— The banks we’ve created will have belonged to our people already. Only the private aspect will change — there’ll be government men on the boards, some of the directors will go.—
He? He’ll move on, as he did from the way he found to emerge from the Odensville affair, doing what was to be done when it had to be done.
— I wonder what you really think of them. When you’re with them.—
— People. Human beings, men like any other.—
— Oh come on. That’s the ‘politically correct’ reply. And women? The few women I’ve met in that circle are not what I’d call like any other.—
— Can’t think of any women … yes, there’s one.—
— Poor thing.—
— Well, yes, I suppose so. But I have to admit I didn’t notice it, how she was treated. Among us black men, too, it’s been usual. I suppose I’ve been conditioned from boyhood. Although I like to think I’ve resisted all that!—
— You’re the least conditioned person I’ve met. I was quite wrong about you when I first saw you, hat in hand. I mistook dignity for servility. I can tell you that now.—
He avoided personal references by withdrawing to himself. He filled his cup. — And you? — She put her palm over hers. — I mean would you say you are conditioned?—
She knew he was saying he didn’t believe it was so, while he didn’t think they needed to be personal in this way; such a level already existed differently between them.
— I find at the moment I need to be, more than I am. I have my son’s young son living with us.—
Correcting the awkward definition: —Your grandson.—
— Grandson. I’m unsure — of our position — you know? I don’t know what he expects, the right thing.—
This was how he listened in boardrooms, waiting to unravel speakers’ motives, giving them time.
— What I should be to him.—
— You’re Vera. — His, the last word, no qualifications.
She laughed and pulled a face.
— What about the other children?—
They had been thinking aloud over the news that pupils at black schools were out in the streets again, this time in refusal to pay examination fees. He took up in doubt: —I wonder why we call them children. Eighteen, nineteen, sometimes more than twenty years old, and that’s part of what’s gone so terribly wrong in our times. If the parents weren’t too poor to keep them in school when they’re small, if there had been enough schools to take them all in at the right age, as white children start their schooling, if they hadn’t been chased here and there, everywhere, all over the country in removals — if they’d really had the chance to be children like other children — they wouldn’t be young men and women treated like children now. They wouldn’t be doing the things that scare people so much, the things that young men and women do when they’re angry. This country got it all wrong.—
— And we have to believe we’re going to get it right.—
— A piece here, a piece there. It’s all broken up. You do what you can, I do what I can. That’s it.—
Vera was looking at the palm of her right hand as if (to him) seeking to divine something there; but she was turning to the distraction of some blemish while dealing with uncertainty; she picked at the tiny grains of a couple of warts that came and went, from time to time, in that palm. — So it’s some sort of historical process in reverse we’re in. The future becomes undoing the past.—
— You still believe history will do it through us. I believe we act through God’s will.—
— I know. I know you do. — It was an atheist’s declaration of faith: in a man.
They sat in unnoticed silence for a while, closer in their difference than they might have been in agreement, with others.
Chapter 22
When politics turns to gangster methods the vocabulary that goes along with these is adopted. The slang of the TV crime series people amuse themselves with night after night becomes the language by which planned killing of leaders and those close to them is termed. There is a hit-list, there are hit-men. Just like the movies — but these tough guys are not actors behind the get-up of balaclava helmets they wear, they are individuals convinced by others that they have a mission: to save this or that political ideology, racial or national formation, religious belief.
It is only after an assassination of a leader has successfully taken place that the hit-list is released to those whose names it comprises. No one gives a ministerial or official police explanation for this, so that an explanation offers itself out of the very circumstance: those in officialdom who kept the list to themselves had among them some who were involved in compiling the list and providing the hit-men. But there are so many formations, so many intrigues, so many messianic claims for exclusive destinies not provided for by any Bill of Rights, that there could be any one of these responsible. If there is an arrest — and most times there has not been — the unlikely individual seems a strange being (produced in an unlikely period in the sense that nothing is like it was for so long) who could have served any of them. For although they squabble solemnly among themselves their yearning is the same, they yearn for the impossible (escape from history, Vera Stark would call it), the reinstatement of life as it was before. They are prepared to kill for that, although nothing will bring it back; assassination is an offering for which there are no gods left.
Sibongile Maqoma is on a hit-list. A telephone call came while she was turning over some chops under the grill. Mpho, who always rushes to answer a ring in the evening in the certainty calls are for her, yelled through the sizzling to her mother, and Sibongile picked up the mobile phone she has resorted to, like her beeper, to make her life manageable. When she heard the slowly emphasized voice of an Afrikaner speaking English she quickly, with the free hand, signalled to Didymus, who was opening a bottle of beer, to go and listen in on the receiver in the living-room.
There had been one or two abusive calls since she had become a member of a multi-party commission in negotiation talks. Pushed under the front door, a note written in straggly capitals called her a black bitch who should keep her cunt out of politics — but to be told over the telephone in that steady monotone (the man might have been reading a grocery order) you were listed to be murdered! If the Colonel had sent someone to talk to her, to tell her; but a telephone call!
She rushed to the living-room giggling on a high note, shaking. Didymus and Mpho stared as if the threat must somehow show on her. — It was so casual, I felt like just saying thanks but my chops are burning—
Mpho flung herself on her mother and started to cry. Sibongile struggled to lift her face and chide her lovingly, don’t be silly, nothing’s happened, I’m all right. — But he said they’re going to kill you— Didymus took over, his arm round her. — You’ve got it all wrong, he said her name is on a list, a whole list of other people, some names jotted down, that’s all. Your mother’s not a real target, she’s not one of the top leaders, is she.—
— But she’s up there, isn’t she, she’s sitting there, she’s part of the discussions those awful people want to stop. They hate us! They hate her!—
Mpho had not been told about the note under the door; but they could not fob her off again by telling her, don’t be silly, it’s nothing. She sat with her head on her father’s shoulder; Sibongile repeated exactly what the police officer had told her. She had at least resisted her disbelief sufficiently to ask where the list had come from: it was not in the interest of certain investigations to reveal. That’s all. They calmed the girl, Sibongile taking her hands, turning the silver and elephant-hair rings on her fingers, Didymus stroking her hair, while they talked, as of commonplaces in their lives, of the possibilities: which group might be responsible for the list and how the police found it. In someone’s house, office — where? But Didymus was experienced in these matters. — It’s come from the cells. They’ve got someone to sing.—