Mrs Stark ran her fingers through her hair, a commonplace sparrow ruffling its feathers, and yawned, the yawn turning into a smile, the pleasure she always took in the young man’s ebullience, his awesome way of dealing with his terrible experiences in the indiscriminate narrative style in which he would gossip of something pleasant or funny. The soft red road was empty except for a distant stick-figure zigzagging on a bicycle just below the horizon. The tea was hot and sweet. Beyond a barbed-wire fence where wispy beards of sheep’s wool were caught, veld grasses and weeds streaked in undulations of green woven to bronze and rust where a declivity in the ground had been swampy in summer. Black-and-white plover flung themselves up out of the grass as if they had been thrown, crying out on a single note at human presence. After the battering of responses and emotions in the exchange with the farmer, the irritation and exasperation repressed — and who knows, neither Mrs Stark nor Oupa, what else the Odensville man was experiencing? — calm and quiet fell upon the three as a common bond. After this one unremarkable manifestation of that conflict which rang and babbled about them, in them, a constant garbling of their different lives— suddenly the swallows of hot sweet tea were their only awareness. The paper-flutter of white egrets lifting the sky, the gauzy sleeves of water trailing from irrigation faucets in a vast field of something barely there, barely green; the three rested on the land: this was what it was, not a wrangle in a cross-fire of saliva on a stoep, not folders of documents citing deed, claim and proclamation in the files of a Legal Foundation. Oupa wandered off to pee behind a tree. Mrs Stark, unconcerned about the dignity of her maturity, climbed through the spiky fence with the skill of one used to improvise and found a bush for herself. As she squatted there so privately, the flit of insects in the sun above her head made her drowsy, as if they were some pleasant drug taking aural effect. In an instant measured by the flick of transparent wings, there/away, she felt she was about to lie down on the damp rough grass and dream something she had forgotten. She came back to herself and through the fence again. The Odensville man was still sitting as if at a church meeting. — What about you?—
But if he understood the brisk reference to the humble call of nature he perhaps thought it an embarrassing familiarity on the part of this woman, from whom he expected the formulations of the law. He dusted the elbows of his jacket as he rose, asking whether she would mind dropping him at a store nearby, he had to see someone. He got out of the station-wagon there, taking off his hat.
— I’ll be contacting you when I have any news, good or bad. You have my phone number? Yes, keep me posted if there are any developments. One of us’ll come out again some time next week to take statements — if you could get some people together.—
It was the same sort of professional formula she had used for the farmer, a lawyer must not identify with the anxiety of a client any more than a doctor can function effectively if he begins to feel the pain of his patient.
A day or night when Vera heard, like a phrase recurring from a piece of music once listened to and out of mind: Meneer Odendaal, don’t be afraid. We won’t harm you. Not you or your wife and children.
She separated the three statements.
Meneer Odendaal, don’t be afraid.
(Meneer Odendaal) We won’t harm you.
(Meneer Odendaal) Not you or your wife and children.
She thought that she had not heard them aright on the stoep that day. The farmer heard them and Rapulana the Odensville man heard them the way she did not, they understood what was being said. The words of tolerance and forgiveness so strangely coming from the Odensville squatter dweller, shaming her for the crude aggression of the farmer, were not tolerance and forgiveness but a threat. Remember, Meneer Odendaal, we are thousands on Portion 19, our Odensville. We are there across the veld from you, every night. You have dogs, you have a gun, but we are thousands, and we can come across the veld to this house, this house where you and your wife and your children are asleep, and, as you said about us if we don’t go from Portion 19, that’ll be your funeral.
Transit
Chapter 3
You don’t know who this is?
On her way in the city, coming up to the street from the underground garage where her car had its regular booth, a creature within its range of burrows walking the block to the Foundation from the bank, a coffee bar where she might have joined a friend or the Italian restaurant where occasionally she and Ben, in the observance of a forgotten retreat for clandestine lovers, met for lunch, Vera sometimes found herself stopped by someone who was searching for recognition to come from her.
You don’t know who this is?
The chestnut satin skin of a young black woman now darkened and puckered beneath the eyes, the saucy jut of dancing buttocks now built into a monument of solid, middle-aged flesh; a figure of a man with one tired shoulder lower than the other, shining pink dome where Vera would have recognized only the lost blond curls, another whose belly-fat, straining gaps between shirt buttons, had swallowed the slender black Jonah (that really happened to be his name) she and Ben had hidden from the police in Ben’s office before he fled the country — who would suspect a market research consultancy of harbouring one of the leaders of the uprising in ‘76. Some had come from their years in prison, some were the first of those returning from exile. As they talked, hands grasped, sometimes embracing, the double embrace first clasped round this side of the neck then that, which everyone in the liberation movement forgot was derived from the embrace of dictators, Vera and these old acquaintances and friends were giddy with discovery, the past set down on the streets of the present.
You don’t remember me?
The past is known to be irretrievable. But here that proposition is overturned.
In the euphoria of being back, of presenting themselves alive, resurrected from the anonymity of exile, of these who have returned, and the eager desire of those who have stayed at home to make up, in welcome, for the deprivation of exile they have not suffered, people who had had reason to distrust or simply dislike one another and people who once had been close as brothers and sisters are all greeted in the same way as cherished returning heroes. It is something of the same phenomenon as young Oupa’s lively accounts that do not discriminate between terrors he has experienced and the everyday gossip of the Foundation’s personnel. A convention came instantly into being, as conventions often do, to serve where it seems established patterns of behaviour don’t. Yet beneath it, under the disguise of flesh, behind the sunken eyes, within the clothes of a foreign cut, the black leather caps of East Germany, the dashikis of Tanzania, the Arab keffiyeh worn as a scarf, the old events and circumstances exist; standing there in the street, the old dependencies, the old friendships, the old factional rivalries, the old betrayals and loyalties, political scandals and sexual jealousies were not gone for ever but persisted in evidence of traceable, ineffaceable features, visible cell structure, still living. The past was there.