She sat in the bath soaping her neck. Her hair was piled up and tied out of the way in the old purple scarf that had its place on a hook among towels. He was already drawing breath to speak when he came through the door. — Why should you be 'grateful' for the measly subsidy they give so you can run a crèche for them.—
— Not for them, for the children.—
— Ah no, no, for them. So they can sit in their council chamber and congratulate themselves on 'upgrading' living conditions in the ghetto where our kids are brought up. Where we're supposed to live and die. The place where they confine us. Zoo. Leper colony. Asylum. It's humiliating to take from them, Aila. Let them have it.—
Her questions were never objections; they were the practical consequence of acceptance. She did not oppose the move. She was careful to present it to their children as something exciting and desirable. And the children were ready to quit with heart-lessness their friends, their school, the four walls and small yard where they had played. Baby had the teenager's longing for the life she imagined existed in the city; Will cared only about taking the dog along. To Johannesburg, Johannesburg! Nobody asked exactly where. The husband, the father, was taking care of that.
When he knew where they were going to live the slither of the commuter train over the rails, taking him home from the warehouse, raced his bravado excitement, but as he walked the familiar streets each night, back to the old house, through the greasy paper litter outside the fish and chips shop, past the liquor store with its iron bars and attendant drunk beggars, past the funeral parlour where the great shining black car stood always ready to take the poor grandly on a last ride, past his old school with its broken windows and the graffiti of freedom that still had not come — as he deserted this, he realized that a certain shelter was being given up, for the family. Shabby, degrading shelter — but nevertheless. He himself had the strength of a mission to arm him; his family — Aila — it would be different for them. So he calmed his euphoria before he told her. And it was not in front of the children.
— We're going to move in among whites. It's a tactic decided upon, and I'm one who's volunteered. If you agree.—
She smiled indulgently, disbelieving. The committee had debated many tactics of resistance that did not come to anything. — What are you talking about. Tell me. How?—
— It's been done already. It'll be in one of the southern suburbs, of course, not where well-off whites live. Working-class Afrikaners want to move up in the world and they'll sell for a high price.—
— We can't afford to buy anything! In Johannesburg! Where will we get the money?—
— The money's being put up for us. We'll pay off a rent, same as we do here.—
— But it's illegal, how can you own a house in a white place?—
— That's the idea. We don't accept their segregation, we've had enough of telling them, we're showing them.—
— Us? — A pause. — So that's the idea.—
It was the nearest she came to challenging a committee's presumption in directing her family's life.
— It's a really nice house. Three bedrooms, a sitting-room, another room we can use for your sewing and my books— imagine! I'll be able to have a desk. We'll do up the kitchen, I'll build you a breakfast nook. And there's a big yard. A huge old apricot tree. Will can make a tree-house.—
Aila was inclining her head at each feature, as if marking off a list. She stopped when he did, looking at him with her black liquid gaze, appreciatively. Aila understood everything, even the things he didn't intend to bring up all at once; he could keep nothing from her, her quiet absorbed his subsumed half-thoughts, hesitations, disguising or dissembling facial expressions, and fitted together the missing sense. Because she said little herself, she did not depend on words for the supply of information from others. It was as if she had been there when he had been walking home from the station through the dreary streets and he had spoken aloud about their degradation as also some kind of shelter. Aila said: —Afrikaner neighbours.—
— Oh kids quickly get together. Dirty knees all look the same colour, hey. He'll make friends. The parents will avoid us… if we're lucky, that's all they'll do. But then we don't need them.—
— No.—
A single word had weight, from her. The subdued monosyllable was pronounced with such certainty; the habit of each other had made them even less demonstrative than they had been at the beginning of their marriage, but he was moved to go over to her. She turned away to some task. Awkwardly — she touched him only in the dark, in bed — she put up a hand to rest a moment on the nape of his neck. The spicy-sweet steam of Friar's Balsam came from the jam jar into which she had poured boiling water. — Who's that for?—
— Will's got a chest cold.—
— I'll take it to him. Is he in bed?—
He went off to tell his son about the tree-house they were going to build together. At their new home, high up, leaving the ghetto behind.
I don't understand how Baby doesn't know. Of course the fact that my father is away at all hours and sometimes for several days in itself doesn't mean anything. Long before he went to prison he had to get used to leaving us alone a lot. We had to get used to it. He wasn't a schoolteacher anymore, home every evening. He hasn't worked in the warehouse since the end of the first year in Johannesburg because the committee needed him as a full-time organizer. And then the committee made alliances with the new black trade unions which had just been allowed to be formed, and I don't know what else. All sorts of other people; groups active against the government. He was always one of those who wanted unity among them, always talking about it. When he was at home there were meetings sometimes the whole of Sunday, blacks, and our kind — lucky this house was built as a white people's house and there was room for them to shut themselves away.
And as soon as he came out of prison it started again — my father isn't the man to be scared off his political work because he's been jailed for it. Or he wasn't the man; now I don't know what he is. He goes out, away, and when he comes back, walks in, does the things he used to (pouring himself a glass of iced water from the fridge, hanging keys on one of the hooks he put up when we first moved here, asking us what sort of day we've had) he is acting. Performing what he used to be. Can't my sister feel that? It isn't something to see — the point is, it all looks the same, sounds the same. But the feeling. The body inside his same clothes. Whatever he touches, it's with the hand that has just left her. He smells different. Can't my sister smell it? Not of scent or anything, it's not that. I suppose he'd surely be too ashamed, he's become too sly for that. His own smell— of his skin — that I remember from when I was little and he'd cuddle me, or that used to be there until quite lately, when we'd share the bathroom. It's gone. I wouldn't recognize him in the dark.
Why should I be the one who had to know. Is it supposed to be some kind of a privilege? (What does he think!) She's older than I am, why should she be running around happily with her boy-friends, going off to her commercial college with silver-painted nails and Freedom T-shirts, secretly smoking pot every day.