None to Accompany Me (6 page)

Sibongile came to Didymus with a blanket held draped over
her raised palms. He had no idea what for, but was always patient with her sense of drama.

—I can't live like this.—

—What is it?—

A crust of something whitish-yellow dried in a smear on the hairy surface.

—What is it!— Her rising laugh, a cry. She thrust the evidence at him.

—Oh. That. Yes.— Semen, someone's seed.

—I can't live like this, I can tell you.—

—Sibo, you've lived much worse. It didn't kill us.—

—At the beginning, years ago, yes. It was necessary. In Dar, in Botswana. But now! My God! I'm not running for my life. I'm not running from
anybody
any more, I'm not
grateful
for a bit of shelter, political asylum (the blanket dropped at her feet, her hands lifted, palms together in parody of the black child's gesture of thanks she had been taught as a little girl). This's not for you and me.—

—What can they do about it? They can't find accommodation for everyone overnight. Give it another week or so … —

—Accommodation.
How long can we be expected to carry on in this filthy dump, this whore-house for Hillbrow drunks, this wonderful concession to desegregation, what an honour to sleep under the white man's spunk.—

—What about all the others living here … it's no better for them.— He was confronting her with herself, as she was every time she entered the foyer of the hotel or walked through the room smelling of cockroach repellent that was the restaurant, embracing unknown women, men and children in the intimacy of shared exile and return.

She had a way of screwing up her eyes and opening her mouth, lips drawn back, mimicking the expression of someone
straining to hear aright. —If you're happy to come back to this from your meetings of the NEC, your big decisions, no complaints … —

—How can I have complaints when so many have come back to nowhere at all. At least we have dirty blankets.—

She ignored the smile. —And how does that help them?—

It was Vera Stark to whom she suddenly felt she could unburden herself; the farce of self-sacrifice when it was not necessary might have to be kept up with the wife of the leader in whose house she and Didymus had spent the first night, but Vera, while counted upon to understand perfectly the necessity for such tactics within that circle, was outside it. There were whites who had been in exile, but Vera had not; there were whites who shared the wariness of return, Vera was not one of them. Unburden to her and, by implication of a grant of intimacy, place responsibility on her.

When Vera answered the telephone with the usual cheerful how-are-you, there was a pause.

—Lousy.— And then that cry of a laugh.

Vera, good old Vera, didn't make the usual facilely sympathetic noises. —Let's have lunch today. Have you time?—

—I just have to get out of this place.—

On the site of the small restaurant where young Vera and her wartime lover had sat longing to embrace, the place now transformed into a takeaway outlet with additional vegetarian menu and tables open to all races, Sibongile was first to arrive. Her crossed legs were elegant in black suede boots draped to the knee.

—I love those boots. London boots.—

Vera had the generosity, towards women who still make their appearance seductive, of a woman confident that she was once successfully seductive herself and now knows she may only
occasionally, and in an abstracted way, herself be merely pleasing.

The two women kissed and each gave a squeeze to the other's arm as men greet one another with a mock punch.

—Do you? Yes, London. I suppose they give me away.—

They ordered a meal. Vera, whatever was the special for the day; her guest reading up and down the menu and asking for what was not on it—fish, was there no fish? The waiter smilingly patient, addressing her respectfully as mama, persuasive in what he somehow correctly divined was their shared mother tongue that this dish or that was (back to English) very, very nice, tasty.

Vera read the message of the fish. Lousy; everything lousy, not even possible to get what you wanted to eat.

With the waiter gone the required time had passed for her companion to be able to speak. She described the hotel—the ‘accommodation' she kept calling it, by turns derisive, angry, disgusted, despairing, and—being Sibongile, Sally—giggling sharply. —But Didy! I don't know, he seems ready to accept anything, he's
meek!
Like a rabbit, quiet, nibbling at whatever's given to him.—

That veteran of prisons and interrogation. That fox at infiltration, raiding under the eyes of the police and army. They laughed at the notion.

