He spread and then dropped his hands: not prepared to argue. — I’m going to his flat to see if he knows where she is.—
Sibongile was due to take part in a press conference — it would be that very morning the child chose to run away, God knows where. She was dressed for public exposure. In her distraction and anxiety she had put on as a general does his uniform her tailored skirt and jacket, her accoutrements of small gold ear-rings (nothing showy), her carved wooden bracelets — as royalty is expected to wear garments and jewellery designed and made in their own country, a walking billboard for home products, she always saw to it that she included on her person some example of African craft. It’s understood — and she exacted this from her co-workers — that personal obligations must be subordinate to the cause, always had been in exile and clandestinity and were no less now, round conference and negotiation tables. Public exposure may be an armour within which trembling flesh is hidden. Photo opportunities (that’s what the press asks for) are the victim’s obligation to wear a persona separated by duty from self.
It simply was not possible, for Sibongile; not possible, if she was what she had taken responsibility to be in the Movement, for her to telephone and leave a message that her chair would be vacant — because? Because a foolish child had got herself into a mess and punished her mother by leaving a deserted bed. When she was ill and alone, in London, with a baby to care for, could she expect to call her husband back from wherever they might have sent him, another country, another continent?
She stood there, looking at Didymus, unable to leave. All the partings and reappearances, the arrivals and departures, the climates and languages, the queueing for rubber-stamped entry and exit were present between them, as a wind gathers up a spiral of papers in dust.
He released her. — Go on. I’ll call. I’ll leave a message for someone to slip to you.—
The lift did not move; he stabbed at each button in turn. A beer can rolled into one corner had dribbled its dregs and caked dirt on the floor. He climbed stairs and walked corridors to number One-Twenty-One, passing napkins, T-shirts and underpants hung to dry over the burglar bars of kitchen windows, doors with their sections of stippled glass replaced by cardboard, bags of trash in doorways, a bicycle frame without wheels he had to step round: our people moving into the shell of middle-class life without the means or habits that give it any advantage. So they inhabit it and destroy the very thing they believe they wanted. It becomes the ghetto we think we’ve escaped. Only it costs much, much more. The white landlord cuts the water supply because ten people in a two-roomed flat, multiplied by ten storeys, strain the sewage system beyond the capacity it was installed for; the rent falls into arrears and the electricity supply is disconnected. This building with its mirrored foyer and panelled lifts hasn’t got there yet but it’s on the way, it’s on the way. Isn’t this what our ‘education for democracy’ is all about, after you’ve learnt to make your cross on a bit of paper, after you’ve learnt not to allow yourself to be bribed or intimidated to vote for someone you don’t trust to govern your life: it’s about not occupying the past, not moving into it, but remaking our habitation, our country, to let us live within the needs of space and decency our country can afford. And that’s what the whites have to learn, too. Luxury’s a debt they can’t pay. A good thing he wasn’t called upon to make speeches any more; something more easily recognizable as rousing than this would be required.
Unlikely the bell worked. He struck the stippled glass with his knuckles and waited; if the answer were to be a long time in coming, he supposed she was there; he felt a eurve of sorrow wash over him, as if he had come to fetch his little girl from some misdemeanour at that English school she had attended paid for by white fellow-travellers, and was about to meet her humiliation. Bloody fucking bastard: suddenly he joined Sibongile in anger against Vera’s nice young man. But a watery dark outline had appeared on the other side of the glass door; it opened and he was there, barefoot, in running shorts, a thick slice of bread with a bite out of it, in one hand; at once showing in his face that he felt foolish caught like that.
Didymus spoke Zulu — it was Sibongile’s, not his own language and he didn’t know what this man’s was, but every black in Johannesburg at least understands Zulu, he needed a lingua franca other than English for this occasion. Was the girl there?
No.
He was not asked to enter but saw at once that it was unnecessary.
You know her friends, your friends. Do you know where she might be.
Uncomprehending: She’s not at her home?
She’s disappeared since last night. You know some friends … where she would go?
The young man slid a glance at the piece of bread he could not drop, came back with an open face, upper lip faltering before he spoke confidently, no doubt at alclass="underline" Her grandmother. There in Alex.
Mpho.
That’s Mpho.
Their girl was ironing on the kitchen table in the Alexandra house where her father had come to live as an infant when his parents left the Transkei. So many countries, cities, rooms, hideouts, personae — and now his daughter was ironing sheets on that same table in that same kitchen, a doek tied over her fancy hair-style. She said as if they were unwelcome neighbours dropped in, Hullo.
The old lady was peeling potatoes into a basin on her spread lap.
They spoke in their family language, Xhosa. — Why should I phone you? She often comes, doesn’t she? I thought you knew — every time. Why must I phone?—
— But Mama, didn’t Mpho tell you?—
— What should she tell me, my son. You say.—
Sibongile’s elegance, the hound’s-tooth tweed suit and knotted silk scarf, high-heeled patent shoes and sheen of matching navy blue stockings emphasizing her stance before all that was familiar to him and his mother within the four walls; the old grey-painted dresser with its display of enamel plates, mugs on hooks, three-legged alarm clock ticking, the refrigerator with wadded newspaper under one lame leg, the enormous scoured aluminium pots on the stove, his childhood reassurance against hunger through many lean times, the calendars illustrated with pink blondes and fluffy puppies, the framed Last Supper and blurred certificates of children’s prowess, long ago, at bible class, Didymus Maqoma’s matric certificate — these powerful inanimates stood back from Sibongile’s presence.
— I think Mama knows what her granddaughter told her. We don’t have to go over it. — Sibongile spoke a mixture of her own Zulu with what she knew of Xhosa, not to be seen wanting in respect. But English was the medium for Mpho, English was the reminder to her that there was no running away from what she was, what circumstance made of her, a girl who had to have lessons in order to claim a mother tongue. Once home, the new world had to be made of exile and home, both accepted. In the vocabulary Sibongile herself had absorbed unconsciously through the circumstance of exile in London she found this next escapade — Alexandra — what the English called tiresome—yes, plain tiresome, mixed with a concealed hysterical relief that the girl was alive and safe. — Mpho, why did you have to go off in the middle of the night or whenever it was, not leave a note or anything. Nobody would have stopped you if you’d said you wanted to spend the next few days with gogo. It was just silly, darling.—