered my mother used to use for darning our socks. There was a box of schoolbooks, some off-cuts of material, and wrapped in the material were three hand-grenades, two limpet-mines and two land-mines. The stuff was what was left over from the curtains in my room, she'd made them when we moved in. The hand-grenades looked like small metal pineapples, I recognized them from the charts put up in post offices to alert people to the presence in the city of weapons that might blow them up. I also recognized the tubular limpet-mines. The two other objects looked like air filters from a small car engine. I wouldn't have known them for what they were.
I had followed the search through all our things in the house with smiling rage, enjoying the fruitless and disgusting rummage which discovered, as I knew it would, nothing. My father is too experienced to keep so much as a scrap of compromising paper here in our own house. I said, now you've made your bloody mess, will you go and let me clear it up — but the louts were weaving about our place like dogs who know there's a bone buried somewhere and they started on the yard. They lifted the hood of my car. They emptied the dustbin. And then among the schoolbooks and the bits of cloth left over from the curtains they found what they'd known was somewhere to be found.
He and I worked it out together; in the kitchen grabbing tea and bread to keep us going, in the car driving from police station to police station, determined to find where they were holding her. He had no doubt that it was because of him. A frame-up to trap him. They were after him and couldn't pin a new charge, so they'd come for his wife, hoping that in his anxiety for her he would reveal himself, do something that would give away real involvement with activity like the one they had set up for her. They had planted the explosives and then come back to 'find' them.
— But why take the whole house to pieces first. — Because you were there, Will.—
At the reminder of his absence his cheek twitched, I almost felt sorry for him, though where the hell was he… he wasn't even where he knows I could find him, when it happened.
He insisted they must have planted the stuff when they came to take her; but I answered the door, I saw them leave with her, nobody went near the storeroom.
— They must have come back after you'd gone to sleep again. You didn't hear anything?—
He was keenly enquiring-I suppose he thinks he might light upon some testimony from me he might use to her advantage; he's accustomed to finding me useful. But he's the one who, once again, wasn't there.
So I stared at him. — I went to look for you.—
— Oh. I see.—
His face closed away, in defence, to an archetype — his big nose carved and dominant, his lips mauvish and curving in a strong dark line. He escaped into an old schoolmasterish gesture, sounding the table with a tapping thumb.
— I left the whole place open, the lights were on. Anyone coming would have thought they'd be bound to be seen.—
No reproach for my carelessness; hardly!
But if we couldn't be father and son in any other way, we had a single purpose in our determination to get my mother out. A new conspiracy. And he was brave, of course — I've always admired his courage — because he constantly showed himself in places and situations where they might have decided to pick him up. They often do this when relatives of a detainee or indicted prisoner are lured to police stations by the presence of one of their own held somewhere behind walls. I was surely in no danger, a 'clean' member of the family, like my mother.
— They even gave her a passport — just like that. — He explained that he was, most unfortunately, away on urgent matters (the lawyer knew that could only mean the movement's affairs) when Aila was arrested but he was taking full responsibility on himself for whatever that innocent woman might be charged with. — Let them arrest me. I'm willing to be involved up to the hilt, so long as they let her go. The whole thing is insane. Aila! Can't you do something, get them to let her out and take me as hostage for her? I'm serious.—
I listened and I saw he was. But the lawyer stretched his legs before his chair and pulled at his lower lip. — Sonny, you're serious about nonsense, then. You know you can't make such deals with them. For god's sake… you're not green… you know it all well enough. It's the old process; as soon as they charge her we'll keep pegging away for bail, I'll press for the earliest possible appearance for the application.—