Life Times Stories Part 19

'I know it. Did you see? A white man?'

He began to dress.

'Don't go out, my darling. For G.o.d's sake! Wait for him to go away.'

He sat on the side of the bed, in s.h.i.+rt and trousers. They listened for the sound of a car leaving. They knew why they had not heard it arrive; they had been making love.

Still no sound of a car.

'He must have walked through the bushes, all the way from the road.'

Her lover was deeply silent and thoughtful; as if this that had happened to them were something to which there was a way out, a solution!

'Somehow climbed up the bougainvillaea.' She began to s.h.i.+ver.

'It could have been a cat, you know, gone wild. Trying to get in. There are always cats around stables.'

'Oh no, oh no.' She pulled the bedclothes up to the level of her armpits, spoke with difficulty. 'I heard him laugh. A horrible little coughing laugh. That's why I put my face in the pillow.' Her cheeks flattened, a desperate expressionlessness.

He stroked her hand, denying, denying that someone could have been laughing at them, that they could ever be something to laugh at.

After a safe interval she dressed and they went outside. The bougainvillaea would give foothold up to the small window, but was cruelly th.o.r.n.y. She began to be able to believe that what she had heard was some sort of suppressed exclamation of pain and serve the b.a.s.t.a.r.d right. Then they searched the ground for shoe prints but found nothing. The red earth crumbled with worm-shredded leaves would have packed down under the soles of shoes, but, as he pointed out to her, might not show the print of bare feet. Would some dirty Peeping Tom of a private detective take off his shoes and tear his clothes in the cause of his disgusting profession? She a little behind him but she wouldn't let him go alone they walked in every direction away from the cottage, and through the deserted stables where there were obvious hiding-places. But there was no one, one could feel there was no one, and on the paved paths over which rains had washed sand, no footprints but their own. On the way to their cars, they pa.s.sed the granadilla vine they had remarked to one another on their way in, that had spread its glossy coat-of-mail over weakening shrubs and was baubled with unripe fruit. Now the ground was scattered with green eggs of granadil-las, bitten into and then half-eaten or thrown away. He and she broke from one another, gathering them, examining them. Only a hungry fruit-eating animal would plunder so indiscriminately. He was the first to give spoken credence. 'I didn't want to tell you, but I thought I heard something, too. Not a laugh, a sort of bark or cough.'

Suddenly she had him by the waist, her head against his chest, they were laughing and giddy together. 'Poor monkey. Poor, poor old lonely monkey. Well, he's lucky; he can rest a.s.sured we won't tell anyone where to find him.'

When she was in her car, he lingered at her face, as always, turned to him through the window. There was curiosity mingled with tenderness in his. 'You don't mind a monkey watching us making love?'

She looked back at him with the honesty that she industriously sh.o.r.ed up against illusions of any kind, preparing herself for some day their last afternoon. 'No, I don't mind. I don't mind at all.'

While Charles drove about the country fetching what was needed sometimes away several days, covering long distances Vusi and Eddie bricked up the fourth wall of the shed. The girl insisted on helping although she knew nothing about the type of work. 'Just show me.' That was her humble yet obstinate plea. She learnt how to mix cement in a puddle of the right consistency. Her long skinny arms with the blue vein running down the inside of the elbows were stronger than they looked; she steadied timber for the door-frame. The only thing was, she didn't seem to want to cook. They would rather have had her cook better meals for them than help with what they could have managed for themselves. She seemed to expect everyone in the house to prepare his own meals when he might feel hungry. The white man, Charles, did so, or cooked with her; this must be some special arrangement decided between them, a black woman would always cook every night for her lover, indeed for all the men in the house. She went to town once a week, when the combi was available, to buy food, but the kind of thing she bought was not what they wanted, what they felt like eating for these few weeks when they were sure there would be food available. Yoghurt, cheese, brown rice, nuts and fruit the fruit was nice (Vusi had not seen apricots for so long, he ate a whole bagful at a sitting) but the frozen pork sausages she brought for them (she and Charles were vegetarian) weren't real meat. Eddie didn't want to complain but Vusi insisted, talking in their room at night, it was their right. 'That's what she's here for, isn't it, what they're both here for. We each do our job.' He asked her next day. 'Joy, man, bring some meat from town, man, not sausages.'

