As he came level with the security cage of the electricity sub-station, the take-away, and then the garage and the houses prefiguring his own, the need to tell began to subside inside him with the slowing of his heartbeat. He heard himself describing his amazement, his shock, even (disarmingly honest confession) his shit-scaredness, enjoying the tears (dread of loss) in the eyes of his wife, recounting the humble goodness of the unknown woman who had put out her round butterscotch-coloured arm and pulled him from danger, heard himself describing the crowded deprivation of the shack where too few possessions were too many for it to hold, the bed curtained for some attempt at the altar of privacy; the piously sentimental conclusion of the blessing, as he was restored to come home for breakfast. The urge to tell buried itself where no one could get it out of him because he would never understand how to tell; how to get it all straight.
— A bit excessive, isn’t it? Exhausting yourself — His wife was half-reproachful, half-amused at the sight of shining runnels on his face and his mouth parted the better to breathe. But she was trailing her dressing-gown, barefoot, only just out of bed and she certainly had no idea how early he had left or how long he had been absent while the house slept. Over her cereal his daughter was murmuring to a paper doll in one of the imaginary exchanges of childhood, he could hear the boys racing about in the garden; each day without fingerprints, for them.
He drank a glass of juice, and another, of water. — I’ll eat later.—
— I should think so! Go and lie down for a while. Are you trying to give yourself a heart attack? What kind of marathon is this. How far have you been today, anyway?—
— I don’t keep track.—
— Yes, that’s evident, my darling! You don’t.—
In the bedroom the exercise bicycle, going nowhere.
In brokerage, her darling, resident at this address. He took off his running shoes and threw his shirt on the carpet. He stank of the same sweat as those he was caught up among within a pursuit he did not understand.
The unmade bed was blissful. Her lilac-patterned blue silk curtains were still drawn shut but the windows were open and the cloth undulated with a breeze that touched his moist breast-hair with a light hand. He closed his eyes. Some extremely faint, high-pitched, minute sound made timid entry at the edge of darkness; he rubbed his ear, but it did not cease. Longing to sleep, he tried to let the sound sink away into the tide of his blood, his breath. If he opened his eyes and was distracted by the impressions of the room — the dressing-table with the painted porcelain hand where her necklaces and ear-rings hung, the open wardrobe with his ties dangling thick on a rack, a red rose tripled in the angle of mirrors, his briefcase abandoned for the weekend on the chaise-longue, the exercise bicycle — he heard the sound only by straining to. But the moment he was in darkness it was there again: plaintive, feeble, finger-nail scratch of sound. He staggered up and went slowly about the room in search of the source like a blind man relying on one sense alone. It was behind a wall somewhere, penetrating the closed space of his head from some other closed space. A bird. A trapped bird. He narrowed the source; the cheeping came from a drain-pipe outside the window.
His bare feet slapping flat-footed with fatigue, he slumped back to the breakfast table. — There’s a bird trapped in the drain-pipe outside the bedroom.—
— So the kids told me.—
— Well let them take the ladder and get it out.—
— It must be a chick from the nest those mynahs built under the eaves. Fell into the gutter and then down the pipe, so it’s stuck — what can the boys do?—
— So what’s to be done about it?—
— Can’t exactly call the fire brigade. Poor little thing. Just wait for it to die.—
Back in the room, on the bed, he listened. Eyes closed. Every time the sound paused he had to wait for it to begin again. Die. It would not die. In another darkness the most insignificant of fragments of life cried out, kept crying out. He jumped from the bed and burst through the house, going after her, bellowing, his hands palsied with rage. — Get the bloody thing out, can’t you! Push up a pole, take the ladder, pull down the drain-pipe, for Christ’ sake!—
She stared at him, distancing herself from this exhibition.
— What do you expect of little boys? I won’t have them break their necks. Do it then! You do it. Do it if you can. You’re so athletic.—
Amnesty
When we heard he was released I ran all over the farm and through the fence to our people on the next farm to tell everybody. I only saw afterwards I’d torn my dress on the barbed wire, and there was a scratch, with blood, on my shoulder.
He went away from this place nine years ago, signed up to work in town with what they call a construction company — building glass walls up to the sky. For the first two years he came home for the weekend once a month and two weeks at Christmas; that was when he asked my father for me. And he began to pay. He and I thought that in three years he would have paid enough for us to get married. But then he started wearing that T-shirt, he told us he’d joined the union, he told us about the strike, how he was one of the men who went to talk to the bosses because some others had been laid off after the strike. He’s always been good at talking, even in English — he was the best at the farm school, he used to read the newspapers the Indian wraps soap and sugar in when you buy at the store.
There was trouble at the hostel where he had a bed, and riots over paying rent in the townships and he told me — just me, not the old ones — that wherever people were fighting against the way we are treated they were doing it for all of us, on the farms as well as the towns, and the unions were with them, he was with them, making speeches, marching. The third year, we heard he was in prison. Instead of getting married. We didn’t know where to find him, until he went on trial. The case was heard in a town far away. I couldn’t go often to the court because by that time I had passed my Standard 8 and I was working in the farm school. Also my parents were short of money. Two of my brothers who had gone away to work in town didn’t send home; I suppose they lived with girl-friends and had to buy things for them. My father and other brother work here for the Boer and the pay is very small, we have two goats, a few cows we’re allowed to graze, and a patch of land where my mother can grow vegetables. No cash from that.
When I saw him in the court he looked beautiful in a blue suit with a striped shirt and brown tie. All the accused — his comrades, he said — were well-dressed. The union bought the clothes so that the judge and the prosecutor would know they weren’t dealing with stupid yes-baas black men who didn’t know their rights. These things and everything else about the court and trial he explained to me when I was allowed to visit him in jail. Our little girl was born while the trial went on and when I brought the baby to court the first time to show him, his comrades hugged him and then hugged me across the barrier of the prisoners’ dock and they had clubbed together to give me some money as a present for the baby. He chose the name for her, Inkululeko.
Then the trial was over and he got six years. He was sent to the Island. We all knew about the Island. Our leaders had been there so long. But I have never seen the sea except to colour it in blue at school, and I couldn’t imagine a piece of earth surrounded by it. I could only think of a cake of dung, dropped by the cattle, floating in a pool of rain-water they’d crossed, the water showing the sky like a looking-glass, blue. I was ashamed only to think that. He had told me how the glass walls showed the pavement trees and the other buildings in the street and the colours of the cars and the clouds as the crane lifted him on a platform higher and higher through the sky to work at the top of a building.