Life Times (56 page)

The girl sat on the floor under the ox-wagon wheel chandelier with its pink shades like carnival hats askew, sucking a strand of her hair as she read. Vusi had the single armchair and Eddie and Charles the sofa, whose snot-green plaid Joy could not tolerate, even here, and kept covered with a length of African cotton patterned with indigo cowrie shells: every time she entered this room, a reminder that one really had one's sense of being (but could not, absolutely not, now) among beautiful, loved objects of familiar use. The four exchanged sheets of newspaper restlessly, searching for the world around them with which they had no connection. The Prime Minister had made another of his speeches of reconciliation; each except Charles read in silence the threats of which it was composed. Charles spoke through lips distorted by the pressure of his fists under his fleshy face, one of those grotesque mouths of ancient Mediterranean cultures from which sibylline utterances are supposed to well.

When they heard this rhetoric on the radio, they were accustomed to smile as people will when they must realise that those being referred to as monsters are the human beings drinking a glass of water, cutting a hangnail, writing a letter, in the same room; are themselves. Sometimes they would restore their sense of reality by derision (all of them) or one of them (Vusi or Charles) would reply to thin air with the other rhetoric, of rebellion; but the closer time drew them to act, the less need there was for platform language.

‘Scared. Afraid.'

Vusi dropped single words, as if to see what rings of meaning others would feel ripple from them.

The girl looked up, not knowing if this was a question and if anyone was expected to answer it.

Eddie sniffed with a twist of the nose and cocked his head indifferently, parrying the words towards the public office, occupied by interchangeable faces, that had made the speech.

The moment passed, and with it perhaps some passing test Vusi had put them to – and himself. He had opened a hand on the extreme danger hidden in this boring, fly-buzzing Sunday ‘living room'; in that instant they had all looked at it; and their silence said, calm: I know.

The allusion swerved away from themselves. Vusi was still speaking. ‘Can't give any other reason why he should have them in his power, so he's got to scare them into it. Scare. That's all they've got left. What else is in that speech? After three hundred and fifty years. After how many governments? Spook people.'

It was a proposition that had comforted, spurred, lulled or inspired over many years. ‘So?' Charles's beard jutted. ‘That goes to show the power of fear, not the collapse of power.'

‘Exactly. Otherwise we wouldn't need to be here.' Joy's reference to this house, their presence and purpose, sounded innocently vulgar: to be there was to have gone beyond discussion of why; to be freed of words.

Eddie gave hers a different, general application. ‘If whites could have been cured of being scared of blacks, that would have solved everything?' He was laughing at the old liberal theory.

Charles swallowed a rough crumb of impulse to tell Eddie he didn't need Eddie to give him a lesson on class and economics. ‘Hell, man . . . Just that there's no point in telling ourselves they're finished, they're running down.'

Joy heard in Charles's nervous asperity the fear of faltering he guarded against in others because it was in himself. There should be no love affairs between people doing this kind of – thing – (she still could not think of it as she wished to, as work to be done). She did not, now, want to be known by him as
she
knew
him
; there should be some conscious mental process available by which such knowledge would be withdrawn.

‘Don't worry. If they're running down, it's because they know who's after them.' Eddie, talking big, seemed to become again the kid he must have been in street-gang rivalries that unknowingly rehearsed, for his generation of blacks, the awful adventure that was coming to them.

‘They were finished when they took the first slave.' Knowledge of Vusi was barred somewhere between his murmured commonplaces and that face of his. He was not looking at any of them, now; but Joy had said once to Charles, in a lapse to referents of an esoteric culture she carefully avoided because these distanced him and her from Vusi and Eddie, that if Vusi were to be painted, the portrait would be one of those, like Velázquez' Philip IV, whose eyes would meet yours no matter from what angle the painting were to be seen.

Vusi and Eddie had not been on student tours to the Prado. Vusi's voice was matter-of-fact, hoarse. ‘It doesn't matter how many times we have to sit here like this. They can't stop us because we can't stop. Never. Every time, when I'm waiting, I know I'm coming nearer.'

Eddie crackled back a page to frame something. ‘Opening of Koeberg's going to be delayed by months and months, it says, ay Vusi?'

‘Ja, I saw.'

Charles and Joy did not know if Vusi was one of those who had attacked the nuclear reactor installation at the Cape before it was ready to operate, earlier in the year. A classic mission; that was the phrase. A strategic target successfully hit; serious material damage, no deaths, no blood shed. This terrifying task produces its outstanding practitioners, like any other. They did not know if Eddie knew something about Vusi they didn't, had been told some night in the dark of the back room, while the two men lay there alone on their mattresses. Eddie's remark might indicate he did know; or that he was fascinatedly curious and thought Vusi might be coaxed, without realising it, into saying something revealing. But Vusi didn't understand flattery.

Eddie gave up. ‘What's this committee of Cape Town whites who want it shut down?'

Charles took the paper from him. ‘Koeberg's only thirty kilometres from Cape Town. A bicycle ride, man. Imagine what could happen once it's producing. But d'you see the way the story's handled? They write about “security” as if the place's a jeweller's shop that might be burgled, not a target we've already hit once.'

Joy read at an angle over his shoulder, an ugly strain on the tendons of her neck. ‘Nobody wants to go to jail.'

Charles gave the sweet smile of his most critical mood, for the benefit of Vusi and Eddie. ‘Ah well, but there are ways and ways, ay? A journalist learns to say what he wants without appearing to. But these fellows sit with the book of rules under their backsides . . . well, what'm I talking about – you need wits to outwit.'

‘What makes you think they even want to?'

‘Because it's their job! Let's leave convictions out of it!'

