None to Accompany Me (7 page)

In the streets of Johannesburg, on your way around the city,
You don't know who this is?

Even Oupa managed to move into a white suburb.

Why did his white colleagues at the Foundation use, to themselves, the prefix ‘even'? Because once the legal restrictions they campaigned against were lifted there remained an older, even (yes, again) greater restriction to be addressed: poverty.
The clerk was decently paid by the decent standards of a Foundation that was non-profit-making not only in the money sense but also the human one, providing the same benefits of medical care and pension fund for all who worked there, from the director to the cleaner. But the rent of apartments in the area where he wanted to live was beyond his means. In one way, he was like any other young man in training for a professional career; a stage when it is assumed the youngster has as yet no responsibilities, has emerged from school, free, to a few years of chasing girls and enjoying himself with his male peers.
Starting out in life
, the saying goes. But of course this one's start had been delayed so long, he had queued up unable to get into schools, dropped out into political action, spent four years on Robben Island, that before he could start on the lowest rank of a career he had acquired the responsibilities of maturity. Oupa was a man, not a boy. A burdened man, at the same time as he was the Foundation's bright protégé. For him the business of growing up had not been, could not be, followed in recognized chronology. Of course Oupa had a wife, somewhere, of course he had children. His decent salary was diminished by the rent, the food, the clothing to be provided out of sight, for the anachronism of his life. The wife and children lived in another part of the country, with relatives who were dumped by the Government in some resettlement area. The eager apprentice was in fact an adult already trapped by adult desires, conflicts and responsibilities.

The Foundation was more than tolerant of the time he took off from work to find a place, a bachelor home among them in what had been the streets where only whites could live. They feared for him on his daily journeys to and from Soweto by train; he could be knifed by gangsters or thrown out of the window to his death by political thugs. Mrs Stark was remiss in
being too busy, at the time, to telephone around among friends who might know of vacancies or have influence with estate agents who were wary about letting to blacks; it was someone else in the office who found a lead that resulted in the young colleague getting what he wanted. He was elated, although the rent was too high for him to afford; untroubled, although he had signed a lease restricting occupancy to two people, and he was going to split the rent by sharing the place with a couple and their two children.

Oupa planned a house-warming for everyone from the Foundation. Mrs Stark, to compensate for not having been any help to him in finding somewhere to live, offered to contribute homemade snacks and left with him a little early on a Friday afternoon to help with preparations.

—Where do we go?— Oupa had mentioned enthusiastically to everyone an area where there were numerous apartment buildings but had given no further details. He named a street and chattered on. —It's an old building, man, but that's why it's so nice, big rooms and everything. Here we are—here it is. ‘Delville Wood.' (Look at that real marble entrance!) Something to do with a war, isn't it?—

The car came to a standstill neatly against the kerb. —Delville Wood.— Walking up the steps under packages loaded between them, Mrs Stark turned to him, an odd smile accompanying the banal scrap of information she was giving. —Yes, it's a battle. Where it happened.—

He thought there was some unhappy connection with the name he'd ignorantly blundered on. —Someone you knew died there?—

But she laughed. —That war took place before I was born.—

He led her along red-polished corridors. Her eyes counted off the numbered doors as they passed.

—That's it!—

In his proud moment, she pronounced before his doorway: —One-Twenty-One.—

He rapped zestfully on the number and echoed her. —One-Twenty-One Delville Wood.—

In the living-room two junk-shop chairs covered with nylon velvet shaved by wear, a one-legged stand topped with a fancy copper ashtray, and an old box trunk covered with a piece of African cloth. Everything faced the glaucous giant eye of the television set.

—Of course it's not fixed up yet. Pictures and so on. I need a desk and something for my books. I'm going to do a lot of work here, man! But nice, aih?—

—A desk over there at the window … Ben might have one you could use. Yes, this is a lovely room.—

He had switched on the television, it was a children's programme with the squeaky voices of anthropomorphic animals but he did not notice, it didn't matter, the gesture was that of possession, he was at home in these walls where only whites had lived before.

