‘We can’t stick it,’ said Martha.
‘I suppose it’s all right for the Africans,’ said Jasmine. ‘They’re persecuted day and night, it gives them an interest in life. But I swear, all my parents’ friends, they might just as well have been dead and buried these last fifty years. And you’re not far off, Matty, I’m warning you.’
‘Well, thanks,’ said Martha.
At which point Solly came in. He smiled at them generally, and said: ‘Up the Reds!’
Then he sat down and, seated, directed a mock, obsequious bow towards Jasmine. ‘I hear you have orders for me, cousin comrade?’
‘Not orders.’
‘That’s a good thing, in the circumstances.’
Johnny Capetenakis stood by his old customer Solly, offering him a plate of stuffed vine leaves.
‘And how goes it, Johnny?’
‘Fine, Mr Cohen. I’m going back home soon.’
‘You’ll get a bullet in your back.’
The Greek shook his head. ‘No, in my village things are quiet—the rebels are chased out.’
‘You are the rebels, Johnny.’
‘I do not have politics in this restaurant.’
‘And have you heard from Athen?’ asked Jasmine.
The Greek tactfully averted his eyes at Athen’s name, but listened.
‘No,’ said Martha. ‘I suppose he must be dead.’
A moment’s silence, then Johnny said, in a hard, angry sorrow: ‘He was a brave man. He was a brave man, but he was crazy.’ And he walked away, shaking his head.
‘So let’s have it, cousin Jasmine, because I’m on my way.’
‘The Party has decided your activities are all right-wing deviations,’ announced Jasmine.
‘How can I deviate from something I’m not a member of?’
‘It’s an objective truth,’ said Thomas, speaking for the first time, and bitterly. The note he struck was so sombre, so harsh, that for a moment they were silent, looking at him.
Then Jasmine turned back to Solly: ‘That’s not really what I wanted to say, though. After all, no one can stop you if you want to play Napoleon, all by yourself.’
‘Why don’t you make enquiries of comrade Matty here? She’s an old friend of Mr Zlentli, aren’t you, Matty?’
‘I went to see Mr Zlentli, if it was Mr Zlentli, because Joss wrote and told me his little brother was up to no good,’ said Martha.
‘And what is my big brother doing up North? He’s playing Napoleon too, but I suppose that’s all right,’ said Solly.
‘At any rate he accepts discipline,’ said Jasmine.
‘And how was Mr Zlentli?’ said Solly to Martha.
‘If it was Mr Zlentli, then he’s fine. But surely you should know?’
‘I don’t know, why should I know?’
‘Do stop it, children,’ said Jasmine. ‘I’m not surprised that everything goes from bad to worse here, if you go on like this.’
‘I haven’t been going on at all,’ said Martha. ‘You must apply to Solly for information.’
Here Solly grinned, made another mock bow, stood up, and with his hands folded together meekly on the table, in a pose of willing patience, looked at Jasmine.
‘Okay,’ said Jasmine. ‘It’s this. The people in the Party who know this kind of thing…’ here she rolled her eyes again, ‘…they’ve got a contact in the Special Branch, and they have found out that they are hand in glove with the police here.’
‘Well, of course,’ said Solly.
‘Of course,’ said Martha.
‘It’s one thing to say of course—that’s theory. But it’s different finding out it’s really true. What I have to tell you is this: there is some kind of demonstration being organized, a national demonstration, with a man called Zlentli running it. Well, the authorities here know all about it. They’re just waiting. The South African authorities tipped them off, they intercepted some letters. So the Zambesian authorities just sit here, waiting to scoop up the leaders. So I’m detailed to tell you, since I was coming up here anyway, that if you are in contact with Zlentli, that you must warn him they know everything and he’d better lose himself for a time till things blow over.’
She was eating a stuffed vine leaf, as she talked, and now she wiped her fingers carefully on a scrap of handkerchief. She frowned as she discovered traces of yellow oil on a small, pink fingernail. She said to Solly: ‘That’s all. So if you are in a position to do anything about it, it’s all yours.’
Solly had absorbed this, as one could see from the quick, darting movements of his eyes while he tucked away the information and made plans. Now he re-directed an intent black stare at his cousin—but in fact he was pleased and this was merely routine aggression: ‘How am I to know it’s the truth and not some kind of trap?’ said he, widening his eyes and putting his face close to Jasmine’s, in a fierce scowl.