—I'm telling you! He seems to be living in the past, a time warp, we're still some sort of refugee, we must suffer in noble silence—for
what the cause doesn't need any more.
While he's meeting members of the Government, for God's sake! The Boers fawning all over us, inviting us to official dinners, getting themselves photographed with us for the papers! But he won't tell anyone on the NEC, straight out, we must have something decent to live in if we're to function properly at that level. They're
never going to find anything, that I know. We'll have to do it ourselves …
I'll
have to do it … but in the meantime! That flea-pit, I wouldn't put a dog in it, and you know I don't like dogs. I never dreamt I'd think back on our basement London flat and the one we had in Stockholm, those grey days—my God, I do.—

So Sibongile and Didymus Maqoma regained the personae of Sally and Didy, the code names of their old concourse with whites. They came to stay with the Starks. —Ben, you should just see the Hillbrow dump! Not just the dirt Sally goes on about … people sit around in the bar lounge watching television all day long, sprawled there sucking Coca-Cola, nothing to do and nowhere to go. She's years from that kind of slum atmosphere, even though they're her own people … she and Didy have moved away from that cheek-by-jowl existence they were at home in, the old days, Chiawelo.—

Ben defined the element exile had, at least, brought into the Maqomas' life.—Privacy; they've had it in London for years, now.—

There was no reflection between the Starks that their privacy was invaded for the five weeks Sally and Didy lived with them. Their own relationship was at the stage when the temporary presence of others was revivifying. They had an extra bathroom; that was the only condition of middle-class existence that had any importance for them.

Sally and Didy's late-born daughter, Mpho, arrived from her school in England. She stayed indiscriminately, a weekend here, a week there, between her grandmother's house in Alexandra township and the Starks' house, sleeping in the bed and among the curling pop-star posters and odd trinkets that had survived their daughter Annick's adolescence and absence. The Maqoma daughter was a sixteen-year-old beauty of the kind
created by the cross-pollination of history. Boundaries are changed, ideologies merge, sects, religious and philosophical, create new idols out of combinations of belief, scientific discoveries link cause and effect between the disparate, ethnically jumbled territorial names make a nationality out of many-tongued peoples of different religions, a style of beauty comes out of the clash between domination and resistance. Mpho was a resolution—in a time when this had not yet been achieved by governments, conferences, negotiations, mass action and international monitoring or intervention—of the struggle for power in the country which was hers, and yet where, because of that power struggle, she had not been born. This schoolgirl combined the style of
Vogue
with the assertion of Africa. She was a mutation achieving happy appropriation of the aesthetics of opposing species. She exposed the exaggeratedly long legs that seem to have been created not by natural endowment but to the specification of Western standards of luxury, along with the elongated chassis of custom-built cars. The oyster-shell-pink palms of her slender hands completed the striking colour contrast of matt black skin with purple-red painted fingernails. Her hair, drawn back straightened and oiled to the gloss of European hair, was gathered on the crown and twisted into stiff dreadlocks, Congolese style, that fringed her shoulders. Despite all this, Mpho did not have the aspirant beauty queen's skull grin but a child's smile of great sweetness, glittering in her eyes. Out of her mouth came a perky London English. She could not speak an African language, neither the Zulu of her mother nor the Xhosa of her father. —Oh but I
understand
, mother dear, I can
follow
— And she would open her eyes wide and roll her head, appealing to high heaven in exactly the gesture of the mother with whom she was arguing.

