None to Accompany Me (23 page)

These shelters provided for by men absent in cities fill up with women; in the all-purpose room were several and a baby or two, flies, heat coming from a polished coal stove. The sweetish smell of something boiling—offal?—was swallowed with tea flurriedly made for the white visitor; the children brought her their school exercise books. Perhaps they thought she was some kind of teacher or inspector. In her familiarity, through her work, with homes like this one, scatterings of habitation outcropped along with the trash-pits of white towns, she was accustomed to being regarded as someone to whom it was an opportunity to address a demand, attention. She and the children chattered and laughed although they had no common language, while she admired their drawings and painstaking calligraphy. Time passed—some idea the visitors were to wait for the eldest child to come home from school. But he did not appear, and his father was not surprised or perturbed. —It's far. And they play on the road, you know how kids are. Sometimes I myself, I used to be the whole afternoon, coming home, forgetting to come …— From the cajoling, laughing tone of his voice he was telling
the mother not to be angry with the child, but she jerked her head in rejection. Such movements of self-assertion surfaced from the withdrawn placidity with which she kept her place. Sitting at the kitchen table, she might be any of the other women murmuring there. Her man from the city talked and she responded only to questions, now and then giggled when others did, and covered her mouth with her hand. The sun shifted its angle through the window barred with strips of tin; he decided, turning to his fellow visitor —Time to get going, hei— And while the farewells were being made to all the women, the children hung again about him. Their heads caressed under his hands storing up the shapes, he asked—undercover—whether his employer could help him out? —The loan of twenty rands or so.—

Only then did he and his wife have a few minutes alone together; he put his palm on her waist to guide her to the only other room of the house, where through the door, in a mirror, a crocheted bedspread was reflected. The door was not closed behind them but their voices were so low they could not be heard in the kitchen. Whether they embraced, whether they said to one another what could not be said in the company in which the visit had passed, no one could know. They were soon back. He hugged his children, he joked again with the women: a man, a lover, a husband, a father. His wife stood aside—displaced by an arrival without a letter, without warning in the life she held together by herself; in her stance, the way her full neck rose, she alone, of all the other women, in possession of him; lonely. That was how Vera saw her and did not know she would never forget her.

Driving away. To say he was so happy: how to explain what this was. He might have expected to be sad. Depressed, at least, at taking up with the road the split in his life. But he was talking about his children, boastful of their excitement at seeing him,
he was drinking deep of being loved. —Man, I wish you could've seen my big boy, last time, he was nearly as tall as I am—right up here to my ear. And he's clever, there he's already bigger than me, I'm telling you … He can do everything. At Christmas, one of my other uncles was here at their place with his car, so this kid says,
Ntatemoholo
, I bet you I can drive, so his uncle gets in next to him and hands over the keys. And off! That kid manages the clutch, gears, everything. Just learnt from watching people.—

To say he was happy: it's to say he was whole. He'd accepted himself again; husband, father, Freedom Fighter, womanizer, and clerk at the Legal Foundation. At that moment when, glancing at his profile, she found the definition, he saw someone flagging him down on the road. A black man was waving a plastic container. A good mood overflows in openness to others; the Foundation station-wagon slowed and pulled up level with a brother in trouble, run out of gas. He leaned from the window and spoke to the man in the language of the district. An arm thrust through and snatched the keys from the ignition. She heard the gurgle as the forearm struck against Oupa's windpipe in passing and saw the mound of a ring with a red stone on a finger.
Tswaya! Get out!
A voice that of a man giving routine orders.

