— According to a plan you believe in.—
— Yes. Pretty much.—
— And you’ve got the satisfaction that whatever goes wrong with it, at least what you’re doing now realizes something of it, in advance.—
— Oh— she lifted her head, fanned out her hands — So little, such a dab of cement filling in a corner. Typical that I’m using the old image of a building, while people have nowhere to live.—
— They were telling me, Odensville, what are the others— is it Moutse? — people with the right to live in these places, now. Of course it must be a satisfaction, it’s there with you, in your busyness, your preoccupation — I don’t mean that as a reproach — I see it in your face, everything about you since I’ve been here. But him. In him. None of that, in him. And I’m in London, Annie — well he mourns for Annie, d’you know that, you’d think she’d died — that’s another story. What has he got apart from his damn suitcases?—
She looked up at him to see what he knew.
— Me.—
The waiter arrived with plates ranged along his arm. Another hovered with the censer of a giant pepper-mill. The wine was uncorked, Ivan lifted his glass and mouthed a kiss blown to his mother across the table; —Where are the Indian waiters there used to be when I was a kid? They’re all African now.—
— Moved up a rung on the ladder. They’ve taken the place of whites who used to serve in shops — men’s outfitters and so on. You’re like an old man, reminiscing! That’s what happens when you exile yourself.—
They ate and drank, in the charm each invested in the other during absence. In this variation of meals both had eaten as the opening act of a love affair, there was the same calculation going on of how presumptuous each might be, approaching the other. He judged he had cajoled her sufficiently, in the persona of her small boy become an attractive man, out from behind the line of intrusion set up by her. — You didn’t tell us Feldman didn’t go with you to that funeral. You know you shouldn’t have gone alone.—
— I didn’t go alone. — Head cocked at him.
— Oh. That was sensible. But how is it you didn’t mention Feldman was ill and you were going with someone else? Ben thought you were with someone he trusts, back on that road again.—
— I took along a friend he knows, the man who’s just won the Odendaal case, there couldn’t be anyone safer to be with.—
— But Vera. — He tapped a dance between a knife and fork. — You puzzle me.—
— My darling, how do I puzzle you? — Her face thrust towards him in a smile.
He wasn’t to be turned aside by any ploy of motherly affection. — Why didn’t you let him know it wasn’t Feldman? He thought you were safely with one person, you were with another. When you talked to us about the funeral you didn’t mention Feldman wasn’t there. It’s childish. — He has the right to be critical with her; that’s the kind of edgy relationship both are aware exists between them.
— I don’t know. It’s the usual form of evasion, to say so. Perhaps I’ll find out now you’ve mentioned it.—
Fascinated, he hesitated, sat back in his chair, and then righted himself. He spoke with an intense curiosity. — Do you often lie to him?—
— Is keeping something for yourself lying.—
— I suppose so. Even if you manage to put it that way.—
— And do you?—
— Who to?—
His mother rounded her eyes exaggeratedly, pulled a face: what are the limits of what you will tell me, what can we divine of one another. — Well, the Hungarian.—
He laughed, and then shook his head, down, down, at what had been come upon. — Well yes. As you say, the Hungarian. She wants a child. From me. For instance, there’s that. I tell her no, it’ll spoil what’s between us, I want her to myself. But that’s not what I want. There’s Adam, one hostage enough between me and a woman I couldn’t go on living with.—
— So you don’t envisage going on living with the Hungarian.—
— She’s got a name, Mother! — Eva. No, we get along well but I’m getting old enough to realize what you don’t know at twenty; life isn’t going to end with the catastrophe of hitting the forties, you’re very likely going to have to continue for a long stretch ahead with what — with whom — you take on now. Eva. It’s not like with you and Ben, something for life. I’m not like him — alas, I suppose. He took you away from that first husband of yours, at least that’s what he’s sure he did, I think it’s the basis of his feeling that he belongs to you entirely. You’ve always been and you are all that he has.—
— You can’t belong to someone else. It’s love-making gives the illusion! You may long to, but you can’t. — She stopped, as if the mouthful of wine she swallowed were some potion that would suffuse them both with clarity. — You see, Ben made a great mistake. Choice. — A flick of a glance returned her conspirator to the earlier remark: something not known about at the time. — He gave up everything he needed, in exchange for what he wanted. The sculpture. Even an academic career — all right, it didn’t look brilliant, but he might have been a professor by now, mightn’t he? What d’you think? That wouldn’t have been marginal? He put it all on me. — She was excited to continue by a sense of approaching danger, saying too much; doing exactly that, herself: putting the weight of all this on a son, a grown child. There is a fine limit beyond which a son or daughter may turn away in revulsion. Parents must be defined as such.
— What on you?—
— The whole weight of his life. That love he had. I love him but it’s hard to remember how much I was in love with him. That love affair that started on a holiday in the Drakensberg, it hasn’t moved, for him. It hasn’t been taken up into other things. Children born, friends disappearing in exile, in prison, killings around us, the death of his father in the house, the whole country changing. It hasn’t moved. Not even his confusion over Annie has shifted it, not even your divorce, because both he’s understood only in relation to his own feelings in the Drakensberg, he hasn’t any other criterion. The violence that was always there, pushing people out into the veld, beating them up at police stations, and the gangster violence that’s taking the opportunities of change, now, that’s killed Oupa Sejake — even that he understands now through me, it’s because it’s something that happened to me, it’s the bullet that went through my leg. Love. There’s been so much else, since then. Ivan, I can’t live in the past.—
— I wish I were nearer. For him. Because I always loved you best, as a kid.—
An offering of complicity she did not choose to see, held out to her.
She was examining him lingeringly. — Yes, so far away. You are his favourite. His only child, now. That’s how it turned out.—
Theirs was the last table still occupied but they sat on unnoticing, accepting coffee, more and more coffee, like lovers reluctant to part.
— You don’t need anything, Mother.—
In the clatter of waiters clearing tables he touched her cheek to soften what she might take as judgment.
— On the contrary, I’m finding the answer presents itself before the need. I know only then that it existed.—
They went out into the street roused with wine and confidences, laughing.
‘Do I lie to him often?’
How alike we are, it doesn’t end with the mask that is the face. He knows me because he himself was the first lie. One day I’ll be so old we’ll even talk about that. And he will say, I knew all along, although he couldn’t possibly know except through the code of genes and the language of blood.