Eddie was emboldened, frowned agreement, but giggling. 'And some mealie-meal. Not always rice.'

'Oh Charles and I like mealie-pap too. But I thought you'd be insulted, you'd think I bought it specially for you.'

They all laughed with her, at her. As Vusi remarked once when the black men talked in the privacy of their own language, 'Joy' was a funny kind of cell-name for that girl, without flesh or flirtatiousness for any man to enjoy. Yet she was the one who came out bluntly with things that detached the four of them from their separate, unknown existences behind them and the separate existences that would be taken up ahead, and made a life of their own together, in this house and yard.

It took Charles, Vusi and Eddie to hang an articulated metal garage door in the entrance of the converted shed. It thundered smoothly down and was secured by a heavy padlock to a ring embedded in Joy's cement. There was the pleasure to be expected of any structure of brick and mortar successfully completed; a satisfaction in itself, no matter what mere stage of means to an end it might represent. They stood about, looking at it. Charles put his arm on the girl's shoulder, and she put out an arm on Vusi's.

Eddie raised and lowered the door again, for them.

'It reminds me of my grandfather's big old roll-top desk.'

Eddie looked up at the girl, from their handiwork. 'Desk like that? I never saw one. What did your grandfather do?'

'He was a magistrate. Sent people to jail.' She smiled.

'h.e.l.l, Joy, man!' Either it was a marvel that the girl's progenitor should have been a magistrate, or a marvel that a magistrate should have had her for a granddaughter.

One thing she never forgot to bring from town was beer. All four drank a lot of beer; the bottom shelf of the refrigerator was neatly stocked with cans. Charles went and fetched some and they sat in the yard before the s.h.i.+ning door, slowly drinking. Vusi picked up tidily the tagged metal rings that snapped off the cans when they were opened.

Until the garage door was in place the necessities Charles brought in the combi had had to be stored in the house. Over the weeks the bedroom empty except for two mattresses and a trunk with a lamp was slowly furnished behind drawn curtains and a locked door whose key was kept in a place known only to Vusi though, as Charles said to Joy, what sense in that? If anyone came they would kick in any locked door.

At night Eddie and Vusi lay low on their mattresses in a perspective that enclosed them with boxes and packing cases like a skyline of children's piled blocks. Eddie slept quickly but Vusi, with his shaved head with the tiny, gristly ears placed at exactly the level of the cheekbones that stretched his face and formed the widest plane of the whole skull, lay longing to smoke. Yet the craving was just another appet.i.te, some petty recurrence, a.s.suaged a thousand times and easily to be so again with something bought across a corner shop counter. Around him in the dark, a horizon darker than the dark held the cold forms in which the old, real, terrible needs of his life, his father's life and his father's father's life were now so strangely realised. He had sat at school farting the gases of an empty stomach, he had seen fathers, uncles, brothers, come home without work from days-long queues, he had watched, too young to understand, the tin and board that had been the shack he was born in, carted away by government demolishers. His bare feet had been shod in shoes worn to the shape of a white child's feet. He had sniffed glue to see a rosy future. He had taken a diploma by correspondence to better himself. He had spoken n.o.body's name under interrogation. He had left a girl and baby without hope of being able to show himself to them again. You could not eat the AKM a.s.sault rifles that Charles had brought in golf bags, you could not dig a road or turn a lathe with the limpet mines, could not shoe and clothe feet and body with the offensive and defensive hand grenades, could not use the AKM bayonets to compete with the white man's education, or to thrust a way out of solitary confinement in maximum security, and the wooden boxes that held hundreds of rounds of ammunition would not make even a squatter's shack for the girl and child. But all these hungers found their shape, distorted, forged as no one could conceive they ever should have to be, in the objects packed around him. These were made not for life; for death. He and Eddie lay there protected by it as they had never been by life.

