And then to come home fucked out.
The shower in One-Twenty-One, the dousing with perfume, the careful rearrangement of the hair (still so long, then, she could caress his breast with it) — nothing could disguise sexuality. A sign of life. Without knowing it, she had ringed herself just as she once ringed a photograph.
Mrs Stark at her desk was working on the Foundation’s yearly report and clerks and colleagues came in and out with documents she requested or advice she sought. The tension between tenant-labourers and white farmers had come into prominence alongside that of the old squatter removals and their consequences. The Foundation had had successes in overturning eviction notices farmers served on tenant-labourers for fear these might make a claim to their share-crop holdings under a future majority government, but already in one case success ended in tragedy. Philemon Maseko — in this very office he had spoken through an interpreter — was shot dead by a group of white farmers a few days after his case was won. There were no arrests, no names of the farmers published; the Foundation was to prosecute on behalf of the man’s family. Whether it was a general disturbance, with doubts about the apparent consequences of some of their work, that produced a distracted mood among Foundation people, or whether this was something she projected from herself, it was present. Even Oupa seemed inattentive and distant. There was agreement among senior colleagues that they ought to publish some sort of ‘crisis’ paper in addition to the report, urging that a drastic revision of property and land laws was necessary to forestall disaster in the growing conflict between white and black over access to land. She worked at night, at home, on a draft. Annie’s Lou shopped and did the cooking. Ben entertained his daughter become a guest, and her friend, taking them to the cinema or one of the so-called clubs where they could hear black groups play the kind of music they enjoyed. The night nurse creaked heavily up and down the passage to make herself tea.
No arsenal of repressive laws, no army, no police force can stabilize the situation—catch herself out in the jargon officialdom used to abstract and distract, draw the shroud of order over the body of Maseko with his bit of legal paper in his dead hand. No laws, no army, no police force can protect white farmers from the need and right of people desperate to find a place to live. She wrote and rewrote. Who will read what is happening on the farm Rietvlei, Mooiplaas, Soetfontein, Barendsdrif, at Odensville? The newspapers paraphrase a paragraph or two, even those who read the original will be those who do not know, have never seen Odensville or lived, neither as farmer nor tenant-labourer paid once a year when he harvests his crops, on the ‘pretty farm’, at the ‘sweet fountain’ or the river-crossing Barend claimed for himself. Who, understanding by ‘land reform’ the loss of his weekend fishing retreat, you chaps won’t be invited down any longer, will be interested to hear that without reform tenant-labourers are losing the mealies and millet they have worked the land for, every day, for generations? How far from one another. The commissions in session, the politicians promising, the Foundation challenging the law by means of its interstices and the great principles of justice beyond it: these stand somewhere between. Through the will to formulate the Foundation’s understanding of the meaning of land, her own life was gathered in. She had no thought, no space in herself for anything else. When she stood up a moment to place her hands at the small of her back and arch it, face upturned to the ceiling, to ease tension, with the slight dizzy lurch there came the presence of Annick, Annie, about the house, although the girl might be out at that particular hour: the fact of her.
You’ve always been available to so many other people.
The seventeen-year-old schoolgirl alone in the kitchen over those textbooks she used to cover with fancy paper and stickers of film stars. She looks up from the conventional wisdom of adults she’s been taught, parents love one another, that’s the goal of sex children are taught, for parents their children come before everything and all others — her mother walks in warm from the body of another man. Fucked out. How can that schoolgirl be expected to know the family never was the way she’s been told families are, to accept that her own father was ‘another man’, her mother’s sexuality something that made a claim above the love of children?
There came to Vera, as what had been a long time waiting to be admitted: it was because of her that Ben’s daughter was a lesbian.
During the night she went into the room where he was dying. The black nurse was dozing in a chair, her uniform ridden up her thick thighs. Her stockings were stretched so tight over the flesh that they shone, catching the light silvery from the shaded lamp.
She looked at her father-in-law. His hand lay palm up outside the covers. She looked a long time. She knelt at the side of the bed and said close to his poor flabby ear, with prurient curiosity: What’s it like?
He couldn’t hear; or he heard only as an echo in an empty chamber. His head stirred, she thought — imagined? — as if he were somewhere shaking it. The side of his mouth twisted. It was the way a baby’s did when it was too young to smile — could be mistaken for a smile.
The Egyptians took with them furniture, jewellery, food, wine and oil, and attendants who must finish their lives in the next world. Even his false teeth had been taken from him. His watch, his time run out, had been handed to Ben for safekeeping. His attendant, as usual for whites in this country, was a black woman, caring for the failing functions of the body without shaming him. This black face crumpled with weariness, a deep division of effort frowning between the eyes, as if in perpetual anxiety to catch the crammed minibus that brought her back and forth from Moletsane or Chiawelo or Zondi to be with him on the last threshold.
There was no one else.
When the nurse saw he had crossed she would replace her knitting in its plastic bag, pack up her cardigan and tube of lip salve, collect her pay and maybe a gift of oranges from a box bought thriftily in bulk by Lou, and leave.
Chapter 12
Vera was sorting the clothes to give to charity, taking the opportunity of one of the public holidays renamed like the streets under successive regimes to reflect shifts in the ethos of power: Dingane’s Day, his victors oddly conceding the force of the black warrior-king’s name, changed to Day of the Covenant, commemorating his defeat by the Boers’ hard bargain with God, and become for the present something presumed semantically less offensive to blacks sold out by God: Day of the Vow. It was the first time she had handled a dead person’s clothes; life shed like a skin. Different garments marked the ambivalence of the species to which the old man could be ascribed. Why two dress suits and a white dinner jacket as well, whereas the shirts were so worn they were not worth giving away, and there seemed to be only three pairs of misshapen shoes. A silk dressing-gown with satin revers was folded in tissue paper in its presentation box, apparently never worn, and of a style (she shook it out) that suggested it must have been very costly, even in the Thirties in which it must have originated. The awareness of a survivor that one knows so little about the other and there will be no opportunity to know more, is usual; an accompaniment to death. Only speculation on the evidence of relics: one of the few known personae with which the old man could be identified was as an Englishman among expatriates of various roving nationalities in corporate outposts and Belgian colonial clubs in the Congo. There (Bennet had picked up only the barest outline of his own origin, with which to fascinate her in the mountains) the liaison with the half-Spanish half-Lebanese wife of a dealer in wild animal skins had led to his marriage to his mistress’s daughter. The dressing-gown had no place in the category of charity clothing for refugees or drought victims. But Ben wouldn’t wear it, it was hardly for him, either. She was just thinking that the one person she could imagine it on, to his pleasure, was young Oupa, she would take it to the Foundation and offer the gift in such a way that it would not be a hand-me-down — when the phone rang. There was Oupa’s voice. — Telepathy! You were in my mind—