The black man he would never speak to — never! — looked at him unavoidably as the dark aperture of a camera aimed. This was a country black, brought up where his parents and grandparents, share-croppers and labourers, spoke the language of the farmer they worked for, and the school for blacks where he learnt to read and write taught in Afrikaans, not his black language. The man’s Afrikaans was Odendaal’s, not Mrs Stark’s pidgin.
— Meneer Odendaal, don’t be afraid. We won’t harm you. Not you or your wife and children.—
The woman lawyer touched the man’s shirt-sleeve (dressed up like a gentleman, jacket over his arm). Before she led the way back to the station-wagon she paused persistently. — Mr Odendaal, I apologize for turning up without telephoning. I’ll be writing to you and probably will be able to explain the Foundation’s assessment of the situation more acceptably than I’ve been able to do now.—
The farmer turned his back. He opened his front door and slammed it on them behind him. In the optical illusion of blotchy explosions that comes with leaving the glare of sun for a dim hallway, he, too, paused a moment. He listened to hear the station-wagon leave his property. As if he had just stopped running, his leaping, bursting heart slowly decelerated to its normal pace.
For a long time — how many years? — Vera still told her husband everything. Or thought she did.
Meneer Odendaal, don’t be afraid. We won’t harm you.
This reaction, response, whatever you like to call it, lay between her husband and her like a gift. Of what, to whom, their faces showed neither could decide. Back in the blueish domes where his black eyes always stirred in her the strange attention they had attracted against the thudding of a waterfall she and he had climbed to at the beginning, she looked for his answer. Once he had been the answer to everything; that was falling in love: the end of questions. But she was finding an answer within herself. The gift of the squatter leader’s tolerance, forgiveness — whichever it was — was something the farmer didn’t deserve.
And it was unclaimed! Rejected. — Don’t you see, he isn’t able to be aware of it. — A further explanation, coming from one whose familiar symmetry of features juxtaposed the harmony of life with the discord she had not only witnessed, but been part of in this experience and was part of routinely in many others. How could these contradictions exist in one species, the human one? How could such beauty be achieved in the composition of this man’s, her chosen one’s, face, and such ugliness distort the ability of human response in that man’s, the farmer’s, spirit?
— Who’s the fellow, anyway — from Odensville — d’you know anything about him?—
She opened and shut a hand in the gesture of her limitations. — About as much as I do about all the others who come to us. Only difference, he’s apparently the one all the squatters trust to represent them. In many of these places there’s so much rivalry, different factions saying theirs is the man. Often we find the person we’re working with isn’t accepted by this group or that. Little power struggles going on even among people you’d think too desperately busy trying to survive, to have the energy … He seems well-educated, not like most rural schoolmasters. But I don’t know if we’re going to get anywhere with this case. If the Administration does give the farmer permission to declare a township there, he’ll be in a position to say to the people, pay up or get off. He’ll zone such and such a number of plots, and that won’t be enough for even those who possibly could pay. There’s no minimum living space in a squatter camp, you know!—
— He could charge what he likes for his plots?—
— I’ve seen farmers rent a piece of ground half the size of this room for a hundred rands a month. Rural rack-rent, and we’ve no legal recourse. Exploitation is the other name for the law of supply and demand, my darling.—
— Maybe. Maybe. In the situation of people with nothing. When it comes to land. Pocket calculators, deodorants, vodka brands … the stuff I’m consulted about — the greater demand you create the greater the competition and the less chance of getting away with exploitation.—
He spoke in irony but without resentment. A contradiction between the purpose of Bennet Stark’s occupation and the purpose of Vera’s was something that, as with other couples of their kind, of their place and time, was unremarked in their intimacy, part of an accepted ambiguity. For so long this had been a place and time when integrity in many matters could be maintained only by dishonesty, when truth had to survive by lies. If Security (itself a euphemism for threat) came to ask where so-and-so was living, you said you did not know, and, out of necessity to protect yourself as well, might even put Security off on a plausible false trail. If you were going to be a conduit for letters addressed to certain destinations that risked being intercepted by agents at the post office, you hired a mail-box under a fictitious name in a suburb far from where you lived. If there was a rumour that this one or that among acquaintances was suspect as a police plant, you smilingly dissimulated before the person but no longer talked in that company about anything you believed in. You lied by omission, and warned others against association with someone who perhaps was innocent, a name smeared by yet others to cause dissension in your ranks. These were the only ways to defend at least something of the truth against the ultimate lie, the only way to defend the principle of life struggling against death, which is the ultimate, forgotten etymology, not to be found in any dictionary or political speech, of that embarrassing word, freedom. So while Vera’s Foundation upheld the right of land and shelter, the object of Bennet’s market research consultancy was to discover for his clients the enticements that distract people from what they really lack.
But — again, wait! — isn’t there another, everyday, pop-freedom, broadcast everywhere in shops and elevators and the combis which transport everyone in cities and on country roads, an easy-to-use freedom in the choice of buying the beer that champions drink or the hair-relaxer beauty queens advise? Must people forgo the pleasure of the unnecessary, as well as everything else they don’t have? If Bennet had stayed on as Our Male Lead at the university, he would have been teaching a curriculum devised for the level of general education and Western cultural background of white students, difficult to attain for the black students who satisfied entrance standards nominally but came from township schools where boycotts were their history thesis, running battles with the police their epic poetry, and economic theory that of a home where there wasn’t enough money for bus fare, let alone books. So what was the difference, whichever way a failed sculptor might earn a living?
In some blessed peaceful country, existing far away, an obvious moral contradiction in the activities of a man and woman might destroy the respect that goes with love. But here, for these two, while the great lie prevailed, it was part of a shackle of common experience of what was wrong but aleatory, could not be escaped. They were scarcely aware of its chafing.
When Oupa had driven two or three kilometres from the Odendaal place the little party from the Foundation stopped on a side road for tea under a tree. Mrs Stark always took along on such trips a flask and a packet of biscuits, sugar in a jar, and a stack of plastic cups. Most welcome, the Odensville man said several times, sitting with his knees neatly together, on the grass. Young Oupa crunched one biscuit after another and every now and then, irresistibly, shook his head and laughed on a full mouth at the encounter they had left behind them. — I know that man. Yoh-yoh! I know him! That kind from the Island, warders just like him. There was one commandant — stood there like a bull in front of you when you came up for interrogation. Never spoke himself, let the other one question you and rough you up, but just standing there he was in charge. If he hadn’t been there, they couldn’t have done the things they did to you. And every time I thought, now it’s coming, now he’s going to start in on me, too. Yrr-ah, man. But he didn’t need to, he just had to be there.—