But she had said after the first few times she had visited One-Twenty-One, This won’t last long, you know.
He misunderstood what she was telling him: that he couldn’t count against Ben, although she was free to choose both of them. He thought she was referring to the limit of his working assignment in the country. — I’ve got a surprise for you — I’ve applied to be stationed here, the channel’s correspondent for the region.—
They were getting dressed. He did not know what to make of the way she dropped her hands at her sides. He came over and bound her arms with his, bending his head to bury it in her neck.
Alongside the success of managing clandestinity there was in her a wish to take her foreigner home, to introduce him to her life, so that he might know her elsewhere than behind a desk or in his bed. She rationalized: if he were invited to the house occasionally, as both she and Ben would naturally bring home a new acquaintance whom they liked, this would reduce the risk of someone drawing other conclusions should she and Otto happen to be seen together somewhere.
Otto was reluctant to come to Vera’s home, to enter her life in which he had no part. But he acknowledged she must be a better judge than he in the situation. There were other guests, some of them blacks he had met in the course of his filming of trade union officials and minor political figures, and there was the husband, an impressive man, very skilful in pleasing the guests in unison with his wife, the two of them managing the gathering. The wife: that’s what she was, in this house. He was introduced, also, to her daughter, who quickly disappeared from the parents’ gathering that no doubt bored her; beautiful, but exactly like the father. So there was nothing to trouble him as evidence, in a younger version of herself, that his lover had faded in the years she had lived ahead of him.
With the chat that accompanies clearing away in the wake of guests Ben mentioned he hadn’t had much chance to talk to the young German, what was his name again? A strange name; giving it, she asked in innocent-sounding interest what its origin might be? Ben was so well-read, had a memory for all kinds of esoteric knowledge that never came her way.
— Abarbanel? But that’s an old Sephardic name, must be a Jew, not a German.—
— I think he’s Austrian. — She was enquiring.
— Could have been born there, I suppose. Jews’ve been dispersed all over, so long. Who knows.—
Who knows.
And so it was her husband who roused her curiosity. An erotic curiosity. In the dreamy confidentiality after love-making, she spoke to her lover. — So you’re a Jew. Someone told me your name’s Jewish. Sephardic. That’s Spanish, isn’t it.—
— It has a Spanish origin but the Jews were expelled from Spain in the fifteenth century.—
— I wouldn’t have known you were a Jew. — Murmured laugh. — They’re supposed to be circumcised.—
— I didn’t have the usual sort of beginning and I was sent away quite young with other orphans and adopted, I grew up in Vienna with those people who took me. People of Sephardic origin, somewhere far back.—
— What about your own mother and father?—
He turned so that their profiles faced one another on the pillow. — Dead.—
She would ask no more: the Gestapo round-up, the closed cattle-train, the concentration camp, the gas chamber; a provenance she could be familiar with only from books and films, documentation.
Vera was a gentile atheist gratified by the idea that her lover was a Jew, orphaned by racism, without a name that was his own — this linked him with the open, daily purpose of her life, the files of displaced communities on her desk and, before her on the other side of it, day after day, the faces of those who had been made wanderers because they were decreed the wrong race. She found herself paused, before the windows of expensive shops selling men’s clothing; she bought French shirts and Italian ties, and because he was fond of a few Ghanaian gold weights he picked up on assignments in West Africa, searched the art and craft galleries to bring him additions to his collection. She was making up to him for the deprivation of childhood, deprivation like that of so many she knew in the veld settlements she investigated. She was giving him toys and sweets. Naked in bed with her, he was also an infant deported, naked in the world.
Vera continued to make love with her husband, even if she felt she had the delicacy not to initiate it. She thought of it as part of a strategy, both to have her lover and not to hurt him, Ben; for the credo she had adopted for the situation was the well-worn one that anything was permitted her, was her right, so long as no one was hurt. Otto had no woman she knew of; there might be one he would go back to in Europe. And the fact was that the love-making with Ben was strangely successful. Ben must have been moved by her; instead of hurt. It was rather like it had been long ago on the mountain holiday, and again after the birth of Annick; she could not help being convulsed by wave after wave of orgasm.
Bitch.
Bitch, greeted her face in the mirror.
And next day she went back to One-Twenty-One. There she felt it was her lover she was hurting. What lover would accept that a woman like her could enjoy making love with another man? With her husband?
She was not free at all, after all. There was a clause in their love affair — she had formulated the small print of it, through her work she was familiar with the importance of clauses that allow breach of contract. This won’t last long, you know. But the clause was forgotten, buried in bedclothes and that other fabric, of the intimacy of a certain complementary pattern in their working lives. He witnessed: he was becoming filled with horror at what he recorded on film, the savagery of those who called their victims savages, the shooting of children, beatings, torture, and the savagery that this was beginning to bring forth in retaliation, the knifings and burnings in the revenge of the night. He was telling her of what he managed to film the previous day, before the police had threatened him with arrest unless he left the site of a school where they had thrown tear-gas into classrooms to drive out children who had stoned their vehicles. Dogs rounded up the terrified children, white policemen caught them at random and beat some as they were dragged to police vans, there were shots — the two children he saw fall screaming: he did not know whether they were dead or not, nor would anyone know, because at that point he and everyone there to record was ordered out of the area. Black kids, he said. As if expecting some explanation. — Black kids. A girl tried to hide behind me.—