None to Accompany Me (9 page)

That was the day and place of betrayal of Ben, Bennet, the chosen man.

Bitch.

Many years later, Otto Abarbanel has long left, and occasional meetings abroad, telephone calls from remote places, letters, have ended, and all sense of touch and feel associated with him seem to have returned to other responses as nerves regenerate after damage—that kitchen, One-Twenty-One Delville Wood, is still the day and place of betrayal, as a battlefield never loses its association. And that is why when Ben comes in with his offering of wine, Vera, spreading apart hands innocently soiled, a knife in one, suddenly drops her housewifely task, comes towards him, and embraces him.

Does the past return because one can rid oneself of it only slowly, or is the freedom actually the slow process of loss?

What she remembered while Ben uncorked the wine and joked with Oupa—come into the kitchen fondly steering a giggling young woman who protested in Tswana—was driving with Otto Abarbanel into the city one summer day and passing a restaurant where through the open doorway she saw Ben. In that moment before the traffic bore her on she could not possibly have recognized anyone but him, matching one whose unique features and bodily outline she carried within her.

He was bent over his plate, his dark head down and shoulders curved. He was alone. By the sight of him she was overcome with desolation, premonition like the nausea of one about to faint. How could he look so solitary? Did all the years together mean nothing? A childish fear of abandon drained her. His lowered head and bowed shoulders knew without knowing that he was no longer her lover. His aloneness was hers; not here, not now, but somewhere waiting.

 

Under banners on posters in the offices of Movement Headquarters, just opened in the city, on photographs in progressive journals and newspapers, Didymus appeared among others released from prison or returned from exile. Our leaders, our heroes. Who would occupy which office and in what capacity could not be decided quickly after so long a period when there had been leadership dispersed between a number of representatives in different countries of exile, leadership confined in prison, and leaders in the front organizations which had grown up and survived within the country. He did whatever was needed, as everyone must. Sometimes he found himself arranging protocol and press conferences; then he was off to fulfil the request of some provincial branch for a speaker, he was in one of the first delegations to talk with white businessmen, he gave a graduation address at a college where the rector had hoped for some better-known face too busy to attend. But this was while it was taken as understood that his legal training rather than the avocation of clandestine missions he had carried out so successfully in the days of exile and underground activity would decide what position he would hold on the national executive in
a time, now, when that formation was legal and the political ethos was negotiation, the grinning face at receptions in place of the disguised one moving in the streets.

—Jack of all trades!— Sally with her affectionately exaggerated shrug as a softener to her rising voice answered Vera when her friend asked what position Didy held now. A rap performer yammered into a microphone with the speed of a tobacco auctioneer; the Starks were come upon at the opening of an exhibition of painting and wood carving by black artists whose work had become fashionable since city corporations and white collectors had seen such acquisitions as the painless way to prove absence of racial prejudice. —And what a mob this is … all these
cultural workers
who're ashamed to call themselves painters and writers. And the insurance bosses and bank PROs showing how they appreciate our black souls. Now for Christ's sake don't quote me, Ben!—I use that jargon around the office corridors, oh yes I hear myself … but thank God to find a
businessman
, dear Ben, among my friends in this crowd who don't want to say what they are.—

Of course. The torsos are only part of the furnishings Sally knows well in the Stark house. No one singles out the identity
—sculptor
—of the one who shaped them, only he remembers the identity of the missing head, the complex nerve-centre of the woman he lives with and that he had given up (once, long ago) attempting to capture in its material form.

So Ben laughs with her. Of course.

—You don't have any work going in your firm, do you?—

—Only the kind of thing you read in the Smalls. Some of my clients are in the mail order business. Money in your spare time selling from your own home—you know.—

—Most that we're dealing with don't have homes to sell from. But seriously … I've been meaning to get in touch with
you, your advice about how we might set up some sort of liaison with business people, operating outside the usual employment-agency style, something more personal, tapping bad conscience … why not. I've been meaning to come round.—

The Starks and the Maqomas had not seen much of each other lately. Although Sibongile spoke of her job as if it were quite humble—it was the democratic vocabulary, hangover from exile with its brave denial of hierarchy—she was one who could not be reached except through a secretary these days. She had her offices and battery of command—computers, fax, assistants whose poor education and lack of skills she was attempting to tolerate while disciplining and training them. When there were complaints about her she said to her comrades in high positions what they themselves thought it better not to express. —I don't want to be told I behave like an exploiter just so someone can go on sitting around filing her nails or someone who was once detained thinks he's for ever entitled to disappear two hours for lunch. Comrades employed here are expected to have the will to work harder, not less than they would for some white boss. This's not sheltered employment.—

The furnishing of the house was completed, if too sparsely for her taste; she liked beautiful objects, and some of those she had collected with little money saved while moving around in exile had had to be left behind. The daughter had been fitted out with all her mother needed to supply for the new school. There was a microwave oven installed in the kitchen so that she could leave a meal to be heated when she had an official obligation that meant she would be home only in time to find Didymus and her daughter in darkness lit up by a television film, or to take off her shoes and move about without disturbing the husband who, asleep, left space for her at his side. Home was set up; but she did not have time to do the daily tasks that would maintain
it; it was Didymus who took the shopping lists she scribbled in bed at night, who drove Mpho to and from her modern dance class, to the dentist, to the urgent obligations that schoolgirls have to be here or there, it was he who called the plumber and reported the telephone out of order. His working day was less crowded than hers. She would be snatching up files, briefcase, keys in the morning while he was dipping bread in coffee, changing back and forth from local news broadcasts to the BBC. Their working life was housed in the same building; sometimes he came to look in on her office: she was talking fast on the telephone, held up a hand not to be interrupted, she was in the middle of briefing the fieldworkers through whom she had initiated research into the reintegration of returned exiles.

