Didymus was against nepotism, but what is nepotism? — nothing more than putting in a word when this seems appro priate. He was one of the old guard, there were private moments when he could remark to a comrade with whom he had experienced much in so many situations and crises, that he scarcely saw Sibongile these days, she was working so hard, she was so dedicated to her returnees. And the permissible observation was always received with some such formula: Oh yes, she’s doing a remarkable job of it. But whether this was a cautious assurance that her value was not unrecognized, and went no further, or whether it was to remind the old comrade that he should not think he could promote his wife, the response was dismissive. A brush-off.
Chapter 6
Driving through an area where her work took her Mrs Stark’s attention to the voice beside her and what she was seeing about her kept being diverted, as if by a seized muscle which will not be discernible to any companion. There was, among the documents in that loaded sling bag that was always with her, a letter found in her office mail that morning. Ivan’s handwriting on the envelope, not addressed as usual by one of his typists and sent to his childhood home. She had opened it in the awkward privacy granted to the recipient of a letter in the company of others. Hardly taken in any details, any explanation; just the central fact her skimming arrested: Ivan was getting divorced. She folded the letter without reading the last page and thrust it somewhere in the bag.
The undertone of a shy young woman was speaking of brutality. — So you see, Mrs Stark, I mean they’s upgraded Phambili Park, sewerage and that, and we all building, but now the men from the hostels is just coming to run all over, the women from the squatters’ place is sitting in the veld right there by our houses — what can a person say to them? They frightened. Like we. We frightened, too. Last week two nights there was shooting, the men from the hostel was chasing someone—
How was it—‘I’ve got Alice to agree to a divorce.’ The sight of his handwriting on the envelope is already a signal of something unusual to be conveyed; a banker so successful that he is going back and forth from London to Poland, Hungary and Russia to negotiate new banking alliances doesn’t have time to lick stamps personally. As if she were saying it to Ben now, she heard herself, when Ivan came back to South Africa and married his schooldays girclass="underline" He’ll stay with her as long as he’s not successful.
— so I was scared, I can tell you, I was so scared, and my mom, we just hid there without the lights while there was running and screaming, terrible, and then that noise, that noise! something falling hard, just like that, heavy at the door, so I thought what if it’s Colin, he wasn’t home yet—
Billboards on bare ground proclaimed the right to shelter elevated to middle-class status. Easy Loans Available, Protea Grove, Blue Horizon, Hill Park, you too can say you live in a place with a beautiful name like a white suburb, you too can feel you are making a claim for yourself when your address is Phambili Park — forward, let us go forward! Now on the horizon, a vast unloading of scrap without any recognizable profile of human habitations, now at the roadside, the jagged tin and tattered plastic sheets that are the architecture of the late twentieth century as marble was the material of the Renaissance, glass and steel that of Mies van der Rohe; the squatter camps, the real Post-Modernism: of the homeless.
— Oh sorry — turn here, no, left, sorry— Such an apologetic young woman, with her oval face, varnished olive by the mixture of races, in its corolla of springy black hair. Is she apologizing for existing at all, neither white and living far from the wrath that overflows from the black hostels into a fake suburbia nor black and fleeing into the veld from a burning shack? — and I heard someone groaning there outside and what can I do, my mom was trying to stop me, I thought what if it’s Colin so even I get killed I must—
Ben was shocked. That’s not the kind of attitude you’d expect to have towards young married people. Hurt. Ben, who had been Bennet, the young man who took someone else’s wife while the man was away at war, had fear disguised as disapproval in his face, the withdrawal in his eyes in their dark caves. He did not want his son to suffer any complications in the search for sexual fulfilment and companionship that beckons from that other billboard: Happiness.
On a straggle of wire clothes were dripping, a woman flung a basin of water to the ground and looked up, a white flag on a dead-branch pole announced something to the initiated — a healer or some other form of counsel for sale, or maybe mealies to be bought — above a shack leaning like a house of cards. Business going on; straggling letters on board or wavering across the corrugations of tin, New York Gents Tailor, Dry Cleaning Depot, Latest Hairstyle Braiding Afro Relaxing, Mosala Funerals, Beauty Salon, a shutter propping up an eyelid of tin where a handful of cigarettes, a few bottles of bright drinks, twists of snuff and dice of chewing gum were ranged. Store. Coal Wood. Turn here. Turn there. Oh Mrs Stark. Combis have widened and channelled the dirt road to the passage of a river in flood, the Legal Foundation station-wagon is carried along, keeping track as the combis draw level so close the elbow of the driver out of his window almost touches the arm of the station-wagon’s outside mirror; held back when the combis stop at speed, without warning, to take on or discharge a passenger.
— Oh Mrs Stark, I tell you a person can’t go through that, he can’t. When I saw it wasn’t Colin, when I opened the door just a bit and I saw the head, the black man, blood, and the brains—
Crying, and all she has to deal with the shock and horror come back to her in the telling is a fancy handkerchief patterned with a pierrot’s head, his two crystal tears printed tinseclass="underline" Mrs Stark sees as she turns in the gesture of acknowledgement that is all Mrs Stark has to deal with it. For the moment; the Foundation must not flounder in effects, it tackles causes.
— like at the butcher’s shop, I never knew our brains was like that—
There is no stain on the doorstep. Neither blood nor the red-veined jelled grey displayed in shallow pans. All has been scrubbed away in the desperate upkeep of housewifely standards. A tall woman is waiting, bony in the way that often comes to African fleshiness from the mixture with European blood, and prematurely aged (she could probably give Mrs Stark a year or two) by the determination to defeat poverty by the virtues of fastidious cleanliness and decency believed to belong without effort to people with money, the rewards of being white. The door is not that of a house but the side-door of a garage; a stove, refrigerator, TV, beds, the family is living there. — Colin’s doing the house on weekends, oh it’s over a year now, a slow business! — The older woman insists on making tea, there’s a granadilla cake with yellow icing, she breaks in for emphasis: —His brother-in-law, my other daughter’s husband, he’s in the trade, and there’s others in the family comes to plaster and so on.—