None to Accompany Me (28 page)

Sibongile was the one more suited to present roles. Moving from group to group about the room, she paused with equal amiability among members of the white Government, comrades from the Movement, and a loud huddle that included the sometime apologist for having sat in a white's seat in a train. Now Didymus heard her familiar singing rise of voice as she joked
with the man, drawing attention to his resemblance to the huge ink-and-wash panel of a Chinese sage on the wall behind him, his wispy beard and straggle of hair over his collar therefore referred to without offence, flatteringly. Delighted, taking the reference as to his wisdom, he was making some remark Didymus could not catch, and put his arm in avuncular flirtatiousness round her bare shoulders, half-complimenting, half-patronizing femininity.

While Didymus stood talking to others, in his mind he walked across the room and pulled her away, punched the face with the smile that had forfeited self-respect in apology for what should have been taken as right, and slapped the woman who tolerated his touch. Slapped Sibongile. As if Sibongile were a woman craven as the man, and would accept restriction on her actions; as if he, Didymus, belonged to the tradition of men who took it as their right to hit their women. Sibongile had been, was his comrade-in-arms, something along with and beyond his woman. The fantasy enacting within him had no sense or usefulness in real time. Sibongile was on a mission, in action suited to particular circumstances, as often he had been. He said nothing to her of the incident. He was tender to her when they got home that night. Sibongile had the feeling he thought he had to atone to her for something—something that had been said to her or about her? That she had been wounded—had a wound of public life (by now she knew well enough about those) she herself was not yet aware of, but that would evidence itself, throb in harm, in time, sometime? —What did you think of it?—

—Of what?—

—Well, the ambassador, the evening, the whole do—

He answered in her language, that they used in intimacy. —Just like all the others now. Exchange compliments with foreigners
for trade deals, alliances, maybe arms if we should need such things again. Eat and drink with friends and enemies even if once they drank your blood. Our fathers did it under a tree but they had their impis ready. (In English:)
Public Relations.—

She unwound the turban, feeling through her freed hair as if for some inkling of what he saw had happened to her. Nothing; one of his mysteries. —I knew you were bored.—

But the fantasy sprang from convictions, however unreasonable and inappropriate, outdated, they might be, that could not leave him. He had lived a whole life by them; whole lives, different personae. Traitors come large and small, and those who commit petty treachery, apologizing to the enemy, abasing, licking backsides, are no more fit company than the informers who infiltrate a liberation army and are confined in camps where no one may admit to being an interrogator, no one may admit to knowledge of what that meant. What has to be done in war is terrible and if this is to be forgotten then so has that committed by traitors—that's it? Yes, that is it.

This was Didymus's mystery. His moods, the contradiction he could not speak of, turning inside himself without the acceptance that is resolution. The old silences that were necessary between him and his wife when he came back to their exile home from a mission, the weeks and months he could not speak of, had returned between them although now they were really at home, together.

And then something happened. Human affairs move in natural uncertainty always, deaths and lives and eras end in illness, old age—and accident. And accident is exactly that: something unplanned, unforeseen by anyone.

Assassination is planned. Assassination is determined. There is no uncertainty; pure intention. Assassination axes jaggedly through the fabric of life, the bearable and borne, tears the assuaging progression of past into present and future. Murder strikes the lives corollary to an individual; assassination rips the life of a country, laying bare ganglia that civil institutions have been in the process of covering with flesh. Assassination is a gash.

The death of an old leader can be understood and taken into continuity in the sense that his work was done. The assassination of the young leader, outside his gate, that day like any other—there's no sense to be made of it except in the mind of the one who held the gun, no sense although the priests and ministers may speak of commending him to God's keeping, the prayers speak of laying him to rest, and the funeral orators assure that his spirit lives on. His place and work was on earth,
here, now
, not in God's keeping, wherever that might be situated; he was for action, not rest, and the survival of his spirit is claimed in many distortions to the purpose of the crazy pleasure of looting, burning, and killing, licence taken in the name of revenge for his death.

But the irreplaceable, no matter how obviously so, must not be so, even in the confusion of loss must be replaced. With his assassination the meaning of the position of the young leader in negotiations becomes clearer than it has ever been; his presence carried the peculiar authority of the guerrilla past in working for peace. If men like him wanted it, who could doubt that it was attainable? If a man like him was there to convince his young followers, could they fail to listen to him?

Didymus was one of those who put on again the battle dress he had worn in the camps and the bush, a persona that was no disguise but his ultimate self, and bore the weight of the coffin
on his shoulder. He had read in the paper that morning a letter signed with a white man's name that rejoiced in revenge that the man being carried to his grave had lived by the sword and deserved to die by the sword. He had been angered by the letter, but now, with sorrow palpable on his shoulder, he felt peace in himself and for the man he carried, at having had to accept the necessities of living by the sword prepared to die, as he had been, by the sword.

In the days following the assassination of the young leader, when the gap left by it had to be closed and a successor chosen, he and his kind were sought out and consulted.

Didymus had worn the battle dress again, emerged out of his past. The day had come—aborted from the logic of history by the intentions of tragedy—too soon.

 

Empty houses. FOR SALE. Estate agents' portable signs propped at corners, arrows pointing: ON SHOW. Clues in the paper-chase of flight. On Sunday afternoons the cars clustered at an address are not the sign of a party but another form of diversion, curiosity to see what other people are abandoning— not all who follow the estate agents' signs are prospective buyers.

It has happened a number of times in the neighbourhood where Vera Stark has continued to live in the house that is one of the only two evidences of an early alliance. The Sharpeville massacre in the Sixties, the black student uprising in the Seventies, now the assassination; although all these dire events did not lay a hand upon the occupants of the white suburbs (only the violent robberies against which they try to protect themselves with walls, alarms, dogs and revolvers do so), these events literally send them packing. In commercial indices in a time of recession, the international movers' firms report unprecedented growth, their competitive advertising campaigns include jingles on television and radio.