She began to appear at many of the meetings he attended. Glided in, late, graceful with her well-dressed big hips, eyebrows arched when anyone was long-winded. She had a complaint about her director, who didn't want to attend and made a habit of asking her to do so in his stead. Let's have a post-mortem, she would say, at home. She and Didymus were the best of comrades, best for one another, of all others, at such times. The months she had gone about her work in London and taken care of their child without knowing or asking where he was, the letters—suddenly, sometimes, a love letter—that came to her unsigned through some country other than the one he was in, the strangely pure emotion of his returns—what other relationship between a man and a woman could prove such trust? The abstentions from adultery that ‘trust' means to most couples are petty in comparison; this was a grand compact beyond the capacity of those who live only for themselves. They argued, they met in complicity over this issue or that, together in the line each would follow, she in her department, he at his higher level. They defended to each other a partiality for or lack of confidence
in certain leaders. —We need someone tough and quick-thinking in that sort of negotiation. Sebedi's too much like— (she closed her eyes and thrust her head forward, pinching the bridge of her nose)—he's an old rhino, only one horn, only one tactic—

—But when he charges, aih! There's force, he knocks the hell out of government spokesmen.—

—Ah … how often? By the time he's got his bulk together to charge, they've slipped the issue to something else, out of the way.—

—Not always. Not always. I've seen him make a hit. And what you must remember is that he's impressive, these early days, he sits with his hands folded and his big head held back that way, and the government boys see he's really listening to them, he doesn't scratch himself and drink water and stub out cigarettes like some of the other comrades, the young ones who're only thinking what they're going to say next. He commands
respect.—

She drew back in staring reproach. —Who wants respect from those people? Those bastards who've been mixed up in hit squads, who've sent their men in to murder our people at the funerals of people those same police have killed? It's the other way round—they have to be shown there's no
respect
due to them!—

—Then you don't understand negotiation. There has to be an appearance of respect, it's got to be there, it's like the bottles of water and the mike you switch on before you speak. It's a convention. It reassures those ministers and aides. And it traps them. They think if they hear themselves nicely addressed as minister this and doctor that, if they're listened to attentively, the whole smoothing-over process is in progress, the blacks have been flattered into talking like white gentlemen, they're nicely
tamed. Why do you think we turn up in suits and ties instead of the Mao shirts and dashikis the leaders in countries up North wear? So that the Boers on the other side of the table will think there's a code between us and them, we've discarded our Afrieanness, our blackness is hidden under the suit-and-tie outfit, it's not going to jump out at them and demand! Not yet.—

Sibongile was twirling her hands in impatience to interrupt. —And out lumbers the old rhino! Where are the young lions?—

—Queueing up at your office, that's where—the only place they can be. They're the ones you're trying to find jobs for!—

Mpho watched her parents as if at a tennis match, sometimes laughing at them, sometimes chipping in with an opinion of her own. Sibongile and Didymus encouraged her, proud of a bright girl whose intelligence had been stimulated in exile by a superior education which perhaps also disadvantaged her by setting her apart among black youngsters. They were uneasy about the school they had been relieved to find for her; although ‘mixed' most of the pupils were white, it retained the ethos and rituals of a white segregated school. They were grateful that in the early weeks when they were staying with their friends the Starks, Vera had introduced the girl to some decent young black people with whom she enjoyed herself. Her surprising attachment to her grandmother unfortunately did not mean that there were any suitable contacts for her in the dirt and violence of a place like Alexandra.

Didymus kept in himself a slight tautness, the tug of a string in the gut ready to tighten in defence of Sibongile—he was troubled that her frankness would be interpreted as aggression; her manner, sceptical, questioning, iconoclastic, would be taken as disrespectful of the traditional style of political intercourse that had been established in the higher ranks of the Movement
through many years of exile, and would count against her advancement at the level to which she had, for the first time, gained access. Even the way she used her body: coming into conference, where she was by proxy rather than right, on high heels that clipped across the floor, no attempt to move discreetly. He was anxious; not looking at her, as if that would prevent others from being annoyingly distracted, then not being able to prevent himself from being aware of the stir of legs and seats as perfume marked the progress of her breasts and hips to her place. He felt that even her obvious undocile femininity would count against her; the physical disturbance she made no attempt to minimize prefigured the disturbance in the male appropriation of power she might seem presumptuous enough to ignore. He was sensitive to any response to her comments, sometimes hearing, as offensive proof of what he feared for her, undertones that merely made her laugh (the volume of her laugh was not moderated to the atmosphere of conference, either) or provided her with the opportunity of expounding a new point. He was familiar with the way things were done, always had been done, must be done, he was part of them; he could sense how others would feel towards a personality like Sibongile's; and a woman's. What he knew was remarkable in her could be misunderstood. He did not know how to give her the benefit of his own experience, teach her how to conduct herself if she wanted to realize the ambitions he saw were awakened in her. Home for her was the politics of home. That's how things had worked out. But she wasn't going about it in the right way. He feared the effect of failure on a person with such high confidence in and expectations of herself. God help me, and Mpho, and everyone else she knows, when that happens.

Didymus was against nepotism, but what is nepotism?— nothing more than putting in a word when this seems appro
priate. He was one of the old guard, there were private moments when he could remark to a comrade with whom he had experienced much in so many situations and crises, that he scarcely saw Sibongile these days, she was working so hard, she was so dedicated to her returnees. And the permissible observation was always received with some such formula: Oh yes, she's doing a remarkable job of it. But whether this was a cautious assurance that her value was not unrecognized, and went no further, or whether it was to remind the old comrade that he should not think he could promote his wife, the response was dismissive. A brush-off.