None to Accompany Me (34 page)

Adam stayed on for a while in Ivan's room. He and Vera had the curious loose accommodation of individuals who, though vastly divided by age, by the commitment to ideals in one and the lack of ideals in the other, are at some base alike in following their instincts and will. His grandmother did not give him advice
(the one occasion on which she had done so was to protect her friends rather than himself), make his bed, sew on his buttons or supervise his activities, so she was no grandmother. They took telephone messages for one another, ate independently at no fixed meal times whatever was in the refrigerator or each left for the other in the oven, sometimes met up late at night and chatted like contemporaries simply sharing a convenient roof. At one of these incidental meetings he remarked that a friend had found a cottage in Bezuidenhout Valley and wanted someone to share it. A week later he moved out in a party atmosphere, borrowing Vera's car to make several trips with the possessions he had acquired, helped and hindered by the to-and-fro of volunteers among his friends. There was fondness between Vera and him but both knew they would see one another rarely once they did not sleep under the same roof. The family roof: it was that, the house built in the Forties in the style of whites of the period, half colonial bungalow and half modernist with a split-level living-room and coloured slate stoep they called a patio, the house provided for the young bride and their soldier son by people who did not know what they themselves were, part of Europe or part of Africa; the house that was Vera's loot by divorce, the roof under which she took her lover home, where her children were born, where the ‘patio' meant for white teaparties had been converted to a study where strategies for restoring blacks to their land were worked out. In every room the house retained the life lived there. Scratches and stains, makeshift (bookshelves built of planks mounted on bricks) the newly married lovers, caring only for love-making, nothing for material things, had made do with. A sculptor's chisel among counters from a children's game and someone's collection of labelled stones, rose quartz, crystal, geode. Clothes hanging limp, lost the shape of the body that wore them, never given away because
someone (Annie?) once had had the intention to pick them up some time. Boxes that hid the remains of Promotional Luggage, ‘vanity' cases and elephant-hide wallets nobody wanted to buy. The scent—her own particular body-smell of the house, independent of the perfume she used—of the documents and newspaper cuttings she hoarded, a calendar of her days and years, live as paper in its organic origins is, secretly wadding together in damp and buckling apart thinly in heat. Broken pottery, a Mickey Mouse watch stopped at some hour in childhood, postcards and photographs. It is impossible for anyone, tidying after the departure of a sojourner, not to stop as Vera does and look through photographs come upon. It is then that she turns up, once again, the postcard photograph sent to Egypt during a war. She had not thrown it away, torn it up; only slid it back under all this other stuff.

And who was that?

I'm the one in the photograph whom no one remembers.

It was within this calm that she worked with the Technical Committee on Constitutional Issues. What came out of the Committee would be anonymous in its effect on millions, only a small sample of whom she had known and knew, and whose lives she had affected personally, the people of the Mogopas and Odensvilles. She and Zeph Rapulana talked together under the jacaranda as perhaps they would not, elsewhere. It was necessary to believe that elections and the first government in which everyone would have a vote would stop the AK—47s and petrol bombs, defeat the swastika wearers, accommodate the kinglets clinging to the knobkerries of ethnic power, master the company at the Drommedaris; no purpose in giving satisfaction to prophets of doom by discussing with them the failure of the mechanisms of
democracy, of elections ‘free and fair', in other countries of the continent.

—At last—a year, a month, an actual day!—our people are coming to what we've fought for. They can't be cheated! It can't happen! Not to us. We can't let it! What a catastrophe if people started thinking it's not worthwhile voting because whatever they do the old regime will rig the thing.—

She took his determination as a reviving draught. —But if we're going to deliver the goods there has to be a real anticipation of what could happen, Zeph. How to deal with the Homeland blacks who'll still want to keep their petty power even if their territories have been reincorporated into the country before the elections. What if their alliance with the white right-wing holds, grows? What if the white generals become
their
generals? And the regular army becomes their source of weapons?—

—They have to be shown—absolutely, no other possibility—they can't win. After all the years with their guns and their armies, after all the thousands they've killed, all the laws they've made, all the millions they've robbed of land and chased about the country to take it for themselves, they had to let Mandela out of jail and sit down and bargain with him. Didn't they? They must know they can't win! Not even if they do what UNITA did in Angola and refuse to recognize election results when we win, not even what Babangida did, and declare elections null and void. They can't win.—

—So somehow they must be convinced to take what's offered them. But this has to be done
now
, they have to be accommodated somehow,
before.
And that may betray everything.—

—How everything, Vera?—

—If we have to give in to that crazy idea—the white extremists—the bit of the country they want exclusively for themselves! The ultimate laager. What corner of the country
doesn't also belong to others? What about the blacks who live there, or once did? The land, Zeph, the land. You know all about the land. We promise redistribution of the land to the people and then we so much as consider giving even a metre to those who stole it in the first place? Are we going to start endorsing people out again, this time in the name of the good of unity, one South Africa, one people? And are we going to have to settle for federalism, or some sort of regionalism that's a disguise of federalism, so the old power blocs of whites—maybe with some black satellites, or their alliance with ethnic ambitions—remain?—

—We'll deal with that with regional powers, that's being tackled. The regions aren't going to be a disguise for anything. It's a difficult game, but it'll come off.—

—But the other! Those whites we laughed at until they drove an armoured car into the negotiations building.—

—That track goes nowhere. They'll run out of steam. You and I can't tackle that one, Vera.— He was kindly amused at consideration of the presumption. —We have to trust the leaders to find the right signals to send them on their way. We can only stick to what we're doing. Each of us.—

Chill comes quickly these afternoons. The last light intensifies evergreen foliage to black, with a brush of thin gold across the fading jacaranda that will shed only when winter ends. In pure radiance far off a plane floats silently, linking their vision as their eyes follow it. The presence of shrubs rises. And then the incineration of the vanished sun blazes a forest fire behind blackened trees.

