A sign. — I'll be able to come back sometimes. — Oh thou weed.
Oh thou weed: who art so lovely faire, and smell'st so sweet that the sense aches at thee, Would thou had'st never been born.
They were going to see her. Father and son went with the lawyer to court to hear him argue application for bail. Sonny knew the procedure: Aila would be produced for formal charges to be laid, the case would be remanded for a later date. They would see her; she would materialize out of all the suppositions and talk and fears of the days since she disappeared — Aila in her new avatar. Disbelieving, Sonny, who himself had been the one to be produced from cells behind courts, did not know how to prepare for this apparition. Without being aware of it, he had dressed as he did when he was the one to be led into the dock.
The hearing was not at the great grey block of the city magistrate's courts in the district of the other great authority, the mining corporations' headquarters, where already an explosion of the kind that could be caused by the objects wrapped in curtain off-cuts had one day taken place. The court allotted was across the veld in Soweto. They travelled in the lawyer's air-conditioned car sealed like a diving bell from the mouthing noise and crowded faces in the combis that nosed past close and fast, and the huge shaking transport vehicles coming and going, crossing to industrial sites rearing up off the highway. In between, a green pile, the remnant of reed-beds, parted under gusts set up by traffic. The lawyer changed cassettes in his console dashboard and there was no conversation. Will sat on the back seat behind his father's head.
In the trampled veld where one area of Soweto ravelled into another the courts enclosed a quadrangle and their only access was from the verandah that ran along all four inner sides; red brick and shrubs, hangover from the old colonial style when the forts of conquest became the administrative oases, ruled into geometrical lawn and flowerbeds that demarcated the gracious standards of the invader from the crude existence of his victims. The lawyer left father and son at once, among people like themselves; drifting, standing, leaning against pillars, clustering around doorways from which they scattered to make way for the purposeful rumps of court officials. Waiting. All, like them, waiting to see a face that had been obliterated by uniforms, armoured vehicles and blind doors to break your fists on.
They were Sonny's constituents. He had taught their children, he had roused them to demand their rights, himself had disappeared into prison for them. But he never before had come, like them, to wait humbly for someone of his own flesh and blood caught up in some incomprehensible disaster. (Wasn't her flesh and blood mingled with his forever in the body of their son, trailing beside him.) These old women drawing snuff through their nostrils, mothers of murderers, these young women, painted and dressed to remind the car thief of the desires they provoked, these others, weary against the wall, swathed about with babies under blankets, and these hawking old men shrunk in baggy cast-off suits — it did not matter if they were waiting to see a common criminal or, like him, to have produced, habeas corpus, a prisoner of conscience (Aila! In that role!). He was one of them, now, in a way he had not known. Attending the trials of comrades was no preparation for this; there the solidarity of purpose made one's presence a defiance of the legal process. But to imagine the freedom songs and salutes for poor Aila!
The lawyer had gone to establish formalities and find out in which court she would appear. It was a long wait and at first the father and son walked again and again along the four sides of the verandah, as people do while expecting to be summoned any minute. — Why doesn't he come back? — His father spoke, the son knew, only to break the silence between them in their isolation among other people's voices; he didn't have to answer.
— At least tell us what the delay's about.—
— D'you want me to go and see if I can find him?—
— No point, Will.—
The son jumped down from the verandah. The shadow of one side of the building bisected the quadrangle into shade and sun and he stretched out on the grass among the people who followed warmth there. It was a kind of strange picnic, where patience substituted for holiday relaxation. Some people left the enclave and came back with fat-cakes and oranges, tins of Coke and fresh packets of cigarettes. Children played and fought furtively. Like them, he cupped his hand under a tap and drank. With the unconcern of routine, an employee in government-issue boots and overalls, singing a hymn in Sotho under his breath, unwound a hose and turned the flowerbeds into puddles.
Sonny stood above his son, made as if to prod him with the toe of his shoe. — Isn't it damp? (Smiling faintly.) Do you want something to eat?—
Neither wanted to be the one absent when the unimaginable moment came and she was brought into court. The father paused, with a gesture at the sun, went back to stand on the verandah. Perhaps he thought his son had dropped off, asleep; face up to the sky, eyes closed. But he was on his feet and leaping over the people on the grass before his father beckoned at the sight of the lawyer twisting his shoulders through the crowd on the verandah. — At last! — application's set for two this afternoon, though. The police agreed to bail but the Prosecutor insists on contesting… I know that fellow… big ego… it's absurd, but there you are. And by now no court's available this morning. I'll have to go to chambers and come back, there're urgent matters I have to attend to. But let's not waste time asking questions, just stick with me and say nothing. Will, take my bag. You're my clerk. Come.—
Gabbling in an undertone he hustled them along before him through a corridor and to a walkway enclosed in heavy diamond-mesh wire. — Just hang about. Take no notice of anyone. Point at me if you're asked what you're doing here.—
He strode up to the long counter in the room in which the walkway ended, again using his bulk to push through a confusion of policemen and other people competing for the attention of the officers in charge. A gross tap dance of policemen's boots clipped smartly up and down past the father and son. Whichever way they stood aside, they were in someone's path. Exchanges and orders in the blacks' own languages and the Afrikaans of white officers flew about in the haste and impersonality of individuals dependent, each for his own fingernail hold of authority, on a hierarchy of command. Physical bewilderment made it difficult for the father and son to be self-effacing; both let themselves be buffetted as if they were inanimate obstacles some cleaner or workman had left lying about, while what they were witnessing through the wire mesh and the doorway was some intensely piercing awareness they alone could receive, because Aila belonged to them. Because Aila belonged to them, everything they saw happening to the other victims being escorted across the yard from some cell or Black Maria out of sight could be happening, out of sight, to her. Sonny himself had been brought at that trotting gait of one in handcuffs to register in the anterooms of trials. He had seen wretched, blubbering men dragged by warders, punched, where they bent double, to make them opstaan jou bliksem, by white bullies or shaken and shouted at by black bullies, he knew as a commonplace sight a barefoot man hobbled by ankle chains shuffling as a horror risen from the slave past into the memory of computers and the glare of strip lighting in the anteroom. But Aila, Aila, Aila had nothing to do with this! Aila in the neat, sweet-smelling clothes she sewed for herself, the seed-pearl necklace round her throat, her arms drawn to her sides in rightful, subconscious shrinking from the walls that held him — that was as far as Aila had ever been, ever should be, in contact with any of this. And the boy — what must it mean to be the boy, who knew nothing of it, not a particularly manly youngster, protected too much by his mother so that despite his intelligence and his reading (yes, admit it, encouraged in that by his father) he knows only at second-hand the ugly, brutal temptation of the power of one being over another, he's been shown only the beauty and nobility of resisting it, father smiling calmly at his adolescent son brought to pay a prison visit. The father could do now what he had not been able to across the glass barriers, then: Sonny put a hand on Will's shoulder. To comfort. To be one with him.