She was given instructions to find her way to the shop. Lost, turned back by police road-blocks, she found another route— there it was, so that was it, she remembered dropping him off at that store the first day when they had left Odendaal’s house.
He was there, standing, waiting for her, wearing a tie, right arm in a sling and, oozing through gauze, the pursed red lips of a deep cut drawn together by surgical clips on the black flesh of his cheek. Smiling.
She was overcome by a kind of shyness, because the man was alive. She began to shiver — not tremble — it was the quivering wave that comes when you give way to fear or are going to be sick. Certainty that he had been killed by Odendaal, that she had not allowed to rise in her, now struck at the sight of him.
— I’m so sorry. You were worried. My cousin told me. — A gentle and calm voice.
She stood there, someone dropped from another planet, the outer space of safety, in the dim little store’s light moted by the dust of grain and spilt sugar, thick with the closed-in smells of the night, snuff, soap, sweat-dried secondhand shoes and army surplus coats, mouse-droppings and paraffin. He saw, came over at once and with his left hand strangely clasped her forearm above the wrist, held it there, between them. Tentatively, her other hand came to rest over his.
He tramped before her to a shed behind the shop. There were plastic chairs and a bed in disarray where someone had slept. He turned off a radio and gave some instruction to a child who brought cups of sweet milky tea.
She didn’t ask whether the squatters had approached Odendaal’s house armed with stones and weapons. She didn’t ask if he led them. He told drily, now and then touching with a middle finger along the gash on his cheek, how Odendaal and his commando had gone through the squatters’ shacks, firing, dragging people out. A pause, tracing the gash. A considering, rumbling murmur, expressive in his own language, that she understood from experience with blacks who have status in their communities as always some sort of warning or preparation for what was about to be said. — Now Administration will act. Now they’ll have to buy his land. No more trouble for him. Lucky Odendaal. He’ll get money, plenty of money, he’ll be happy. And the land—
Their eyes held, and shifted.
— Nine dead, so we’ll get it. — Now it was possible to say this to this man. — We’ll have to make sure it’s for occupation by your people there, no one else.—
— Quickly. When shall I come to the office? I’d better bring the Chief with me, it’s always better for Pretoria if anything is backed by a chief. First I have to make the funeral arrangements.—
She had no preparatory murmur such as he could use. — Perhaps near escapes from death are always a resurrection. Perhaps that’s how the whole legend of Christ rising from the tomb came about — I was thinking, they took him down from the cross and couldn’t believe he wasn’t dead, couldn’t believe he was there, alive, in front of them … that was the resurrection, really. The whole tomb story, the miracle came from that. — Then she remembered he was probably religious. When they first met, that day they went to see Odendaal, the man had about him the kind of modest self-righteousness, prim bearing, an overlay on the African spirit that regular church-going seems to bring about in rural people; at the roadside he sat circumspectly as if he were in a pew. This surface had burned off like morning fog in the heat of the events in which he was involved, as she had come to know him — or rather as he had come to reveal himself released by that involvement. Yet beliefs inculcated in childhood often remain uncontradicted by mature reasoning and experience. He might be offended by a Christian heretic’s doubts of Christ’s divine powers.
He understood she was talking about — himself.
— I managed to drive. I took two of them to the hospital in my car. There’s blood all over. The woman died before we arrived around midnight. Yes … The youngster may be all right. That’s how I got this stitched up. — He moved his lower jaw against the stiffness of the flesh drawn together on his cheek.
In Vera’s car they went to what had been Odensville.
A stunned aftermath of disaster slowed the pace of existence to its minimum; people were breathing, just breathing. Children with lolling-headed babies on their backs sat about, there was no way of knowing whether outside where they had lived — every element that could identify shelter and possessions cast in turmoil. Dried tears were the salty tracks on the grey-black cheeks of women who must not be gazed at. Men wandered, turning over splintered wood, torn board, plastic burned black-edged into fantastic whorls and peaks like the frozen waves in Japanese prints. A sewing machine under kicked-aside crazy mounds of pots and clothing was an artifact uncovered from a destroyed culture. To Vera’s eyes it had never seemed that the squatter camps she had been in could represent what anyone would be able to regard as home. Now in the destruction of the wretched erections of rubbish-dump materials she saw that these were home, this place had been home.
He talked quietly to people; he and she did not speak to one another, everyone ignored her, as if she could not be seen, the events of the night imprinted on their eyes, blinded to the day.
What happened.
There are always explanations expected.
— I can’t … You can read in the papers what happened, you’ll see on TV what the place looks like now. That’s all. Who has ever explained what a war is like — everyone witnesses something different.—
Ben had a fingernail in his ear, something worrying him in the aperture; the private moment like an offended inattention.
She tried again. — When you’re there yourself, it’s not anything you’ve thought. And everyone who went there would know something else … it wouldn’t be the same for you as for me, or for others as for you.—
— Isn’t it that you didn’t live through the night there. — The tone of one who assumes he knows the other better than she could know herself.
— No no. No no. That’s obvious. It’s not what I’m trying to talk about.—
— After the event: isn’t that what your work is. Always the same thing, not something different: consequences. It’s not the first time you’ve seen such things.—
In her office she dictated to a tape recorder an account of on-site investigation of the Odensville attack. It came back to her desk with neat margins and headings in the flat print-out of a computer. As she read it over for secretarial errors it seemed what Ben had annoyed, almost hurt her, by describing as having been a routine part of case work. The pain of catatonic inertia, yet another aspect of despair in addition to the many she already understood, was a terrible knowledge she would carry, because she never could be, never could wish to be inured to feeling by professionalism. That was what happened at Odensville; that she understood. The other happening was something she came to realize slowly, returned to as a distraction from work and all the preoccupations of her life, interrupting, like a power failure of all the main lines of consciousness and memory, seeking a new connection with responses untapped, as there are known to be connections in the brain that may go unused through a lifetime. At first, with a beat that was half-distaste, half-fear, it came to her suddenly that the gesture of the man, grasping her arm, and her automatic placing of her hand, for a moment, over his knuckles, was a repetition of the compact to begin a love affair with her Hitler Baby, Otto, years ago. Yes — that had been a sexual question-and-answer by sudden contact, but the advance of this other man towards her and his assumption of the right to touch her strangely, her hand placed over his, was something quite other. And yet again quite different from shaking hands, which also has as little to do with any kind of intimacy as greeting by the shoulder-bobbing accolade has to do with kissing.