All the muscles in Oupa's body gathered in a storm of tension that sucked into a vacuum his shock and hers, she felt it draw at her as if he had had his hand upon her. He burst out of the door knocking the man back with its force. The scuffle and animal grunting and yells of two men fighting. She saw another man run from behind the decoy car with a gun and she jumped out of the passenger seat hearing a woman's voice screaming screaming and ran screaming, another self, screaming, to where the two men fought on the ground. The keys were thrown, the
hand that had held them struggling to get something out of his pocket as he fought. She and the third man were racing towards the ring of keys shining in the dust; she was terrified of what she was converging with, thumping tread like hooves making for her, there was a loud snap of giant fingers in the air—! and then another that gave her a mighty punch in the calf. She lost herself, more from lack of breath than whatever had happened to her leg. The first thing she was restored to was the ordinary sight of a man picking up a ring of keys. He came over and not looking at her face, tore off her watch and grabbing her left hand, pulled at the ring on her finger. She put her finger in her mouth, wet it with saliva and gave the hand to him. He made a disgusted face and signalled her to take off the ring. She worked it over the knuckle and handed it to him; she didn't know what had happened to her leg, she didn't know if she could get up, he was there above her ready to strike her down if she did. The sling bag—her money, the Foundation's money, all her documentation—was in the station-wagon, was his, taken possession of without any further effort necessary. As feeling came to her leg in the form of pain making pathways for itself, she saw as he left her that he was not like the other, he was a puny man and the thumping tread that had pursued her had come only from the pump-action of jogging shoes below skinny legs.

The two vehicles were driven away. He—Oupa—lay gasping over there. There was a tear in her jeans, quite small, some ooze of blood, she did not want to roll the pants leg and see more, she had the desire to sit up and wrap her arms tightly round the leg but she moved, squatting on one leg and supporting the other, to where he was. They clasped hands, dumb. Tears of effort, of the violence with which he had fought, were finger-painting the dirt on his face. He patted his ribs on the right side
to show her where: blood was blotting out the face of Bob Marley printed on his T-shirt. They were castaways in the immensity of the sky. They were abandoned in the diminishing perspective of an empty dirt road, leaving them behind as a speck to be come upon as hornbills come upon a cowpat. They helped each other somehow to the side of the road.

Tears and blood. It was a country road, it was miles from anywhere. But they are everywhere, the violent. To meet up with them again:
Je-ss-uss! I'd be terrified.
He carefully rolled the leg of her pants and fonnd —Oh my God, there's a hole on the other side, the bullet went right through … it should've been there, where you were standing, did you find it … — But neither had the strength to go back and search. She lifted his shirt and saw the hole, like the socket where an eye had been gouged; on his back there was no exit wound.

—It's still inside?—

—I don't know too much about anatomy. But it's far from your heart.—

Their watches were gone. They did not know how long after but it must have been quite soon that a cattle truck loaded with beasts huddled together for the abattoir stopped and the driver, calling out in his language, came over with the face of dismay and curiosity with which a man meets a disaster that could happen to himself. The cattle jostled to the bars of the truck to stare and low, giving off the ammoniac stench of their own instinctive fear of their last journey. Under the panicked whites of the beasts' eyes he and she were helped into the cab. She was a leg, her whole being stuffed down into a leg, a concentration of pain filled to bursting down there. Blood trickled from her; she kept her gaze on a vase with its branch of artificial carnations hooked above the windscreen. Oupa and the driver talked in
their language; although short of breath he was fortunately in less pain than she, the bullet inside him perhaps was lying in some harmless space of the mysterious human body.

Oupa had his bullet on the cabinet beside the hospital bed between the bottles of orange squash and bunch of bananas his friends at the Foundation brought him. No longer any segregation of black and white sick and injured, but the elegant Indian lady who shared a ward with Vera rang for a nurse to come and draw the curtains round her bed when Oupa, in a dressinggown, came to visit Vera; on crutches, she went to visit him. Animatedly they pieced together over and over again the details rescued from the confusion of the dog-fight blur in which the attack happened. —You noticed that big ring with the red stone— —Oh I can see his hand as the back of it hit your throat, I don't think I'd recognize the face but I feel I'd know that hand anywhere— —I heard you screaming, I thought my God they're killing her— They shuddered and they laughed together: lucky to be alive.

