Yet a kitchen is like a Ladies’ Room in a public place, the secure refuge for confidences — same food-warmed air despite the fan the Dolphins have installed in their conversion of the chancel into the place where (some of) the appetites of the flesh are catered to by the latest models of microwave and blender, and a dishwasher helps with the aftermath of sinful indulgence.
— I’ve never known them, you know, so close before. They seem just like us, don’t they — living here like us in this suburb, keeping house, bothered having to call the plumber because of leaks, paying the monthly fee of security patrol. All the stuff that goes along with being married, domestic, in the end however you started together. Steve and you, Jake — coming in from the cold. No — the heat, Umkhonto—I don’t count myself in your class, Jake has to stand in for me; well, another way, they’ve come in from the cold. They’re neighbours with the rest of us. We lend each other the lawnmower, soda water when we run out. Comrade bourgeoisie. Oh, by the way, I resent, that’s one thing I hold against them, they’ve hijacked the word. You can’t say you had a gay time, you like gay colours, and what about ‘gaily’, you can’t walk gaily along feeling happy — all these have a special meaning these days. Theirs. You can’t have that word just for living it up. Having a jol. — Isa was stacking the plates into the machine, word by word.
Both were laughing, because they were doing just that, themselves with these good neighbours.
Jabu put the detergent tablet into its slot and snapped the latch, Isa pressed the right combination of switches. Under the machine’s swirling tidal rush that isolated them she was able to speak as if without being heard. — Have you ever had a man do, I mean what they do — to you.—
Jabu runs the palm of one hand down the fist of the folded other, cautious as what she understands Isa has said cannot be what she meant.
There was never a curtained confession box in a Protestant Gereformeerde Kerk, but there can be confession under the leap tide of the dishwasher. Isa places herself before the black box curtain.
— Once I did. I was crazy about the man and he told me, to know everything sex is, can be, do. It was so horrible Jabu — some goo, Vaseline, so he could get into me and it hurt I was ashamed I felt like I wanted to shit he came on his own without me. All I could get out of it was the idea of the dirt in that place, my dirt, coming off on him, his thing. How can they do it to each other? — An abrupt gesture — stayed — in the direction of the swimming pool. — And we have the clean soft smooth place specially for them. To take them in.—
Jabu could only move to take Isa’s hand as if whatever had happened had only just happened. This woman Isa-and-Jake, Jake didn’t know, would never know? That’s certain, the way some things can’t be said between a man and a woman: what had been told now. It’s a responsibility she didn’t want — to have received it.
Isa was asking as if to put finality to the moment in the kitchen — A black man wouldn’t do it to a woman.—
A question. Or an affirmation to compensate for all the assertions of blacks’ savagery that she had lived among as a white.
Jabu was finding herself as she so seldom had time, was ever challenged within, to be set in the past — going home was done easily now, with a sense of belonging unchanged though experienced in a new self; no estrangement. The way sexuality had been, was still ordered there — and the way it was far from home, Swaziland college, recruitment to detention, bush camp; correspondence courses, Freud included, in Glengrove clandestinity. This kind of order is what she would think of as ‘sexual code’. What did she know.
Men. Was there a black man who would do the same thing to a woman. Who is she to say — in her reaction. Claim a superior decency — sensitivity, for blacks?
The two women left the cloister of the kitchen and came among the company mainly of men with Mkize’s wife there innocent of what had passed between her comrade sisters in the domesticity for which they were being jokingly lauded.
Everybody goes overseas.
It’s understood that Steve and Jabu have a particular life of their own and are not often involved in the many occasions of celebration which are observed in the Reed clan. But when they do take part (it’s Jabu who says it’s only right they must) Jonathan seems always to have just returned from a business trip or holiday ‘abroad’ with his wife. Brenda tells graphically of Trafalgar Square, castles they have seen, Montmartre, Roman tavernas, the Holocaust Museum in Berlin, the beaches in Portugal.
Places Steve and Jabulile have never been. Steve might have once gone on a student tour to Europe if it hadn’t meant fiddling while the townships burned in police fire. Only a very few blacks, venerable as scholars or Christians, promoted by the institutions or white benefactors got out of South Africa for reasons acceptable to the powers-that-were for the issue of passports; the others were escaped freedom fighters receiving military training in Moscow, China, Ghana…If any of these came from the coal-mine village no one would know of this. Except maybe the schoolmaster Elder. His daughter had got as far as Swaziland and detention in a South African prison; that he knew. She had learnt something of the existence of the outside world by some pictures of it in her father’s clandestine store of books secretly coming from and to be returned to the library he had no right to use.
Both she and Steve had seen it all on television, the daily devastation of wars, and the Sistine Chapel. While, of course, his brother Jonathan and eagerly receptive wife had never experienced the inside of a tent in the bush or desert camp where each night you could be spending the last of your existence without ever having had the chance to look elsewhere, at the wonders of the world.
Everybody goes overseas.
With the new millennium came the time they could and did. Justice Centre cooperatively allowed her leave to coincide with the winter vacation at the university, summer in the other hemisphere. As his brother Jonathan was so knowledgeable about airlines and flights and Steve, against her suggestion, wouldn’t ask advice, Jabu herself called Brenda, and Brenda delighted, insisted on coming over to give hers. Where exactly was the house again, she’s been there once, how long ago — bringing a generous gift of the latest baby equipment when Gary Elias was born — wasn’t there some old church where you had to turn…
Even though she and Jonny didn’t need to skimp it (this was the way she put their resources) she always made it her business to get the best value for a reasonable fare, and of course there were cheaper ones she could also recommend, their daughter and a pal had happily travelled that way. It was a Saturday morning and Steve was at the gym; Jabu offered coffee and the two women talked for the first time outside his clan occasions. — Is your little family complete now? — If Brenda was thinking, though not from the same authority, of the home women’s expectation always of more babies — isn’t that the African way? — this wasn’t patronisingly white, coming from this woman. Quite the reverse. She is eager to be loved by a sister-in-law, the Reed family’s black stake in the new dispensation. Steve boyish in brief shorts and with hair flat from a shower walked in just as she was irrepressibly repeating the embrace with which she had waylaid Jabu at his father’s funeral. His quiet greeting just as irrepressibly expressed that this was excessive, but when Jabu was released the women were two bells set pealing.