None to Accompany Me (32 page)

—No.—

—Before Ivan.—

—Before Ivan, no.—

—Did Dad really not mention that he's met him?—

—You know how his letters have been preoccupied with you.—

The gentle reproach had him deflected, smiling in a different direction. But he fingered along his jaw a small lump where a shaven hair had burrowed into the skin. —Not just the meeting at the conference. The man took him snorkeling with him, he flew him to the Barrier Reef.—

There was the waiting silence that comes between two people when one is confronting thoughts the other does not know of, but an instinctive inkling, a kind of prickling of the nerves, is being conveyed.

—They seem to have had a great time together.— His curiosity grew; it secluded Vera and him closely.

—I've heard the Barrier Reef's wonderful.—

—Oh he says it was the time of his life. Dad as a pick-up! It's sure out of character.—

—What do you think of as Ivan's character?—

—Well he's not—spontaneous (pleased at finding the right word), like you must have been. He weighs things up. Look how long it took him to make up his mind between my mother and the Hungarian. But maybe it was because of the man knowing you. Not just any stranger in a bar.—

—Maybe. We never know what a son or daughter understands about us; what we think of as ourselves.—

—Well old people are so cagey! … d'you ever tell Ivan what you've just said, about the war and sex and everything?—
He slowly moved his head in certainty of her joining him in the denial, and she did, the two of them smiling at her compliance.

They returned to the computer. —It's really bombed out. I'll see if I can recover the data, try the back-ups.—

She said she'd leave him to it. He sensed that he had gained some advantage over her: she was at once Vera, to him, and his grandmother. He turned. —I'll take some other girl—you'll lend me your car for Saturday?—

Consequences.

Father and son.

Vera sees them. They swim towards each other through ruined palaces of coral, flippered feet undulating, ribbons of current and light passing, and, magnified by water: recognize. Ivan's face is the face of the young woman on the bedroom floor, the wriggling sperm magnified by time out of sight and mind into the man picked up, tagged, in a bar. Without the tag, he might have been taken for one of those coincidental likenesses that share no blood: at one side of the ocean and another two beings happen to have been born with the same conformation of features. Vera, that wilful sexy bitch Vera, had to transform fertilization into parthenogenesis, the proof of her deceit being that she reproduced herself, only herself, in male form, for her new lover. And Ivan is drawn to the man never seen, never talked of, who once was married to a girl who became his mother; such attraction is a kind of recognition. The time of his life, together.

Father and son. No end to consequences. This consequence is that the seventeen-year-old boy has become one of Vera's confidants. He knows there is something about herself she conceals, making other confessions round about it. He does that
kind of thing himself, to protect himself from adults. In recognition—another kind of recognition—of this, she lets him drive without a valid licence, and both of them, as friends, are concealing this from Ben.

She has a need to redefine. Friends. Friends are differing individuals who are the repositories of confidences and confessions. The act of these friendships, in which the various aspects of self cannot be placed all upon one person, is the equivalent of placing the burden of self within the other by which she used to define the sexual act.

 

Ms Vera Stark, Deputy Director of the Legal Foundation (in the end she has not been able to avoid a title), is among the faces in the newspapers captioned as nominated to serve on the Technical Committee on Constitutional Issues. Vera had heard that her name was being considered, but had not taken the possibility seriously; there were so many commissions and committees sitting, more set up every day either to pass the heat of change from hand to hand or keep an ethos of democracy evolving while the set of the old hegemony theatre was being struck, its now incongruous flats still lumbering people's lives. Some groups wanted to keep them in the way, hoping that an ivy of acceptability might be able to be painted over them; others wanted to cart the junk off to live by in some enclave of a single skin colour or language, and pranced the streets with guns in mounted commando to make their Nazi neo-Arcadian cause a threat. Some enterprising adapters to a coming order where it might be possible still to make money while losing political control, wanted to lease the ultimate relic of the dead regime's power, Robben Island, to a resort developer. A former political prisoner whose people the Foundation was representing in a land dispute made to Vera the counterclaim:
We spent our lives there. We earned it. The Island is ours.