FOR SALE. ON SHOW. Are these suburban museums, exhibiting a way of life that is ended? Is that why the once houseproud
occupants are leaving? Or as they flee do they really have to fear for their lives—in the constitution, Bill of Rights, decrees that are going to change life?

Vera and Ben Stark drive past the signs on their way to the airport, not to see someone go, but someone arrive.

Several months before, there was another letter from Ivan in London. One unlike the short notes and postcards which supplemented phone calls and kept awareness of one another's existence, the slack familial liens, hooked up. After the first page the letter broke off and had been continued under a new date: a letter the writer did not know quite how to write, whose reception he was unsure of. It was addressed to them both, this time. Vera handed it to Ben. A gesture to how much Ivan meant to him.

—I'll read it out.—

—No don't—I can wait.— She was opening other mail, tearing up pamphlets, putting aside bills, but as he read he put a hand out to her. In response, she moved to read over his shoulder as he sat.

—Oh my god.—

—Ben wait, let's get the whole picture.—

But he was drawing breath through pinched nostrils, he held his hand, stayed, at the page.

The boy, the son Adam, had been arrested for drunken driving, suspended sentence, but only after Ivan had made representations to the magistrate, and then the boy had been arrested again, his third offence for speeding, and lost his driver's licence.

Vera did not find it such a tragedy … she spent every day with people in great anxiety whose youngsters threw stones,
couldn't be got back to school, defied the police in marches and sit-ins, and risked being shot dead. Thinking of what sort of hazards were likely in London streets, she offered —At least it isn't drugs.—

They read on. Ivan put the blame ‘mostly—I'm aware I'm a weekend father, and sometimes not even that' on the boy's mother.
To put it bluntly, Adam is too intelligent for her. She can't meet him on his own ground and so he does what he likes with her—and for himself. She makes scenes. She phones me around the world, always these urgent messages to get in touch with her at once. I think god knows what's happened to Adam, and then it's the same tears on the phone, he won't listen to her, he came home five in the morning, he won't bring his friends in for a meal, he wears jeans torn over the backside, what must she do. And it's finally not a matter of what she must do, it's what
I
must, I see that more clearly every day, if Adam isn't to become at best a drop-out and at worst land in jail.

Here the letter had been put aside, like Vera's bills. Three days later, Ivan began again.
I said I must do something. Of course it's obvious—you'll be thinking. I should try and get custody for myself. (She has it until he's eighteen.) There's the strong evidence that the mother is not a fit guardian—the arrests testify to that, eh, Vera, you're the lawyer in the family, but of course this kind of case, divorce wrangles, are not quite your thing. And these days the preference of the youngster himself for one parent counts, in the courts; I'm pretty sure he'd want to come to me, though not for the best reasons, I'm afraid. He's bored with her nagging, with being expected to bring his friends home to chat with her over tea (that's what she really wants, she has never got over her girlishness, sees herself as one of them, and you know how the young hate that—you never did, never, Vera, a great advantage of the little time you had for us
when we were adolescent). He knows I'm away a lot, and he'd be on the loose. And he's old enough, worldly enough to see that as I live with a woman I'm not married to I couldn't very well make some big moral stand over his relations with girls—and he seems to have many.

Which brings me to a tremendous worry. The usual. AIDS. He's had all the information and warnings (they educate even small children as well as adolescents at schools here) and I've added mine, told him that as he never goes out without his credit card he must never go out without his condom—but … What I'm getting at I'd better come right out with. If his mother is not fit to look after him at this stage in his life, neither—and it's hard for me to admit it—am I. I think he needs time to mature, away from both of us, before he goes to university or trains for whatever else it is he wants to do (as yet undecided, of course; that's part of the trouble). Once he's in training for a career and living independently—I'll set him up in a flat or something—I'm sure he and I will get on and become closer. (It's not that we don't get on well now, it's that I know I can't give him what he
doesn't know he needs.)
So I'm going to ask you if he couldn't come to you, to the house at home, our old place that doesn't refuse anyone or anything, not that I know of, Ma. I have a feeling his mother will consent, though she'd raise all hell if I wanted to move him in with the Hungarian and me. If Vera and you, Dad, would let him live with you for, say, a year, I think he'd gain a new perspective on his life. If Ben could find him something to do, some work—no offence, Vera, but quite honestly I don't want him getting out of one kind of mess here and getting into another kind because of becoming involved in politics. Anything you'd offer him wouldn't be without that risk. One bullet in a leg's enough. So no good works, please, no brave works. He doesn't belong in that country, he
doesn't owe it anything. He did fairly well in his A levels and, at my insistence, is taking another at a crammers to be sure he'll be well qualified to get into a university eventually. This course will be over soon. Ideally, he should go to you then.
The handwriting became larger and wide across the page.
No immediate hurry. Think about it. Do it for me. I can ask you because I love you, Ben, Vera.

We can talk now.

This is something they can talk about. Now; any time. What concerns Ivan occupies Ben's attention and energy openly. He remembered Vera's dismayed silence when—some time ago, he'd been thinking about this solution for the boy even then—there was the divorce and he suggested they might take the boy for a while. Ben rose, turned her to him and with his index fingers lifted her short hair where it lay behind each ear as if it were the long tresses he used to loop back to study her face when it was new to him. He kissed her, one of his long embraces, sensuous as they always became at any contact with her, the letter hidden in one hand of the arms that held her. —It'll be like having Ivan back again. It'll be all right.—