—Come and see the rest.—

Talking expansively, he led her to a room with a double bed made up under a fringed bedspread with three cushions propped diamond-shaped against the wall. —I might put the desk in here, because the others use the sitting-room as well. Better for work.— He was assuring her of his seriousness about studying; after all, although she was a motherly friend, she was also one of the seniors in the Foundation that employed him. The second room: a chaos of clothing, toys, pots and pans, hot
plate standing on a triple-mirror dressing table, cot filled with jumbled shoes. —They're moving in.—

Oupa went to fetch from the car the folding chairs borrowed from the Foundation and when he returned Mrs Stark was in the kitchen unpacking what she called the goodies. He stood about: —I haven't got the hang of the stove yet— But she had opened the oven door and taken out fat-encrusted shelves, she tried the plates one by one, knowing exactly how everything worked, I'll show you, she said, just as she calmly and quietly would explain to him some legal question he would bring to her from his correspondence course. He was flattered that she concentrated on the preparations for his little party as if it were of great importance to get everything right, to think of nothing else until this was so. He felt Mrs Stark knew what this occasion meant to him, even if to others it was just another office party.

The extended family of the Foundation arrived. Husbands and wives, permanent lovers of this sex or that, the other half of unexplained attachments. There was the bonhomie of the special set of relationships between people who work together and find themselves at play, their joking in-house references that others might not follow but which raised the general level of celebration. Somebody's boy-friend had brought a guitar and he sang his compositions in a mixture of Zulu, English and Afrikaans to a group that stood about or sat with their drinks on the fringed bedcover in the bedroom, while in the living-room nobody was listening, the talk and laughter at a higher volume than the music. Mrs Stark's hot cheese puffs ran out. She and several others from the Foundation were back in the kitchen opening cans of Viennas that seemed to be Oupa's sole food supply, when her husband arrived late and had brought along a carrier of wine and beer. With a knife in one hand and the greasy other hand held away from contact with his jacket, she
dropped what she was doing and went over to kiss him for the thought. He almost backed in surprise, then held her shoulders a moment; it was so unlike her to make a show of affection public. His contribution to the party hardly called for any special mark of gratitude; perhaps she'd had a few drinks—well, why not?

The promised desk was picked up from the Starks' house and delivered to One-Twenty-One Delville Wood by a friend of Oupa who borrowed a bakkie from another friend. Oupa bought a computer, on credit, to complete the equipment; the only problem, he remarked to Mrs Stark some weeks later, was that the friend who transported the desk had moved into the flat with him, the couple, and the two children. —He's got no place to stay. His place is in Sebokeng and now he's working here in town.— Soon this friend, who had agreed to contribute to the rent, was joined by another, workless and penniless. This came out when Oupa, bringing his lunch as usual into Mrs Stark's office, relieved by talking to her his anxiety about not having fulfilled that month's correspondence-course assignments. —He also slept in the living-room, with my other friend. On the floor, but better than nothing, aih? But now the other people are fed up, they say they're paying for sharing the sitting-room and he's always there, lying around. And doesn't pay. So now he stays with me in my room and when I want to study at night he's talking to me all the time. Man! Till midnight, one o'clock.—

What could she be expected to say? ‘Tell him to find somewhere else.' Where else? Weren't she and the young clerk surrounded by the papers, right there under crumbs from their lunch, of people who had been sent somewhere else, over years, and still had nowhere. She offered what she knew was useless, indignant at exploitation of him by his peers; he could have been her son. —Oupa, you have to be firm. You're too soft. If he could move in with you, there must be someone else he can go
to in the same way. You can't be expected to live like that. Now you've at last got a place—

The young man swallowed a mouthful and sagged in his chair, blowing out his cheeks. He shook his head, again and again, in denial of the pressure of her attention. —He was with me on the Island.—

He bit again into his chicken leg and chewed.

She held her cup in both hands and gulped tea.

—Oh god. Wha'd'we do. What's his line of work, can't we find something for him.—

—Worked in a dry cleaner's, a box factory, I don't know … he hasn't got skills.—

She threw up her hands, then rattled a pen against her cup. —Why do I have to open my big mouth! Why do I have to open my big mouth!—

 

Passing.

