— Of course I’m all right! What do you think! Now come on.—
At the party he took part in the noisy discussions that assessed the composition of the new Executive which (’on balance’ was the phrase) had kept the key positions intact while pushing a few of the leadership upstairs under honorary titles, and bringing in new people with better contacts within the country. One would have thought him quite detached from the event; he succeeded in this: no one dared commiserate with him. Towards the end of the evening, when he and everyone else who took alcohol heightened the atmosphere of achievement (the younger comrades tended to find this a weakness of the old guard and drank fruit juice), he himself was in a mood to believe he felt that all that mattered was that the congress had established conventional political legitimacy for the long-outlawed Movement. You had your role, your missions, you took the risks of your life, you disappeared and reappeared, went into prison or exile, and there was no presenting of the bill for those years to anyone, the benefit did not belong to you and your achievement was that you wanted it that way.
The marital tradition of the post-mortem between husband and wife who were also comrades: one o’clock in the morning in the bedroom, the silence of weariness, stripping off shoes that have become constraints, opening waistbands that leave the weal of a long day — Sibongile burst into anger.
— Those sly bastards! They planned it! They wanted you out, I know that cabal, I’ve seen their slimy smiles. They’ve never forgiven you the time when you opposed them over the business of landings on the coast—
— Oh nonsense. It was a crazy idea, I wasn’t the only one.—
— How can you say that? You were the one. You were the one who had gone inside and reconnoitred, you were the one who knew whether it was possible to carry it out or not. What you said had to be what High Command would listen to. And those others couldn’t stomach to see themselves made fools of.—
He sat down on the bed. This seemed to make her angrier.
He did not look into her anger. — All so long ago.—
— They slapped you on the back, they whispered with you in corners, I saw them, even tonight, right there! And all the time they had it all set up to get you out. It isn’t long ago, for them. They don’t forget they didn’t come out of that business too well.—
She was pulling clothes over her head and flinging them across the room. Her straightened hair broke loose from its combs and stood up blowsily, her mouth was squared open, anger made her ugly.
— For God’s sake, Sibo— He changed from English to their language, or rather hers, which was the tongue of their intimacy. — It’s done. It’s happened. I don’t want to deal with it now. It’s political life, we held everything together in exile better than any other movement did, now’s not the time to start stirring up trouble. There may be a purpose, I don’t know, something else planned for me.—
— Hai you! What purpose! You going to grow a beard and all that stuff and infiltrate — where? What for? Where can’t we just get off a plane at an airport and walk in, now? We’re not living in the past!—
— That’s exactly what you’re saying — we are — there was a plot against me because of something that happened outside, done with. For God’s sake, let’s sleep.—
She lay beside him stiffly, breathing fast. — I don’t sleep. I can’t turn over and forget about it.—
— Listen, woman. — He sat up with effort. — You are going to be there, now. In there. Here at home in the country. Keep your mind on what you have to do, you have to work with everyone on the Executive, don’t make enemies for private reasons.—
She came back to English. — On principle. Ever heard of it, Didymus. On principle. —
— You’ve got a lot to learn. Let me look after my own affairs.—
— Your affairs are my affairs. Have I lived like any other woman, hubby coming home regularly from work every day? Have I known, months on end, whether you were dead or alive? Tell me. And could I ask anybody? Did I ever expect an answer? Could I tell our child why her father left her? Our affairs. —
— Not now. Not in politics, where you are now.—
Deep breaths snagged on a few sobs. She had always wept when she was angry. But was she also giving vent to the emotions of excitement and pride she had repressed out of consideration for him, when in the hall filled with delegates she heard that she was one of their chosen?
Chapter 8
We don’t seem to have much success with them. All he said.
— What d’you mean? Banking may not be exactly what you or I would have chosen for him, but he’s good at it, and Annie always wanted to be a doctor, she’s doing good work isn’t she, her heart’s in it— But she knew what he meant. Annick, inheritor of his beautiful face, had brought many boys home when she was a teenager but since she had qualified and taken a post in community medicine in the Cape she appeared to have no man and in her thirties gave no sign of marrying; Ivan was getting divorced without showing enthusiasm for a new woman who evidently was as much business associate as lover. Arid lives, by Ben’s hidden standards of high emotion.
— Well I don’t suppose we were such a good example — at least to Ivan.—
— I’ve never been divorced.—
The forgotten heat of blush, called up by Ben in her cheeks: Bennet, who thought he had seduced someone’s wife but had been seduced by her, and never since made love to another woman. That she was sure of, the certainty was there in the image bent alone over a meal in a restaurant that came back to her with blood in her face. I love you. That was in the blood, too, but she could not say it, what reason would he find for such a — declaration, at this moment? What reason was there? — Anyway, it’s not whether or not we make a success of their lives. Nothing to do with us.—
His palms smoothed along his jaw-line, a familiar gesture in the language of their marriage, not, as it might seem, a physical response to the shadow of his dark beard that by evening always had appeared again, but a sign of disagreement. — Maybe we should take the boy if they’re squabbling over him. Give him a stable home for a year or two.—
He went away to write a letter to Ivan, turning from what he knew was her alarmed silence.
Ben didn’t show her the letter and she did not ask to read it. Perhaps he had not made the offer to Ivan. It was not mentioned when Ivan telephoned, as he did now and then, or they called him because there had not been time or thought to write to him. The idea that there could be space in their life for something more was mislaid like a document lost in the bottom of the files where the struggle for another kind of space grew up every day around her. On the western border people from a tribe that had been moved with the concession that they could come back to their land to tend the graves of their ancestors for one day a year did not leave at nightfall but began to build huts. The sullen silence of reclaim met the arrival of authorities to evict them; they were left there — temporarily, the Foundation was warned, when it took up the issue on the appeal of the tribe. Vera and Lazar Feldman, a young colleague, found themselves proceeding from instructions of two kinds: one, from their own training in secular law, that the owners of the land had been displaced illegally in the first instance; the other, from the people who were thatching huts and surrounding them with fences of thorned branches and hacked-off prickly pear plants, that the instruction to return and take possession came from the ancestors.