Vera was cautious not to decide at once on what the nomination meant. Not in terms of how she was favoured publicly: with committees on all questions—and what was not in question now?—there was surely a desperate search for people even marginally qualified to deliberate them.

Ben looked at her with admiration, seeing the light of others playing upon her and taking pride in it. He chided her hesitation. —You don't refuse an honour! And you damn well deserve it. Your qualification as a lawyer is as good as any of the others— better. None of them has your experience. What do they know about rural communities and squatter camps, all those constituencies to be considered?—

They had met for lunch at his suggestion, the new development providing the occasion to take up again what once had been a means of seeing one another during the separation of the working day. She went on picking olives out of her salad. He watched her. —You're not thinking of turning it down, are you, Vera.— She did not know what she was waiting for him to say, what it was she wanted from him. When the coffee came she sat over her cup, dragging the skin of her cheekbones under her fingers towards the temples. All she received from Ben was distress at her indecision, and her apparent lack of ability to explain it. Then she had to get back to the office; there was the awkward fact that he was in no hurry, unfortunately his business was doing poorly and there was no urgency or incentive to cut short the distraction of lunch. She touched his hand in acknowledgement and left, not looking back at him sitting there, alone.

She sat at her desk gazing at the door so familiar she no longer saw it, following the gauze of an after-image, the old entry of Oupa with his papers for her and his plastic tray of curried
chicken and pap. If he was no longer there, neither was she. When did she first start suddenly seeing a familiar scene (bedroom at night, the level of a glass of water, the abandoned clothes) as if she were describing to herself something already past? It was when she had beside her in One-Twenty-One, so real, a young lover. The Hitler Baby. Long ago as that. Her sense of her existence was as if she had entered someone's house and seen a letter she had written, addressed in her own hand, lying there, delivered and as yet unopened: the impulse to gather it up, gather it in.

One by one her colleagues finished the day's work and left the offices. She could hear the cleaner emptying paper baskets with a slap on the base accompanied by singing in the strange soprano, almost atonal, of black women, the Greek chorus to their lives. They passed one another in the corridor on Vera's way out, Vera prompted to come up on cue with the usual enquiry for Bella's
amour propre
, how was the Dobsonville Ladies' Choir doing in competitions lately, and Bella responding with the appreciation expected of her in return —Oh very good, very good, just won second place.

The lopsided Stop sign at a crossroad, the splendid purple bougainvillaea espaliered on a wall, the fence where the black-and-white mask of a Husky was always pressed yearningly against the lattice, the place at which the elephant's-foot roots buttressing a belhambra tree had raised the tarmac of the pavement like the bedclothes of a restless sleeper; the turn into a side street where these signals reached a destination. She picked up the evening paper at Zeph Rapulana's mail-box and took it with her to the front door. Rang; stood there patiently. The silence of an empty house where his electric wall clock (a stickler, he says, no African time for him!) whirrs on the edge of audibility, and documents shift under the current of air from a
fanlight left open. After a while she turned and went into the garden where a neat arrangement of two plastic chairs and a table was kept under the jacaranda. There she sat reading the paper. She did not find it difficult to give it her full attention. The dimension of awareness she had inhabited at the office had closed away. Vera was not even waiting for the owner of the haven she occupied to come to his home. If he had not, she would simply have stood up and left, when she was ready, refolding the paper and placing it carefully on the doorstep. But his car was heard slurring into the garage, and in a few moments he came through a side gate into the small garden claimed with palms and tree ferns he had brought from some ancestral home in the Lowveld that was not the Odensville squatter camp which for her was his place of origin.

He smiled without sense of surprise, as if he always expected to find her there; or more likely because the African characteristic that rather exasperated her, in her house, of arriving at any time without a telephone call in respect for privacy, worked appealingly in reverse, where in African homes it was taken for granted that people walked in whenever they wished. He wore one of his Drommedaris suits, an elegant grey, but they exchanged the usual bobbing embrace of greeting appropriated by the liberation movement from the dictators. He took off the jacket and settled down in shirt-sleeves.

