— Many things seem not to make sense because we’re rushing ahead, we have to, and this gets pushed aside for that, gets knocked over so something bigger can go forward.—
— But nothing measures up.—
— No. We have to leave the old standards of comparison, what’s important and what’s not. We’re not just weighing a bag of salt against a bag of mealies, Vera.—
— I’m supposed to sit quietly on an electoral committee while down the road someone watches Sally and Didy’s house, waiting the chance to kill her.—
— Have you seen her?—
— I took a bunch of flowers, and that was all wrong — as if she were sick, or the way we do when someone’s died. She took them from me with a peculiar expression.—
— You should go often. When something is threatening people need to have others coming round. I’ve known that in my life.—
— She and Didy won’t come to our house. It is as if it were a disease. Or a curse. They don’t want to involve anyone else in the risk. Sally’s all bravado, of course, says you never know whether the man knows how to shoot straight, he might hit someone else by mistake.—
The sun had set and the underlit sky was pearly with cloud. She stood up and stretched towards it. They walked together to his gate, sharing the end of the day without domesticity, he did not ask what she was going to do, she gave him no decision. He twisted a yellow rose absently off the bush beside the gate; and then handed it to her. She rolled the stem in her fingers.
— Mind the thorns.—
— Empowerment, Zeph. What is this new thing? What happened to what we used to call justice?—
Chapter 25
Didymus accompanies Sibongile everywhere with a gun in the inner pocket of his jacket. On his political record he never would have been granted a licence to carry a firearm had he applied for it; the Movement supplied one, asserting its own form of legality. Not only the State, but those factions within it but out of its control, rebelling at the State’s even reluctant concessions over power, had the whole arsenal of army and police force to seize upon. What were a few caches of smuggled arms— symbolized by the AK-47, mimed, chanted, mythologized— against that? When police protection is blandly offered, behind it is this reality: the bodyguard itself may include in its personnel an assassin. To have that one patrolling the street outside the house, the first home back home, where Didymus and Sibongile and their daughter are eating the evening meal, to have that one sitting behind her head as she drives into the city!
Sibongile looks at the thing, the gun, with distaste, and constantly asks Didymus if he’s sure the safety catch is on, there against his body. But he is no white suburban husband, needing to be instructed how to ‘handle’ a gun — as the professional-sounding phrase used by amateurs as a euphemism for learning how to kill, goes. And he will not, he assures, hit anyone by hazard, the wrong one.
And they both know that if the hit-man acts it will not be while presenting a target. It will be, as it has been for others, a spread of bullets from a passing car, or through a window where she and her husband and daughter sit at table. Didymus will not have time to see a target or fire. The gun is a pledge that has little chance of being honoured. Didymus has long been accustomed to heavy odds in his way of life and all he can do is lead Sibongile through them.
Suspicious-looking individuals hang around the house but they are only journalists; the assassins will not arouse suspicion, or if they do, it will be after the event, as when neighbours remembered that a red car circled the block a few days before the last assassination. Failing to get to the prospective victim or her husband, journalists manage to waylay Mpho, who is quite flattered to be asked how she feels about her mother being under threat, and appears in a charming photograph which she cuts out of the newspaper and puts up in her room. The distraction makes her feel less afraid.
No one can say when again it will be safe. Safe to do what? Move about freely. Leave the gun at home. At the Negotiating Council sessions Sibongile and others on the hit-list are at least conveniently gathered in one place. Young men from the liberation army are on guard; grown plump and relaxed after the austerities of years in bush camps, they stand close among themselves, like schoolboys at lunch break, when their share of the refreshments provided for delegates is handed out to them. To be accustomed to precautions may be exactly what the hit-men are waiting to happen to their targets. Any routine, even that of watchfulness itself, becomes absent-minded: once you get used to being at risk that is when you are most at risk. That is when the opportunity arises for you to be taken in a way not foreseen. A surprise. Those singled out on the hit-list remind each other: go out to the corner shop for a newspaper on a quiet public holiday morning, there’s nobody about so early, it’s not a movement habitual to you that anyone could predict, just to the corner, that’s all, and when you come back you get a bullet through the head, not once but three times, to make sure. The last surprise of your life.
Sibongile has the compulsion to leave nothing half-done. The most trivial task; before she leaves the house in the morning she goes from room to room, putting things in place, fitting new batteries in the cassette player Mpho has left empty, sorting the disorderly files Didymus piled on the kitchen table, as if these tasks will otherwise never be completed. She is agitated at any disagreement left unresolved when Mpho closes the door behind her on the way to the computer course she now attends, even at the casualness with which such daily partings take place. She will rush to snatch a kiss on Mpho’s cheek and watch, from a gap in the blinds supposed to be kept drawn so that movements inside the house may not be followed, while the girl’s high little rump pumps under her scrap of denim skirt as she hurries. Didymus finds notes in various places. He sees they are not Sibongile’s usual reminders to herself but instructions for others that would keep continuity in life if she went out, like the one who bought a newspaper at the corner, and did not get back. He says nothing. Crumples the notes and aims them at the kitchen bin. He himself had never succumbed to the temptation of rituals of this nature; but then he had had the talisman of disguise.
They continued to sit in the house in the evenings, he reading or at the computer making notes for the book he was expected to write and she studying documentation from various committees who reported to the Negotiating Council. Would it happen when she went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of that rooibos tea which in her old fussiness about her health she thought was good for her? Or when she said, I’m off now, and, on the way to bed, in the bathroom would have time only to turn the taps on? The slam of a door or the crack of gas exploding from a car’s exhaust in the street made them both swiftly look up; then Sibongile assuming careless haughtiness, and Didymus wryly smiling to her. Mpho sat with bare feet up on the sofa arm, little mound of well-fed stomach showing in her slouch, rustling a hand into a packet of her favourite cornflakes as she watched the TV parody of their lives in simulated violence and shootings.
Sibongile and Didymus went about as a team, and with others on the list were the initiated, set apart from people who had not been singled out, even close comrades and friends. These did not seem to know how to deal with the situation, though the victims appeared to be managing the unimaginable well enough. Vera Stark came to the house fairly regularly with silent Ben. What was happening in the Starks’ lives? At least this was one way of getting friends off the subject of the List, away from the endless going-over who was behind it. Vera is battling with the Advisory Commission on Land Allocation—‘as usual’, she dismisses. They talk of the first sitting of the Technical Committee on Constitutional Issues due soon, assuming she is going to be part of it. Didymus is not resentful at himself being passed over; the threat of death, close by, drains ambition of all importance, for the time being. — You’ll be taking leave from the Foundation next week, then. — He grins and gives a tap on her hand; wonderful she’s been chosen. Vera glances at his assurance, a moment of exchange between them.