‘No, she's right, man. If you work on these papers, you're just part of the system.' Eddie kept as souvenirs the catch-all terms from his Soweto days.

‘To be fair' (for which ideal the girl hankered so seriously that she would not hesitate to contradict herself) ‘there are some who want to . . . A few who've lost their jobs.'

‘Someone reads this, what can he know afterwards?' A sheet went sailing from Vusi's hand to join those already spread about the floor. ‘You must call in an interpreter, like in court, to know what's going on.'

‘Like in court?
Jwaleka tsekisong?
' Eddie went zestfully into an act. A long burst in Sesotho; then in English: ‘He can't remember a thing, My Lord.' Another lengthy Sesotho sentence, with the cadence, glares and head-shakings of vehement denial: ‘He says yes, My Lord.' A rigmarole of obvious agreement: ‘He says no, My Lord.' The pantomime of the bewildered, garrulous black witness, the white Afrikaner prosecutor fond of long English words and not much surer of their meaning than the witness or the bored black interpreter:

Out of their amusement at his nonsense there was a rise of animation, change of key to talk of what or was not to be understood between the lines of reportage and guards of commentary; in this – the events of their world, which moved beneath the events of the world the newspapers reflected – the real intimacy latent in their strangeness to one another, their apparent ill-assortment, discovered itself. There was sudden happiness – yes, unlike any private happiness left behind, independent of circumstance, because all four had left behind, too, the ‘normal' fears, repugnancies, prejudices, reservations that ‘circumstance' as they had known it – what colour they were, what that colour had meant where they lived – had been for them. Nothing but a surge of intermittent current: but the knowledge that it would well up again made it possible to live with the irritations and inadequacies they chafed against one another now, waiting. Charles said it for them, grinning suddenly after an argument one day: ‘Getting in one another's hair, here – it's a form of freedom, ay?'

Apart from politics, there wasn't much to engage, in Charles's Sunday papers. One printed for blacks reported the usual slum murders perpetrated with unorthodox weapons to hand; a soccer club scandal, and deaths at a wedding after drinking tainted homebrew. The whites' papers, of which Charles had brought several, and in two languages, had a financial crash, a millionaire's divorce settlement, a piece about that monkey no one could catch, which had stolen a maid's dinner.

Sunday torpor settled on the four. Charles slept with his beard-ringed mouth bubbling slightly, as Naas Klopper was sleeping ten kilometres away in his split-level lounge. Eddie wandered out to the yard, took off his shirt and sat on the back step in the sun, smoking, drinking a Coke and listening to a reggae tape as any young labourer would spend his lunch hour on the pavement outside whites' shops.

 

On a radio panel ‘Talking of Nature' an SPCA official took the opportunity to condemn the cruelty of throwing out pet monkeys to fend for themselves when they outgrow the dimensions of a suitable domestic pet. Mariella Chapman heard him while preparing plums for jam according to the recipe given by her new mother-in-law over the weekend. Mariella and her husband had gone to visit his parents on the farm for the first time since their marriage five months ago, and had come home with a supermarket bag of fresh-picked plums and a leg of venison. Marais (his given name was his mother's maiden name) hung the leg before he went on duty early on Monday at John Vorster Square; he had to put up a hook in the kitchen window because their modern house didn't have a back stoep like the old house at home.

At police headquarters Sergeant Chapman (an English stoker in the 1880s jumped ship, married an Afrikaans girl and left the name scratched on a Boer family tree) took over the 7 a.m. shift of interrogation of one of the people held in detention there. It was a nice-enough-looking place to be stationed, right in town. The blue spandrel panels and glimpses of potted plants in the façade it presented to the passing city freeway could have been those of an apartment block; the cells in which these people were kept were within the core of the building.

It was tiring work, you need a lot of concentration, watching the faces of these politicals, never mind just getting something out of their mouths. He kept his hands off them. Unless, of course, expressly instructed by his superiors to do certain things necessary to make some of them talk. When they got out – particularly the white ones, with their clever lawyer friends and plenty money coming from the churches and the communists overseas – they often brought court cases against the state, you could find yourself standing there accused of assault, they tried to blacken your name in front of your wife, your mother and dad, who knew only your kindness and caresses. He wanted promotion, but he didn't want that. He did his duty. He did what he was told. And if it ever came to court – oh boy, I'm telling you,
jong
– all was on the Major's instructions, he could swear on the Bible to that.

No wonder most of them talked in the end. It was hard enough to do a number of shifts with them during the day or night, with breaks in between for a cup of coffee, something to eat, and best of all, a walk outside in the street; whereas most of them, like this tough nut he was handling with the Major now, were questioned by a roster of personnel twenty-four, thirty-six hours non-stop. And, as the Major had taught, even when these people were given coffee, a cigarette, allowed to sit down, they knew they were being watched and had to watch themselves all the time, for what they might let slip. It was one of the elementary lessons of this work that the gratification of a draw of smoke into the lungs might suddenly succeed in breaking the stoniest will and breaching trained revolutionary hostility towards and contempt for interrogators. (The Major was a very clever, highly educated and well-read man – you had to have someone like that for the class of detainee that was coming in these days, they'd just run rings round someone who'd only got his matric.) The Major said it didn't even matter if you got to feel sorry for them – the Major knew about this, although you always hid it; ‘a bond of sympathy' was the first real step on the way to extracting a confession. Well, Sergeant Chapman didn't have any such feelings today. Inside his uniform his body was filled with the sap of sun and fresh air; the sight of the sleepless, unshaven man standing there, dazed and smelly (they sweated even if they shivered, under interrogation) made him sick (the Major warned that occasional revulsion was natural, but unproductive).