Over at the window, she drew back the curtains, it was a night shiny-black as wet coal and a plane making for the airport trailed its own constellation of landing lights up along the stars. The world was witnessing. D’you think that’s what he would have wanted from us?
Get back to bed.
They were closer, coming upon discoveries in one another’s being, than they had been since first they had met, when they were young and in the novelty of perilous human intimacy.
The Constitutional Court has gone into deliberation on the verdict and Harald and Claudia have no information as to how long this may take.
For them, their son has been already on trial — this trial in a court other than the one in which he will appear — and is awaiting a Last Judgment above any that may be within the jurisdiction to be handed down when his own case is heard. Motsamai is sympathetically condescending, reiterating reassurance. — I know you don’t believe me. Ah-hêh … I know what you think: what can I know if the whole question has been argued before the highest authority we have except the President of the country and God Himself, and those judges haven’t been able to come up with a verdict? But it may take them many weeks. My concern for my client does not include any fears about the outcome. What will emerge will be the end of the Death Penalty. My concern is to demonstrate without any doubt that this young man was driven by circumstances to act totally against his own nature. This woman, and the individual who was once more than his friend — the pair betrayed him out of his mind!—
There were other people in trouble waiting to be received by him. He ushered these two to the door of chambers. — Look, I want you to meet my wife, and my son — we’ve applied for medical school for him, I don’t know if he’s got the aptitude, you could give us some good advice, Claudia? What about this Friday evening? I hope you’ll get a good dinner. I’ll be coming back from the Appeal Court in Bloemfontein, so let’s say around eight-thirty, something like that.—
The aplomb glossed urbanely over the sensitivity to their situation; he knew how it was, they would be in retreat from the company of friends whose sympathetic faces served only to set them apart from the basis of old friendship, common circumstances no longer shared. It was not always necessary or desirable to keep the relationship with clients formal. Taking on a brief means establishing the confidence of human feeling, some sort of give-and-take, with the family of the life to be defended, even while retaining professional objectivity. This white couple didn’t have the resilience that blacks have acquired in all their generations of being people in trouble by the nature of their skins. He knows how to handle these two: they’ll feel they’re able to do something for him; that aside about wanting advice on a career for an ambitious son.
When they are in the visitors’ room neither lets surface their preoccupation with the unknown deliberations of the Constitutional Court. It was not the first time they had had to employ this tact; there are so many subjects and reactions that are inappropriate to display to someone living unimaginably, exposed there before you only for a half-hour between two prison warders. The prisoner is a stranger who should not be confronted with what can be dealt with only in the familiarity of freedom. Certainly Duncan knew of the subject of the first sitting of the Constitutional Court; he had access to newspapers but he — also out of tact, it’s a two-way process if it’s to make these visits possible — he does not speak of it either. Or perhaps it is because they could not even begin to comprehend what the proceedings of that Court must have meant to him as he followed reports. A man who declares himself guilty, is he declaring himself ready to die? Or does he, as only he can, know himself in the death cells with Makwanyane and Mchunu, asserting the right to life no matter what he has done?
They ask him instead if he’s able to make progress with the plans he’s drawing and he says yes he is, he is, the work is going well enough.
— It’s pretty remarkable you manage all that. — Harald is admiring; admiration is a form of encouragement that’s admissible.
— The only problem is I don’t get a chance to discuss any difficulty that comes up. With the others at the office, as we generally do. So this really will be all my own work … a bit eccentrically so, who knows.—
— Maybe someone from the firm could come and talk about it with you. Why not. — Harald is prepared to ask the senior partners for this service (if his junior colleague Verster had been the right person Duncan surely would have mentioned him); prison is not a disease, there’s nothing infectious to keep clear of, in this visitors’ room.
— Not worth the trouble. When I’ve finished the draft plan Motsamai will take it out and someone’ll look at it.—
What is really being said here is that he understands that if the Last Judgment is going to be in his favour and will ensure that his life will not end now, it still has to be endured: back to the drawing board. But what that means to him, having once sacrificed the life of order for chaos, is something that cannot be conveyed.
When they retreat down the corridors behind the riding buttocks of the usual warder, Claudia — and maybe Harald — envies a woman taking the same route who humbly tries to hide her face in a scarf as she brays aloud, like a beast of burden, in tears.
Claudia supposed they couldn’t very well refuse. They preferred to be at home together, these days. Best off like that. Recently Harald had taken tickets for a chamber music concert, his favourite César Franck on the programme, but the paths music takes are so vital, unlike the perceptions that divert in a film or a play — it drove them even deeper into their isolation.
He means well. Harald was familiar with the combination of business interests and a certain trace of personal liking come about, of course, that prompted such invitations.
Harald and Claudia had never been to a black man’s home before. This kind of gesture on both sides — the black man asking, the white man accepting — was that of the Left-wing circles to which they had not belonged during the old regime, and of the circles of hastily-formed new liberals of whose conversion they were sceptical. If they themselves in the past had not had the courage to act against the daily horrors of the time as the Left Wing did beyond dinner parties, risking their professions and lives, at least neither he nor she sought to disguise this lack (of guts: Harald faced it for himself, as he now did other soft moral options taken) by dining and wining it away. Black fellow members on the Board; well, they were no longer content to be names listed on letterheads; they were raising issues and influencing decisions; recognizing this — that at least had some meaning? And Claudia — she had something remote from anything he had, familiarity with the feel and touch of blacks’ flesh, knowing it to be like her own, always had known — an accusation, too, for all she failed to do further, in the past, but a qualification for the present; she didn’t need any gesture of passing the salt across a dinner table.
The address Motsamai’s secretary handed on his card was in a suburb that had been built in the Thirties and Forties by white businessmen of the second generation of money. Their fathers had immigrated in the years when gold-mining was growing from the panning by adventurers to an industry making profit for shareholders and creating a city of consumers; they were pedlars and shopkeepers who became processors of maize the millions of blacks who had lost the land they grew their food on couldn’t subsist without, manufacturers of building materials, clothing, furniture, importers of cigars, radios, jewellery, carpets. Their educated sons had the means of their fathers’ success to indulge in the erection of houses they believed to express the distinction of old money; dwellings like the ones the fathers might have looked on from their cottages and izbas in another country: the counts’ mansions, the squires’ manors. Architects they employed interpreted these ideas in accordance with their own conception of prestige and substance, the plantation-house pillars of the Deep South and the solid flounced balconies from which in Italy fascists of the period were making speeches. In the gardens, standard equipment, were swimming pools and tennis courts.