During the day, he instructed Eddie in the correct use and maintenance of their necessities. He was the more experienced; he had been operational like this before. He checked detonators and timing devices, and the state of the ammunition. Necessities obtained the way these were were not always complete and in good order. He and Charles discussed the mechanisms and merits of various makes and cla.s.ses of necessities; Charles had done his South African army service and understood such things.

Once the garage door like a grandfather's roll-top desk was installed, they were able to move everything into the shed. They did so at night, without talking and without light. There had been rain, by then. A bullfrog that had waited a whole season underground came up that night and accompanied the silent activity with his retching bellow.

A chimpanzee, some insist.

Just a large monkey, say others.

It was seen again in the suburb of wooded gardens where Stanley Dobrow took the only photograph so far obtained. If you could call that image of clashed branches a likeness of anything.

Every household in the fine suburb had several black servants trusted cooks who were allowed to invite their grandchildren to spend their holidays in the backyard, faithful gardeners from whom the family watchdog was inseparable, a s.h.i.+fting population of pretty young housemaids whose long red nails and pertness not only a.s.serted the indignity of being undiscovered or out-of-work fas.h.i.+on models but kept hoisted a c.o.c.ky guerrilla pride against servitude to whites: there are many forms of resistance not recognised in orthodox revolutionary strategy. One of these girls said the beast slipped out of her room one night, just as she was crossing the yard from the kitchen. She had dropped her dinner, carried in one enamel dish covered with another to keep it hot. The cook, twenty-one years with the white family, told the lady of the house more likely it was one of the girl's boyfriends who had been to her room to 'check out' if there was another boyfriend there with her. Why hadn't she screamed?

The girl left without notice, anyway, first blazing out at the cook and the old gardener that if they didn't mind living 'like chickens in a hok', stuck away in a s.h.i.+t yard where anyone could come in over the wall and steal your things, murder you, while the whites had a burglar siren that went off if you breathed on their windows if they were happy to yesbaas and yesmissus, with that horrible thing loose, baboons could bite off your whole hand she wasn't. Couldn't they see the whites always ran away and hid and left us to be hurt?

And she didn't even have the respect not to bring up what had happened to the cook's brother, although the cook was still wearing the mourning band on the sleeve of the pastel-coloured overalls she spent her life in. He had been a watchman at a block of flats, sitting all night in the underground garage to guard the tenants' cars. He had an army surplus overcoat provided to keep him warm and a k.n.o.bkerrie to defend himself with. But the thieves had a revolver and shot him in the stomach while the owners of the cars went on sleeping, stacked twelve storeys high over his dead body.

Other servants round about reported signs of something out there. It was common talk where they gathered, to hear from the Chinese runner what symbol had come up in their daily gamble on the numbers game, in a lane between two of 'their' houses after ten or twenty years, living just across the yard from the big house, there develops such a thing as a deferred sense of property, just as there can be deferred pain felt in a part of the human body other than that of its source. Since no one actually saw whoever or whatever was watching them timid or threatening? rumour began to go round that it was what (to reduce any power of malediction it might possess) they called not in their own language with its rich vocabulary recognising the supernatural, but adopting the childish Afrikaans word a spook.

An urban haunter, a factory or kitchen ghost. Powerless like themselves, long migrated from the remotest possibility of being a spirit of the ancestors just as they themselves, that kind of inner attention broken by the batter and scream of commuter trains, the jumping of mine drills and the harangue of pop music, were far from the possibility of any oracle making itself heard to them. A heavy drinker reminded how, two Christmases ago, on the koppie behind 'your' house (he indicated the Dobrow cook, Sophie) a man must have lost his footing coming over the rocks from the shebeen there, and was found dead on Boxing Day. They said that one came from Transkei. Someone like that had woken up now, without his body, and was trying to find his way back to the hostel where his worker's contract, thumbprint affixed, had long ago run out. That was all.

Eddie wanted Charles to hire a TV set.

'But Charlie, he just laughs, man, he doesn't do anything about it.' Eddie complained to him through remarks addressed to the others. And they laughed, too.

