The centuries of painters and sculptors which had created the visioning of the world was work neither he nor she had seen other than as reproduction. Quietly not remarked to one another, in the National Gallery it was to each another pair of eyes given. For her, da Vinci. She walked back again to The Virgin of The Rocks. Steve stood beside: her experience. She turned at last, to him, as if it were he who had given it to her, it came from his past, which was not only the colonial heritage.
Returning to the entrance foyer of these places is coming to the souvenir shops, bookshops, people struggling into coats for the return — to the city. She bought a postcard of The Virgin of The Rocks. Directed to a post office in Trafalgar Square she stamped and mailed, sent it to her father. The Elder in his Protestant church.
He said — Do you think he’d really like the Virgin, she’s so Catholic.—
— Aren’t you dying for tea? Or coffee. I am. — She was gone, back into the street. Looking this way and that, as if expecting to be hailed. Spied a coffee bar where they sat behind a heat-blurred window and agreed and disagreed, transported, about what had confronted them.
Another day they were at an exhibition of African Art. It was meeting in another place, space in life, someone you know intimately. They had the special animation of pride ethos shared, although here was her ethos, and it was his by adoption — no, earned with formulae and chemicals for explosives while in the paint factory! The Greek gods and warriors in some museums are all aeons dead but the African sculptures that combined without contradiction the abstract of reality, the totality — bone structure of human faces, feet, limbs, the perspectives of features profile, frontal, appearing anywhere in single, the one image which Picasso took for himself from the African vision, they are still being created at home, by people of Africa whose vision it was and is.
Macbeth probably had been chosen of Shakespeare at her Swaziland school because it was thought young Africans would more easily understand this play, it would relate to the tribal chieftains of their own history. When in the London rain he declared ‘Let it come down!’ he confessed to her amusement he’d played Banquo in his school’s production: they must get tickets for the performance at the Globe listed in Time Out. She didn’t know about the continued existence of Shakespeare’s Globe; but that he had been familiar with as living heritage in the English culture from which the Reeds came far back and passed down indiscriminately along with the imperialistic ones the comrades set the Spear against — and there occurs to him, too, from The Tempest—he quotes Caliban for her: ‘You taught me language, and my profit on it is I know how to curse’—his island’s invaders from Europe.
In the Globe they stood in the audience as in Shakespeare’s time, in its open auditorium. The endless conversation of English downpour drowned the beautiful delivery of the cast and drenched her; bewilderment at this primitive worship of the Bard’s shrine — What’s the idea of having people stand out in the rain?—
Their comrade hosts offered as their treat a Soho night club: a black singer from home (she’s made it in London, a wow) sang with the instrument of her whole body along with the voice, music by Todd Matshikiza, the composer and jazzman from Johannesburg who had died in exile, some other country in Africa. Too wide awake with the beat they lingered together before giving up the evening. In the shared living room the West Indians and their friends had left empty glasses, the shed coats of bananas, and a mat of newspaper sheets, open bottle of wine, as if welcoming, Steve was stretched out on the floor with his head against the base of the sofa between Jabu’s feet as she sat. He was playing with the spindle heels of those sandals of hers, scuffed by London streets, as a light late-night context to what he was saying to their comrades — When are you coming back?—
There was a pause. Perhaps the English rain had stopped, outside. A silence when something that shouldn’t have been said has been said. A subject the speaker knows is taboo. The woman, Sheila, began — But why? — and the man snatched from her — Why do you think of that, what would the reason—
To go back.
— Home. — Jabu addressed nobody in particular, as one stating the obvious. The two doctors had been avid for details of the mounting number of AIDS infections and deaths in the country they had left. — There’s a shortage of doctors.—
— And you two are good ones. — Added, perhaps it was the wine in him that found plain speaking from Steve. — You had your training at our medical schools. — It could be a reproach.
— I believe you’ve got doctors from Pakistan and even Cuba. It’s a choice, where you do your work as a doctor. Your obligation to the patient, the profession…it’s the same.—
His woman Sheila came to his rescue perhaps to prevent giving away before comrades in this hour of indiscretion released by beat of rhythms and drink, more personal and questionable reasons. Isn’t there a right to ambition and professional prestige, after years that these had no claim against dedication to the Struggle. What do you owe; after.
He spoke for himself. — I’m getting skills for the care of babies and children that don’t exist at home, no such facilities.—
When they stirred for bed and the usual token goodnight embrace, he hung back to be last beside Steve, and shaking his head to dismiss his woman’s loyal justification on his behalf along with his own — I envy you. And Jabu. — The voice the murmur allowed oneself in the dark; he switched off the lights.
They hadn’t missed the children. Didn’t have to confess or tax one another with this unnaturalness. Those two weeks in London, mother lair of the imperialism they along with their comrades at home saw lingering while the USA was the successor imperialist, were freedom they never had tasted. Free of the discipline of the Struggle, free of the discipline of the Aftermath, the equally absolute necessity to resist, oppose the underside prejudice and injustice persisting, whether with the witnesses she must coach when the Justice Centre is to testify for their defence or whether he must be regarded in the academic establishment as a Leftist troublemaker self-righteously supporting students in their ungrateful demands of the higher education system granted them by a Constitution. Time; to be alive for each other, without other commitment. Is the term for a first ever like that — holiday.
The children. Sindiswa had quickly become a directing personality not the guest of hospitality, she didn’t want to hear anything about London — the place the presents came from, yes — unable to tell fast enough in her splendid shrill tumble of words everything said and done in the adventure of Isa and Jake’s home. Isa said Sindi was an entertainment she didn’t want to part with.
Gary hung back. He had the air of someone nowhere, self-misplaced. If such, an adult state, can be attributed to a child. With that guilt upon them, Steve and Jabu were back in the Suburb and with the exploited coming for redress at the Centre and the students coming from their university, circumstances centuries-long in measure against a two-week desertion.
The rent has been raised; he remarked with a mock sigh to Jake — Your comrades and gays’ Suburb’s going upmarket.—
— Yes my brother, the bourgeoisie created by the landlord capitalist…Well well whatever. — He and Isa had bought their house.