I wouldn't let him go alone to police stations when we were looking for her. I don't know why I should have thought that would be any protection for him; but I knew what she'd ask me to do, even when she herself couldn't tell me. We took food and clean clothing. He knows what you need in jail. He also knows how to talk to the police; apparently, once they're aware you've been inside and come out again, not afraid of them no matter what they did to you, you can talk to them and they can't refuse an answer as easily as they do to other people who don't know prisons, familiar ground to both jailers and jailed. Where the lawyer had no success in finding my mother's whereabouts, my father did, acting on a tip, I suppose, from the detainees' support organization. My mother was not at Diepkloof, where we'd thought her to be and he'd argued with the Major who'd refused to accept her change of clothing. They'd taken her to a jail in some dorp. I drove him there. They wouldn't let us see her but they accepted the food and clothes.
— And now? — I waited for him to give the word to start back because he seemed coiled in a daze; he sat hunched beside me as if he might leap out and hammer on the door as I did— the prison doors.
— It's a better place than Sun City.* Better conditions.—
But I'm not an old lag. She's in prison, that's all I know.
'Sun City', actually a casino resort, is the name given by political prisoners to Diepkloof Prison, near Johannesburg.
The big boys — the leadership — come round to the house again, the way people who've become too busy or important for old friends arrive to offer condolences. He shuts himself in with them; I suppose there may be something to be gained from their experience in dealing with the ways of Security. But if anything happens to her it's his doing. He knows that, every time he catches me looking at him. The little girl who's attached herself to me burst into tears when I told her what had happened, and she's offered to come and 'look after us'. But it's nobody's business — except his and mine. We eat together and go over the details of that night and anything else of relevance that might be recalled. I've told him of the phone calls; no lead there. One of his comrades suggests someone talked under interrogation — but about what? There had to be something to give away if someone talked. My father said, again, alone with me, what the lawyer had dismissed as nonsense from a man of his experience and intelligence. He carried it further. — What if I walk into the Major's office and tell them I hid the stuff in the yard, the limpet-mines and the hand-grenades planted there are mine?—
No man — no husband — could do more, even if he were to have loved my mother. I don't know the explanation. If she were one of his comrades — maybe they have to do that sort of thing if one individual were to be more valuable to the movement than another. That'd be more like it. But in this case. my mother!
If he loves her as much as that, he nevertheless goes off some evenings to that woman. He moves about the kitchen aimlessly with his bent back to me. Says to me at the door, I won't be late, or pauses, not knowing how to say what he really wants to, which is that I'll know where to find him if anything new happens, to assure me that's where he'll be, this time.
He leaves looking as if he's going to hang himself.
What would he do if he came home and found her here, suddenly released?
Before my father could go to the police and claim he was the possessor of the explosives hidden in our yard our lawyer was shown the signed statement in which my mother admitted she had consented to allow the storeroom to be used to store certain persons' property 'for a few nights'.
It was my mother who had talked under interrogation.
I know why she did. It was to be sure neither her husband nor I would be held responsible. She had insisted she didn't know the name or names of whoever was to remove the 'property'; and she refused to reveal the name or names of whoever had entrusted the 'property' to her, or to say why she had cooperated.
She had been briefed on how to deal with interrogators. My father clasped fist in hand as if stunning himself, his knees spread and his head sunk over his sagging body. The lawyer was embarrassed and alarmed. He tamely filled a glass of water; could not offer it to a man who had been through detention and imprisonment himself, a veteran of challenge to jailers of all kinds. My father looked up all round, wanting to know from somewhere — from me, because I was there, I was always there at home, her boy, mother's boy, how it happened? When? Where did my mother learn these things? How, without his having noticed it, had she come to kinds of knowledge that were not for her? And what was it she knew? Whom did she know whose names she couldn't reveal? What was Aila doing, all those months, without him?
I was not stunned; I was elated. It didn't last — she was charged, the case didn't look good, the lawyer admitted — but (I have my crazy moments, too) I felt a release soar up from somewhere in me, scattering showers of light. She was in prison and she was free, free of him, free of me. What nonsense.
She was shut in there. She, who had held us close to her, not wanting our clothing to touch the walls of the prison corridors when she had taken us as children to see our father between his jailers on the other side of a dirty glass screen.
It was Hannah who found out where Aila was being held. Hannah's connections. It was Hannah who got a note from Aila's husband smuggled to her. Hannah had helped this family in trouble before. Many families. She had visited the father and husband in prison. The note was a minute tightly-rolled piece of paper — Sonny knew how such things had to be slipped in stuck to the bottom of a tin plate at meal time or under the inner sole of a shoe. Hannah did not read the note before she passed it on for delivery. A note came back in Aila's handwriting. The scrap of paper was the label soaked off an aspirin bottle. There were four words. Don't contact Baby. Wait.
Sonny did not tell his son about the notes in case he asked questions. Hannah was, after all, a comrade. Always had been, from the first; and as well. The cause was the lover, the lover the cause.
Hannah's concern about Aila was a comfort; and could not be. It seemed to him she lay beside him now as if in her professional capacity, as she had come to see him when he was in detention, one among others her persistence in devotion to the cause enabled her to get to visit, and to whom, as to him, she wrote morale-building letters. He did not go to her to talk. He could not talk to Hannah as he needed — about how he had let it happen, how Baby and that husband he had never seen had somehow recruited a woman like Aila, poor Aila of all people, exposed her to danger, used Aila — and all behind his back. He had let it happen, not seen it, not been told (he sometimes didn't believe the boy hadn't known, didn't know) because of this woman in his arms. She knew that and so it could not be talked about. It was something neither could have foreseen could ever happen, she with her romantic respect for his family, he with his confidence that his capacity for living fully, gained through her, never tapped in the shabby insignificance of a small-town ghetto across the veld, made him equal to everything his birth, country and temperament demanded— dedication to liberation, maintenance of family, private passion. She was the only chance. The source of ecstasy and hubris. She still was, when she made love to him. Aila was in prison, this woman was going away because the common good outside self required this. Yet when he sank into the warmth of her and himself, when the nerves of his tongue passed over the invisible down of her skin, the different, goose-fleshed texture of her buttocks, when her weight was on the pelt of his chest, blinded and choked they were flung together, curved round each other like mythical creatures fixed in a medallion of the zodiac.