Neither he nor she was prepared for the strangeness into which his cheerfully ordinary remark had fallen.
— He’d already been gone a long time.—
Didymus did not want to be drawn into confidences with this woman, old friend from the days across the colour line. The private relationship of his secret visit in one of his revolutionary personae was not licence for her to speak to him of that other privacy, between husband and wife. It was something only a white woman would have expected. Yet he understood what she was telling him; understood out of the balance and imbalance of withdrawal and closeness experienced between himself and Sibongile. But in their case it was surely all due to factors outside themselves, to the struggle and what that meant in all its phases. Whites, even Vera and Ben, surely had at least some intimacy safe from these things? If he had allowed himself to say: I’m sorry — that would have acknowledged he understood, and burst discretion for her to pour out God knows what, Ben with another woman, the usual story. In and around the Movement there were many such; when political action is the only imperative, the sexual emotions rebel.
— Ivan’s still over there, isn’t it? Big boy in banking, man, that’s really nice. We must get together and hear all the news when Ben gets back. I’m expecting Sally next weekend, with luck. She’s in Los Angeles and coming via Bonn. You know that Mpho’s got a scholarship to study drama at N.Y.U.? — Here was an area of confidence to which both belonged since Vera had taken responsibility for a mishap in the girl’s life, along with her parents. — Much better, for a girl like Mpho, than computers — she’d never have stuck with that, hei. Not with her temperament. Sally fixed it.—
Vera returned to the empty house at night in complete self-forgetfulness; and met herself. The curtains she went about drawing across the windows, the angles of walls she followed, the doors she closed as she passed from room to room sheltered and contained only her. Her house, acquired dishonestly, that she never should have kept; that house was still with her, it was, in a sense, her sole and only possession, the only one she had carried with her through everything that had come and gone within and around her, Mrs Stark and Vera; men, the children she bore them, the communities she saved or failed to save from removal, the deaths of and the death-threats to companions, the terrified traipse of squatters from hostel attacks to refuge, the return of faces from prison and exile, the last white parliament that would ever sit, the swastika rising from the bunker to blazon, with a new twist, on the arms of white vigilantes; the abstract of words, power struggling with the unfamiliar ploughshares of negotiation, the committee she came home from where the needs and frustrations and ambitions of more than three centuries were meant to be reconciled and achieved on paper in some immutable syntax.
Old partners in crime (so long ago it had become respectable, a family home) she and her house were alone together. Ben had put in an alarm system. Like every other dwelling that could be called a house, whether in the city suburbs or the black townships, it was a cage outside which prowlers cruised in their cars or loped along the gutters waiting for a way to get in and take what they wanted. She was not afraid because she reasoned that a house with such a shabby exterior would tempt no one to believe there was much worth taking, inside; and that belief would be correct: her files were priceless to herself and would rouse only disgusted disappointment in anyone expecting valuables; the furniture supplied by parents-in-law for the war bride was worn and abraded.
She would pour herself a stiff vodka with a prickle of tonic water and put up her feet on the coffee-table elevated with stacked newspapers. She watched the news on television and then listened to every other version of it, switching from station to station on the radio. Events were in the house with her, nothing else. The voices of events peopled it, speaking to the preoccupations of her day, and the responses she made mentally were as if she were answering. The evidence of personal life was around her; but her sense was of the personal life as transitory, it is the political life that is transcendent, like art, for which, alas, she’d never had time after Bennet read wonderful poetry to her in the mountains. Ben himself had so easily given up what had attracted her to him along with his sexuality — his artistic ability, his sculpture. Politics affects and is evolved endlessly through future generations — the way people are going to live, the way they think further. She had no illusion about politics; about her part in it. People kill each other and the future looks back and asks, What for? We can see, from here, what the end would have been, anyway. And then they turn to kill each other for some other reason whose resolution could have been foreseen.
Yet there’s purpose in the attempt to break the cycle? On the premise that the resolution is going to be justice? — even if it is renamed empowerment.
Sometimes, after a second drink, when the news gave way to some piece of popular music revamped from the past, Vera, too old to find a partner, danced alone, no one to witness, in the living-room of her house, the rock-’n’-roll and pata-pata her body remembered from wartime parties and the Fifties in the Maqomas’ Chiawelo house. That was the time, she accepted, tolerant of her young self, when all other faculties of judgment were blinded by sex. She would stop: laughing at herself giddily. But the dancing was a rite of passage. An exaltation of solitude would come over her. It was connected with something else: a freedom; an attraction between her and a man that had no desire for the usual consummation. Ben believes their marriage was a failure. Vera sees it as a stage on the way, along with others, many and different. Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self.
Chapter 27
After Vera signed the deed of sale of her house she went to spend a week with her daughter Annick in Cape Town. As she was leaving she stood a moment in the doorway and looked at all that had been there over decades, in place still. Buildings, rooms, witness; the inanimate stand outside time.
Lou came to meet her at the airport. Annie had taken the baby to her surgery for routine inoculations; Annie and her lover had adopted an infant. It was female, like themselves, and black, chosen whether as their form of political commitment against that of sitting on commissions and committees or in their concern for one of the abandoned children of adolescent schoolgirls Annie came upon in her round of clinics in the squatter camps and black townships outside the city.
Annie and Lou were in the state of distracted preoccupation of new parents. Lou called to Annie to listen to the infant’s breathing or sniff at its stool in case there was something to be worried about her professional skill would detect; Annie summoned Lou all through the house to witness that she was the first to get the little creature to smile. The room that had been a Victorian nursery and was converted to a lovers’ retreat where Annie and Lou had kept to themselves was restored to a nursery with the door kept ajar so that the baby’s summoning cries could be heard. The baby girl was not beautiful. It had feet and hands too attenuated for its body, wavering about like the legs of an insect trapped on its back. Its sad oil-yellow face crowned with hair like a black sponge bore the aspect of something unloved and unwanted in the womb.
— Here’s your grandchild. — Annie placed the baby in Vera’s arms. She had sensed Vera’s reaction; perhaps because it was her own, that in her case moved her to love and protect. — They’re all a rather pale muddy colour when they’re new. But her mother’s a beautiful Xhosa from the Transkei.—
Annie and Lou had rearranged their working schedules so that one stayed at home to take care of the child on alternate days. All such arrangements were discussed, told to Vera in the conviction of parents that every detail concerning the conduct of life around a child is of the same interest to others as it is to themselves. — We tried turns taking her with us to work, Annie to the hospital and I to the lab, but the one who was without the baby always got so worried about what was happening — we were phoning each other madly all the time! Hopeless! When she’s a few months older we’ll get a good day-care woman in.—