‘Please yourself,’ said Jasmine, picking up another stuffed vineleaf between thumb and forefinger. ‘I’ve done what I said I’d do and now it’s up to you.’
‘But what if Mr Zlentli doesn’t trust Solly?’ enquired Martha, of Solly.
‘Then Solly had better see that Mr Zlentli gets the information from some source he does trust,’ said Jasmine.
They all smiled at each other, sweet and knowledgeable.
Then Solly smiled, said: ‘Will do,’ and departed. As he passed the Greek, who was serving a table a few paces off, he laid his hand on the man’s shoulders and said: ‘See you on the barricades.’
‘Everything goes on as usual, I see,’ said Jasmine. ‘When I think the fate of a big national thing is in the hands of cousin Solly, then…’ she rolled up her eyes and began collecting herself to leave.
‘What you don’t realize,’ said Thomas, again in the overintense, harsh voice, ‘is that that’s how things are everywhere. Everywhere in the world cousin Jasmine sits licking her pretty fingers and thinking, No wonder everything’s in such a mess if they are in the hands of cousin Solly. And of course that’s the point, they are in the hands of cousin Solly.’
Martha and Jasmine looked at him—it was from a distance, a distance he was putting between him and them. What he said was meant for a light tone, and should have been followed by a laugh. But he spoke in a dark, angry voice, and everything was discordant and disconnected.
‘And you’re all getting very defeatist,’ said Jasmine: and her words, fitted for a half-joke, were suddenly harsh and sorrowful. She looked surprised herself. She got up. ‘I’m going to pack now. Goodbye, Matty. If you get fed up waiting for Anton to sort himself out, then drop down South and see me some time.’ She hesitated before saying to Thomas, in a tentative, gentle voice: ‘Goodbye, Thomas.’ He nodded.
Jasmine bent over to kiss Martha and said softly into her other ear: ‘Do leave, Matty. You’ve no idea how nice it is to get out—you’re human when you get out. People have no idea how awful this place is until they leave it.’
She stood up, raised her gloved hand towards Thomas and said: ‘Barricades!’—which abbreviated farewell was the fashion, apparently, that year in ‘the Party down South’.
She departed lazily, wrapped in her thick, white wool. As she went past Johnny, she said to him: ‘Good luck in Greece—but I’m only speaking personally, if you get what I mean.’
‘Well,’ said Thomas, ‘if that had gone on another five mintues I’d have shot myself.’
‘You mean, anything that happens here is too unimportant to take seriously,’ said Martha. Hearing what she had said, she realized Thomas was about to announce his departure.
‘What were you thinking about—while that went on?’ enquired Thomas.
‘Went on—I suppose it is of some importance?’
‘What was Jasmine saying to you?’
‘That I should leave.’
‘Of course. You’re mad to stay.’
After a moment she said quietly, very hurt: ‘One of the things I was thinking, while Solly was here, was that I can??
?t be all that mad—because instead of having an affair with Solly I stuck around for you.’
‘Well, of course,’ said Thomas. Again, it should have been light—humorous. But it sounded irritated. Seeing Martha’s face, he sighed, and shut his eyes a moment. Then he said: ‘I’m angry with you because I’m trying not to care about you. I’m leaving.’
‘So I thought.’
‘When I got home that night the police were there. I’m afraid even to tell you—it’s so impossible. But they had worked it all out: my wife’s third cousin is in the Stern Gang, or so it seems. Not that I knew it, or my wife knew it. But they know it. And I’m a Red. And my name is Stern. Put these facts together—and I’m responsible for the atrocities in Israel.’
His face was swollen with anger, with hatred.
‘I nearly laughed at first. You can imagine how it was: my friend Michel sitting there stroking his pretty, black beard and smiling: All this has nothing to do with me, I’m just a man of peace. And two nice Zambesian boys with their raw, red thighs and their stupid faces. Tell me, Mr Stern, are you responsible for the murder of our fellow-national, the poor British Tommy in Haifa last week? Do have a drink, Sergeant, sit down, Trooper Jones. No, I must explain things to you—the fact that my wife happens to be visiting her aunt in Tel Aviv does not automatically make me responsible for the murders of your British boys in Haifa. They smiled—embarrassed at putting me to such trouble. But excuse me, just for the records, your name is Stern, sir, isn’t it?’