In some eras what would seem the most impersonal matters are the most intimate. Becoming part of the massed design of the dark, there was nothing either felt more intensely than these political fears and exaltations, no emotion that could draw two
individuals more closely than this. A strong current of the present carries them headily: this is the year when the old life comes to an end.

Ben and Vera exchange regular telephone calls. Tacitly they were supposed to alternate but if a week passes in silence when it is Vera's turn to call, he will call instead.

When the phone rang late at night she knew it was him.

He heard the rings and followed them through the empty rooms of the house to find her: the stoep-study under the gooseneck lamp, the piece of fruit she had beside her when she worked at night, the kitchen where she would be squeezing a lemon to make herself a hot drink, the bedroom where her body emerged from her clothes in an unconscious ritual he could have described.

Usually she was in bed, her arm went out for the phone. Each gave an account of those of their activities they thought the other would like to hear. There were pleasantries, small anecdotes. Ivan had had a party and one of the guests had brought a two-year-old boy who had been put to sleep on Ben's bed and wet it. Vera had been driven round the block on the back of the motorbike Adam had acquired and brought to display. Ben asked, with in his disembodied voice the assumed concern of one to whom such things are a story in the foreign news pages of a daily paper, how the negotiations, committees and commissions were going, and whether the killings were as bad as it seemed on TV flashes. She asked if Ivan was away in some other capital or at home with Ben. He reminded her of routine obligations she might forget—he knew how little time Vera had to think of such things. Licences to be renewed, tax returns—although she was the sole earner now. She passed this
over quickly: another kind of reminder, one she wished to avoid, for him—the failure of Promotional Luggage to provide for her as he wished. This was the progression to the moment when there was nothing left to say. In a pause before goodbye—she was lying looking at the ceiling as if she were a stray fly walking there in the silent room—his voice reached her. —Are you lonely.—

—No.— A laugh. —No.—

After she had dropped the receiver she cringed with remorse. She must pick up and call him back, call Ben, Bennet. Say what? If she could lie to him before, times before, why couldn't she find it in herself to give him a lie to grasp at, now. She turned out the light and slept, her empty house drawn up around her.

Forgive me, for I know quite well what I do.

Ben and his other beloved, Ivan, were having a good time in London as bachelors together. Ben was in a rage of sorrow no one knew of. A rage of sorrow for all Vera has done and will never know. And if she had? Would things have been different, better? If he had told her that he had felt another man on her, in her, those years, he knew that she was enjoying two men at once, she was capable of it then, he knew there was a flat or a hotel room somewhere she came from, back to him—would she be lonely without him, need him now? Oh not as in the mountains, the delicious and wonderful seduction of him by someone else's wife. But as the husband he became. He saw that Vera never ever really wanted a husband—only for a time, when it excited her to have her lover domesticated, a kind of dressing-up in other garments, perversely, looking after babies together, telling each other confidences, having friendships as a couple, tandem in political beliefs even if she lived them in her work, risked
herself, while he built the beaver dam to shore up, provide for her … the dam that breached, wrong enterprise for the wrong era. Not that she cared about that; it was part of her not having wanted a husband, ever, not the first or the second: not needing security, which he supposed is what a husband represents to most women. She's getting old and she understands something about security, down there he's far away from, he can't fathom. She's getting old, even his Vera's ageing; and she's not lonely. He searched himself for the bitter comfort of her inadequacies, the things in her that irritated him. She had no plastic, tactile feeling—except for flesh, of course, fondling him, making him rise in terrifying excitement, stroking his lips and eyes, she used to, telling him how beautiful that face of his, that he still bears with, was. A mask for a performance he can't take off. He has all the time he's always needed for reading, now. There is exegesis in everything he reads. Going back to the books that had been the essential texts of his youth, rereading Rilke, he seems sought out, signalled to: Vera is Malte Laurids Brigge's ‘one who didn't want to be loved.' ‘That inner indifference of spirit': it was written of Vera. And he was reading an Irish poet—not Yeats this time—he wanted to let the words tell her that although he'd failed to share the credo with her in the end, he understood:
What's looked the stronger has outlived its term, I The future lies in what's affirmed from under.
(But it's the beauty of the assonance, perhaps, that holds the meaning for him.) She had listened in his arms when he read poetry to her, Yeats and Lorca, in the mountains, she had said she was entranced. Entranced! Vera never read anything but newspapers and White Papers, Blue Papers, a house full of Reports. For her the condition of existence was what happened in the power of politics, while the very power of life itself, the all-beneficent sun, god-symbol eternally of a future rising, was turning out to be the source of death
rays humans are letting in upon themselves by tearing their only shelter, the atmosphere. She nagged him to ‘keep up' sculpture in his spare time of being a husband; she didn't know volume, shape, the smooth skin of wood and the grainy one of stone, and the full time these needed. She favoured her daughter openly, cold Annick, and seemed, even when he was a baby, her firstborn, to have some kind of unexplained resentment against her son, perhaps because Ivan was formed in her image—did this mean Vera did not like herself? God knows. Lover, husband, you never know the one to whom you are these. He wanted to call out, call out to her—Yeats again—lines that came back to him as a blow:
What do we know but that we face I One another in this place?
He hated—not Vera, but his dependency on loving her. He has gone away knowing that he does not know how to carry on his life alone.

Didymus gave evidence about the camps. It became necessary, for the cause, to go further than a report. He was to speak in open inquiry of what he had had to keep to himself. A change of self-discipline; in a career of exile, infiltration, guerrilla battle, spy and spied upon, he was accustomed to such switches. The Movement itself announced to the press and conducted the investigation.