—Yes, but who knows you
understand
when you never
answer, people will think you're an idiot, my retarded child. You're going to have lessons.—

—Well, that's pretty humiliating for you, ma, isn't it—have your daughter taught our language as if it's French or German or something.—

Sally appealed to their hosts, Vera and Ben —Listen to that. My girl, that is exactly what has been done to our people, you, your father, me. We've been alienated from what is ours, and it's not only in exile. Your father's descended from a great chief who resisted the British more than a hundred years ago—you have a name to live up to! You were robbed of your birth—that should have been right here. Take back your language.—

The schoolgirl gave a smile of complicity with the witnesses to her mother's emotionalism, dealing with it in harmless insolence. —I'll learn from my
gogo.
— She giggled at her use of at least one word in a mother tongue, but was too shy or perhaps defiant to admit that she was serious about the intention. It was of her own volition that she left the guest room so well suited to her age and comfort and often went off to stay with her grandmother in Alexandra. After the first duty visit of respect required of a son's child, Sally had not expected the girl to go back again soon, let alone pack her luminescent duffle bag and spend days and nights there in the house with its broken-pillared stoep and dust-dried pot-plants, battered relic of real bricks and mortar with two diamond-paned rotting windows from the time when Alex was the reflection of out-of-bounds white respectability, yearned for, imitated, now standing alone on ash-coloured earth surrounded by shacks, and what had once been an aspiration to a patch of fenced suburban garden now a pile of rubbish where the street dumped its beer cans and pissed, and the ribcages of scavenging dogs moved like bellows. How could a child brought up with her own bedroom, fresh milk delivered at the
front door in Notting Hill Gate every morning, tidy people who sorted their newspapers for recycling, be expected to stand more than one night in such a place,
gogo
or no
gogo?
Going out across a yard to a toilet used by everyone round about! Heaven knows what she might pick up there! A return to a level of life to which Sibongile, Didymus, had been condemned when they were their child's age—what did a sixteen-year-old born in exile know of what it was like when there was no choice?

The distress is something that can be conveyed to someone other—Vera—but a kind of pride or self-protection would prevent Sibongile from acknowledging to the child herself the dismayed humbling of the mother by the worldly child's innocent level of acceptance: the sense that she knows what home is.

Mpho moved between Alexandra and the house that came from Vera's divorce settlement with an ease that charmed the Starks. At the Starks', along with her parents, she met and mingled with the Starks' friends, Vera's colleagues from the Foundation, the protégé Oupa and the lawyers. The young people got on well together, Mpho was carried off to parties with these youngsters her relieved parents knew were decent, no drugs or drunkenness; through a contaet of one of the lawyers, the Maqomas found exactly what was needed, a small house in a white suburb near the school where, again with the help of someone met in the Stark circle, the girl was accepted to complete her A-levels. The day after they moved in with nothing but borrowed beds, Sally, taking the car the Movement provided for Didy, drove along the street of local shops to look for secondhand furniture, and reversing into a parking place was held up by a municipal cleaner, a woman sweeping the gutter-muck into a drain. She didn't know that women did this work, now. Well, any job was better than nothing, these times. It could be that some of those she had known in exile, the fighters in the training
camps, might end up sweeping streets; the probability gave her an internal cringe, the drawing in of her stomach muscles that was involuntary when she confronted herself with the responsibility in which she was engaged: she had just been appointed deputy director of the Movement's regional redeployment programme, at present a collection of research papers emerging at the pace of stuttering faxes. As she locked the car (forewarned since the day of arrival of those for whom theft was better than nothing) she saw that the cleaner had not moved on, was leaning on her broom and looking at her, a woman dressed ridiculously in the handout of bright protective overalls, football stockings rolled round her calves, flat-footed in men's shoes, a fisherman's hat complete with slots for flies crammed on her head. Begging? She would give her a greeting, anyway:
Sawubona, sisi.

The woman did not approach but spoke excitedly. —Sibongile, when did you come? I'm Sela's child, your mother's cousin, you remember? From Sela's house, you used to see us there, in Witbank.—

Wakened suddenly, shaken alive into another light, another existence. Sally is drawn over to her other self, standing there, the one she started out with, this apparition with a plastic bag tied over the hand with which, deftly, it picks up dirt the broom misses. Home.