Martha waited, then as Thomas didn’t say any more, she said: ‘Well, I know it’s—ridiculous. But that’s all it is. That’s what this country’s like, isn’t it—’ She realized she was apologizing for it, as if she were responsible for it.
After a time Thomas said: ‘I found out recently that Tressell is in the CID these days.’
Martha, absorbing this, discovered that she had not taken a breath for some time. She set her breathing going again, unknotted tensed muscles, drank a mouthful of muddy coffee, sat back. Here it was…there was always a point at which anything—loving someone, a friendship, politics: one went over the edge into…but she did not understand into what. Neither the nature of the gulf nor what caused it, did she understand. But a note was struck—and that it would strike could be counted on. And after that…
When they occurred, these sharp, improbable moments, one felt as if they had nothing in common with what had gone before; that they were of a consistency, a substance, that were foreign. Yet later, looking back, it was always precisely these turning-points, or moments, which contained or announced the truth—harshly and improbably, because up till that time one had refused to acknowledge their possibility. And afterwards, it was not the moments like these, whose common quality was a suddenness, a dislocation, that were wrong, faulty; but one’s way of looking at what had led up to them. There had been a failure of imagination. A failure of sympathy. Her way of seeing Thomas, his life—it was that which had been wrong, at fault.
Thomas said: ‘You’re thinking: Thomas is paranoid.’
She said: ‘Something like that. But what does it matter?’
‘Except for one thing, Tressell is in the CID.’
She was watching his hand. It was a fist, and he was pressing down on the stained cloth with the weight of his powerful body behind it. It trembled with the force he was putting into it.
She wanted to stroke the hand, or to lift it and hold it against her cheek. But there was nothing to be done.
‘And what now?’ she said.
‘Martha, are you suggesting that Tressell would be incapable of it?’
‘Look,’ she said carefully. ‘A fool, an idiot—something reminds him of a man who irritated him when he was in the army. He thinks: how can I get my own back? He has an idea, and he rings up a country office from his town desk and he says: Drop over to the Black Ox Farm and find out if the man who owns it has anything to do with anti-British activities in Palestine. The local man says: Oh, hell, just when I said I’d take my girl out swimming. But I suppose orders are orders. So he takes one of the troopers and out they go to the Black Ox Farm. The people on the farm obviously know nothing about it. The Sergeant thinks: Oh, Christ, those fools in the town office, what do they think they’re doing? He rings up the town office and tells Tressell he’s been out to the Black Ox Farm. Tressell thinks: Well, I’ve given that bastard Thomas Stern an uncomfortable afternoon, that’s something. And off he goes to play golf.’
While Martha brought this out, in a voice which she tried to keep ‘humorous’, she watched his frowning face. He was hardly listening to her.
‘I’m going to Israel the day after tomorrow.’
‘For good?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve got a cousin in Haifa. And my wife’s got relatives everywhere.’
He beckoned to Johnny Capetenakis, who came over with his little pencil and his little pad, and made out the bill. Thomas handed him a note, and said, getting up: ‘Keep the change—for the Royalist cause.’
He walked out of the restaurant. The Greek looked at Martha—bitter, reproachful. He pushed across the change at her. After a moment she picked it up and said: ‘Everybody’s upset today.’ Her voice sounded weak and false.
She went out after Thomas. The lorry stood in a filthysmelling side street that was full of old paper, bits of vegetables, and stacked bicycles.
Thomas stood by the door to the driver’s seat. Martha went up to him and said: ‘Well, goodbye.’
‘Goodbye,’ he said. He looked at her, severe. Then he smiled. She saw that his eyes were full of tears, and she felt her cheeks were cold and wet.
He said: ‘I’m not going to kiss you, because what’s the point? I’ll write to you, Martha.’
Then he got into the lorry and Martha stood on the pavement and watched him manoeuvre the machine back out of a mess of bicycles and a handcart. Some small black boys came running out to shout: ‘Ticky, baas, sixpence, baas, sixpence, baas, baas, baas!’
It appeared he did not see them. Martha gave the largest child the change Johnny had pushed back at her. He gaped at the sight of so much money. The other children came clustering around, their faces stunned into immobility by awe. Then they rushed off with their haul, screaming like birds.