Oupa's bullet had been removed cleanly through an incision just below the ribs. It had missed both lungs and liver, merely chipped a rib and lodged in muscular tissue. He was proud of this form of resistance to the attackers. —I think I got so tough on the Island, you know, and I've done some weight-lifting, well, I used to, so I'm sure that's helped me.— He took his bullet back to One-Twenty-One with him in a cigarette pack. Vera's wound at the point of entry of the bullet became infected and she was kept in hospital a few days after his discharge.

Ben telephoned Annie with daily bulletins and requests for professional advice, insisting she keep in touch with the hospital surgeon. He related Annie's reassurances with a lack of confidence
in doctors' judgment, sitting through long silences at Vera's bedside looking at her as if piecing her together, out of destruction, from images in his mind. When she came home he returned from Promotional Luggage at odd hours of day to make sure she was following doctor's orders for healing to be established. —We ought to take a break somewhere.—

She was reading documents from the Foundation, sent by messenger, strewn on the sofa. —I must get back to work. It's piling up there.—

—Just three or four days together.—

She tried to give her attention to understanding the need; his need or hers. —Well, where.—

—To the sea … —

—I don't suppose I should put this thing in water yet.—

—To the mountains.—

The mountains.

Ah, so there was no practical reality to be understood, she was obtuse in objecting to the sea because she would not be able to swim in it just as she would not be able to climb—these were not mountains for climbing, they were the site in themselves, herself and Bennet, proposed to return to. —I ought to get back to work.— No more assertive than a murmur.

The words fell from him with the clatter of a weapon concealed on his person. —I couldn't live without you.—

A jump of fear, of refusal within her.

He began to straighten and stack the sheets of paper lying haphazard as fallen leaves over the outline of her legs under a rug. In her appalled silence his continuation of the senseless task, picking up sheets that slithered off the sofa, putting an order into documents, whose sequence he did not know, understood the rejection.

She could not see the violence at the roadside as evidence
of her meaning in his life. She could not share the experience with him on those terms. She was not responsible for his existence, no, no, love does not carry that covenant; no, no, it was not entered into in the mountains, it could not
be
, not anywhere.
What to do with that love.
Now she saw what it was about, the sudden irrelevant question, a sort of distress within herself, that came to her from time to time, lately.

When he had gone back to his office she lay, holding off confusion and resentment, stiff, head pressed into cushions. She rose slowly and pushed back the rug, rolled up the leg of her track suit to the place on her calf where the punctured flesh, still an outraged blotchy purple, had been secured by metal clips.

The sacred human body is only another object that can be patched together, like a tyre. This is one meaning of what had happened on the road. Something to be traced with a forefinger. There are many. Violence has many: now, in this country, as the working out of vengeance, as the return of the repressed, for some; the rationalization for their fear, of their flight, for others. But the experience of violence is for the victims their conception of a monster-child by rape; only they share its clutch upon their backs. Only they, in the privacy of what has been done to them, can search through the experience for what they should have done differently in resistance, where there was a failure of intelligence, of courage, of wiliness, of common sense; of how much they were influenced, even in panic, by the conditioning of the rules of the game, their society's game. Never stop for anyone on the road. Let them die there. Break the rule for a brother, Oupa, and you stop a souvenir bullet. You admired the criminals you were forced to share a cell with—but to meet them outside —Those people? I'd be terrified. The attraction of power predestines us as its victims. And if I hadn't been wasting
my breath screaming I might have reached the keys, run over the bastards. Oh easy to swagger in retrospect. While you were fighting, while I was screaming, weren't we conscious of getting what we deserved, according to the rules? If I had stayed home as a white woman should in these times (what other times have there been in the efficacy of a country run by fear) it wouldn't have happened, serve you right. There's someone there at home who can't live without you. What were you doing about that when you got yourself shot in the leg?