Passing down the street. Driven by countless times so that the destination it once meant has been obliterated, layer upon layer, by errands taking that route. At first, for months, halted at a traffic light, staring up at the closed windows of the flat as if into the eyes of someone who gives no sign. Then there was someone else's washing on a laundry stand on the baleony. A dartboard hung on the wall below where the bathroom fanlight looked out. That was when the letters stopped; or only now did the image seem as signalling that other dispossession; the end of sueh experiences in reality comes much more slowly, the drama of parting, repeated in variation—the end of touching, the end of talking on the telephone, the lengthening gap between letters—it's over-rehearsed and so the final performance is not recognized.

An old actress in many positively last appearances.

Here we are.

To stop outside the entrance, to hear the name spoken by a stranger to the site, is simply the quiet ripple of a smile: Delville Wood. This is it. Walking along the corridors, same concrete
slippery-polished ochre red, a mixture of fascination and a sort of dread. After all, the mail-boxes in the foyer are numbered through six floors, the new kind of tenant could have been leading along another corridor to another number. Even on this floor it surely must be another number. But no, more and more impossible, a coincidence against odds of six floors of flats, One-Twenty-One. The door opening on locked feelings; the coming to life as fascination and dread is the old sexual anticipation of walking along the red-polished corridor to enter One-Twenty-One. Amazing: the sensations are pleasurable, as if the one who had been there at the desk before the window will get up to press himself against her or in the sleepy surprise of an early-morning visit lift back his bedclothes for her to slide in, shivery-naked beside him—as if he were going to be there, was there, in the return of the desire he had created in this living-room where the great eye of the television set sees nothing, in this bedroom where a new, poor young tenant makes his bed. The motherly friend is helpfully surveying the needs of the new kind of tenant. She is briskly preparing the dirty stove to warm up her provision of snacks. The evidence that she knows her way about this kitchen as if she lived there is attributed to the general familiarity of women with the domestic domain: I haven't got the hang of the stove yet, the new kind of tenant says, apologetically male.

What you have done once you will do again. Sometimes Vera had reminded herself, sneered at herself, jeered in reproach; but this did not stop her. She felt resentment at self-confrontation with this evidence of what, when she was a child, her mother termed ‘behaviour'—which implied only transgression. Bennet was her lover, he was the one with whom she had slept while her young husband was fighting a war, expecting to
come home to her. Bennet therefore would be for ever in the category of lover, the one chosen above the sexual bond and moral ties of marriage, even when he became husband. That was how it was for how long? Again, the reality comes at an unnoticed pace, in the brief human time-span of one life the equivalent of the smoothing of the thumb on a holy effigy by centuries' homage of those who kiss the hand. Bennet became Ben. The skill of his love-making became satisfaction to be counted on. She could not believe she was being strongly attracted to another man; Ben, Bennet
was the other man.
Yet in a way it was he who made another man possible, wanted, because he it was who had shown her, up in the mountains with those friends of a group photograph, what love-making could be, how many revelations of excitement and wild sensation it could mean beyond what she had thought was its limit, with the husband who was out of the way at war. If Ben had taught her that the possibilities of eroticism were beyond experience with one man, then this meant that the total experience of love-making did not end with him. The understanding of this, in her body, must have been there for years—logically, ever since she first was made love to by him? But it remained unaccepted or dormant until, somewhere in her forties, oh when her hair was still abundantly glossy, not a single broken vein showing a red spiderweb on her legs, a man came to the Foundation to film an interview on its work for a documentary he was making about forms of resistance in the country. He left his card to join those of other visitors to the Foundation who imagined they might be contacted again, though what for, politeness forbade asking. Otto Abarbanel. The surname was one she had never heard of; he worked for an Austrian television network and spoke with a slight—to her—German accent. He was solemn going about his filming and formal in manner, like Germans she had met. He telephoned her several
times and came back to the office, apologizing for disturbing her, wanting to verify this information or that, and when she realized these were pretexts she was at first amused to find she did not find him a nuisance. Then, that afternoon, without any transition from formality, he grasped her fist where it was resting slackly on her desk, covered it tightly in his own. She placed her other hand over this grip. And so suddenly, there was a covenant of desire.