It was the time when what there was to be done was wait. Charles brought the Sunday papers. He had finished reading a leader that tried to find a moral lesson for both victim and perpetrator in one of the small ma.s.sacres of an undeclared and unending war. His whole face, beard like the head of a disgruntled lion resting on its paws was slumped between two fists. 'You want to watch cabinet ministers preaching lies? Homeland chiefs getting twenty-one-gun salutes? Better go and weed your mealies if you're bored, man.' A small patch of these, evidently planted by the man who had looked after the Kleynhans place while it was unoccupied, had begun to grow silky in the sun, since the rain, and Eddie monitored their progress as though he and Vusi, Charles and Joy would be harvesting the cobs months ahead.

The girl sat on the floor under the ox-wagon wheel chandelier with its pink shades like carnival hats askew, sucking a strand of her hair as she read. Vusi had the single armchair and Eddie and Charles the sofa, whose snot-green plaid Joy could not tolerate, even here, and kept covered with a length of African cotton patterned with indigo cowrie sh.e.l.ls: every time she entered this room, a reminder that one really had one's sense of being (but could not, absolutely not, now) among beautiful, loved objects of familiar use. The four exchanged sheets of newspaper restlessly, searching for the world around them with which they had no connection. The Prime Minister had made another of his speeches of reconciliation; each except Charles read in silence the threats of which it was composed. Charles spoke through lips distorted by the pressure of his fists under his fleshy face, one of those grotesque mouths of ancient Mediterranean cultures from which sibylline utterances are supposed to well.

This government will not stand by and see the peace of mind of its peoples destroyed. It will not see the security of your homes, of your children asleep in their beds, threatened by those who lurk, outside law and order, ready to strike in the dark. It will not see the food s.n.a.t.c.hed from your children's mouths by those who seek the economic destruction of our country through boycotts in the so-called United Nations and violence at home. I say to countries on our borders to whom we have been and shall continue to be good neighbours: we shall not hesitate to strike with all our might at those who harbour terrorists . . .

When they heard this rhetoric on the radio, they were accustomed to smile as people will when they must realise that those being referred to as monsters are the human beings drinking a gla.s.s of water, cutting a hangnail, writing a letter, in the same room; are themselves. Sometimes they would restore their sense of reality by derision (all of them) or one of them (Vusi or Charles) would reply to thin air with the other rhetoric, of rebellion; but the closer time drew them to act, the less need there was for platform language.

'Scared. Afraid.'

Vusi dropped single words, as if to see what rings of meaning others would feel ripple from them.

The girl looked up, not knowing if this was a question and if anyone was expected to answer it.

Eddie sniffed with a twist of the nose and c.o.c.ked his head indifferently, parrying the words towards the public office, occupied by interchangeable faces, that had made the speech.

The moment pa.s.sed, and with it perhaps some pa.s.sing test Vusi had put them to and himself. He had opened a hand on the extreme danger hidden in this boring, fly-buzzing Sunday 'living room'; in that instant they had all looked at it; and their silence said, calm: I know.

The allusion swerved away from themselves. Vusi was still speaking. 'Can't give any other reason why he should have them in his power, so he's got to scare them into it. Scare. That's all they've got left. What else is in that speech? After three hundred and fifty years. After how many governments? Spook people.'

It was a proposition that had comforted, spurred, lulled or inspired over many years. 'So?' Charles's beard jutted. 'That goes to show the power of fear, not the collapse of power.'

'Exactly. Otherwise we wouldn't need to be here.' Joy's reference to this house, their presence and purpose, sounded innocently vulgar: to be there was to have gone beyond discussion of why; to be freed of words.

Eddie gave hers a different, general application. 'If whites could have been cured of being scared of blacks, that would have solved everything?' He was laughing at the old liberal theory.

Charles swallowed a rough crumb of impulse to tell Eddie he didn't need Eddie to give him a lesson on cla.s.s and economics. 'h.e.l.l, man . . . Just that there's no point in telling ourselves they're finished, they're running down.'

