The two vehicles were driven away. He — Oupa — lay gasping over there. There was a tear in her jeans, quite small, some ooze of blood, she did not want to roll the pants leg and see more, she had the desire to sit up and wrap her arms tightly round the leg but she moved, squatting on one leg and supporting the other, to where he was. They clasped hands, dumb. Tears of effort, of the violence with which he had fought, were finger-painting the dirt on his face. He patted his ribs on the right side to show her where: blood was blotting out the face of Bob Marley printed on his T-shirt. They were castaways in the immensity of the sky. They were abandoned in the diminishing perspective of an empty dirt road, leaving them behind as a speck to be come upon as hornbills come upon a cowpat. They helped each other somehow to the side of the road.
Tears and blood. It was a country road, it was miles from anywhere. But they are everywhere, the violent. To meet up with them again: Je-ss-uss! I’d be terrified. He carefully rolled the leg of her pants and fonnd — Oh my God, there’s a hole on the other side, the bullet went right through … it should’ve been there, where you were standing, did you find it … — But neither had the strength to go back and search. She lifted his shirt and saw the hole, like the socket where an eye had been gouged; on his back there was no exit wound.
— It’s still inside?—
— I don’t know too much about anatomy. But it’s far from your heart.—
Their watches were gone. They did not know how long after but it must have been quite soon that a cattle truck loaded with beasts huddled together for the abattoir stopped and the driver, calling out in his language, came over with the face of dismay and curiosity with which a man meets a disaster that could happen to himself. The cattle jostled to the bars of the truck to stare and low, giving off the ammoniac stench of their own instinctive fear of their last journey. Under the panicked whites of the beasts’ eyes he and she were helped into the cab. She was a leg, her whole being stuffed down into a leg, a concentration of pain filled to bursting down there. Blood trickled from her; she kept her gaze on a vase with its branch of artificial carnations hooked above the windscreen. Oupa and the driver talked in their language; although short of breath he was fortunately in less pain than she, the bullet inside him perhaps was lying in some harmless space of the mysterious human body.
Oupa had his bullet on the cabinet beside the hospital bed between the bottles of orange squash and bunch of bananas his friends at the Foundation brought him. No longer any segregation of black and white sick and injured, but the elegant Indian lady who shared a ward with Vera rang for a nurse to come and draw the curtains round her bed when Oupa, in a dressinggown, came to visit Vera; on crutches, she went to visit him. Animatedly they pieced together over and over again the details rescued from the confusion of the dog-fight blur in which the attack happened. — You noticed that big ring with the red stone — Oh I can see his hand as the back of it hit your throat, I don’t think I’d recognize the face but I feel I’d know that hand anywhere — I heard you screaming, I thought my God they’re killing her— They shuddered and they laughed together: lucky to be alive.
Oupa’s bullet had been removed cleanly through an incision just below the ribs. It had missed both lungs and liver, merely chipped a rib and lodged in muscular tissue. He was proud of this form of resistance to the attackers. — I think I got so tough on the Island, you know, and I’ve done some weight-lifting, well, I used to, so I’m sure that’s helped me. — He took his bullet back to One-Twenty-One with him in a cigarette pack. Vera’s wound at the point of entry of the bullet became infected and she was kept in hospital a few days after his discharge.
Ben telephoned Annie with daily bulletins and requests for professional advice, insisting she keep in touch with the hospital surgeon. He related Annie’s reassurances with a lack of confidence in doctors’ judgment, sitting through long silences at Vera’s bedside looking at her as if piecing her together, out of destruction, from images in his mind. When she came home he returned from Promotional Luggage at odd hours of day to make sure she was following doctor’s orders for healing to be established. — We ought to take a break somewhere.—
She was reading documents from the Foundation, sent by messenger, strewn on the sofa. — I must get back to work. It’s piling up there.—
— Just three or four days together.—
She tried to give her attention to understanding the need; his need or hers. — Well, where.—
— To the sea … —
— I don’t suppose I should put this thing in water yet.—
— To the mountains.—
The mountains.
Ah, so there was no practical reality to be understood, she was obtuse in objecting to the sea because she would not be able to swim in it just as she would not be able to climb — these were not mountains for climbing, they were the site in themselves, herself and Bennet, proposed to return to. — I ought to get back to work. — No more assertive than a murmur.
The words fell from him with the clatter of a weapon concealed on his person. — I couldn’t live without you.—
A jump of fear, of refusal within her.
He began to straighten and stack the sheets of paper lying haphazard as fallen leaves over the outline of her legs under a rug. In her appalled silence his continuation of the senseless task, picking up sheets that slithered off the sofa, putting an order into documents, whose sequence he did not know, understood the rejection.
She could not see the violence at the roadside as evidence of her meaning in his life. She could not share the experience with him on those terms. She was not responsible for his existence, no, no, love does not carry that covenant; no, no, it was not entered into in the mountains, it could not be, not anywhere. What to do with that love. Now she saw what it was about, the sudden irrelevant question, a sort of distress within herself, that came to her from time to time, lately.
When he had gone back to his office she lay, holding off confusion and resentment, stiff, head pressed into cushions. She rose slowly and pushed back the rug, rolled up the leg of her track suit to the place on her calf where the punctured flesh, still an outraged blotchy purple, had been secured by metal clips.
The sacred human body is only another object that can be patched together, like a tyre. This is one meaning of what had happened on the road. Something to be traced with a forefinger. There are many. Violence has many: now, in this country, as the working out of vengeance, as the return of the repressed, for some; the rationalization for their fear, of their flight, for others. But the experience of violence is for the victims their conception of a monster-child by rape; only they share its clutch upon their backs. Only they, in the privacy of what has been done to them, can search through the experience for what they should have done differently in resistance, where there was a failure of intelligence, of courage, of wiliness, of common sense; of how much they were influenced, even in panic, by the conditioning of the rules of the game, their society’s game. Never stop for anyone on the road. Let them die there. Break the rule for a brother, Oupa, and you stop a souvenir bullet. You admired the criminals you were forced to share a cell with — but to meet them outside — Those people? I’d be terrified. The attraction of power predestines us as its victims. And if I hadn’t been wasting my breath screaming I might have reached the keys, run over the bastards. Oh easy to swagger in retrospect. While you were fighting, while I was screaming, weren’t we conscious of getting what we deserved, according to the rules? If I had stayed home as a white woman should in these times (what other times have there been in the efficacy of a country run by fear) it wouldn’t have happened, serve you right. There’s someone there at home who can’t live without you. What were you doing about that when you got yourself shot in the leg?