Ann and Gideon could not have been further from the world of ordinary appearances, earth covered with tar, space enclosed in concrete, sky framed in steel, that had made the mould of their association. They walked over the veld and already it seemed that this was as it had always been, before anyone came, before the little Bushmen fled this way up to Rhodesia and the black man spread over the country behind them, before the white man rediscovered the copper that the black men had mined and abandoned — not only as it had been, but as it would be when they were all gone again, yellow, black and white. They did not speak, as if they were walking on their own graveyard.
Mapulane said, “You’re not too comfortable, I’m afraid — stay as long as you like, man,” but he admitted to Gideon, in an impersonal way, when they were talking about his position in general, that things were “a bit tricky”. The Native Commissioner would be bound to find out Ann was there. Gideon said lazily, “She helps with research about African music, eh—? She’s been in reserves all over the show—”
Yet he was not seriously opposing Mapulane’s need for caution; he knew that the good chap was already suspect enough on account of certain activities with political refugees on the run that the Commissioner suspected but hadn’t yet been able to pin down. Mapulane had had mysterious visitors before now; they came and went before their presence could be investigated, and that was the best way.
He and Gideon had long talks about politics and the personalities of politics; whether Sijake was too much under the thumb of the white leftists who advised him, whether he could handle Thabeng, whether Nguni could be counted on in a mess. Listening to Mapulane’s way of speaking, sitting with the tall, thin, “respectably” dressed figure near him (Mapulane kept, perhaps as a protective colouring, perhaps because, despite everything, some part of him corresponded to the image, something of the black teacher’s humble assumption of a status that doesn’t ask too much), Gideon felt the free running of a special, unimpeded understanding that comes with certain friends. Mapulane never said two words to him that did not go deeper than the words and touch off some recognition of an attitude or an idea that lay awaiting some such claim in himself. Yet when they left he saw in Mapulane’s affectionate face what he was thinking now that he was driving away. The small head on the tall body, the glasses, neatly-parted hair and frowning smile — the smile was one of tolerance, helplessness at something that couldn’t be enquired into; there went Gideon, landing up with this white girl, losing himself with a white girl on the way, the hard way that didn’t provide for any detours. Here Mapulane did not follow him; only regretted him.
The baobabs passed, slowly turning forms as the car approached, then left them behind. The Rhodesian border was only a few miles away. Ann was one of those people who, because of the very casualness with which they regard formalities, are usually equipped to go anywhere. She had her passport lying somewhere in the suitcase she had hastily packed — the passport was simply kept there, anyway; in half an hour they could be over the border — no doubt someone like Mapulane could smuggle Gideon across somehow, if she and Gideon really wanted it. But she said nothing, just sang a little, as a soldier sings on a troop-ship or a transport lorry bound for some destination he does not expect to know. The border was something she and Gideon had not approached; they did not know how far or near they were from it in the real measure of their distance from the life that lay on the other side. They knew one thing: that it was irresistible to be together. Whether they wanted to make this fact responsible for the rest of their lives was not something they had troubled themselves with yet. Neither had she ever asked herself how long they could go on not troubling; not cowardice but a confidence rarely impaired by failure allowed her to come upon such things without preparation. She was bored by self-doubts and anticipations; she trusted herself to know what she wanted as she knew the moment to cross the road in traffic.
Gideon thought about James Mapulane’s face, but he did not think about the border. He had not thought about the border since the time when he was supposed to be going to Italy, and had thought about it all the time, the form constantly changing like a cloud taking shape from what is in one’s mind — now the actual veld and stones and baobabs, the wide brown river of this border near Mapulane’s, now the sands and the kraals hedged with euphorbia that led to the one in Bechuanaland, now simply the outline and end of something, an horizon over which he was a still smaller dot within the diminishing dot of a silver aeroplane.
They slept in the car on the way to Basutoland. It was a small car and even the back seat, which Ann had, was very cramped. In the morning they were dazed and stiff-necked and she said, “We’re going to buy a tent.” He had slept in all sorts of places but never in a tent; that belonged again to that world of pleasure jaunts and leisure that black children did not have.
“Oh look …” A stretch of tall yellow grass, where the sakabula birds flew, trailing their long tails, was passing her window. “A house there — imagine a house in the middle of that …” She had never had a house of her own, but all over the world she saw places where a house might be, and to which she would never go back.
“I like a place with trees. Right in the middle of trees. You know, one of those houses where the light is striped, all day long.”
The sluggishness of the cold and stuffy night in the car lifted as they drove, and their responses, that had coiled away back to themselves in separateness, began to warm and open.
“But grass all round, as high as your head, as far as you can see … Let’s go down there a bit?”
“What for?”
“Oh what for, what for.”
Ann strolled over the whole earth as if it belonged to her, for she did not question, which amounted to the same thing, that there was nowhere where she wasn’t wanted. He brought a blanket out of the car and when they had walked a little way they sat hidden in the grass, leaning comfortably back to back, eating bananas and smoking, coming back to life.
He said, “What time is it?”
“Are you hungry?”—because this was his usual way of suggesting they ought to get a meal. She leaned over and broke off another banana, offering it to him. But he wanted somehow to attach this space of existence, which he and the woman both contained and were contained by indivisibly, to what he had all the rest of his life — to that constant bearing away upon actions and desires. He was not hungry — not in any way at all. He wanted nothing, and had in himself everything. He did not need to touch her, even without touching her he possessed her more completely than any woman he had ever had. She lay back and closed her eyes. He watched her a little while as she slept, the pulse in her neck the only moving thing in the silence about him, and then he got up and went in search of a reedy place that he had noticed, not far off, from the car; if there was water there, he wanted to wash. He smiled at the thought of the sight of himself, walking through the veld with her cake of perfumed soap and a nylon toothbrush.
Ann opened her eyes on one of the beautiful, untidy birds, swaying almost within reach of her hand on a thick dead stalk of the grass that was high as a wall round the nest the blanket had broken into it. She sat up with a cat-yawn. Her body was with lack of it. The strands of the bird’s long tail tangled in panic with the grasses as it took off. She stood up to watch it and saw a man standing a few yards away.