The lawyer was flinging arms wide before the sergeant at the counter, displaying his black robe. — I'm her lawyer — you can't refuse me permission to consult with my client! I demand the officer in charge— He gave a quick imperious lift of the head towards the door, drawing the father and son to him. — My briefcase. Bring me my papers. — A round-bellied policeman blocked the way. But Sonny, like a traveller slipping into the foreign language he hasn't forgotten, argued with him wheedlingly in the idiom of prison Afrikaans. Will sidled by in the confusion and placed himself close to the lawyer. The lawyer signalled Sonny to keep talking and, indeed, the policeman's attention left him at someone's urgent yell to attend to something else. Under the harangue of threats to report the personnel to the Master of the Court, the Prosecutor and the Judge, no-one now questioned the right of the lawyer's entourage to be present.
— Ten minutes, that's all. — The commanding officer retained his self-respect in a sharp edict.
The lawyer gave no sign of accepting the condition and no explanation to the father and son; they followed him to a small partitioned booth at the end of the anteroom, people crossing and recrossing before them, and behind the bubble glass rippling distorted colours of other heads moving. The lawyer opened the door.
She was standing there smiling to greet them, husband, son, lawyer. The wardress stood back from her, the policeman at a desk was scarcely a presence in contrast to Aila's presence. She wore one of her home-tailored jackets and there were the reassuring touches of her makeup (compact of self-respect made with Sonny, unharmed, thank god) but through the familiar beauty there was a vivid strangeness. Boldly drawn. It was as if some chosen experience had seen in her, as a painter will in his subject, what she was, what was there to be discovered. In Lusaka, in secret, in prison — who knows where — she had sat for her hidden face. They had to recognize her.
This woman hugged them ardently all in turn — Sonny, the lawyer, and then, of course, the one whom she had never let out of her embrace, her son.
Will, put on a tie. God Bless Africa I V Kaiser Chiefs
I stared at the back of his head on that drive and everything inside me shut down. I didn't think of anything, I didn't think of her, I was aware only of what was outside me. The stickers on the combis that cowboy lawyer raced and repassed. Sting and The Genuines playing on tape. The thick nap of the sheepskin-upholstered seat burying my hand. It's all complete, round a vacuum, whenever I want it.
When I saw the man hiding his head between his elbows while a policeman hit him, and everything inside me opened up, loosed — caged fear for her, for myself, fear of life — my father put his hand on my shoulder. He knew. A hand came down on my shoulder. To demand something of me; to be one with him. And after she had come to me, saving me for last as she used to do — a secret between us — when she came to kiss Baby and me goodnight, I saw her remarking — yes, that's the good old word — taking note: my weight, the softening round the chin and the belt slipped down under the beginnings of belly. No-one in our family's had flesh to spare. Not what she wanted me to be. But on the other hand, Baby has made her what Baby wanted her to be.
I didn't know what to say to her. I know that everything he had prepared he saw was wrong. Worse than that: she didn't need it. I could have told him that. I could have told him a lot of things he didn't notice, was always too preoccupied elsewhere to notice, things I understood, now; the visits to 'friends from work' he was pleased to accept as relieving him of responsibility for his neglect, the frequency of her trips over the border— well, he'd already realized they weren't spent sentimentalizing over a grandchild, but he was mistaken in his demeaning decision (typical! of course only his blonde has the intelligence and guts to be a comrade-in-arms) that she was manipulated, beguiled into use by Baby and that husband. He must have seen, the moment the door opened and there she was. He must have seen she was not 'innocent'; epithet that, I've heard him speechify, means denying responsibility towards your people.
He must have seen how she was. She kissed him like a young woman — I've never known my mother could be that way, I suppose now she's on the other side she knows what it's like not to be able to touch — but she didn't need comforting, there were no fears for him to still or tears for him to wipe. A lawyer is more than a husband and son when you are in the hands of those who bellow and beat a man who hides his head. I saw that. The lawyer, who had status here among the warders and policemen, he was the power, he was the one she was with. There were quick, voluble questions and answers between them, the ease of two who have established confidence in a matter of survival; he was the only one to have seen her while she was in detention, the only one who knew anything about her as she was now. She didn't have time or thought to ask us how things were at home. My father made several attempts and managed to murmur privately to her — The whole thing's insane, don't worry Aila, nothing will stick. — He meant any charges made against her. She looked at the lawyer, then at me; her dark smooth eyebrows came together in a pleat above the softness of her pausing glance, she's always looked like that when there's something not understood, and which cannot be explained. She touched my father's hand. — My turn, now. — She and the lawyer laughed.
At two o'clock in the afternoon, in Court B, Aila was charged with four offences under the Internal Security Act. — I think of her as 'Aila' since I saw her appear in court, that day, heard her names called out to identify her. The charges included terrorism and furthering the aims of a banned organization. Aila was accused of being a member of something called the Transvaal Implementation Machinery, responsible for acts of terror in the region, and connected to a high command named Amos Sebokeng. She was alleged to have acted as a courier between Umkhonto weSizwe in neighbouring countries and a cell in the Johannesburg area, to have attended meetings where missions for the placing of explosives were planned, and to have concealed terrorist arms on the rented property where she resided illegally.
She came home with us. The lawyer eloquently produced all the good reasons why my mother — that exemplary wife and home-maker whose retiring nature and virtues as a conscientious worker were attested to by the highly-respected medical practitioner by whom she had been employed for years — should be granted bail for Aila. The prosecutor's objections were overruled and ten thousand rands were paid; the lawyer had Dr Jasood's blank cheque ready, as the doctor's bandages had been there, in my father's absence, to bind up Baby's slashed wrists.
I have lived with Aila all the time while he, my father, was living his secret life and I have never heard of this 'Machinery' or this code name for some high command: the secret life she was living. I've been the cover for both of them. That sticks! She didn't even need to confide in me; the silence she kept, for my protection, made me her conspirator, just as I've been his.