None to Accompany Me (25 page)

An insect settles on a leaf and slowly moves its wings.

She sat and watched.

The Fat Nurse and the Thin One, the Chinese and the Black (nurses are known by rank and the most obvious features, they seem to have no names) came and went, marking the passing of time ritually as the tongue of a church bell striking against its palate where traffic is not yet heavy enough to break the sound waves. How ignorant, how far away from this, she had been curious:
what's it like. This
is what it's like; an anatomical demonstration that spares nothing. When, in church between her mother and father, she heard about that moral division, the soul and the body, and grew up unable to believe in the invisible, what the priest really was talking about and didn't know it, was this: what he called soul was absence, the body was presence. It was swollen now, not only the hands: one day when she walked in there was the young man's flat belly blown up, the skin taut and shiny, a version in a fun-fair distorting mirror. To look for identity in the face was to be confronted by an oxygen mask. The Chinese gave it a touch to make it what she judged would be more comfortable, if one could feel. The Black used a little
blood-sucking device to draw specimens from a huge toe pierced again and again. The Fat One cleaned the leaking anus. If one could feel? The dumb creature that is the body cannot tell. It is an effigy of life ritually, meticulously attended. Outside, in between times, the acolytes eat grapes, arrange on the counter flowers left behind by dead patients, and whisper forbidden telephone calls to children home from school and boy-friends at work.

Vera no longer imagined the plump young woman down the turn-off from the eucalyptus trees and phrased what she ought to be saying to her. Ivan, back at the house where he was conceived, disappeared from her awareness as if he were still in England. The wheeze and click of machines that now breathed for the body and eliminated its waste chattered over its silence. Remote from her, within that awe, a final contemplation was taking place—isn't that what it is—what it's like?—the years on the Island, night study to be a lawyer in what the politicians promise to be a new day, freedom the dimensions of a flat in a white suburb, a box-cart pulled through the dust by children— who knew what the final contemplation must be? In that silence she saw that the certainty she had had of death, Zeph Rapulana's death among nine at Odensville, when he was, in fact, to appear before her alive, was merely a mis-sort in time, a letter first delivered to the wrong address: the certainty belonged to her where it reached her now, in this place, in this presence.

Among the casualties of violence listed in the newspaper is a clerk in the employ of the Legal Foundation, Oupa Sejake, who has died of complications resulting from an injury received when the Foundation's vehicle was hijacked.

 

It was only decent that the Foundation be represented at the funeral. Because the poor young man had been more or less her assistant, Mrs Stark would be the obvious choice. Lazar Feldman volunteered to accompany her and do the driving, since muscles torn by the bullet's passage through her calf felt the strain of depressing a brake pedal. But the day before they were to leave he developed that perfect alibi for opting out of anything and everything, virus flu. While other colleagues were avoiding one another's eyes and suggesting someone ought to take his place, she said—without having any idea of whom she might have in mind—no need to worry, she would not have to go alone. Perhaps she had been thinking Ivan might come with her; it would give them a chance to talk, reopen the secret passages between intimates that have to be unsealed each time after absence. The first week of his visit had belonged entirely to him and Ben—between meetings at the Foundation with major funders from Sweden and Holland and running to the hospital, she barely had had time for a meal with her son. Ah—but she remembered Ben mentioning, with pride that drew down the corners of his mouth, that Ivan was so well thought of internationally
in the banking world that the Development Bank had invited him as a special guest to participate in talks with a representative of the IMF, to take place next day.

Another claim of life while the process of dying was moving to its close was the hearing in the Supreme Court of the farmer Tertius Odendaal's appeal against a judgment allowing an informal housing settlement to be established on the land known as Odensville acquired from him by the Provincial Administration. Zeph Rapulana was present when the judges dismissed the appeal; one of the Foundation's lawyers who had accompanied him while she was preoccupied with the Swedes and the Hollanders brought a note: ‘Vera, we've won, this time we've shut the door in his face.'