—It's an honour.— She tried it out on him.

—Oh certainly.—

—But is an honour the most useful. For me.—

—Now what are you thinking of, Vera?—

—Aren't I better off, isn't it better for me to be doing my job at the Foundation—the work you know I do well, don't I—than putting myself in the position of making terribly important
decisions, conditions for other people—the whole country. Putting myself way up there, above them—

—Isn't an honour as useful as you can make it? You know you always remind me I'm not against what people think of as honours. Some of our people even think of going to a board meeting as an honour, but you and I know it as something else. What did you once say?—infiltration.—

—But this's different. It's setting oneself up to decide power, in the end. What's a constitution but the practice, in law, of a Bill of Rights? The practical means of achieving all our fine phrases, The People Shall Have …—

—It's only the draft you'll be dealing with. Something for the transitional council. It's not final, all-out responsibility our grandchildren will blame you for.—

—Ah but it's the draft that will have to reconcile everything, so that the final constitution will have coherence, at least, to go on. Think of regions, alone; the passions of disagreement over regions, everyone with his own home-drawn map and the powers he wants there. The Odendaals, the Buthelezis and Mangopes all shouting and stamping their feet for the right to do what they like with the people in this part of the country or that, no power of interference from a central government.—

—But that's exactly where the last battle's going to be fought! There where the Committee sits! That's the last gasp of the old regime, we'll hear it there! There's this one breath left in it. Go for it!—

She swayed uncertainly, half-smiling; his usual manner was not vehement.

The schoolmaster in him spoke as if he were back in his rural office and had called her in. —It's your duty.

— But she couldn't see herself as self-righteous.

—All right. It's power. And power scares you.—

—I don't know.— She feels vaguely aggressive. —Yes it … I'm not like you: I've belonged so long to a people who used it horribly. I distrust it.—

—For yourself. But if this Committee does the job, it'll mean real empowerment for our people.—

It was accepted tacitly that when he spoke of ‘our' people it was as a black speaking for blacks, subtly different from when he used ‘we' or ‘us' and this meant an empathy between him and her. They continued to accept one another for exactly what they were, no sense of one intruding upon the private territory behind the other. It had come to her that this was the basis that ought to have existed between a man and a woman in general, where it was a question not of a difference of ancestry but of sex.

—It's a matter of degree, whether I sit on boards or you get to be part of the Committee—that's something more urgent. You've never shown any doubts about where I sit.—

—Ah no. Who could have anything to say about that. You're making a place for blacks in the money world. Even the ex-Stalinists among us want it. There's no millennium; only the IMF and the World Bank—

—There are plenty who do say! I'm in it for the directors' fees. I'm living in the Northern Suburbs instead of Alex or Soweto.— He was smiling at her certainty.

She had teased him about that fancy restaurant. She released her tongue sharply against her palate and jerked her head in dismissal of herself and his detractors. To believe in him was to accept that the Left, as expressed in the living conditions of the majority rather than in ideology, can find its solutions to those conditions by using some of the means of capitalism. Looking at the neighbouring countries of the continent,
what other solution was there to try, for the present?

—So I should set myself up there among the little gods who are deciding what the country will be. Proportional representation, regions … And what about the Foundation? I'd be away for months, you know. We're always short-staffed. There's going to be so much work, things hotting up before a new government comes. People fear the old boundaries will stick unless you can get back to your land first. Places on the borders of homelands that are resisting incorporation with the rest of the country— we need successful court action to claim them quickly, and you know what a wrangle that can be. Problems like Zevenfontein —who, black or white, wants those poor people squatting next to them in a middle-class suburb? And Matiwane's Kop, Thembalihle, Cornfields—they want their land back. Yesterday I was in Pretoria—again—the Advisory Commission on Land Allocation—