And then again — in his depression, the absence of Sonny/ Aila, his feelings somersaulted violently; he found himself think-ing — insanely — that if the law had still forbidden him Hannah, if that Nazi law for the 'purity' of the white race that disgustingly conceived it had still been in force, he would never have risked himself. For Hannah. Could not have. Because needing Hannah, taking the risk of going to prison for that white woman would have put at risk his only freedom, the only freedom of his kind, the freedom to go to prison again and again, if need be, for the struggle. Only for the struggle. Nothing else was worthwhile, recognized, nothing. That filthy law would have saved him.
Out of the shot and danger of desire
And then he feared himself, come to such perverse conjecture. If it should somehow show in his face, if anyone should somehow sense the shame of it passing through his mind, one of their interrogators jeering in glee, one of his comrades: staring, appalled.
He turned fifty-two. The day was not remarked in any way. His son did not remember the birthday but, a few days after, a card came. Pasted on it was the photograph of a laughing small child in a cap with Mickey Mouse ears. Loving wishes (the formula of the card), and hand-written X-ed kisses, signatures— Baby, Aila, the husband he had never met.
A tide wearing away a coastline, little by little, falling into the ocean of time. They fall away, one by one, lovers, the clinging arms of children, the memory of when life was unthinkable without them. Fifty-two. And all the while he was triumphant in his vitality and virility, apparently unaffected by his forty-something years, this decay was taking place… His gums (the dentist insisted it was a long-term process) were already shrinking, his prostate (Jasood said he might have to operate) was becoming enlarged. Close to the earth and happy for battle as he had felt himself, age was there, working within him.
Yet what had been the political ideal now became realized in his daily life under circumstances never sought. Living with his son in a house emptied of its life — two silent men, unable to sustain it — he was stripped of every obligation, every preoccupation, left for the cause alone. And unfettered, even, by any ambition, from the seduction of being the crowds' 'Sonny', which perhaps at one time muddied the clear commitment that had evolved in the schoolmaster, he continued to work for the cause now, all his days and half the nights whenever he was needed. He lived like so many others of his kind whose families are fragmented in the diaspora of exile, code names, underground activity, people for whom a real home and attachments are something for others who will come after.
There were no more letters from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. Occasional phone calls came with Aila's voice, deceptively near in his ear; far away, in countries she didn't name. After a few minutes he would pass the receiver to the one she was waiting for; although he no longer had it to his ear, standing by he could hear Aila's voice rise with excitement now that she found herself talking to her son.
When everything was forgotten, he dreamt of her: Hannah. A brief, brilliant dream precise as an engraving. Out of the steep dark of his sleep she shook each foot like a cat, as she always had, scattering drops of water while she got out of the bath.
The dream wakened him. He could not fall asleep again. There flashed and plunged behind his closed eyelids a broken sequence of men with white rags tied across their faces in torchlight, men on horseback carrying their flag with its emblem of the swastika, the deformed shape twisted once again to the same purpose. White extremists were rallying to that sign; blacks who had moved into white neighbourhoods were suffering threats and vandalism beneath it. And fear, fear.
An electronic cricket sounding in the quiet: he could hear the creaking whirr of Will's word-processor, printing out. At least the boy seemed to have turned studious enough, although business administration was not exactly the aspect of economics he himself would have chosen for his son. The boy, too, worked late night after night on whatever it was he was doing, since he'd bought the word-processor with money saved from part-time jobs he found himself. It was not possible to get up and go to the boy, tell him, I can't sleep, talk to me. But the silence was not the silence of the day, between them; Will was there, they were still together.
Although Sonny had been refused a passport for the compassionate purpose of visiting his wife and daughter, others were making the trip across the frontier for openly political purposes. White industrialists, churchmen, academics, liberals and lawyers: they were people belonging to professional and social structures within the law, even if they now pressed official confidence in them by tentatively stepping beyond it. Most never had had, nor sought, any contact with the liberation movement within the country. The instinct of a ruling class to seek out what it hoped might be the discovery of something of their own kind beneath a different skin and a different rhetoric ignored the opportunities to do so at home and led them to go abroad to meet the movement's leaders in exile, instead. For the feared future seemed to exist, already, there, outside the country. Perhaps some of its expected retribution might be won over, by pre-emption, before it arrived within.
Some came back in a euphoric state. The exiled leaders wore lounge suits not Castro fatigues, they could small-talk over wine. Surely such people were not really revolutionaries? And even the Russians, who had armed them all these years, had turned out to be amenable to dining in Pretoria — in the end there is surely no deal so difficult, so unlikely, so obscured by tear-gas, punctured by gunshot wounds, so bedevilled by the explosion of land-mines and petrol bombs, by the preparation of lifetimes of imprisonment, the documentation of nights of interrogation, by the thundering of trucks moving thousands from their homes — no deal that, in the end, cannot be clinched in the course of a business lunch.
And meanwhile, let the police and army deal, in another proven way, with the strikers and demonstrators, the eloquent troublemakers, black and white, at home. And if they can't do it, there's yet another way of dealing: never discover those who finish off the troublemakers, killing from behind masked faces and shooting from moving cars.
At the same time as envoys of change on the white man's terms were flying back and forth, some perhaps secretly briefed by the government, several of Sonny's colleagues were getting travel documents restricted to certain destinations and valid for short periods. Some pragmatist in Pretoria must have calculated this could sweeten up the American Congress in its raucous calls for mandatory sanctions against the country. There was no logic — for anyone outside the Department of the Interior — to the decisions why this one should be let out on a string and that one should not. One or two were able to fly to Lusaka or London directly after being released from a spell of detention; the applications of others, like Sonny, were refused repeatedly. He had given up, for the time being, anyway. Assigned to responsibilities dealing with the crisis in black education, he was too busy to absent himself. And there were more and more disturbing happenings to preoccupy him; some in the area where he himself lived. At this house bricks were flung through a bedroom window; over the façade of that one, paint was splashed. Graffiti left its snail-trail of slime. Only a street away from Sonny's house a couple had just moved in and were arranging their furniture when a group of white men and women invaded the house and ordered them to leave. One bellowed at the husband: —This's a white suburb under Group Areas and there's enough of us to make you people get out. Even if it's made a free-settlement area we're not going to take any kind of kak law here, I'm warning you. — The wife said she was going to call the police; the group laughed, and tramped away. Little wonder they had laughed; the police told the couple they were occupying the house illegally: there were no grounds to file a complaint.