This other conclusion, of a process that had seemed to have little chance of success, bubbled a clear spring through her preoccupations. Zeph Rapulana had a base in the city, now, backyard cottage in a suburb—his success with the Odensville affair had brought him to the attention of a housing research project which employed him as adviser. On the telephone they both talked at once: Vera wanted to know exactly what the judge had said, how Odendaal reacted—and it became quite natural for her to go on to suggest, look, why don't you come with me tomorrow, we could talk. He knew about the death of the young man who had been shot, as she was, on the road: —If it'll be any help to you.—

The stand of eucalyptus. Then approaching, a face awaiting, demanding recognition: it happened, it happened, it happened here, the death began here—the place on the road where Oupa, sitting beside her as this other man, Zeph, sits beside her now, drew up and called through the window, Brother.

—This is where they were.—

Pointing out a landmark, that's all. The only being with
whom what happened there is shared has disappeared. But there is a counter-balance in the presence beside her; with him is shared something else, living, that could not be shared with anyone else. From the day Odendaal had closed the door in their faces; from the statement, the threat (never to be discussed between them) Don't be afraid, Meneer Odendaal, you won't be harmed, your wife, your children—to the nine dead, to the judge's words dismissing Odendaal's appeal, the door shut in Odendaal's face—this single return of land to its people was their right, Rapulana's and hers, to quiet elation. Like the feeling between lovers continuing in the presence of the pain of others, it showed no disrespect to the dead. Out of companionable silences she let her thoughts rise aloud now and then. —Why is it that more can be done for the dead than the living? I'm on my way to his home, his wife, now, but neither I nor anyone else went to fetch her while he was at least still alive, although he might not have known she was there. There was no proper address to send a message, a telegram, no telephone, no one knew how to get in touch with her short of driving there, but once he died—suddenly someone at the office knew someone else who was a friend of his, the Soweto grape-vine was followed, there was a way found to get a message to her: Oupa dead. Just that.—

—You don't think he'd let her know about the attack.— —I don't know. And would she read the papers? Unlikely. Of course, someone might have heard from the driver of the cattle truck and passed the news on to her. Who can say? It's hard for someone like me to imagine the feelings of a woman like her—living as she has to. You've known so many … I suppose it doesn't strike you … She gets his body back. And that seems so important. The dead body? She didn't show much enthusiasm when he walked in that day. But someone came specially—from
her—to arrange the transport, the money for the funeral. All the things that distance and poverty and … I don't know— acquiescence in the state of things?—couldn't manage before become possible when there's so little purpose left. But I suppose it's your custom.—

He watched the mealie fields approach and turn away, cleaved by the road. —We have too many graves and too few houses for the living.—

Vera followed the ritual of the funeral without understanding any comfort it could bring to the wife. She was dressed in a polka-dot skirt and jacket that she endured like a tight pair of shoes (an outfit bought by her husband from a street vender in the city?), the skin of her stunned face peeled raw by tears. The children were wearing white socks and polished school shoes. The gangling boy who (that day, that day) hadn't returned from school held the hand of a two- or three-year-old who stared down curiously into the pit of dank-smelling earth ready to receive his father. There was singing, of great beauty, from these women left behind, and when they wept one of them took Vera's arm because with the bullet that passed through her leg she was part of the son they mourned and she wept, with them, for the horrible metamorphosis revealed by Intensive Care.