Joy heard in Charles's nervous asperity the fear of faltering he guarded against in others because it was in himself. There should be no love affairs between people doing this kind of thing (she still could not think of it as she wished to, as work to be done). She did not, now, want to be known by him as she knew him; there should be some conscious mental process available by which such knowledge would be withdrawn.

'Don't worry. If they're running down, it's because they know who's after them.' Eddie, talking big, seemed to become again the kid he must have been in street-gang rivalries that unknowingly rehea.r.s.ed, for his generation of blacks, the awful adventure that was coming to them.

'They were finished when they took the first slave.' Knowledge of Vusi was barred somewhere between his murmured commonplaces and that face of his. He was not looking at any of them, now; but Joy had said once to Charles, in a lapse to referents of an esoteric culture she carefully avoided because these distanced him and her from Vusi and Eddie, that if Vusi were to be painted, the portrait would be one of those, like Velazquez' Philip IV, whose eyes would meet yours no matter from what angle the painting were to be seen.

Vusi and Eddie had not been on student tours to the Prado. Vusi's voice was matter-of-fact, hoa.r.s.e. 'It doesn't matter how many times we have to sit here like this. They can't stop us because we can't stop. Never. Every time, when I'm waiting, I know I'm coming nearer.'

Eddie crackled back a page to frame something. 'Opening of Koeberg's going to be delayed by months and months, it says, ay Vusi?'

'Ja, I saw.'

Charles and Joy did not know if Vusi was one of those who had attacked the nuclear reactor installation at the Cape before it was ready to operate, earlier in the year. A cla.s.sic mission; that was the phrase. A strategic target successfully hit; serious material damage, no deaths, no blood shed. This terrifying task produces its outstanding pract.i.tioners, like any other. They did not know if Eddie knew something about Vusi they didn't, had been told some night in the dark of the back room, while the two men lay there alone on their mattresses. Eddie's remark might indicate he did know; or that he was fascinatedly curious and thought Vusi might be coaxed, without realising it, into saying something revealing. But Vusi didn't understand flattery.

Eddie gave up. 'What's this committee of Cape Town whites who want it shut down?'

Charles took the paper from him. 'Koeberg's only thirty kilometres from Cape Town. A bicycle ride, man. Imagine what could happen once it's producing. But d'you see the way the story's handled? They write about "security" as if the place's a jeweller's shop that might be burgled, not a target we've already hit once.'

Joy read at an angle over his shoulder, an ugly strain on the tendons of her neck. 'n.o.body wants to go to jail.'

Charles gave the sweet smile of his most critical mood, for the benefit of Vusi and Eddie. 'Ah well, but there are ways and ways, ay? A journalist learns to say what he wants without appearing to. But these fellows sit with the book of rules under their backsides . . . well, what'm I talking about you need wits to outwit.'

'What makes you think they even want to?'

'Because it's their job! Let's leave convictions out of it!'

'No, she's right, man. If you work on these papers, you're just part of the system.' Eddie kept as souvenirs the catch-all terms from his Soweto days.

'To be fair' (for which ideal the girl hankered so seriously that she would not hesitate to contradict herself) 'there are some who want to . . . A few who've lost their jobs.'

'Someone reads this, what can he know afterwards?' A sheet went sailing from Vusi's hand to join those already spread about the floor. 'You must call in an interpreter, like in court, to know what's going on.'

'Like in court? Jwaleka tsekisong?' Eddie went zestfully into an act. A long burst in Sesotho; then in English: 'He can't remember a thing, My Lord.' Another lengthy Sesotho sentence, with the cadence, glares and head-shakings of vehement denial: 'He says yes, My Lord.' A rigmarole of obvious agreement: 'He says no, My Lord.' The pantomime of the bewildered, garrulous black witness, the white Afrikaner prosecutor fond of long English words and not much surer of their meaning than the witness or the bored black interpreter: I put it to you that you claim convenable amnesia.

He says he doesn't know that Amnesia woman.

I put it to you it's inconceivable you don't remember whether you were present on the night of the crime.

