Joy. From something so slight.
They were friends for some time before they were lovers. Before the ultimate joy of making love with someone who, too, is in the battle, for whom the people in the battle are her only family, her life, the happiness she understands — as he now does — is the only possible one. She told him afterwards she knew it would be hard for him to allow himself to become her lover; she was satisfied to be his friend so long as that satisfied him. But once they were lying naked together for the first time she made a solemn condition. — I wanted this. Yet I don't want it at all if it's going to replace our friendship with something else.—
He raised himself on his elbow in her bed to look at her with honesty that doesn't belong in bed. She thought he was about to take the opportunity to tell her right away that he loved his wife, his beautiful wife whom she had seen, visited, shared concern with for his welfare, and to tell her that she herself must know the strict limits of this share of him she was taking. He lay back again. — You are the only friend I've ever had.
That's what I feel. Now. That's what making love with you has told me.—
The immense reassurance sent her venturing deeper into the territory of intimacy. She wore a curio-store filigree ring, and she began cleaning the dried soap from its recesses with her thumbnail. — And when you first knew Aila.—
She didn't exclude Aila; it was one of the things he found remarkable about her, moving, that she did not want to oust Aila — from his mind, when they were together. She conceived of Aila as an equal, not an adversary defeated: she didn't refer to her as 'your wife'. He was filled with. gratitude, yes. No guilt, no concealment between them, with her; everything that had remained hungry, stunted, half-realized, streamed towards her through opened gates.
— We were so simple. You can hardly imagine. In Benoni's coloured township. Such simple people. And young. I think, you know, our understanding was too easy. The first layer. And you believe that's all, that's it. For myself, I'd say I didn't know what I needed.—
Needing Hannah. And now she was there, she had discovered Sonny for himself. She was a euphoria natural as a pulse beat with him wherever he went, in the house with him when he came home after he had left her, making him oblivious to the hostility of the boy (after the business of bumping into him at a cinema), making it possible to perform as a father and husband. A husband! Aila was not an emotionally demanding woman — imagine Aila! But she was accustomed to the quiet occurrence of conjugal love-making, that as the children grew up had become less and less frequent, more peripheral to loving. When a daughter begins to show breasts and a son's voice begins to be mistaken, on the phone, for his father's, there comes a kind of reversal of the clandestinity courting couples have to practise in the house of their parents: the long-married now feel an inhibition about making love in the presence — separated only by the bedroom walls — of children who themselves are now capable of feeling the same sexual desires. Of course, this never would be said openly, between Aila and him; but it must have been there, and it meant she didn't expect — she didn't expect him to expect — to make love to her more than occasionally. And this periodicity surely had been extended by the two years in prison. It did not mean there was no physical contact between them. On the contrary, once in the dark, wordless, Aila always moved into his shelter, against his chest or round his back, and neither was roused by the warmth of his genitals against her or the shape of her breasts in his hands. They would fall asleep; fall away from each other only in sleep, as they had done for years, as they cleaned their teeth before bed and she creamed her hands.
The first time he had to make love to his wife after he had begun to make love to Hannah — it was not so much that too much time had gone by, but that he quickly learned, as a novice deceiver, that to avoid this was the surest way to give himself away — he trembled with sorrow and disgust at himself after he withdrew from her body. The caresses were an easy performance, rehearsed in the habit of marriage, without feeling, dutiful to please Aila, but the uncontrollable animal thrill of his orgasm was horrible. He wanted to get up out of that bed and house and go to Hannah. Shut out everything, himself, blotted against the being of Hannah. And every now and then, in the carefully arranged and guarded life he was managing, when he judged it was time to approach Aila again — to pretend to want poor Aila, oh my god — the act drained him, in shame. Sometimes he felt a final spurt of anger, towards Aila, sperm turned to venom.
For months the most precious aspect of his new life with Hannah was that it was clandestine. Like underground political life, it had nothing to do with the everyday. They owned one another because their times together were shared with no-one. They could not even be in anyone else's thoughts in any way that could reach out and touch them, because no-one knew where they were when they were together. To Sonny, who never before had used the commonplace deceptions — the meetings he was supposed to be attending, the visit to Pretoria she was supposed to be making in the course of her work — these were a kind of magic that made them invisible to the ordinary world he had inhabited all his life. Something he never would have thought possible. When he and she found themselves in the same public company at the same time, it was-to them — part of their wonderful spell of intimacy that there shouldn't be the slightest possibility that anyone else present should know of the secret knowledge of each other only those two, themselves, had. They were so successful that now and then somebody would introduce them: I don't think you've met. this is.
Sonny and Hannah: presented each to the other, as strangers, by a third person. What secret pleasure, to conceal the desire between them that this titillated! Sonny had revealed to him how part of the need in his life had been of a sense of erotic fun. To leave, separately, a gathering where each had given full attention to serious decisions (for the roused state of an ecstatic love affair, in men and women mutually dedicated to a political ideal and battle, heightens their concentration and application in relation to these) and fifteen minutes later be undressing each other: what an exquisite range of changing responses such an afternoon expanded! How much that he never would have known he was capable of experiencing, never ever. That it needed the secret (secret everywhere) presence of this woman, this ample girl — she was younger than she looked — to make possible for him. For months when they talked after love-making it was of the remote places they would like to go together. Islands off this or that continent. Forests in the mountains. Nothing but gulls or owls. Like all lovers, they did not know they were trying to prolong by transformation into words, into the future tense, the physical illusion of personal freedom that fades as the lulled and sated senses come back and will relay the knowledge of time passing with traffic: work, loss, hunger and pain, pacing out there in the street: other people.
But even if the islands and forests were only post-coital reveries, they had Hannah's cottage, Hannah's bed, which was unlike any other bed Sonny had ever known, not only because of what passed between her and him there but because it was not a bed at all — a very big mattress laid directly on the floor. He thought when he first saw it that it meant she was not properly settled in; or perhaps it was some Japanese idea. There were so many tastes, he, coming from his background, did not know about. Futon? she prompted, and laughed. Ah, no, just that she liked to be close to the wood of the floor, the earth beneath it. And how right she was. How unnecessary to have little bedside cabinets with hand-woven lampshades you had to be careful not to knock over in your sleep. Under the softness of the mattress only the law of gravity itself.