One evening some months later, when Ida was packing Shibalo’s dirty clothes into a department store paper carrier of the kind she carefully saved for this purpose, she found paint on a shirt. She said nothing; only wondered, in her practical way, how she would get it off.
Ten
In the Easter holidays, Shibalo was free all day. There was nowhere they could go together in town. Ann drove him out into the veld, kicking up a wake of dust in the face of the city where everyone was droning away at their jobs, and sending the little car scudding along the empty, week-day highways and lurching over dust roads and farm tracks. They never knew where they were making for, only what they were looking for, and if they saw a kloof, or the concentration of trees along a declivity that meant a hidden river, Ann found a way to it. They were safe from other picnickers during the week; only once a little troop of passing piccanins stood on the further bank of a river and looked with dull astonishment on the sight of a white girl and a black man eating together.
Ann was seized with the desire for water and grass and willow trees, sun and birds. She swam in the brown rivers, waving to him where he lay sipping beer; she emerged seal-wet and dried off in the warm smell of water-weed rising from her skin. She picked the fragile and sparse flowers of the tough veld with enthusiasm and then let them wither, and she brought a book with her that she never read. He watched her activities with the amusement of novelty. He was born in the townships and had never lived the traditional African life of raising crops and herding cattle, neither had he known the city white child’s attachment to a pastoral ancestry fostered from an early age by the traditional “treats” of picnics and camping. He belonged to town life in a way that no white man does in a country where it is any white man’s privilege to have the leisure and money to get out into the veld or down to the beaches. He could not swim, and felt no more urge to get into the water when she did than if she had had some special equipment for the environment — gills or fins — that he did not naturally possess.
Intense physical silences arose between them. Her smile, his lazy voice filled space no longer fretted and pressed in upon by the jostling of others outside the walls of the flat. The vision of each for the other was not broken up — like a pack of picture cards thumb-shuffled in quick succession — as it was in the clandestinity of the streets. And they had the touch of lordliness of people who are breaking the rules out of no stronger reason than mere inclination.
Yet even in the innocence of one of these Edens each retained something watchful of the other. When Boaz’s name came naturally into her conversation, neither paused; once when he mentioned something about his child, she betrayed no curiosity about the child’s mother, but only asked, with affectionate interest: “What’s he like?” The one time when each was not making an amused and attracted audience of the other was when they talked of the possibilities of his going to Europe to study and paint. The basis of an exciting sympathy between two people is often some obstacle that lies long-submerged in the life of one; he thinks he has accepted it until the resurrection of fresh feeling, the swaggering assertion of self, that comes with a love affair. She heard from him again and again, in the piece-meal way of such revelations, details of the story about the scholarship he had been unable to take up in Italy, because his record of political activity had prevented him from getting a passport. At the time he had turned his back on the alternative of signing away, on the exit permit that was offered him, his right to come home again. He had decided that he did not want to be a painter at the price of giving up his right to fight the system that demanded that price. He had made the decision long ago, in all the ways that a decision like that is made and ratified and accepted and forgotten — except by the one whose life is ringed by it as a tree is ringed, so that as time swells it must be taken into the flesh. He had talked it out in the fire of approval that warmed the group he worked with in politics. He had entered, through it, the solidarity of the wronged, with their pride in their formidability; he had been the cause célèbre, in demand at parties at the homes of leftist and liberal whites; he had boasted, drunk, when everyone was tired of him, and the others around him in the shebeen didn’t even know what he was talking about, of his defiant sacrifice. But lying with her head on his arm in a eucalyptus plantation while she described a life that might be possible for him in Italy or France, Greece, perhaps — he did not pay much attention to the geography, and she did not always identify the strange place-names — the whole balance of his existence seemed to fall on that side, and the weight of a struggle that was other people’s as well as his own did not count against it. He forgot he was an African, burdened, like a Jew, with his category of the chosen, and was aware only of himself as a man who was one of those who, even if they are only drawing pictures on the pavement, choose for themselves.
The eucalyptus plantation was not more than twenty minutes from town; it belonged to one of the dying gold-mines near Johannesburg. Ann was sure they couldn’t be seen there, though, leaning on her elbow, she could see men cross the veld from the shafthead not far away. The little old houses of the white married quarters near by were not lived in. She got up and began to pick the narrow leaves from her dress. “This is a good place to dump a body,” she said, with a laugh. “You know. You see those photographs on the front page with an arrow next to a tree — that’s where it was found after a three-day search.”
The dry, clean smell of the eucalyptus was strong; under the trees it was cool as menthol, in the hot sun it had the live fragrance of burning wood. There was no stir in the air but the leaves moved silently in the evaporation of heat as if unseen insects clambered among them. A dove throbbed regularly in the heart of the manmade wood. The city was so near they might have put out a hand and touched it.
“Do you think you are the kind that gets murdered?” he said proudly.