He says he never made a child with that woman, My Lord.

Out of their amus.e.m.e.nt at his nonsense there was a rise of animation, change of key to talk of what or was not to be understood between the lines of reportage and guards of commentary; in this the events of their world, which moved beneath the events of the world the newspapers reflected the real intimacy latent in their strangeness to one another, their apparent ill-a.s.sortment, discovered itself. There was sudden happiness yes, unlike any private happiness left behind, independent of circ.u.mstance, because all four had left behind, too, the 'normal' fears, repugnancies, prejudices, reservations that 'circ.u.mstance' as they had known it what colour they were, what that colour had meant where they lived had been for them. Nothing but a surge of intermittent current: but the knowledge that it would well up again made it possible to live with the irritations and inadequacies they chafed against one another now, waiting. Charles said it for them, grinning suddenly after an argument one day: 'Getting in one another's hair, here it's a form of freedom, ay?'

Apart from politics, there wasn't much to engage, in Charles's Sunday papers. One printed for blacks reported the usual slum murders perpetrated with unorthodox weapons to hand; a soccer club scandal, and deaths at a wedding after drinking tainted homebrew. The whites' papers, of which Charles had brought several, and in two languages, had a financial crash, a millionaire's divorce settlement, a piece about that monkey no one could catch, which had stolen a maid's dinner.

Sunday torpor settled on the four. Charles slept with his beard-ringed mouth bubbling slightly, as Naas Klopper was sleeping ten kilometres away in his split-level lounge. Eddie wandered out to the yard, took off his s.h.i.+rt and sat on the back step in the sun, smoking, drinking a c.o.ke and listening to a reggae tape as any young labourer would spend his lunch hour on the pavement outside whites' shops.

On a radio panel 'Talking of Nature' an SPCA official took the opportunity to condemn the cruelty of throwing out pet monkeys to fend for themselves when they outgrow the dimensions of a suitable domestic pet. Mariella Chapman heard him while preparing plums for jam according to the recipe given by her new mother-in-law over the weekend. Mariella and her husband had gone to visit his parents on the farm for the first time since their marriage five months ago, and had come home with a supermarket bag of fresh-picked plums and a leg of venison. Marais (his given name was his mother's maiden name) hung the leg before he went on duty early on Monday at John Vorster Square; he had to put up a hook in the kitchen window because their modern house didn't have a back stoep like the old house at home.

At police headquarters Sergeant Chapman (an English stoker in the 1880s jumped s.h.i.+p, married an Afrikaans girl and left the name scratched on a Boer family tree) took over the 7 a.m. s.h.i.+ft of interrogation of one of the people held in detention there. It was a nice-enough-looking place to be stationed, right in town. The blue spandrel panels and glimpses of potted plants in the facade it presented to the pa.s.sing city freeway could have been those of an apartment block; the cells in which these people were kept were within the core of the building.

It was tiring work, you need a lot of concentration, watching the faces of these politicals, never mind just getting something out of their mouths. He kept his hands off them. Unless, of course, expressly instructed by his superiors to do certain things necessary to make some of them talk. When they got out particularly the white ones, with their clever lawyer friends and plenty money coming from the churches and the communists overseas they often brought court cases against the state, you could find yourself standing there accused of a.s.sault, they tried to blacken your name in front of your wife, your mother and dad, who knew only your kindness and caresses. He wanted promotion, but he didn't want that. He did his duty. He did what he was told. And if it ever came to court oh boy, I'm telling you, jong all was on the Major's instructions, he could swear on the Bible to that.

