He must have slept. Both woke at the sound of the door slamming as Mpho left for school, and Sibongile was out of bed instantly, padding over in her slippery nightgown to the half-disgorged suitcase and packages on the floor. — Look what I found for you. — People are happy bringing the consolation of presents to those left behind.
It was a handsome staff (he saw at first), no, a walking-stick, ebony, carved with a handle in the form of a closed fist over a ring, and chased all down the shaft to a copper ferrule. — Isn’t it great? Look at the work that’s gone into it. I knew you’d love it. I’d looked everywhere in the market but I had so little time — and then there was this damned hawker pestering outside the hotel, one day the moment he held it up I knew, that’s for you. See — all carved in one piece—
She loved it, she sat back on the bed as he received the stick from her and followed its features under her eyes, her feet with magenta-painted toenails waving, her thighs shaping shifting curves of shine on the satin that covered them (he always had been proud of her clothes, her ingenuity in devising the appearance of flamboyant luxury, even to go to bed in, even when they were poor in exile and this had to be contrived out of odds and ends). — And look at the grain, here, these lighter stripes going down the fingers — isn’t that amazing — and feel how solid—
He duly held the object horizontally, raised from the pillows, weighing it on his palms. — Where shall I hang it? Above the desk, or here over the door perhaps.—
She slapped her thighs, sending the satin shivering. — It’s not an ornament! It’s to walk with! Keep your weight down! Don’t think I bring you presents without a double motive, dear— Her voice climbed its scale of laughter. She swung herself off the bed and he could hear her going from room to room, inspecting the traces of her absence, closing cupboard doors in Mpho’s little room, clanging the kitchen bin shut on something he or Mpho had neglected to throw away. The walking-stick rested across his chest. He opened his eyes. She appeared in the bedroom doorway, as she had from a distant country at dawn, but in her dressing-gown, her arms crossed under her breasts. — Aren’t you getting up?—
— What’s the hurry.—
— Oh come on. I’m hungry.—
So she wanted him there in the kitchen to deliver to him a lecture on the results of her trip while they prepared breakfast together. She was trying it out on him — he was a comrade, experienced in such presentations, after all — before she prepared a report. It has been an assignment in Africa — where else could that stick have come from — she’d been sent to negotiate the takeover by that country’s Government of a school for exiles’ children and various other buildings the Movement had had there. The National Executive left it to her diplomacy to see whether these assets, no longer needed, should be handed as a gift to a country that had given asylum, or whether it might be possible to expect some sort of compensation — the Swedes had funded the school and added living quarters for the teachers, so there was some improvement to the property since the host government donated the land. — Dinner with the President, flowers sent to my hotel room and all (I like it better when they send fruit, but only Europeans do that, aih, on our continent people don’t think fruit’s a treat). A lo-ong explanation from him on how we should run things here, my God, if you wrote out all the advice we get it would circle the world — not a word about any compensation deal for the property. The next day there was the great ceremony of the handing-over, President’s guard, military band, more speeches, mine as well, but the best I could do when I got the Minister in his office was to get out of him the promise of an agricultural training project, quite small, they’d arrange for a few students we could send up there, tuition free but living expenses our responsibility. I don’t think I can recommend that as worth taking up? Better that I come back with empty pockets than something we don’t want.—
— And the camp?—
She signalled two slices of bread to be put in the toaster. She went into one of her repertoire of elaborate gestures, throwing hands wide, bringing them together with a slight clap that mocked the attitude of prayer, leaning elbows on the kitchen table with a slumping sigh.
— Did you see Matthew or Tatamkulu?—
— Who … —
— You know.—
— Not there any more.—
— So you did go.—
— I had instructions. Just delivering I didn’t ask what— some documents. — It was said as if this were to be the last word on the subject. But he, not she, had once operated in that camp, it was one of the periods when he disappeared from the exiled homes they occupied in Europe and Africa. His was a right to ask about that camp where spies who infiltrated the Movement were imprisoned, although it was not a subject for general discussion. Recently there had been released by the Movement a public report of things done there; unspeakable things. When the report was about to come out he had thought he’d better tell her what he had never told her: that for a time, a desperate time when the Freedom Fighters and the Movement itself were in great danger by infiltration, he had been an interrogator— yes — a jailer, there. He’d told her the code names of others who were running the place and how two of them had joined him, eventually, in protest against the methods being used to extract information. She knew, all right, about whom he was enquiring when he mentioned those names.
— It’s not closed down, then.—
She lifted her chin and blinked wearily. — In the process of. I didn’t see much sign of life.—
— Did anyone say what arrangements are made when inmates are released, who is it that brings them back here? Is it the government agencies who sent them to infiltrate — or are they just being abandoned, that sort of outfit wants to pretend it never existed, these days. They seem to get here anyway, ready to be used against us in other ways. Recycled … Well, we couldn’t think that far ahead; there were a lot of things we couldn’t think about in that place.—
— No one talked to me, I handed over what I had to. That was that.—
— It’s not like you to be satisfied to be a messenger. — He put plates in the sink, his back to her; turned his head.
She was yawning and yawning as if her jaw would dislocate with the force and she wandered out of the kitchen. Gone back to bed to sleep off the journey: but no, she appeared, dressed, eyes made-up, briefcase and keys in her hand, on her way to her office. He sat in his pyjamas over the mug of coffee he had reheated for himself. Ashamed, was that it? She was ashamed that he had ever been involved in that camp where the methods of extracting information by inflicting pain and humiliation learnt from white Security Police were adopted by those who had been its victims. Ashamed, even though he’d finally got himself out of the place, refused to carry on there. Refused, yet understood why others could do the terrible things they did; she was a woman, after all, she could understand revolution but she didn’t understand war.
He sat on in the kitchen aware of the irritating drizzle of the tap he had not fully closed but unable to distract himself by getting up to turn it off.
No. Not ashamed; wary of her political position, calculating that since his code name had not been listed in the public report, she was not tainted, through her connection with him, under the necessity of leadership to discipline and perhaps in some cases expel from the Movement anyone who was involved. Unspeakable: even the subject, for Sibongile. She does not want, even in private, any reminders, any familiarity with names, from him. She has her position to think of. He had the curious remembered image, alone in the kitchen, of her frantically and distastefully scraping from the sole of her shoe all traces of a dog’s mess she had stepped into.