He smiled without sense of surprise, as if he always expected to find her there; or more likely because the African characteristic that rather exasperated her, in her house, of arriving at any time without a telephone call in respect for privacy, worked appealingly in reverse, where in African homes it was taken for granted that people walked in whenever they wished. He wore one of his Drommedaris suits, an elegant grey, but they exchanged the usual bobbing embrace of greeting appropriated by the liberation movement from the dictators. He took off the jacket and settled down in shirt-sleeves.
— It’s an honour. — She tried it out on him.
— Oh certainly.—
— But is an honour the most useful. For me.—
— Now what are you thinking of, Vera?—
— Aren’t I better off, isn’t it better for me to be doing my job at the Foundation — the work you know I do well, don’t I — than putting myself in the position of making terribly important decisions, conditions for other people — the whole country. Putting myself way up there, above them—
— Isn’t an honour as useful as you can make it? You know you always remind me I’m not against what people think of as honours. Some of our people even think of going to a board meeting as an honour, but you and I know it as something else. What did you once say? — infiltration.—
— But this’s different. It’s setting oneself up to decide power, in the end. What’s a constitution but the practice, in law, of a Bill of Rights? The practical means of achieving all our fine phrases, The People Shall Have …—
— It’s only the draft you’ll be dealing with. Something for the transitional council. It’s not final, all-out responsibility our grandchildren will blame you for.—
— Ah but it’s the draft that will have to reconcile everything, so that the final constitution will have coherence, at least, to go on. Think of regions, alone; the passions of disagreement over regions, everyone with his own home-drawn map and the powers he wants there. The Odendaals, the Buthelezis and Mangopes all shouting and stamping their feet for the right to do what they like with the people in this part of the country or that, no power of interference from a central government.—
— But that’s exactly where the last battle’s going to be fought! There where the Committee sits! That’s the last gasp of the old regime, we’ll hear it there! There’s this one breath left in it. Go for it!—
She swayed uncertainly, half-smiling; his usual manner was not vehement.
The schoolmaster in him spoke as if he were back in his rural office and had called her in. — It’s your duty.
— But she couldn’t see herself as self-righteous.
— All right. It’s power. And power scares you.—
— I don’t know. — She feels vaguely aggressive. — Yes it … I’m not like you: I’ve belonged so long to a people who used it horribly. I distrust it.—
— For yourself. But if this Committee does the job, it’ll mean real empowerment for our people.—
It was accepted tacitly that when he spoke of ‘our’ people it was as a black speaking for blacks, subtly different from when he used ‘we’ or ‘us’ and this meant an empathy between him and her. They continued to accept one another for exactly what they were, no sense of one intruding upon the private territory behind the other. It had come to her that this was the basis that ought to have existed between a man and a woman in general, where it was a question not of a difference of ancestry but of sex.
— It’s a matter of degree, whether I sit on boards or you get to be part of the Committee — that’s something more urgent. You’ve never shown any doubts about where I sit.—
— Ah no. Who could have anything to say about that. You’re making a place for blacks in the money world. Even the ex-Stalinists among us want it. There’s no millennium; only the IMF and the World Bank—
— There are plenty who do say! I’m in it for the directors’ fees. I’m living in the Northern Suburbs instead of Alex or Soweto. — He was smiling at her certainty.
She had teased him about that fancy restaurant. She released her tongue sharply against her palate and jerked her head in dismissal of herself and his detractors. To believe in him was to accept that the Left, as expressed in the living conditions of the majority rather than in ideology, can find its solutions to those conditions by using some of the means of capitalism. Looking at the neighbouring countries of the continent, what other solution was there to try, for the present?
— So I should set myself up there among the little gods who are deciding what the country will be. Proportional representation, regions … And what about the Foundation? I’d be away for months, you know. We’re always short-staffed. There’s going to be so much work, things hotting up before a new government comes. People fear the old boundaries will stick unless you can get back to your land first. Places on the borders of homelands that are resisting incorporation with the rest of the country— we need successful court action to claim them quickly, and you know what a wrangle that can be. Problems like Zevenfontein — who, black or white, wants those poor people squatting next to them in a middle-class suburb? And Matiwane’s Kop, Thembalihle, Cornfields — they want their land back. Yesterday I was in Pretoria — again — the Advisory Commission on Land Allocation—
— The old battlefield.—
— Mogopa this time. A hearing we’d prepared for the Mogopa delegation. You know what one of them said to the Commission? ‘The Government is a thief who’s been caught but returned only half he’s stolen.’ The application we’d made for the restoration of those two farms taken from them in the mid-Eighties has resulted in them getting back only one, and it’s Swartrand, the one with less arable land. So we’re contesting. The man burst through our legal jargon like a paper hoop. ‘Now that the land is supposed to be given back to us, there are a lot of talks, talks … the Government is having the power to steal people’s property and afterwards set up commissions.’ And there was one old man, Abram Mabidikama, I can’t get him out of my mind — he said that watching white farmers graze their cattle on Hartebeeslaagte was like watching an abducted child labour for someone else’s profit, ‘while I have nothing’. And then he stood there and he told them, we are going to struggle to get our land back ‘up to the end of time’.—
Zeph echoed quietly, for himself and them. — To the end of time.—
The old man hadn’t said what rally crowds were chanting, kill the Boer, kill the farmer; but like Odendaal when this man sitting opposite her in his cuff-linked shirt-sleeves had said Meneer, we won’t harm you. Not you or your wife and children, the Commission fingered their pens, hid behind their bifocals from the menace as Odendaal did behind his slammed door.
— What piece of paper that’s going to be disputed by the gang of the white Right and homeland leaders is more important than the chance to make sure, now, people have somewhere finally to arrive, for god’s sake — to end being chased from nothing to nowhere. At least I know I can do something about that. Someone else can sit on the Committee? It’s easier than to replace me at the Foundation.—