No wonder most of them talked in the end. It was hard enough to do a number of s.h.i.+fts with them during the day or night, with breaks in between for a cup of coffee, something to eat, and best of all, a walk outside in the street; whereas most of them, like this tough nut he was handling with the Major now, were questioned by a roster of personnel twenty-four, thirty-six hours non-stop. And, as the Major had taught, even when these people were given coffee, a cigarette, allowed to sit down, they knew they were being watched and had to watch themselves all the time, for what they might let slip. It was one of the elementary lessons of this work that the gratification of a draw of smoke into the lungs might suddenly succeed in breaking the stoniest will and breaching trained revolutionary hostility towards and contempt for interrogators. (The Major was a very clever, highly educated and well-read man you had to have someone like that for the cla.s.s of detainee that was coming in these days, they'd just run rings round someone who'd only got his matric.) The Major said it didn't even matter if you got to feel sorry for them the Major knew about this, although you always hid it; 'a bond of sympathy' was the first real step on the way to extracting a confession. Well, Sergeant Chapman didn't have any such feelings today. Inside his uniform his body was filled with the sap of sun and fresh air; the sight of the sleepless, unshaven man standing there, dazed and smelly (they sweated even if they s.h.i.+vered, under interrogation) made him sick (the Major warned that occasional revulsion was natural, but unproductive).

Why couldn't these people live like any normal person? A man with this one's brains and university degrees, English-speaking and whatnot, could become a big shot in business instead of a trade unionist letting a bunch of blacks strike and get him in trouble. When you interrogated a detainee, you had to familiarise yourself with all the details supplied by informers for his file; this one had a well-off father, a doctor wife, twin babies, an affair with a pretty student (admittedly, he had met her through her research connected with unions) and his parents-in-law's cottage at one of the best places for fis.h.i.+ng on the coast, for his holidays. What more does a white man want? With a black man, all right, he wants what he can't have, and that can make a man sit eating his heart out in jail half his life. But how good to walk, on Sat.u.r.day, to the dam where you used to swim as a kid, to be greeted (these people who incite blacks against us should just have seen) by the farm boys at the kraal with laughter and pleasure at your acquisition of a wife; to go out with your father to shoot jackals at sunset. There's something wrong with all these people who become enemies of their own country: this private theory was really the only aspect of his work for security reasons he talked about to his girl, who, of course (he sometimes smiled to forget), was now his wife. Something wrong with them. They're enemies because they can't enjoy their lives the way a normal white person in South Africa does.

He could get a cold drink or coffee and a snack in the canteen at John Vorster but in the early evening when he knew he'd have to stay late, maybe all night, to work on this man with the Major, he'd had just about enough of the place. He took his break where he and his mates liked to go, the Chinese takeaway and restaurant just down the street.

It had no name up and was entered through an old shopfront. There was the high sizzle of frying and the full volume of TV programmes, and the Chinese and his wife moved about very softly. Early in the day when there was no television transmission, a small radio diffused cheerful commercials at the same volume above their pale faces from whose blunt features and flat eyes expression seemed worn away as a cake of soap loses definition in daily use. They belonged to the ancient guild of those harmless itinerant providers, of all nationalities, who wheel their barrows close to the sinister scenes of life the bombed towns, the refugee encampments, the fallen cities providing soup or rum indiscriminately to victims in rags or invaders in tanks, so long as these can pay the modest charge. Convenient to concentration camps there were such quiet couples, minding their own business, selling coffee and schnapps to refresh jackbooted men off duty. Perhaps the Chinese and his wife felt protected by John Vorster Square and whatever they did not want to know happened there; perhaps they felt threatened by its proximity; both reasons to know nothing. Their restaurant had few ethnic pretensions of the usual kind no velveteen dragons or wind chimes but they had put up a shelf on the wall where the large colour television set was placed like a miniature cinema screen, at awkward eye level for diners. In front of the TV they kept an area clear of tables and had ranged a dozen chairs for the use of policemen. The policemen were not expected to buy a meal, and for the price of a packet of chips and a cold drink could relax from their duties, so nearby. Although they were not supposed to take alcohol before resuming these, and the Chinese couple did not have a licence to sell it, beer was silently produced for those who, the couple knew without having to be asked aloud, wanted it. The young policemen, joking and kidding as they commented on the programmes they were watching, created a friendly enclave in the place. Diners who had nothing much to say to one another felt at least part of some animation. Family treats for children and grandmothers were popular there, because the food was cheap; children, always fascinated by the thrill and fear sensed in anything military or otherwise authoritarian, ate their grey chicken soup while watching the policemen.

