Her eyes, on him, seemed to open up into her self, to force him to look there. “No.”
“Just for a few days. Aleke agrees. It would be sensible.”
She said, like a child shifting retribution, “And Edna?”
“Edna’s a nurse.” And of course Edna belonged here, it was her bit of country, her home and people, while Agnes and Rebecca — even Agnes, a town girl, from the capital — had no commitment to what might happen in Gala. If Gala were to be cut off, as it so easily could be, with its single road, no railway, and tiny airstrip, the Tlumes would be at home.
She walked past the two men and went out of the room into the bedroom. He had a very real sense of panic, as if he had done something he could not undo.
She was standing there between the ugly old wardrobe where her dresses hung and the bed where they had slept last night. These things had become the possessions of a stranger; he and she might never have been there before.
“If it were not for me … you understand, my darling …? I feel I’m behaving like a lunatic, hanging on to you.”
“I won’t go.”
He approached her as if they were in a hotel room, alone in a strange room. He stroked her hair and held her. “I stink. I shouldn’t have you near me.”
They said nothing. She scratched the nail of her forefinger down his shirt. She said at last, “How many stitches?”
“Four, I think. No, two — I was counting the four holes as a stitch each.”
“Didn’t hurt? She’s good, isn’t she.”
“Here.” He took her finger and showed her where to feel the little knots of plastic gut through the trousers.
She asked, “You phone Aleke,” and he nodded. They went peacefully back to the living-room, where Hjalmar was slicing a leg of lamb. “Mahlope’s back,” Kalimo announced belligerently from the doorway.
Chapter 21
Aleke was often in the house; he had no one at home and all their lives were thrown together by an hour-to-hour uncertainty in which Kalimo’s hot meals — congealed, dried-up and indigestible — continued to be prepared with dogged regularity fixed as the passage of the sun, and eaten any time by whoever happened to be there. Kalimo apart, everybody else’s functions were blurred and individual purpose and conviction were passed over in simply doing the next thing.
Harassed Selufu depended on Aleke and Aleke assumed that Bray and Sampson Malemba would arrange food supplies for the men sheltered at the showground. But when he and Sampson arrived the second day with meat and porridge commandeered from the hospital kitchen, mugs and urns from Malemba’s Boy Scouts’ equipment — whatever they could beg or borrow — they found the men herded into the arena in the blazing sun, surrounded by soldiers. The soldiers were Talefa from the west and had no common language with the strikers. At the sight of Bray the hail went up: Shinza, Shinza. Malemba argued with the soldiers to let Bray in among the strikers. He stood there absolutely still, tensely wary, holding off any reaction he might precipitate. Then he was let in; the men crowded round to claim him. They wanted to go home; they would walk it. But the police would not let anybody go; the police had taken away more than twenty of them and the rest had been told they were going to be kept in this “cattle place.”
There was nothing to do but get on and distribute the food. He and Malemba addressed themselves to that and that only. He knew that Sampson (despite his firm indignation over the “dog-kennel” issue at Congress) had no doubts about Mweta and would always support Mweta however saddened and puzzled he might be about things that happened under the regime. At the same time, Sampson trusted him; so nothing was said about the way he had been hailed in Shinza’s name. There could be no discussion between them of what they had just seen. The weight of circumstance was palpable in the burning heat that had collected in the old Volkswagen.
He dropped off Malemba; the market was closed, the Indian shops shuttered, but the supermarket had its doors open that morning. There were few people about and wherever they drifted together, even women with baskets on their heads and babies on their backs, they attracted the attention of slumping soldiers who came to life and moved them along roughly. He saw the Gala women swaying off, sweeping their kangas round their backsides, laughing rudely and shouting abuse the soldiers couldn’t understand. Outside the boma Aleke was talking to Selufu through the window of a squad car. He signalled Bray over; the three were a conclave, representing law and order; Selufu greeted him with a businesslike smile. “Everything all right? That’s a very good job you and Malemba’re doing — I was just saying, I must keep that crowd isolated, and where can I put them?” “Nye’s been told where to get off,” Aleke said with satisfaction. And to Selufu— “You should have heard him swearing at Bray — what a character. If it’d been another time I’d have given him one on the jaw.” “Oh, the Colonel isn’t going to worry himself about a man like that one”—Selufu shaped the flattering estimate as one of a company of men who were peers.
“The men’ve been rounded up in the cattle arena without shelter from the sun.”
“Now what nonsense is that — I’ll go down myself and see about it. That sergeant doesn’t know what he’s doing. — How’s the leg? It’s not worrying you, eh?” And he drove off with a word or two to Aleke.
Aleke had brought Rebecca to the boma to try and keep some sort of routine going, but the place was under guard and hardly anyone had turned up for work. Aleke himself had been called down to the industrial quarter — there was fighting going on there sporadically between the fish-factory and lime-works men and bands of Young Pioneers — he avoided naming them and always spoke of “the hooligans.” A fire had broken out— “But it was only that old tree,” he said.
“The slave tree?”
“The one the out-of-works used to sit around under — you know. But it was all right, the fire didn’t spread. The thing’s still damp inside even though the leaves went up like paper.”
“Bray’s fond of that tree — aren’t you,” Rebecca smiled on him.
“Maybe it’s an evil symbol — time it went. I just rather liked seeing people eating chips so at ease there, after all.”
Back at the house, he said to Aleke— “Look, the showground’s been made into a prison camp. What for? Those men ought to be got back to their homes. But Selufu’s arrested about twenty and he’s treating the rest as if they’re under detention — they are under detention.”
“He can’t spare police transport to take them all that way — he needs everything he’s got.”
“Let him commandeer the school buses. Good God, you did it.”
“Yes, but that was an emergency.”
“The whole thing’s an emergency! We weren’t collecting people together for the police to arrest.”
Rebecca and Hjalmar did not look up from their plates. There was a silence between Bray and Aleke.
Aleke said, “The business of coming into town like that — it wasn’t just an idea they got in their heads. Shinza’s fellows are among them; Selufu’s trying to find out more. From the ones he took inside. There’re reports that there are camps in the Bashi just this side of the border — arms hidden in the bush. People have said Somshetsi’s crowd have been filtering over.” He lifted his shoulders and let them fall. “I don’t know. We’ve got enough troubles of our own.”