“… Nobody ever thinks they’re the kind. Who does get murdered anyway?” She appealed to him when she talked; he challenged her — that was their game of communication. Her eyes were lazily following the blanketed figure of a man on the veld path; he bent to pick up something, probably a safety pin he had dropped, and then took off the blanket, cast it out round himself, and secured it closely under his neck. They were both watching him now, and they laughed. “That’ll keep out the cold.” “He’s come up off shift,” Shibalo said. “It’s dark and wet down under the ground and now he’s going back to the compound for his phuthu and his nyama.”
“I wonder where he comes from,” she said. “These mines are worked out, or just about. We came this way one day when I first arrived — with the Stilwells and everybody. We saw them dancing at one of these mines.” The man walked on, unaware of their eyes on him, and disappeared out of sight round the yellow pyramid of a mine dump.
“People get murdered for money,” he said, lying back. “Where I come from it’s money. And women get murdered by men,” he added.
She looked at him, and smiled, and gave a brief toss of her head, to settle her hair and liven the angle of her neck.
Presently she came over and squatted beside him as if she were making herself comfortable at a fire, and said, “Boaz is coming home soon.”
“Wasn’t he home last weekend?”
“I mean he’s coming home to stay. For a while.”
“Your husband is your affair,” he said, stroking her ankle.
She liked to be free, but not as free as that. She smiled brilliantly and her forehead reddened. “I know,” she said, with an uprush of confidence and gaiety. Then suddenly: “Let’s go and buy lunch at Baumann’s Drift Hotel.”
“Oh yes,” he said, “I’m sure that would be lovely.”
“Why not? I mean it. I can go in and tell them I want lunch packed up to eat on the road, and a bottle of wine.”
“You can send the boy in to get it,” he said, grinning.
“That’s right.”
They got into the car and drove off over the veld to the track; the man they had seen, or another in a blanket like his, was sitting on an old oil drum, smoking a pipe. He was talking to another man who still wore his tin helmet and yellow oilskins from underground, and as the two looked up, unhurriedly and incuriously as the car brushed them, Shibalo slowed down and hailed them. They were suspicious and startled, and then their faces opened in delight. Whatever it was that he said seemed to shock them and make them laugh; they called back after him, still laughing. Ann was excited by the ease of this communication. “How did you know they’d understand?” “I talked to them in Shangaan. It’s the first language I ever spoke, up at my grandfather’s place. I could see they were Shangaans, they’re chaps from Moçambique. They were very polite.” “Did you see, the one had clay ringlets in his hair,” she said, her eyes shining. “Of course, that’s the right thing for a young man.” He was laughing with her, in a kind of pride.
They stopped just off the main road to eat the lunch they got from the hotel, and sat under a tree where any passing motorist who looked twice might see them. Neither mentioned the dangerous carelessness of this, or suggested that they might be more discreet. Ann met with the insolence of disregard the outraged curiosity of a woman who kept her face lingeringly turned toward them from a car window; she must have drawn her companion’s attention to the sight, for the car faltered before taking up the speed of its approach again.
That evening, on the way home from a party, some white friends that they were with tried to get Gideon into a night-club with them. Someone’s brother was a member and had a bottle there, and there was a black cabaret act: these were the grounds on which, rather drunk, the party thought they would bluff their way into admittance. The story was that Gideon was a singer himself and brother of the leader of the act. “He’ll sing for you, you’ll see”—the amiable insistence of one of the young white men produced in the manager, who had been summoned to deal with the crisis, the special shrewd sternness, the clench-teeth lunatic tact, of the man who smiles in the patron face all his life and loathes and despises it. The party stood round him in the dim entrance among gilt mirrors, cigar smoke and muffled music; their appearance, the pretty, animated women, the authoritative, light-hearted air of the men, was like a distressing caricature of the scene inside, where such people were being subserviently tended, and where drunken whimsicality, fumbling sex, and argumentativeness, were respectfully condoned.
“You’ll understand, Mr. Solvesen, sir, I can’t do it. I’d lose my licence. I dare not even let the artists sit down at a table after they’ve been on.” The man’s eyes were dead with rage against these arrogant young fools who pretended not to know the vast difference between natives employed to serve or entertain and some educated black bastard sitting himself down, like one of themselves, among the members. He wanted to throw them out, but a long discipline of sycophancy held him back: he had an idea that although the brother was an insignificant member he had been introduced by and sometimes was in the party of a wealthy and important financier.
Ann, who was leaning amiably against the red velvet wall and pinching the plastic laurels of a fake Caesar on a cardboard pillar, said, “Oh, poor little man, let’s leave him alone.”
The group left quite calmly, exchanging private jokes. The girl who had spoken was good-looking, sure of herself; could one understand them? Suddenly, for no reason at all, the man in evening dress felt like a lackey — but of course, a black man was good enough for them to laugh with and slap on the back.