Sergeant Chapman found a few mates occupying the chairs. He joined them. The hot weather left the brand of their profession where their caps, now lying under their chairs, had pressed on their foreheads. Their private smog of cigarette smoke mingled with frying fumes wavered towards the TV screen; he was in time for the last ten minutes of an episode in a powdered-wig French historical romance, dubbed in Afrikaans. It ended with a duel, swords gnas.h.i.+ng like knives and forks. 'Hey, man, look at that!'

'But they not really fighting, themselves. The actors. They have special experts dressed up like them.'

'OK, I don't say it's the actors; but it's h.e.l.luva good, just the same, ay. To be able to do it so fast and not hurt each other.'

Then came the Prime Minister, speaking with his special effects (a tooled leather prop desk, and velvet ceremonial drape as backdrop) on reconciliation and total onslaught. Conversations started up among the young policemen while he was projected overhead and the dinner customers chewed with respectful attention. Two plainclothes men in their casual-smart bar-lounge outfits came in to buy takeaways, evidently pleased with themselves, and did not even seem to notice that their volubility was making it difficult for people to follow the PM's voice.

Sergeant Chapman took the opportunity to phone Mariella, although she knew he would be home late, if at all tonight. He still had these impulses to talk to her about nothing, over the phone, the way you can ten times a day with your girl. The telephone was not available to ordinary customers but the policemen knew they could use it. Its sticky handpiece and the privacy of the noise that surrounded him as he dialled were familiar. But Mariella did not answer with her soft voice of flirtation. She was terribly excited. He didn't know whether she was laughing or crying. When she went into the kitchen just now to get herself some bread and cheese (she wasn't going to bother with supper if he didn't come) the venison was gone from the window. Gone! Just like that. She went outside to see if it'd fallen from the hook but no.

'No, of course, man, I put that hook in fast.'

'But still, it could have fallen no, but anyway, the hook's still there. So I saw the meat must've been pinched. I ran to the street and then I rushed round the yard-'

'You shouldn't do that when I'm not there, they'll knife you if you try to catch them. I've told you, Mariella, stay in the house at night, don't open to anyone.'

But she was 'so cross, so excited' she fetched the torch and took the dog by the collar and looked everywhere.

'That's mad, man. I told you not to. Somebody could be tricking you to get you out of the house.'

'No wait, there was n.o.body, Marais, n.o.body was there, it was all right.'

'Well you were just lucky he'd already got away, I'm telling you, Mariella, you make me worry. There must be blacks hanging around the neighbourhood who know I'm often away late-'

'No, listen, just wait till you hear Buller pulled away from me and jumped over the fence into the lane, you know, there by the veggie patch, and he was barking and scratching. So I climbed over and there it was on the ground only it wasn't the meat and everything, it was just the bone. All the meat was torn off it! You'll see, you'll see the places where big teeth pulled away! It must have been that baboon, that monkey thing, no dog could reach so high! And there was an item on the radio about it only this morning! You'll see, only a bone's left.' And now she began to giggle intimately. 'Your poor Pa. He'll be mad with you for hanging it like that. We'll have to pretend we ate it, hay? Anyway, you'll be pleased to know my jam's OK. It set and everything . . . What should I do . . . send for the police? If it could be you that comes, I'll be already making the bed warm . . .'

Although she sounded so lovable he had to be serious and make her promise to keep all the windows locked. Apes were clever, they had hands like humans. It might even manage to lift a lever and get in, now that it had become so full of cheek. He came striding back to his mates with a swagger of sensation, a tale to tell. 'You know that escaped monkey? Came to our place and swiped the Blesbok leg we brought from the farm yesterday! True as G.o.d! I hung it in the window this morning!'

'Ag, man, Chapman. Your stories. Some black took it. Hanging it in the window! Wha'd'you think you were doing, man?'

'No way, boet. It was that b.l.o.o.d.y thing, all right. She's just told me: she found the bone there in the lane where it et it. Even a black's not going to tear raw meat with his teeth.'