The company trooped back to the house. She felt impatient with herself, confused. —Oupa. Why was he named that? Grandfather, old man, and he's dead before thirty. Why do you name children ‘old man' for god's sake?— Zeph smiled down at her. —Something to do with authority. You take the Afrikaans word for a respected man and it gives—wha'd'you say—confers power on the child. You give him the strength of a
baas.—

At the Washing of the Hands in tin basins set out by women he told her she was expected to say a few words to the wife and company. But apart from their own language they understood
only Afrikaans, the language of the whites they worked for in that district, and hers was court-room Afrikaans; she did not have the right words for this occasion. —You speak to them.—

A mild reproach. —How do I know what you want to say?—

—I want to say I don't know what to say.—

—No, come on.—

—Really.—

—They want to know how he died, of what sickness, what happened at the attack, that he was a soldier in Umkhonto, that he was well-thought-of at work, that he was a good man who cared only about his family although he was far away—

—There, you know it all. Tell them you're saying it in their language for me.—

He became again as he was when he was among his own people at Odensville; the cadence of his voice, his gestures, transformed a fragmented life into wholeness, he knew exactly how to do it, it came to him from within himself in symbiosis with the murmuring group gathered. They understood the tradition and she understood, without words, without tradition, their understanding. It was not true; the son and husband of this place left behind did not think only of his family, he yearned for a girl who had seen things and possessed knowledge he would never have, he did not die peacefully, his body, in attempts made to keep it alive, suffered tortures his interrogators in prison had not thought of. It was not true, in fact, but this stranger she had brought with her made it so beyond evidence. Who was Mrs Stark, herself to some the forbidding eminence of the Legal Foundation, to others the procuress of convenient abortion, to know what was between the young man and the clumsy-bodied young woman with her peasant stance and the classical three lines of beauty round her neck? Who was to know whether or
not the sister in charge was right when she said, finally, he doesn't feel what we're doing to him?

Vera had cleansed her hands of death, with the others. In the car driving to the city she reflected differently, now. —At least we saw him come back. At least he's home.—

The sonorous, lyrical, stately persona created by the company in which Zeph had found himself had retired somewhere within where it had its place and would never leave him. He spoke out of what he had perfectly reconciled with it, in his dealings with laws made to manipulate him, and the entry into relationships for which there was no pre-existing formula of hostility or friendship, suspicion or trust; combinations thrown together by compatibilities discovered, side by side, in conflict and in change. —He didn't want to go
back
, did he.—

How did Rapulana know? He'd seen him only a few times, first at Odensville and then at the Foundation, and, of course, at the party in Vera's house. —He'd had something to drink that night … yes … he told me he was going to do what he thought about when he was in prison. He was going to disappear and travel the world, he was going to Cuba—to England, China, specially Cuba—everywhere.—

The end of the joy-ride.

 

Lucky to be alive.

Ivan paid the courtesy visit expected of a son's interest in his mother's work and the assumed interest of her colleagues in her family; the Foundation is not a business, where directors and staff have no connection outside the purpose of making money. The very nature of their work, concerned with the condition of personal lives in communities, influences their own sense of community. One or two of the older lawyers remembered him as a schoolboy or youth; others, such as Lazar Feldman, exchanged ready-made friendliness established by proxy through their familiarity with his mother. That he looked so like her made this oddly easy. Chatting with him, Lazar remarked how sorry he was to have had to let Vera down over the trip to Oupa's funeral, he really would have liked to be there.

From the Foundation, Ivan took Vera out to lunch. Just the two of them, the son's treat, she walking before him to the table he had reserved in the quietest corner of a good restaurant, the succession to clandestine lunches taken with a lover.

—Is this the time when we compare notes?— She was contentedly
flippant, using the phrasing he would remember from the days when he came from boarding school and the right moment suddenly arrived for wariness to dissolve, so that they had no age, either of them, moved into knowing each other as an element common to them.

—I was thinking all the time I was there—(he read up and down the wine list, looking for something special) you're lucky, with the Foundation. They're such a good crowd, so absolutely dedicated but intelligently tough—you know what I mean? None of the feeling that it's a refuge for the well-meaning who can't face the kind of world I work in, can't face that you have to deal with it, with the Haves, if you're going to achieve anything for the Have-nots. And the way they value you and you're so completely absorbed in what you do … lucky.—