He watched the mealie fields approach and turn away, cleaved by the road. — We have too many graves and too few houses for the living.—
Vera followed the ritual of the funeral without understanding any comfort it could bring to the wife. She was dressed in a polka-dot skirt and jacket that she endured like a tight pair of shoes (an outfit bought by her husband from a street vender in the city?), the skin of her stunned face peeled raw by tears. The children were wearing white socks and polished school shoes. The gangling boy who (that day, that day) hadn’t returned from school held the hand of a two- or three-year-old who stared down curiously into the pit of dank-smelling earth ready to receive his father. There was singing, of great beauty, from these women left behind, and when they wept one of them took Vera’s arm because with the bullet that passed through her leg she was part of the son they mourned and she wept, with them, for the horrible metamorphosis revealed by Intensive Care.
The company trooped back to the house. She felt impatient with herself, confused. — Oupa. Why was he named that? Grandfather, old man, and he’s dead before thirty. Why do you name children ‘old man’ for god’s sake? — Zeph smiled down at her. — Something to do with authority. You take the Afrikaans word for a respected man and it gives — wha’d’you say — confers power on the child. You give him the strength of a baas. —
At the Washing of the Hands in tin basins set out by women he told her she was expected to say a few words to the wife and company. But apart from their own language they understood only Afrikaans, the language of the whites they worked for in that district, and hers was court-room Afrikaans; she did not have the right words for this occasion. — You speak to them.—
A mild reproach. — How do I know what you want to say?—
— I want to say I don’t know what to say.—
— No, come on.—
— Really.—
— They want to know how he died, of what sickness, what happened at the attack, that he was a soldier in Umkhonto, that he was well-thought-of at work, that he was a good man who cared only about his family although he was far away—
— There, you know it all. Tell them you’re saying it in their language for me.—
He became again as he was when he was among his own people at Odensville; the cadence of his voice, his gestures, transformed a fragmented life into wholeness, he knew exactly how to do it, it came to him from within himself in symbiosis with the murmuring group gathered. They understood the tradition and she understood, without words, without tradition, their understanding. It was not true; the son and husband of this place left behind did not think only of his family, he yearned for a girl who had seen things and possessed knowledge he would never have, he did not die peacefully, his body, in attempts made to keep it alive, suffered tortures his interrogators in prison had not thought of. It was not true, in fact, but this stranger she had brought with her made it so beyond evidence. Who was Mrs Stark, herself to some the forbidding eminence of the Legal Foundation, to others the procuress of convenient abortion, to know what was between the young man and the clumsy-bodied young woman with her peasant stance and the classical three lines of beauty round her neck? Who was to know whether or not the sister in charge was right when she said, finally, he doesn’t feel what we’re doing to him?
Vera had cleansed her hands of death, with the others. In the car driving to the city she reflected differently, now. — At least we saw him come back. At least he’s home.—
The sonorous, lyrical, stately persona created by the company in which Zeph had found himself had retired somewhere within where it had its place and would never leave him. He spoke out of what he had perfectly reconciled with it, in his dealings with laws made to manipulate him, and the entry into relationships for which there was no pre-existing formula of hostility or friendship, suspicion or trust; combinations thrown together by compatibilities discovered, side by side, in conflict and in change. — He didn’t want to go back, did he.—
How did Rapulana know? He’d seen him only a few times, first at Odensville and then at the Foundation, and, of course, at the party in Vera’s house. — He’d had something to drink that night … yes … he told me he was going to do what he thought about when he was in prison. He was going to disappear and travel the world, he was going to Cuba — to England, China, specially Cuba — everywhere.—
The end of the joy-ride.
Chapter 18
Lucky to be alive.
Ivan paid the courtesy visit expected of a son’s interest in his mother’s work and the assumed interest of her colleagues in her family; the Foundation is not a business, where directors and staff have no connection outside the purpose of making money. The very nature of their work, concerned with the condition of personal lives in communities, influences their own sense of community. One or two of the older lawyers remembered him as a schoolboy or youth; others, such as Lazar Feldman, exchanged ready-made friendliness established by proxy through their familiarity with his mother. That he looked so like her made this oddly easy. Chatting with him, Lazar remarked how sorry he was to have had to let Vera down over the trip to Oupa’s funeral, he really would have liked to be there.
From the Foundation, Ivan took Vera out to lunch. Just the two of them, the son’s treat, she walking before him to the table he had reserved in the quietest corner of a good restaurant, the succession to clandestine lunches taken with a lover.
— Is this the time when we compare notes? — She was contentedly flippant, using the phrasing he would remember from the days when he came from boarding school and the right moment suddenly arrived for wariness to dissolve, so that they had no age, either of them, moved into knowing each other as an element common to them.
— I was thinking all the time I was there — (he read up and down the wine list, looking for something special) you’re lucky, with the Foundation. They’re such a good crowd, so absolutely dedicated but intelligently tough — you know what I mean? None of the feeling that it’s a refuge for the well-meaning who can’t face the kind of world I work in, can’t face that you have to deal with it, with the Haves, if you’re going to achieve anything for the Have-nots. And the way they value you and you’re so completely absorbed in what you do … lucky.—
— Are you thinking of yourself?—
— Myself? How, myself?—
— Oh I’m not suggesting you haven’t been successful, exceptionally so. But that doesn’t always mean you don’t sometimes think there could have been something else. Something you didn’t know about at the time; time of choice.—
He said it for her: —There’s always something you didn’t know about at the time. Are you going to have meat, then, with that wine? D’you still like calamari so much — we could have a small starter, and a half bottle of white, first. — The habit of discretion in their working lives — his in banking, hers in the confidentiality of the law — tacitly guarded their tongues while the waiter stood by.
— I was thinking about Dad — Ben. What he’s doing. It’s marginal in his life, somehow. He laughs about it. But I wonder. No … I actually see. — At once he sensed intrusion: leaning on the table his mother linked her hands in a single fist and covered her mouth against it. — I don’t know what the centre is. He says this luggage thing is to provide … for the two of you. That’s all.—
— All this concern, it’s something new, with him; age syndrome, turning in on himself. If you live here, the future — not the one you can provide for with suitcases — the future’s more like a pile of bricks. You can only opt to help sort out a few.—