At the end of ‘the next few days’ was the appointment with the doctor Vera had found.
Ah, so it was still silence: the girl didn’t look up, was expertly folding the sheet in four, testing the iron with the hiss of a finger first moistened by her tongue, and then running the iron over the neat oblong. But the old lady was ready to speak. — Our people don’t do this thing. Our children are a blessing. We are not white people. Didymus is my son. Mpho is my child. This child will be my child. I will look after the child here, in my house. I have told Mpho. — She stood up, put aside the basin of potatoes.
Didymus rose, too, from the plastic chair whose screws on metal tube legs he had been turning in patient forbearance. He went over to Mpho and put his hand gently on her nape, the gesture of love familiar to both his women, wife and daughter. — One day Mpho will have children she’ll care for herself. That’s the way it’s going to be for her. But it can’t be now. Thank you, Mama, Sibongile and I, we thank you for looking after her so well; we’ll come back to fetch her at the weekend.—
Careful that the movement should not be interpreted by him as a rejection of his hand on her neck, Mpho slowly looked up, untied the doek from her head, laid it on the table, and turned, ready, to her father.
Chapter 15
A lawyer and a clerical assistant, both of the Legal Foundation, were attacked this week while on an investigative tour of State-owned land the Government proposes to sell off to private ownership in advance of the installation of an interim government. The Foundation has criticized the Government’s intention to ‘offer this land to speculators and developers when a future government expects to use it to solve the enormous land and housing crisis existing in the country’.
What play of inference and preconception, this way or that, comes between the news item on an inside page and what has happened as an interruption of or, maybe, the culmination of certain directions. In the context of newspaper headlines, the nightly sheet-lightning of violence, psychedelic entertainment darkening and flaring on the television screen, this must be an attack by black hatred on a white foolish enough to think she had any reason to be in areas whites themselves had declared fit only for blacks; or it could be an attack by white hatred of white collaborators with blacks’ intention to seize land — the land! — for themselves. Either way, serve the victims right.
And the third possibility. Created as climate creates conditions, accepted like the lack of rain — the couple could have been robbed because they didn’t lock the doors, they didn’t keep the gun handy, they should have had the sense to stay at home. Stay out of it.
Mrs Vera Stark sustained a bullet wound in the leg and Mr Oupa Sejake was wounded in the chest.
What were they doing on a road far from the site of any State land on their itinerary? To know that would be to have to enter their lives, both where they touched and widely diverged, to be aware of what they knew about each other and what they did not know; where they had expectations, obligations operating covertly one upon the other. To know at least that much.
Vera could not know whether, by acting as procuress of an abortion for Oupa’s girl, she was someone to whom he felt he owed gratitude or resentment. The old woman said — Didymus had told her — We are not white people. Didymus dismissed this smiling, in passing. But maybe Oupa would have liked to have a child, somewhere, souvenir of the beautiful girl who was not for him, out of his class, speaking and moving in the manner of cities he had never seen, yet at the same time a black girl, sharing the precious familiarity, the dangerous condition of being black, for which he had dredged seaweed and broken rocks on a prison island. Oupa didn’t have his wife and children with him in One-Twenty-One; what difference if there were to have been another child, likeness of hours of love-making and virility, to be visited with gifts at the home of some grandmother?
He didn’t bring his plastic container of pap and curried chicken-leg to keep company in Mrs Stark’s office. He didn’t discuss problems of his legal studies with her. He was in and out with papers and messages and talk on Foundation matters continued between them as usual, but there were no lively asides from him, he kept his eyes on papers or unfocussed, to concentrate on what was being discussed; only occasionally, from the door, as if he had forgotten something, in what was barely a pause: his smile.
This — to her — self-punishing attitude became more and more unnecessary; she found herself increasingly impatient with the idea that he should have to feel exaggeratedly contrite, to the extent that this was carried over to his demeanour at work. If he thought it was expected of him by her, she didn’t know how to convey to him that this certainly was not so. The image of Mpho, brought to mind by his behaviour, changed outline, developed, on reflection. That charmer was fully aware of, became completely in control of her attraction; quite as much capable of seduction as a man; this young man. There was never any suggestion that she’d been raped, or even found herself innocently in a situation where submission to unwelcome desire was difficult to repulse. Sly little miss lied to her parents, made friends collude with and cover up for her when she went to make love in that flat; the love-nest of two generations.
On the three-day drive around the country the atmosphere between Mrs Stark and Oupa was easier but still was created only by exchanges of reaction to what they saw and to whom they talked in relation to their task. They spent a night in a Holiday Inn where Oupa swam in the pool and she, drinking a beer on the terrace, saw no objection, from the party of white farmers at the next table, to his presence among their splashing, shrieking children. Even at the dorp hotel they slept in the second night, a place where the proprietor and his wife slumped before the television set in the bar lounge while a receptionist-cum-barman took the guests’ particulars, their arrival was accepted with listless resignation. The dorp was dying; local farmers who used to fill the bar had abandoned their farms and moved to town during the years when they feared for their security from groups of black guerrillas infiltrating from over the border; those farmers who had formed commandos and stayed, then, were now trying to sell their farms before blacks reclaimed land under a majority government. But in the meantime without the patronage of black drinkers in the public bar the hotel would be abandoned, too. From his armchair the proprietor called out in Afrikaans — Show mevrou and meneer to their rooms, Klaus, show where the bathroom is.—
They laughed together over this as they had not laughed since Oupa summoned her to the flat. The factotum dragged back and forth serving a dinner of mutton, mealie rice and pumpkin they ate with satisfaction, as people retain a taste for the dishes of their country others would find dull and unappetizing. In his high-collared white jacket moulded in sweat-dried contours like a plaster cast containing his body, listing on shoes cut out on the uppers to ease bunions, the old black man brought Oupa’s third can of beer.
— Didn’t your baas see me when he told you to show the meneer his room, Baba?—
In the black face darker-streaked with age the mouth gaped on a thick pink tongue. He looked slyly, comically round the empty dining-room before answering in his language. Oupa, clasping the old man’s arm, laughed as he translated for her: The white man doesn’t want to see nothing. Nothing any more. Nothing nothing.
In the quiet of an early-morning start in another part of the country, an empty road, hornbills taking off from cowpats they were pecking at as the Foundation station-wagon approached, Oupa spoke as if to himself — This’s only about fifty kilometres from my uncle’s place. Where my wife stays with the kids. The turn’s just over there at the trees.—