Thomas, shaking with the shaking of the machine, sat frowning at Martha. A car hooted behind him. The lorry shot forward and disappeared into the stream of traffic in Founders’ Street.
Chapter Three
A large tree stood in the middle of the avenue, in an island of earth and grass around which the tarmac flowed in two streams that were almost as wide as the street itself. A hundred yards up, a fine clump of indigenous trees spared by the road engineers grew so near the street that a close look showed it made a slight bend South to accommodate them. On the map, though, and even in people’s minds, North Avenue ran as straight and as measured as all the other streets in this grid of streets.
Standing under the tree, looking West, the street arranged itself as a double line of trees which, since many of them were jacarandas and it was October again, looked as if bouquets of airy blossom had taken root beside garden fences. From the sky, the town would announce itself as much by trees as by buildings, and at night, from the air, transparent-seeming shells of building rose from dark or illuminated foliage. Night or day, it was trees, then buildings, that showed where man had staked his claim on the grass-covered high veld. Buildings and trees covered the veld for a mile North, though not so long ago this street marked the extreme boundary of the city, and in five years would have spread another five, and in ten years…But now, the city was a few-miles-wide patch of trees and buildings in a landscape mostly grass. Looking from the air, or from a tall hill, even now, in moonlight, it would seem as if for leagues the wind raised and flattened grasses which whitened or moved into dark under racing cloud shadows. (Although it was October, the clouds were not yet rain clouds, they were unstable and fled in illuminated shreds and streamers from horizon t
o horizon.) Just so, looking from the hill on the farm, the hundred-acres field beneath it reflected the movements of wind or cloud on a surface of rippling foliage. Just so, a patch of lawn in a suburban garden shimmers a vivid liquid green, currents of air violently agitating each individual blade exactly as the minute hairs on the back of a leaf flatten and shine when it is held into a draught or when you blow across it.
Nearly a hundred miles away, in the red earth district, the old house had sunk to its knees under the blows of the first wet season after the Quests had left it, as if the shambling structure had been held upright only by the spirit of the family in it. Already it had been absorbed into a welter of damp growth and it was hard to tell, so Marnie Van Rensberg said her father said (he had bought the Quests’ farm to run his cattle on), where the old house had stood. But morning glory and golden shower creeper festooned the trees in blue and gold all over the hill. It was wet and sultry on that hill, because of the heavy growth, although a thousand winds poured over it, and so walls and roof had rotted years ago in a fierce compost. The wet heat spawned, and the undersides of rafters sprouted fungus, and mosquitoes bred in old shoes. But here, if this city were to be emptied, nothing would happen for a long time, except that dust would slowly film the roofs which now stood glistening in the changeable October moonlight. Then dust would fill the corners of verandas and pile up around the trunks of trees. This city, if emptied, would be conquered at last by dust, not by wet; its enemy would be dryness, the spirit of the high veld where tall, dry grasses have grown since—well, long before man first stood upright here, that’s certain. For how many millions of years has the central plateau stood high and dry, dry above all, lifting upwards to the drought-giving skies? Where Martha stood on dry dust beneath the great tree, bones of drought-bred creatures had lain for—but what use was it to say words like millions, if she couldn’t imagine, really feel them, longer (say) than twenty thousand? Dryness, dryness—the air snapped with it, she could feel the pressure of dryness shaping her substance, the dust was its creature and the air of October gritted on her tongue. Yes, this city would be like the minute, brittle, transparent cases that have held insects and now lie blowing about on the sand. It would be like the carcass of a stick insect, so light it can be lifted into an eddy of air and up into the empty sky in columns of glistening trash to drift until the rains come to wash the air clean. Standing waist-deep in long, dry grass, a small rivulet of white sand appears beneath gold-brown stems that grow as clean as if from clean water. On the white sand minute, faint-brown stains move—the shadows of leaves of grass, tiny, dry fragments of leaf that flutter on long, powerful stems. They lie on the sand, small shadows so faint that the sunlight almost is stronger than they, grains of sand sparkle in the shadow as if the shadow itself were of a specially thin texture, a kind of light rather than a depth of shade. But it is not a leaf-shadow, no: the carcass of a grasshopper lies on the sand, lifting, moving slightly as the wind breathes among the grass-stems. It looks like a minute insect modelled in Perspex, all complete, with even its big eyes staring, but empty.