What happened one morning was the sudden startle of the word ‘Odensville’ in the newsreader’s bland recital. ‘Nine people were killed and fourteen injured in violence at the Odensville squatter camp last night. The clash occurred when a local farmer, leading a group of armed supporters, tried to evict the squatters. Police report that it is unclear whether the bullet wounds sustained were the result of the group’s action or of cross-fire from the squatters. An AK—47 and three Makarov pistols were recovered at the scene. The farmer, Mr Tertius Odendaal, said that he had called by radio the local farmers’ defence commando when the squatters were spotted approaching his house under cover of darkness, carrying stones and weapons.’
The Foundation had been unsuccessful in keeping any contact with the farmer Odendaal. The day he shut his door in the face of its lawyer, her driver, and the squatters’ spokesman, Zeph Rapulana, was the end of negotiation with him. Communication was with his lawyer. Rapulana came to the city a number of times to confer with Vera on the squatters’ options in a course of action. It had become clear to her that it was best for the Foundation to be guided by this man, rather than the other way about. He read, enquired, informed himself of all the intricacies of legislation, so that her task was simply to formulate procedure; there was a zest in working together with a plaintiff rather than taking over decisions for the helpless, which was her function most of the time. He sat quietly watching her, in her office, while she walked about going over exasperatedly her attempts to talk to Odendaal. His alert patience had the effect of taking the place of her own customary manner in that office; he was the one listening to her without showing reaction, as she listened to others. It was a curious kind of release, almost a pleasure, that created ease between them. He had ready what he was going to say, but a natural respect for the views of others made him hear out what might modify his own. There were homely colloquialisms in his command of English, a little out-of-date, with its careful grammatical construction, in comparison with the spliced improvisations — TV jargon, Afrikaans and tsotsi slang, mother-tongue syntax, mixed with English — of city people like Oupa or the Foundation’s black lawyers. — Odendaal won’t budge. We can abandon any idea of that nature. Our only possibility is to sup with the devil. Take a long spoon. Yes … The agents of the Government who put us in our position are the ones we must shame into getting us out of it.—
— Count on the Provincial Administration? Well … —
— Odendaal has threatened to bring the AWB 1 with their guns to evict us. It doesn’t look very nice, does it? In the present political climate, the Government surely doesn’t want too many press reports of blacks being forced out of their homes. That still going on.—
— Their hands would look clean. It would be the work of the right-wing rebels.—
— Even so. They’d be asked why they didn’t do something about it. That’s where we step in. Take the bull by the horns. He applied to the TPA2 to build a black township on his land, we apply now to the TPA to appropriate the farm and declare it a transit settlement, for a start.—
— Worth a try. Our case would be that it’s an initiative to avoid violence in an area of dangerous contention. I suppose we could lead with this.—
Making light of their ‘conspiracy’, they grasped hands that day; sat down together over the formulation.
That other clasp, two hands joined to make one creature, broke apart. Out of bed she stumbled to find the sling bag with the address and telephone book she kept handy when away from the office. She summoned the well-trained orderliness of her working mode in order not to think — anything— not to ask of herself the name of one of the nine dead until she reached the telephone and heard it answered. Zeph Rapulana was a squatter but he had given her the number of a relative in a nearby township who had a store and lived behind it; there was a telephone, whether in the house or the store she didn’t know. It must have been in the store, and so early in the morning the store was not yet open. The telephone rang and rang. It seemed to her an answer: Rapulana would never reply again, anywhere. She called through the bathroom door to Ben in the shower, something terrible has happened, she has to go at once — he came to the doorway streaming. — What? What is it all about? What happened? — He naked, she dressed, it was an encounter between strangers. He called out after her, Don’t go there alone! Vera, do you hear me!
But she was alone. He didn’t know the man, Zeph Rapulana. He hadn’t stood before Odendaal’s anger, Odendaal’s barred door, with him, made decisions affecting families with him, hadn’t come to read the dignity, the shrewdness of confidence and intelligence in that calm black face of the man. She drove first to the empty Foundation — no one at work yet — to pick up documents relating to the Odensville affair. Well along the highway, she remembered she had not left a note, and turned off at a petrol station to telephone her office. The young switchboard operator could hear the voices of the petrol attendants, laughing and arguing over a game of cards set out on the ground, and the jabber from their radio. — Where you partying already, in the day, Mrs Stark!—
She drove; a mind caged back and forth between the witness of the empty office where Zeph Rapulana had talked reason and strategy, the desk from which she had sent the letter to the TPA, and the collage, made up of so many press photographs, so many leaping and falling, running figures on TV, so many burning shacks, so many dead slumped on the earth as so many bundles of blood-stained washing. There was no connection. Before a reply to the letter, hers and Rapulana’s, could be received through the authorities, before bureaucracy had ‘taken steps’, the solution to everything had taken steps — deaths, again deaths.
The car door slammed behind her outside the district police station with the blow of sun striking her with dizziness of the long solitary drive. Dust, sparkle of the wire security fence; she passed under a drowsy-lidded gaze of a black policeman with his sub-machine-gun hitched on his stout thigh. Inside, a white policeman, elbows on the counter and forearms shielding his flirtatious face over the telephone, was engaged in one of those calls made up of sniggering silences and intimately curt remarks between young men and girls. Another policeman was standing before a filing cabinet, smoking and hesitating over papers. While she questioned him he continued to glance sideways at this sheet and that; shrugged without answering and called towards an open doorway through which someone of more senior rank appeared. He was a handsome Afrikaner with a glossy moustache and a Napoleon haircut, a well-groomed stallion of the kind with a special manner when dealing with women, since he felt himself to be pleasing to them somewhere under their complaint or distress, like it or not, in their female innards. Even to this tannie3 he extended the patronage, listening to her rap of questions with the air, yes, yes, he knew how to deal with over-anxious ladies concerned about their black servants. That business with the squatters last night; nine deaths confirmed but no names available, the bodies still to be identified — if the relatives can be found, you never know with them, they’re spread around in these camps. He scribbled the name of the Foundation without reaction to her revealed connection with that trouble-making organization; yes yes they could phone and ask for him personally, yes yes ready to be of any assistance. He cuffed the head of the young man at the telephone as he passed to his office.
She drove to a complex of garage, chain restaurant and restrooms in a loop off the highway and found a bank of telephones. At the store, someone who sounded like a child listened, breathing gustily, and then put aside the receiver. Vera called loudly, hullo! hullo! possessed by a useless impatience with everyone, the police, the unknown storekeeper, the wild-goose chase of calling culpability to account, finding interstices in official obduracy and solutions to ignorance of the uneducated that was, had been so long, her working life. The gaping receiver at the other end of the line, the background noises lazily conveyed, ignoring her — this was nothing but another customary irritation, but it brought her to despair and destroyed the control within which she held the fact of nine unnamed dead. If that child had been within reach she would have struck it. Violence boiled up in her from somewhere. If Odendaals kill, kill back. If they killed that good man, why not deal back death to them — she understood with all her impatient angry flesh the violence that, like others, she called mindless. When the receiver was picked up she gave her name and business testily. A man’s soft hoarse voice said no, it’s all right, my cousin is well, everything it’s all right, nothing is happen, if you want see him I can send someone—